MOD UFO files released last year - has anyone actually read them? Most of it is blacked out rubbish

Right, so the latest batch of Ministry of Defence UFO-related files were released via the National Archives last spring and I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of my Sunday afternoon downloading and going through them. The short version: there are around 240 pages in this release covering the period 1994 to 2002, and of those approximately 240 pages, I would estimate that maybe 60 to 70 are actually legible in any meaningful sense. The rest is either entirely redacted, redacted in ways that remove any useful context, or - and this is my personal favourite - pages where they've redacted the redaction explanations.

What is actually visible is mostly procedural. Memos about how sightings should be logged. Letters from members of the public being politely thanked and told that no defence significance was found. The odd incident report that has had everything removed except the date, the location, and the name of the filing officer. I did find one page that referenced an investigation into a sighting near RAF Lossiemouth in 1997 that seemed to involve scrambling aircraft - the word "intercept" was not redacted - but everything else about that document is solid black. Completely useless as evidence of anything except that they are very good at using a felt-tip pen.

I'm not necessarily saying this proves a cover-up, because obviously the files that prove a cover-up would be the ones most thoroughly redacted. But there's something almost satirical about releasing documents under freedom of information that contain less information than the original press releases. If anyone else has gone through these or has experience with FOIA requests to the MOD more generally, I'd genuinely love to know if there's a more productive avenue. I've found the American approach to UAP disclosure - however incomplete - feels considerably more substantive than whatever this is.

The RAF Lossiemouth reference is interesting and I don't think it's widely known. There were a couple of reported incidents in the Moray Firth area in the late nineties that got a small amount of local press coverage in the Inverness Courier but nothing nationally. The intercept language in an official document would suggest they were taking something seriously enough to scramble, which is not a cheap or casual decision. A shame that's the one bit they chose to leave in while blacking out everything else - almost feels deliberate, like they want us to know they know something but won't say what.

I work adjacent to the public sector (not saying more than that) and the level of redaction you're describing is unfortunately pretty standard for anything that touches on operational military matters regardless of how old it is. The exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 are broad enough to drive a lorry through - national security, defence, international relations - and the MOD applies them enthusiastically. It's not necessarily sinister, it's more that the classification system is deeply conservative and nobody within it has any incentive to err on the side of disclosure. Whether that conservatism is hiding something extraordinary is a separate question.

pages where they've redacted the redaction explanations

Nick Pope spent years running the MOD's UFO desk and has talked quite openly about the frustration of working within a system that simultaneously took the subject seriously enough to investigate but not seriously enough to properly resource. His books are obviously written with an agenda but his description of the internal culture - basically a deep institutional embarrassment about the whole thing - rings true based on what you can read between the lines of these releases. Nobody wanted to be the person who put their name to a memo saying "yes, we think this might be real."

Has anyone tried submitting a targeted FOIA request specifically referencing that Lossiemouth incident rather than the general files? Apparently if you can be specific enough about a particular incident, date, and location it's harder for them to apply blanket exemptions because they have to justify each redaction individually rather than wholesale. I haven't done it myself but someone on the British FOIA Users Network forum apparently had some success with this approach for aviation-related requests.

Honestly the thing that gets me isn't what's redacted, it's what's not in there at all. The Rendlesham Forest incident happened in 1980 and the documents we've seen through various releases are woefully incomplete given the scale of what supposedly occurred. You've got witness testimonies from US Air Force personnel, you've got the Halt memo, and then you've got a yawning silence where the British government's own contemporaneous investigation should be. Either they didn't investigate properly - which given it was a nuclear-armed NATO base on British soil would be extraordinary negligence - or those documents exist and we haven't seen them. Neither option reflects well.

I'll be honest, I think some of the redactions are less about hiding UFO secrets and more about hiding mundane things that would be embarrassing for other reasons - budget overruns, procedural failures, that sort of thing. The MOD has used national security exemptions to protect information that later turned out to be about perfectly ordinary incompetence. Not saying there's nothing to find, just that the redaction blanket gets thrown over a lot of unrelated rubbish too.