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SERIOUSLY In order to evaluate the U.S. government's actions and put them in perspective, we can learn a great deal from examining the activities of other governments and their handling of military and aviation UFO encounters. Since the close of Project Blue Book, the United States has become somewhat of a pariah on the international scene when it comes to official UFO investigations, which is especially a problem since as a superpower it has unique potential to influence scientific progress on issues of global significance. Other nations have behaved admirably when UFO events occurred within their airspace. Some have collected useful data when anomalous objects appeared on radar or left marks on the ground, as has happened in France and the UK. These two countries were especially well equipped to handle events as remarkable as a UFO touching down, because they had in place government agencies specifically tasked with taking UFO reports and conducting investigations. Even after the United States bowed out of the UFO business in 1970, other countries kept at it, and still others formed new investigative offices later on, approaching the problem straightforwardly and responsibly. During the years following the United States' shutdown of its only public UFO agency, those moving forward elsewhere have done the best they could, while sometimes struggling for funding and resources. Thankfully, they have not modeled themselves after Project Blue Book. Rather than devote themselves to disseminating false explanations and other propaganda, these agencies have been willing to conduct honest investigations and acknowledge, particularly in cases documented by pilots, the presence of something unidentified that could not be explained. Pilots and air crews in other nations are not pressured to keep quiet, as their American counterparts were during the O'Hare incident, and are not nearly as wary of ridicule as are their American peers. Elsewhere, military and commercial pilots go on the record about their encounters, and press conferences are held to release information. Aviation safety issues are addressed in connection with UFO events. In general, although the U.S. government hasn't budged since 1970, much of the rest of the world has been moving increasingly in the direction of taking UFOs more seriously. The UK's study of UFOs began in 1950 within the Ministry of Defence, making it one of the longest running official programs in the world. The MoD had a designated agency, or "UFO desk," that handled UFO reports and investigated cases. In December 2009, the staff became so overwhelmed by the volume of UFO reports from the public, which were at a ten-year high, and the endless stream of FOIA requests about the subject that it closed down its public reporting program. The MoD had not CHAPTER 12 TAKING THE PHENOMENON