UK MoD Report: UFOs With ‘Aerodynamic Characteristics Beyond Any Known Aircraft’ ‘Certainly Exist’
Table of Contents
‘Indisputable’
UAP in the UK ADR
Flight Safety Risk
Barely Understood
Military Applications
Political Implications
‘Indisputable’
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region (UAP in the UK ADR) is a secret Ministry of Defence (MoD) report that was declassified in 2006 via updated Freedom of Information laws.
“Codenamed Project Condign, the study was started in December 1996 and completed four years later in March 2000.”
The report was commissioned by the MoD to conclusively determine whether decades of secret UAP investigations had produced any information of value to UK Defence leadership.
The introductory paragraph of the Executive Summary states:
“That UAP exist is indisputable.”
The report clarifies that it’s referring to the type of UAP that have “exceptional characteristics” and are “popularly known as ‘UFOs’”:
“Credited with the ability to hover, land, take-off, accelerate to exceptional velocities and vanish, they can reportedly alter their direction of flight suddenly and clearly can exhibit aerodynamic characteristics well beyond those of any known aircraft or missile — either manned or unmanned.”
UAP in the UK ADR
UAP in the UK ADR is accessible via the UK National Archives website, and its contents have been extensively reported on by prominent publications including BBC News, The Guardian and Wired.
This report was never intended for public distribution. It was the product of a classified internal government study designed to secretly inform executive-level Ministry of Defence decision-making:
“Only 11 copies of the report were produced, and they were circulated to a restricted number of high-ranking Royal Air Force and defense ministry officials. It was so secret that not even the Ministry of Defence’s UFO department or the government ministers in charge of the defense ministry were made aware of it.”
These circumstances are very different from public-facing reports like the USAF/University of Colorado Condon Report or the recent ODNI Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena report.
The MoD went to extraordinary lengths to cover up its involvement in investigating UAP. After years of denial by Defence officials that the report even existed, a Freedom of Information Act request by Sheffield Hallam University academic Dr. David Clarke ultimately led to the report’s declassification in 2006.
In an August 2021 article by Micah Hanks, Dr. Clarke recalled:
“When I … got hold of that report twenty years ago, it was quite a stunning conclusion,” Clarke says. “So here was the guy, the UFO expert at the Ministry of Defence, he was actually saying ‘well, I’ve studied this for thirty years. My conclusion is these things exist.’”
A combination of still-classified material held in Defence Intelligence, Section 55 (DI55), the MoD’s intelligence branch whose existence was denied by the UK government until recently, along with “relevant scientific principles” & “probable underlying science” were used to arrive at the report’s conclusions about UAP.
Flight Safety Risk
The report reveals that UAP were found to pose a flight safety risk to civil air traffic:
“…a head-on encounter with a UAP… could, conceivably, result in a sudden control input from which recovery is impossible before ground impact. Although the risk, based on all available evidence, is judged to be very low, it cannot be totally ruled out.
Attempts by other nations to intercept the unexplained objects, which can clearly change position faster than an aircraft, have reportedly already caused fatalities.”
The report specifically advises that the MoD should warn civil air traffic authorities about the flight safety risk posed by UAP:
The flight safety aspects of the findings should be made available to the appropriate RAF Air Defence and other military and civil authorities which operate aircraft, particularly those operating fast and at low altitude.”
Barely Understood
The report confidently states that UAP with exceptional characteristics “certainly” exist in Earth’s atmosphere. Doubt is notably introduced when a possible origin of UAP is proposed:
“There seems to be a strong possibility that at least some of the events may be triggered by meteor re-entry, the meteors neither burning up completely nor impacting as meteorites, but forming buoyant plasmas.
…the scientific rationale for sustaining them for significant periods is incomplete or not fully understood.”
The conditional language applied to the proposed origin (“seems… strong possibility… some… may be”) of UAP does not elicit the same confidence level as the statements made about their existence (“certainly”, “indisputable”).
The true origin of UAP appears to remain “barely understood” by the top levels of Defence leadership, despite completing a four year study that reviewed “all the available evidence remaining in the Department (reported over the last 30 years)”, which contained “a lot of secret data that a lot of average atmospheric scientists perhaps wouldn’t be aware of.’”
UAP in the UK ADR was commissioned to represent an accurate assessment of all classified evidence held in DI55 files.
If exotic phenomena with exceptional characteristics have been determined to “certainly exist” in the UK Air Defence Region then there’s a clear obligation on national security grounds to conclusively identify their true origin, and failure to do so would pose an unprecedented national security risk.
Military Applications
Former MoD UFO investigator Nick Pope writes about “the one area where conspiracy theorists were right — though not for the reasons they believed” in a 2016 BBC.com feature:
“The UK government — and other governments too, I suspect — were indeed hiding information on UFOs, but not about aliens.
Rather, we might be dealing with exotic atmospheric phenomena — and MOD scientific and technical intelligence personnel believed that, if harnessed, these might be able to be militarised.
This is the ultimate dirty secret about UFOs, since a natural phenomenon that could be weaponised would be hugely attractive to the military of any nation.”
The contents of UAP in the UK ADR support the conclusion that the UK government (“and other governments too”) may be “hiding information on UFOs” because they can be “militarised”:
“further investigation should be into… various characteristics of plasmas in novel military applications…
With respect to the possibility of the use of plasmas for military applications… the implications have already been briefed to the relevant MoD technology managers.”
Hypothetical military applications are proposed. One example is “drag reduction or control”, another is “plasma-type decoys”.
In 2000, the same year as the UK report’s completion but six years before its declassification, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began a Quiet Supersonic Platform (QSP) Program that included drag reduction and control experiments with plasma:
“the development… of… supersonic aircraft with substantially reduced sonic boom… Advanced airframe technologies would be explored… including …exotic concepts (plasma, heat and particle injection)…” (pg. 65)
By 2011 NASA was publicly posting chats with experts discussing theoretical plasma technology that could reduce or eliminate sonic booms on hypersonic aircraft:
“Burin: Is there any chance a laser or plasma beam could be appended to the nosecone of a plane to help pierce the atmosphere…?
Ed.: Yes, plasma would change the gas constant of the air, potentially reducing the sonic boom...”
Recent articles also describe the US Navy’s new “plasma ‘UFO’ decoys”, the exact hypothetical technology described in the 2000 report.
Political Implications
Over twenty years ago Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region informed UK Defence leadership that UAP with exceptional characteristics indisputably exist, revealed that the origins of UAP remain uncertain, identified that UAP pose a flight safety risk to civil air traffic, advised that civil air traffic authorities should be briefed and recommended that UAP-related plasma technology should be secretly weaponized.
The contents of UAP in the UK ADR should motivate citizens from all over the world to determine whether their domestic Defence departments have — like the UK MoD — been concealing classified materials about the flight safety risk that UAP pose to civil air traffic in order to secretly weaponize UAP-related plasma technology.
