Flying Saucer Working Party

The Flying Saucer Working Party was the first official British inquiry into flying saucers: a small body of service intelligence officers set up in August 1950 under the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence and the Joint Technical Intelligence Committee (DSI/JTIC) of the Ministry of Defence on the initiative of the Ministry's chief scientific adviser, Sir Henry Tizard, who held that reports of flying saucers should not be dismissed without some investigation. Its six-page final report of June 1951, marked "Secret/Discreet," concluded that all the sightings it had examined could be explained as misidentifications of ordinary objects or phenomena, optical illusions, psychological delusions or hoaxes, and recommended "very strongly that no further investigation of reported mysterious aerial phenomena be undertaken, unless and until some material evidence becomes available." The report stayed secret for half a century: Winston Churchill was told in 1952 that a full intelligence study had been made, attempts to trace it failed for decades, and a surviving copy was found in the Ministry's archives in 2001 after requests from David Clarke and Andy Roberts. The working party's sceptical conclusions set the template for British policy on the subject, which the Ministry's later UFO desk and the secret study Project Condign followed.

Establishment

The Ministry took up the subject during the spring and summer of 1950, when numerous flying-saucer sightings were reported in Britain for the first time and the press took an interest; two Sunday newspapers serialised the first American books on the topic, and the Sunday Dispatch was encouraged to publish stories by Lord Louis Mountbatten, later Chief of Defence Staff, who was among a small group of officials who believed that UFOs were real and of interplanetary origin. Tizard, best known for his work on radar, came to believe as Chief Scientific Adviser that the reports deserved investigation, and the small team was formed under the DSI/JTIC under terms of reference that were to review the available evidence on flying saucers, to examine the evidence on which British reports were based, to report to the DSI/JTIC as necessary, and to keep in touch with American occurrences and their evaluation. The working party comprised intelligence officers from each of the three armed services and was chaired by G. L. Turney, head of scientific intelligence at the Admiralty; it held its first meeting in October 1950 at the Hotel Metropole in London.

Inquiries and report

The team reviewed what was known about the subject and investigated sightings that RAF Fighter Command reported to it, questioning a group of test pilots from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough who had reported aerial phenomena. Of the hundreds of reports it examined, only three, according to Clarke, merited serious consideration, and the report conceded that "it is impossible to give anything like scientific proof that the phenomena observed are, or are not, caused by something entirely novel." Its members relied heavily on information supplied by the American project then called Grudge and by the Central Intelligence Agency; Dr Harris Marshall Chadwell, the CIA's assistant director for scientific intelligence, was present at the DSI/JTIC meeting in 1951 that received the report, and Clarke finds American influence in the working party's adoption of the term UFO and in its conclusions, American policy at the time being to debunk the subject and restrict public information about service sightings. Circulation of the report within the Ministry was restricted to a single copy sent to Tizard. Clarke writes that Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, the Battle of Britain commander, privately believed in an extraterrestrial origin, and that Churchill's scientific adviser Lord Cherwell, Tizard's rival, endorsed the dismissive conclusions.

Afterwards

After the report was delivered the team was dissolved and its investigations ended. When the Washington radar sightings of July 1952 made headlines worldwide, Churchill asked the Air Minister on 28 July 1952 "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?" and was told on 9 August that the subject had been the object of "a full intelligence study in 1951" and that nothing had since led the Air Staff to change its opinion. Several attempts to trace the study failed until the minutes of the DSI/JTIC were released in 1998; the report itself was found in 2001, released in 2002, and a copy with its covering letter to Tizard was released in July 2008. The surviving copy was found in 2001, almost a year after the author of Project Condign had finished his own study, as a direct result of Clarke and Anthony's requests.

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