U.K.'s real-life version of the "X-Files"

The British government has released 8,500 pages of previously classified documents detailing its decades-long effort to respond to public's insistence on the existence of unidentified flying objects.

The documents also  detail how the British Government began making official inquiries into UFOs starting in 1950 after receiving a number of flying saucer sightings. At the time, Britain's Ministry of Defense set up a secret working group called "The Flying Saucer Working Party" to monitor the sightings.. The existence of the group remained under wraps until 1988 when correspondence between Winston Churchill and the Air Ministry got opened.

"What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience," Churchill wrote to his air defense chief at the time. A six-page report that was subsequently issued by the secret panel found no evidence to suggest anything out of the ordinary. It chalked up the UFO reports up to mistaken sightings of ordinary objects, hoaxes and psychological delusion.

But the British documents also reveal that that report relied heavily on CIA and U.S. Air Force information supplied to the UK. It notes that U.S. policy at the time "was to debunk the subject and restrict the release of information to the public about UFO sightings made by the armed services."

On the morning of Sept. 4, 1967, the authorities received a number of calls reporting six small "flying saucers" across Southern England. The UK responded by scrambling its defenses as well as police forces. But it turned out to be a false alarm: According to the report, engineering students from Farnborough Technical College had concocted "a rag-day hoax."

Over the following years, the British government logged thousands of UFO sightings. However, standard policy until 1967 " was to destroy UFO files at five yearly intervals as they were deemed to be of `transitory interest."  A summary released along with the new documents conclude that "a large number of records dating from the period before 1962 have been lost."

Between 1959 and 2007, Britain's Defense Intelligence branch has logged "more than 11,000 UFO reports." But during a 1979 Parliamentary debate, the government's spokesman, Lord Strabolgi, said that "there is nothing to convince Her Majesty's Government that there has ever been a single visit by an alien spacecraft...As for telling the public the truth about UFOs, the truth is simple. There really are many strange phenomena in the sky, and these are invariably reported by rational people. But there is a wide range of natural explanations to account for such phenomena."

A briefing document accompanying the new files  notes that investigations found "ordinary explanations" for most UFO reports. At the same time, however, it allowed the existence of "some cases on record where no common explanation can be found. For the Ministry of Defence, these types of report remain 'unidentified' rather than 'extraterrestrial'."

Among other highlights:

• British defense officials dismissed claims made by retired US Colonel Corso in a 1997 book "The Day after Roswell" noting that Colonel Corso was not a reliable source of information.
• When RAF pilots were scrambled in response to reports of approaching Warsaw Pact airplanes, there was "no evidence to suggest that any of these scrambles have taken place against anything other than man-made aircraft."
• UFO sightings have dropped from peak of 609 in 1996-97 to an average of 130 per year between 2001 and 2006.
• The number of UFO reports in 1996-97 increased by 50 per cent in connection with the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident.