The MoD's "release" of UFO files is worse than no release at all - anyone else actually read them?

Every few years the Ministry of Defence does its little performance of releasing UFO files to the National Archives and the press dutifully runs the same story about how Britain is "coming clean" about flying saucers. The Guardian did a piece on the latest batch last month, very excited tone, lots of quotes from Nick Pope looking serious. So I actually went and read the released documents. All fourteen hundred pages of them. Over a bank holiday weekend, yes, I know, I need help.

Here's what I found: witness reports (interesting), internal memos discussing those witness reports (less interesting), and then vast swathes of text that are redacted to the point of meaninglessness. We're not talking the odd sensitive name blacked out, we're talking entire pages where the only visible content is a date stamp and the word "CONTINUED." The Guardian piece mentioned none of this. The BBC piece mentioned none of this. Every single outlet just reprinted the MoD press release with minor variations.

The Rendlesham Forest incident files in particular are a joke. The Halt memo is there, as it's been since 1983, and then there's a further 34 pages of what appears to be follow-up investigation that is almost entirely redacted under exemptions citing national security and international relations. International relations. For a light in the woods in Suffolk. Pull the other one.

My broader point is that the media has essentially become the PR department for managed disclosure. They report the release, they don't report what's missing from the release, and the public comes away thinking everything's been explained when actually we've learned almost nothing new. Has anyone else been through these files or am I shouting into the void here?

You're not shouting into the void, I went through about 400 pages of the 2009 batch and had the same experience. The reports from members of the public are often genuinely fascinating - there's a cracking one from a retired police sergeant in Shropshire describing something over the A49 that matches no known aircraft profile from that period - and then the official response documents are either missing or redacted. It's almost more suspicious than if they'd released nothing, because it implies something warranted a response significant enough to need hiding.

To be fair to the Guardian they did run a follow-up piece about the redactions, I think it was about three weeks after the main story and buried on the Science page where nobody reads it. That's almost worse in a way. They knew, they reported it, and then it disappeared. The cycle of news just absorbs everything.

Nick Pope has said publicly that he's frustrated by the redactions too and that during his time at the MoD he saw material that has not been and likely will never be released. He's been pretty consistent about that over the years. Whether you trust him is another matter - some people think he's a genuine whistleblower, others think he's a carefully managed limited hangout. I go back and forth honestly.

The "international relations" exemption on the Rendlesham stuff is the one that really gets me. That phrasing specifically implies another country's government is involved in why we can't see the information. Which is either fascinating or a very convenient all-purpose excuse.

Slight sceptic's perspective here: some of the redactions will genuinely just be protecting intelligence sources and methods that have nothing to do with the UAP content itself. If a report came in through a NATO intelligence channel, for example, you redact the channel not because of what it contains but because revealing the channel compromises other operations entirely. That doesn't explain everything that's missing but it does explain some of it without requiring a conspiracy. The problem is we can't tell which redactions are mundane bureaucratic caution and which are actually hiding something because... well. They're redacted.

The media thing is real and it applies to more than just UFO coverage. I work in local journalism (not naming the outlet) and the amount of times a press release arrives pre-framed in a way that makes it almost impossible to write anything other than the intended story... it's not necessarily malicious, it's just that journalists are busy and understaffed and a well-packaged story is an easy story. The MoD has been doing managed releases for decades and they're very good at making the release itself feel like the news so nobody goes looking at what's actually in the documents.

Fourteen hundred pages over a bank holiday. Mate. Legend. Genuinely though, has anyone tried FOI requests for the specific document numbers referenced in the redacted sections? You can sometimes find that something redacted in one file has been partially released elsewhere because a different department processed a related request. It's tedious work but there are researchers who've had success cross-referencing the National Archives catalogue that way.

The Rendlesham "international relations" exemption almost certainly refers to the United States Air Force given that Bentwaters was a USAF base. The UK government can't release material that implicates American military personnel or operations without American consent, essentially. Which means the actual investigation - if there was one - may be sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere in Virginia rather than in any archive we can access. That's not even a conspiracy theory, that's just how the special relationship works in practice.

Great thread. Bookmarking this. Also slightly depressing that the most detailed analysis of these files I've read in years is on a forum called Quirk Reports rather than in any actual newspaper. No offence to Quirk Reports.