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acknowledged that an incident in which mysterious lights were seen over Arizona had actually occurred. "That has never been fully explained” he said, "but I have to tell you that I do not have any evidence whatsoever of aliens or UFOs." [7] That same year, a class action suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix by witnesses demanding an explanation from the federal government. In response to a court-ordered request for a search for this information, the Department of Defense maintained that it could not find any information about the triangular objects. It provided details of this search process to U.S. District Court judge Stephen M. McNamee. On March 30, 2000, three years after the sightings, McNamee concluded that "a reasonable search was conducted," even though no information was aie 1 a4 1 a4 obtained, and he dismissed the case. We have no way of gauging how thorough this search really was. And the claim of the DoD seems open to question, especially in light of a prior British inquiry about the triangular craft observed over the Royal Air Force base at Cosford. [8] As reported by Nick Pope, this object was seen by over a hundred witnesses in England in 1993, including police officers and military personnel. At the time, the MoD sent a discreet letter to the U.S. Embassy that was "disseminated to all 'interested Agencies’ in the U.S." to find out whether the Cosford object could have been attributable to some secret U.S. prototype such as the Aurora. In response, the American officials said that they had been having their own sightings of these large, triangular-shaped UFOs and wanted to know if the RAF might itself have such a craft! This remarkable reply amounts to an acknowledgment by American officials—which probably they did not expect would be made public—that in 1993 they were aware of the existence of unexplained objects operating over the U.S.A. with the extraordinary capabilities attributed to the Cosford UFOs. Perhaps they were alluding to the Hudson Valley wave of the 1980s, although other sightings had occurred since. Importantly, these officials recognized the similarity between the Cosford object and the ones seen here, and were sufficiently perplexed to express their hope that the American UFOs may have been secret British aircraft flying without authorization, an extremely unlikely proposition given our close relationship with the UK. After this exchange, the British MoD laid the Cosford incident to rest. "None of the usual explanations put forward to explain UFO sightings seem applicable," the MoD stated. The evidence showed that "an unidentified object (or objects) of unknown origin was operating over the UK" (emphasis added). U.S. officials had inadvertently acknowledged, privately and secretly, of course, that this was true in the United States as well, by letting on that our UFOs behaved the same way It seems inconceivable that just a few years later, in 1997, U.S. officials somewhere would not have taken serious note of the similar UFO sightings in Arizona. Obviously, officials at the DoD responding to the 2000 court-ordered search were not the same ones who had made the as those in Britain.