Campaigner urges UK government to reopen UFO investigations

A petition launched in June is pressing the UK government to reopen UFO investigations and create a national reporting office, arguing that unusual aerial sightings deserve a clear public path for reporting, review and explanation. It closes on 18 June 2026 and calls for cooperation with other countries as the debate around unidentified anomalous phenomena intensifies.

The dispute reaches back to the Ministry of Defence’s former UFO reporting desk, which handled calls and emails from the public, military personnel and commercial pilots for more than 50 years before it was shut in November and December 2009. The department said the unit had no defence value, served no defence purpose and cost about £44,000 a year to run. It also said no UFO report had produced evidence of a threat to the United Kingdom or proof that extraterrestrial life exists.

Before the 1960s, the MoD destroyed UFO material after five years, but later records were retained and eventually declassified. The National Archives says the earliest surviving reports were mainly letters or phone calls from members of the public, though some came from military sources. In 2010, more than 6,000 pages of reports covering 1994 to 2000 were released, including accounts of alleged sightings over Chelsea Football Club and over then-home secretary Michael Howard’s home in Kent.

The final tranche of files later showed how active the desk remained even as the closure approached. Declassified material released in 2013 said the unit received more than 600 sightings and reports in 2009, more than triple the previous year. The National Archives also preserves reports from 1997 to 2009 that list dates, times, locations and brief descriptions, underscoring how much of the UK’s UFO history was reduced to scattered case files rather than a standing public system.

That history now sits uneasily beside developments in the United States, where Congress has held hearings, passed laws and created offices to investigate UAPs, including the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. New batches of declassified files were also released in May and June 2026. The UK petition’s central argument is that Whitehall should not leave a gap where mystery, misinformation and national-security concerns overlap. For campaigners, the question is no longer whether sightings exist, but whether the state has a credible way to deal with them.