Britain released hundreds of previously secret ‘UFO files’ on Thursday including a letter saying that Winston Churchill had ordered a 50-year cover-up of a wartime encounter between a UFO and military pilot.
The files, published by the National Archives, span decades and contain scores of witness accounts, sketches and classified briefing notes documenting mysterious sightings across Britain.
A Ministry of Defence note refers to a 1999 letter stating that a Royal Air Force plane returning from a mission in Europe during World War Two was “approached by a metallic UFO”.
The unidentified author of the letter says his grandfather attended a wartime meeting between Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower during which the two expressed concern over the incident and “decided to keep it secret”. The MoD subsequently investigated the case but found no written record of the incident, the files say.
In a case filed in 1995, the captain of a plane approaching Manchester reported a near-miss with an “unidentified object”, and a witness on the ground provided a sketch showing a UFO “20 times the size of a football field”.