UK Ministry of Defence UAP records

The UK Ministry of Defence ran a UFO desk from 1950 until it closed in 2009, logging public reports and investigating those with possible air-defence relevance. Between 2008 and 2013 the MoD released its files to The National Archives; the records here are drawn from that release. They include Rendlesham Forest (1980), the case often called 'Britain's Roswell'; the 1993 Cosford / RAF Shawbury wave, the largest the Ministry formally investigated; and Project Condign, the MoD's own classified study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena completed in 2000.

MoD files are gendarmerie-style report logs and internal correspondence, redacted for personal data under the Data Protection Act. The Ministry's standing position was that almost all reports had mundane explanations and that no report ever revealed a defence threat — read these as the record of how Britain officially handled the subject, not as conclusions about its cause.