Following the initiative of their French neighbors who published their classified UFO files last year, the British Ministry of Defense has started on Monday a four year project destined to transfer the files to the UK's National Archives. The British Ministry of Defense now possesses about 160 UFO related files, collected over a period of time between the 1950s and 2007. The action taken by the MOD represents the biggest release of classified files in the history of the institution.

The decision to make the classified files public came in the outcome of numerous "freedom of information" requests related to UFOs. "This is a great day for open government and freedom of information", said Nick Pope, former UFO investigator at MOD. On Monday, the institution released eight files and published them on a web page owned by the National Archives. Said documents include a series of UFO reports and third degree encounters between 1978 and 1987.

One of the reports describes how an old man had supposedly been taken on a tour of an alien ship by green alien beings. However, he was not abducted because he was too old. Yet another report contains the transcription of the 1978 MOD preparation debate in the House of Lords, between Lord Strabolgi, David Kenwirthy and Lord Clancarty, Brinsley le Poer Trench.

"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. There is nothing to suggest to Her Majesty's Government that such phenomena are alien spacecraft", said Lord Strabolgi.

"The papers show they went to a considerable amount of work to actually produce background briefing for Lord Strabolgi", said David Clarke, Sheffield Hallam University UFO history expert. As far as the government was concerned, UFOs were investigated solely because they might have presented threats to national security. "As soon as they were able to say this particular UFO isn't an enemy aircraft, they weren't interested in pursuing it any further", he said.

"It's a good move on behalf of the Ministry of Defense to put this material in the public domain and demonstrate what they know, which doesn't amount to much", Clarke concluded.