The UFO Files - The Inside Story of Real-Life Sightings

A Review By Stanton Friedman

Perhaps my expectations for the 2009 book “The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-Life Sightings” were too high. Dr. David Clarke is one of the few UK academics to get involved in the UFO issue. He is a senior lecturer in Journalism at Sheffield Hallam University. His PhD is in English Cultural Tradition and Folklore from the University of Sheffield. He is one of the movers and shakers behind the effort to get the Ministry of Defense (MOD) in England to release its UFO files via the National Archives of the UK.

The press in North America and elsewhere has made it sound as though the MOD was releasing TOP Secret UFO files. Technically this is false. One of the glaring problems with the book is the almost complete failure to make a distinction between material classified as Confidential or Secret, much of which has been released, and that material classified as TOP SECRET or TOP SECRET Code Word, most of which has not.

In the USA the code word might be Ultra or Umbra. I can find no indication that Dr. Clarke has ever worked under security, for the government or in the military, which might account for this lapse.

I was once asked by the late Karl Pflock why I insisted the best UFO material would be at least TOP SECRET. I pointed out that when the National Security Agency (NSA—sometimes laughingly called No Such Agency or Never Says Anything) finally got around to releasing 160 UFO documents (all preceding 1980) from its files, they were all TOP Secret or TS plus and one could read only one or two sentences per page because white out was used very liberally to censor everything else .

The excuse was that the redaction was used to cover information about sources and methods for intelligence gathering which is a legitimate justification. It hardly seems credible that 95% of the material applies to sources and methods as opposed to the information itself. It is not as though the Soviet Union was not aware during the cold war that the NSA was gathering all sorts of data about things in the sky.

Furthermore when I finally, under Freedom of Information, obtained a number of TS CIA UFO documents (it took me 5 years), only a few were released and most were very heavily redacted with black ink. They, too, were TOP Secret code word. Some pages had only 8 trivial words that could be read. One has “Deny in Toto” at the top. Couldn’t even find 8 words to declassify!


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