14 DAY TRIAL // Officials with the Australian government appear to have misplaced all files related to the rich history of UFO sightings in the country. After spending two weeks looking for them, officials could not retrieve more than one such file.
The general public in the country has been reporting various sightings and mysterious occurrences for decades, and the national Department of Defense (DoD) has collected them all, presumably, for archival or other purposes.
Some two months ago, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper asked the DoD to release all the relevant files, based on a Freedom of Information (FOI) request that it had submitted to the government, Space reports.
After nearly nine weeks of what must have been an arduous search, authorities came up empty-handed. All they could produce was a report called “UFOs/Strange Occurrences and Phenomena in Woomera.”
“The files could not be located and Headquarters Air Command formally advised that this file is deemed lost,” told the newspaper the assistant director of the country's Department of Defense, Natalie Carpenter. This was her formal response to the FOI request the newspaper set forth.
Officially, all of the documents went missing, even though reports depicting weird phenomena or flying saucers have been definitely filed for years. Since 2000, the Australian DoD stopped taking such reports from the public.
People who experience an odd sighting now address their queries to the police. A file is put together on each of these events, and those files should presumably still exist in the archives. Some newspapers in Australia have already expressed their intention to retrieve them.
Interestingly, the United Kingdom managed to misplace its own UFO sighting reports earlier this year. When Her Majesty's government released archival data on such events, all entries for the period 1980-1982 had been removed.
At that time, authorities claimed that the documents had been either lost, misplaced, or destroyed. Naturally, conspiracy theorist had a field day with the omission, as they are very likely to have with the Australian gaffe as well.