Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Australian government UAP files - why bother?

Hi all,

The other day, via private email, one of the readers of this blog, asked a fair enough question. "Why are you bothering with old files?"

Who is aware?

My initial response was that many people are simply not aware of the contents of the RAAF, CSIRO, Met. Bureau, ASIO, the former Department of Civil Aviation, Army and Navy files on UAP, held in the National Archives of Australia (NAA.)

Some of these files were digitised by the NAA in the period between 2003-2008 during the Disclosure Australia Project. Others have been digitised (for a fee) following requests by myself. More recently, Melbourne researcher Paul Dean has spent money getting most of the remaining known files digitised. Once digitised the material on all these files (about a hundred now) are available for anyone to read. The more people who read these files, the more people there are to discuss and debate their value and meaning.

There are good reports:

Secondly, the files do contain some startlingly good UAP reports, which the RAAF etc. documented but never really analysed. Occasionally, when yet another file is digitised, some more interesting material comes to light.

Newer files:

Thirdly, the old files lead on to newer files. The Archives Act at the moment only allows us to reach back to 1984. I am currently seeking RAAF UAP files for the period 1984 to 1994. The latter date is when the RAAF rounded up all its UAP files from its various bases around the country, closed them off and deposited them into the National Archives. I have already secured copies of two of these files and have requested three more from the RAAF via the Freedom of Information Act. I will post on their contents in due course.

Education:

Fourthly, the current staff of the Department of Defence themselves, do not know the contents of their own UAP files. You may recall news media coverage a couple of years ago which stated that the DOD had "lost" its UAP files. At that time I sent the DOD FOI Unit a list of all the Australian government UAP files of which I was aware. Only by someone like me making the time to document the government holdings, can we assist educate current DOD staff about the topic. My reasoning here, is that the more they know on the subject, the more they can assist us with our enquiries.

That is why I continue to document these "old" files.

2 comments:

  1. Great post. Another argument for researching old data: Mark Rodeghier brought up some excellent points from the recent SSE meeting. He gave a presentation on how the UFO phenomenon has changed over the decades. Examples, after the late 1970's very few landing trace cases when there used to be many. Circular shaped UFOs reported earlier are now low flying black triangles. The more we learn, the more we try to understand what is going on.

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  2. Hi Conner,

    Thank you for your kind words, and the thoughts of Mark Rodeghier. In Australia, we now hardly receive any reports of vehicle intereference cases, whereas in the 1970's my colleagues and I looked into quite a few.

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