Out of the shadows?
It is 14 years since I left the Ministry of Defence Main Building in Whitehall holding one of only a handful of hard copies of the 463-page, three-volume report Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region, codenamed ‘Condign’ by its elusive (and at that point anonymous) author. The penultimate UFO desk officer, Linda Unwin, was, like all MoD staff, subject to the Official Secrets Act. She was responsible for releasing the redacted text to me after I used the Freedom of Information Act to get it from the secret vault of the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS). For years, the MoD had maintained that Linda’s department was the focal point for all British government interest. But the report she handed over made it clear this was far from the whole story. Condign was a project funded entirely by the Defence Intelligence branch DI55 that had kept tabs on UFO reports since the mid- 1960s when they inherited the task from the former Air Ministry (see FT226:32-33).
Files released at The National Archives revealed that DI55’s main responsibility was guided missiles and space weapons. UFOs or UAPs () were a spin-off task inherited from the Cold War era. Anything unidentified that entered Earth’s atmosphere was of interest to DI55’s
