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As July became August and the rain continued to fall, unusual letters started landing on British MPs’ desks. “Dear,” they began – as letters so often do, before continuing in a way that letters often don’t – “I am deeply concerned.” Over the course of 21 paragraphs, the missives expressed distress “about the UK government’s outwardly lacklustre response” to “UAP”, three initials that don’t mean much to many of us. UAP are “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena”. You and I know them better as UFOs.
In total, almost 1,800 of the letters have been sent to unsuspecting recipients through the UAP Disclosure Campaign, run by James Green, a 47-year-old software engineer from Wiltshire, who has been encouraging people to send messages to their MPs through an automated form on his website.
In late July, as the letters were arriving across Britain, a former US intelligence officer, David Grusch, told a congressional hearing in Washington DC that “non-human biologics” had recovered from UFO crash sites by the US Department of Defense in a “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programme.” The US government, Grusch claimed, was hiding intact alien craft. While the Pentagon denied Grusch’s account, it has spent the last three years investigating UFOs, having established a “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force” in August 2020. This September, NASA appointed a former Pentagon official as head of its own UFO research team.
But here in the UK, the responses to letters requesting more information from officials have been mixed. “I’m afraid you lost me after the first two paragraphs,” replied Rob Roberts, the independent MP for Delyn. Most politicians – including the prime minister – wrote some variation of the same thing. The MOD did have a UFO investigations desk, they said, but it closed in 2009 after being deemed unnecessary. In its 50 years, the desk found no evidence that UFOs were a threat to the UK.
“The responses have been quite disheartening for people,” Green says via Zoom, his camera off. “Compare what’s happening in the US to what’s happening here. In the US they’re having a university-level discussion. In the UK, we’re being instructed on how to hold our pencils.”
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Green first became interested in UFOs after reading mystery books as a kid. After he had exhausted all the tomes he could find covering the topic in the UK, he started ordering books from the US using his parents’ credit card. But despite spending 36 years reading about UFOs, he has never personally seen one – much to his disappointment. Green objects when I describe his UFO research as a “hobby” (although he thinks the word “researcher” is also a stretch). Although he backed away from the subject in the ’90s because, “it wasn’t moving forward”, today he’s arguably more involved than ever.
In 2017, the New York Times published a front-page story revealing the existence of a secret government UFO programme at the defence department, parts of which remain classified. Ever since, America has started taking flying saucers more seriously. This year, aliens were beamed onto mainstream news. In July, the US House of Representatives’ Oversight committee held hearings about UFOs for the first time in nearly half a century. “I do believe that there is a very large and looming question about what is being disclosed, what is being properly stewarded, and we have a responsibility across all subject matters to pursue that truth,” congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Guardian.
In September, Mexico held its first congressional hearing on the subject of UFOs, during which legislators were shown two small “bodies” presented as evidence of 1,000-year-old non-human life forms. The Mexican government hasn’t taken an official position, instead stressing the importance of listening to all voices, and the mummies are currently undergoing lab testing.
But in the UK, taboos around UAPs still hover overhead, casting a shadow on those who speak up. “It’s something I’ve kept close to my chest and quite secret over the years, because I know what people’s reactions can be like,” Green says. “The subject is pretty alien, excuse the pun.”
Bolstered by movements in America, a cast of Brits are trying to bring ufology down to earth. There are people like Green; the kinds of people you can talk to at length without anyone using the word “aliens”. Many seemed to believe we are closer to the truth than ever before. I wanted to meet these people, to find out more. Who are they, and what was driving them to search the skies? At least some, it turns out, are looking for something more familiar right here on earth.
Ash Ellis’s neighbours saw the UFO too, but none of them really cared. It was 1997 and Ellis was ten; a group of locals had gathered in his Warrington street to watch the Hale-Bopp comet pass overhead. As they were looking up, a big black triangle appeared above the crowd, three lights blinking at its points. “It seemed darker than the sky behind it,” Ellis says now, “We all saw it.” Unfazed, the adults went back to waiting for the comet and the kids resumed playing football. Ellis recalls asking his friends: “Why are you not wondering what that is?”
Now a 36-year-old working in customer service, Ellis has been fascinated by UFOs for most of his life. While other witnesses “didn’t talk about” the black triangle afterwards – and even Ellis’s parents have forgotten the incident today – he has been unable to let go of what he saw. In April 2020, Ellis created his own organisation, UFO Identified, which has over 4,000 Facebook followers and today boasts the biggest database of modern UFO sightings in the UK.
Ellis and his team personally investigate accounts submitted to the website, having completed the Investigators Training Course offered by the 59-year-old British UFO Research Association (BUFORA), in which students are taught how to separate instances of so-called “high strangeness” from sightings of birds, weather balloons and aircraft. Once, Ellis says, he spoke to a witness in Bolton who saw an object come down from the sky and land in a wooded area – she then videoed an odd light in the trees. “We went straight out there to investigate the case.” Long story short, the falling object had been a meteor, and: “The light in the woods turned out to be people doing drugs.”
Ellis can drive up to 60 miles to interview witnesses. He submits Freedom of Information requests, and talks to local police forces and astronomers to check whether there’s a prosaic explanation for things people have seen. Some witnesses don’t respond well to having their sighting rationalised. “People email back and say ‘That’s just your opinion,’” Ellis says. He has lilac-topped hair, an eyebrow piercing, and on the day we speak is wearing a black hoodie emblazoned with the UFO Identified logo.
UFO Identified now publishes an annual report of its recorded encounters; the 2022 edition is 18 pages long and includes 497 sightings, 84 more than the previous year. Just under half of these reports were accompanied by video or photo evidence. The data found that the most common time to spot a UFO is between 9pm and 10pm on a Saturday (the report is quick to acknowledge that this is also the time people are most likely to be drunk).
The group investigates around 40 sightings each month – Ellis works alongside a 45-year-old Liverpudlian nurse called Natalie Pearce and Abigail Hyslop, a 52-year-old Preston-based civil servant. “We’ve got a good reputation for not being sensational,” Pearce says, wearing an oversized grey cardigan with glasses atop her head. “We will say, ‘Oh that’s a lens flare, that’s a satellite.’ That doesn’t go down well a lot of the time because people want you to say, ‘Oh, that’s a spaceship with little green men in.’”
The team aren’t young, exactly, but they are new on the scene. Ellis and Hyslop got into ufology seriously during the pandemic. Hyslop – who has short cropped hair, glasses, and a nose piercing – grew up in an area of Scotland renowned for “dark skies”, meaning low light pollution that allows for optimal stargazing. While she’s long been interested in UFOs, she “didn’t do an awful lot with it” until she broke her ankle in 2020. She had to spend six weeks with her foot up; coincidentally, “UFO Week” was running on TV. “I got so cheesed off at the same stuff being rehashed, the same people, same stories,” she says, so she jumped at the chance to help Ellis with his new organisation.
In British ufology, there are familiar faces and familiar tales. In November 1980, a police officer named Alan Godfrey saw a bright light and a rotating diamond-shaped object hovering above him in the Yorkshire town of Todmorden – he claims to have lost 30 minutes of time and returned to consciousness with a burned foot. The closest thing we have to America’s infamous “Roswell incident” (when metal debris was discovered in that area of New Mexico in 1947, sparking decades of conspiracy theories) came a month later in December 1980, when residents living near Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk saw strange pulsating lights descending into the trees. Nearby farm animals, according to eyewitness accounts, were sent into a “frenzy”.
As captivating as these stories are, Ellis wants to bring things into the 21st century. “I’ve been at conferences where I’ve sat for five hours listening to old men talk, I’m falling asleep,” he says. “We want to do things differently to try and get newer people in.”
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Not everyone likes this new way of operating. “People are horrible,” Pearce says – “bitchy, nasty.” Ellis has reached out to older, more established ufologists and asked to share information – he pays for his own petrol when travelling to sightings, and can’t physically investigate reports in London, for example, so he tries to pass details on to others. But the “old guard,” as Ellis calls them, often aren’t keen to share. “There’s a big ego thing that I’ve come across, people act like, ‘This is mine’… People who have been doing it for decades tend to keep themselves to themselves.”
When I speak with older ufologists who’ve been around for decades (some of whom charmingly don’t enunciate each letter of the phenomenon, instead pronouncing them “yufoes”), no one is outwardly rude, but a few seem guarded. Some take things just as seriously as UFO Identified but are wary about being mixed up with online “nonsense”. Others are deliberately isolated – one only responds to questions via email “for personal safety” – and others are not at all concerned about seeming serious. One assures me that they could tackle an alien with mixed martial arts, while another describes a sexual encounter with an alien in detail. While these factions are diplomatic about each other, divisions are clear.
Perhaps because of this, UFO Identified is now developing its own training course in the hopes of building a national network across the UK. “The plan is to open up hubs around the country under our name where people can investigate reports on our behalf and run their own meetings in that area,” Ellis says. It’s important to the team that they make all their research public and don’t keep it to themselves like investigators in the past. Ellis is at the very beginning of his five year expansion plan. “Our plan is to be the UK group, really.”
For now, things are starting small: UFO Identified runs three meetings a month across the north west and tries to organise regular “sky watches”. And every year since 2021, the team have thrown a mini conference on the outskirts of Manchester, allowing British ufologists to have close encounters with each other.
It’s 10.30am on a clear October day and someone behind me is munching crisps. When I turn around in my seat – I’m one of about 80 gathered on red velvet banquet chairs in the main function room of Manchester’s Stanley House – I’m delighted to see the crisps are shaped like alien heads. It turns out that UFO Identified’s “Mini-Con 2023” sells Space Raiders, alongside an array of branded merch, and a £15 card game where you can play alien species visiting earth.
The majority of the audience seem to be middle-aged men in glasses, hoodies and raincoats, though there are a handful of women. One wins the tin-foil hat competition (“If you make fun of yourself, you take it away from other people,” Ellis says) by crafting a Viking helmet with an alien face on top. “Best day ever!” says the winner, Jessica, whose name I have changed because she fears career repercussions.
Jessica, who has dip-dyed hair and is wearing a T-shirt she picked up in actual Roswell, explains how she first became interested in UFOs. “I had a bit of a crazy experience,” she says. She’d been sent to Africa for work and when driving home one night, a 100ft “star” started chasing her car. “My mind’s open basically. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I was chased by an alien’ but I’m not discounting it either,” she says. Jessica’s plus-one is finding the conference fascinating; this is their second date.
But then this is perhaps the one day in the one room in Britain where UFO enthusiasts can be certain to avoid stigma. The UFO Identified’s team say that the mockery they receive is now “water off a duck’s back”. Pearce says that her own family call her “nuts” and “laugh at everything I do to do with this.”
The mixture of the silly and the serious at Mini-Con is symbolised by Cardiff Metropolitan University lecturer Dr Daniel Stubbings’ talk about his research into the psychology of UFO sightings, which he conducts while two inflatable little green men await photo opportunities outside the door.
Another speaker, a police officer from the West Midlands named Roy Teague, believes that the British government are “priming kids for the next generation of alien contact”, explaining his theory that, between 2008 and 2017, schools across the country staged UFO crash landings at local schools. Young pupils would arrive to a playground covered in police tape – there were fake spacecraft and sometimes slimy handprints or fog machines. “Look at the effort that has gone into some of these exercises,” Teague says. “I genuinely think it’s to gauge how children would react.”
Teague asks whether it’s a “coincidence” that teachers decided to run these exercises independently. As consumer technology improves, he says, the government will no longer be able to hide the truth about UFOs from the public. “I think they’re drip-feeding us to get us ready for it.”
A man towards the back of the hall puts his hand up. “It’s not really a question…” he begins, before explaining that he also looked into these primary school activities. With incredulity in his voice, he says: “It was alleged to be under the auspice of some sort of creative writing project.”
(Teague’s suggestion that the staged UFO crash landings at schools stopped in 2017 is also shaky. In actual fact, one such event occurred in Norfolk this March. It was to mark World Book Day.)
Proceedings return to earth in the final presentation of the day, given by Vinnie Adams and Dan Zetterström of UAP Media UK, an organisation founded in late 2020 to encourage the British media to take UFOs more seriously. It was UAP Media, in fact, who first wrote the letter that numerous MPs received this summer. (Green’s website simply automates the mailing process.)
The pair tell stories to illustrate their feet are firmly on the ground. While in Colombia, visiting the infamous so-called “hill of the dancing lights”, they met locals who wanted them to investigate a video of an erupting blue luminescence. After interviewing witnesses and searching the area, the pair found that the location of the blue light lined up perfectly with a blown transformer. When Zetterström and Adams presented the witnesses with this prosaic explanation, “they thanked us very humbly for our work” but they “would not accept it.”
I had in fact met Adams earlier, for an interview before the conference. “For decades it was all flying saucers and little green men, whereas now we’re not trying to claim it’s aliens coming from [the star system] Zeta Reticuli,” Adams said, into his podcasting microphone. Though he has long been interested in UFOs, he started his own media company, Disclosure Team, during the pandemic. He now makes enough money from his YouTube channel and Patreon that ufology is his full-time career.
YouTube ufology is varied and often clickbaity – you could leave the platform believing anything you wanted to believe. Creators are incentivised to post extreme claims because on the platform eyeballs equal money. Adams concurs. “It’s disheartening when you see something that is being put out there to be genuine when it’s very clearly not and people are using it to gain views and followers and subscribers,” he says.“As an individual, I do have my biases slip in because I want something to be something so badly. But I rein myself in very quickly.”
Compare this to an email I received from a full-time ufologist who has been working in the field for two decades. “I have been abducted several times,” he says, before describing a sexual encounter with a female alien (he awoke with his pyjamas backwards).
Whatever Adams’ true beliefs – and whatever he wants to believe – the YouTuber seems to know that to be taken seriously by the media, you have to be serious. “It would be very easy for me to say these are definitely aliens, and people do that,” he says, “I feel there are some ethics within this subject I want to stick to. It comes down to keeping credibility and reducing stigma at the same time.”
To the sold-out crowd at Mini-Con, UFO Identified’s Hyslop and Pearce gave their own talk on “hypnotic regression”. Many in the UFO community believe that hypnotists can help witnesses recover their memories after experiencing missing or broken time. Yet older organisations like BUFORA are more sceptical, warning that vulnerable witnesses can be manipulated and their testimony can’t be considered accurate.
Pearce wants to be hypnotised because she has memories of “broken time”. As a child, she believes, she “went somewhere unusual” multiple times. “I can remember the bedside cabinet in my bedroom moving and going down a set of stairs behind them,” she says, “And then being in a clinical space that I shouldn’t have been in.” Pearce says she became interested in pursuing the paranormal because of her nursing career – she began seeing “very strange things floating towards me, all kinds of things I couldn’t explain.” Her interest in ghosts expanded into cryptozoology (think: Nessie and the Yeti) and then UFOs, “The whole thing,” she says, “is all interlinked.”
There is clearly a wide spectrum of beliefs in ufology, and as much as the new guard might initially have seemed to me like its more academic face, I soon find the old guard has its rational voices too. Nigel Watson is a 69-year-old UFO author who has been writing about the subject since the 1970s. Last year, in his column for the phenomena magazine Fortean Times, he argued that we “must remain hard headed when it comes to some ufological claims.”
“Nowadays social media constantly rehashes old video clips and stories that have long been outed as fakes,” he wrote, “yet many believers cling to them like drowning people hanging on to a fragment of wreckage.”
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Watson explains his position when I speak to him on a video call, his grey hair swept to one side. “I’ve gone on a journey where I originally thought well, we’ve landed on the moon, so it’s sensible that aliens would do the same land here and investigate us,” he says, “But I think the [contactee] UFO stories are just too improbable.”
Watson first set up a local UFO group in the 1970s to promote interest in the subject. These days, thanks to the internet, he believes “there’s plenty of promotion of the subject, but I don’t know where it’s really getting anyone.”
When Watson started meeting witnesses to hear their accounts almost 50 years ago, he quickly realised that human beings are just as complex as the great unknown. “It’s almost like roleplay, you can be involved in your own science fiction story,” he says. “Some people get gobbled up with belief in UFOs.”
For Heather Dixon, the national investigations coordinator and investigator training tutor at BUFORA, decades of research have taught her that UFO sightings are as much about “the human condition” as anything in the skies. Dixon has been meeting witnesses since the '90s, and explains that human memory is fallible and our psychology is complex. She now believes ufology is about “who we are, about how we perceive things, about how we understand the unknown.” It is, after all, surely not a coincidence that many modern ufologists arrived on the scene in 2020, a year when fear, loneliness and free time was in abundance. BUFORA noticed an uptick in phone calls reporting sightings during the pandemic. As Dixon tells me, “People look to the skies for a saviour.”
The Pentagon’s task force is currently investigating over 800 alleged sightings. In early November it launched an online form allowing past and present federal employees to share knowledge of any government programmes related to UFOs. Unidentified flying objects soar across our skies all the time – what’s up for debate is exactly what we’ll find once they’re identified. The task force’s annual report, released in October, said that “most” of the sightings it is investigating will “likely” have “ordinary” explanations.
Green’s letter writing campaign is based on his belief that we are closer to disclosure than ever before. Others agree, and are making active plans to prepare. Earlier this year, Brit John Priestland set up uNHIdden, an organisation that hopes to prepare people mentally for contact with non-human intelligence (NHI). “We have no particular insights or information about the existence (or otherwise) of extraterrestrials,” his website says, but, “We are ready to help develop strategies to support anyone who is worried or anxious about developments in this area.”
This sense of offering support and community is what keeps Ellis and his colleagues at UFO identified going. Sure, disclosure would be nice, but it’s not necessarily the aim. Instead it seems to be as much about finding what’s here on earth more than what is lurking in space. “People are very traumatised by their experiences,” says Pearce. “Whether they’re true or not, they’re true to them.” Jessica, the tinfoil-hat competition winner, has long felt the need to be secretive about what she saw that night in Africa. “You can’t really tell people you’ve had this experience,” she says, “One of the things I’ve got from today is it’s just nice hearing from other people.”
While UFO Identified charges £20 for an annual website membership, only 30 people have currently subscribed, meaning the trio regularly pay for the group’s coffee and hot dogs out of their own pocket. When asked why they pour so much time and energy into their interest, Pearce says: “We like talking to people and hearing their stories.” Hyslop adds: “And it helps people, it does help them.”
Ellis has seen first-hand how people “suffer in silence” before blossoming in his meetings, like the older man who sat wordlessly in meetings for months until one day he shared his experience of witnessing a UFO as a boy. “His mother had told him not to ever talk about what he’d seen as a child,” Hyslop says, “And it weighed heavily on him.”
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When Lisa was five years old her mother called her to the window of their Salford home to look at an unusual triangle in the sky. Years later, as a teenager in the ‘80s, she gave a presentation to her English class about UFOs. “I got laughed out of the classroom,” she tells me now, “I remember one lad in particular laughing his head off at me.” But ever since that day she has been waiting for something to show her that we are not alone. And so, in 2019, she says, she asked the universe to show her something, and it responded with blue spheres dropping out of the sky in a line.
The experience made Lisa “giddy”, and although she told anyone and everyone what she saw, she was greeted with sceptical eye-rolls. When she had another sighting, she struggled to get her partner to get out of bed to look, and by the time he got to the window it had disappeared. When she found UFO Identified on Facebook she was initially too nervous to attend a meeting because she suffers from depression and anxiety. But after a year, she built up the courage to go and tell her story. “It’s life-changing, that group,” Lisa says, “I feel like I’ve got friends, I’ve never had a lot of friends.”
Lisa has spent her life with people not believing her or laughing at what she has seen. If she could talk to the teenager whose English class presentation was laughed at, she would speak to that girl kindly: “I’d say: ‘Don’t give up hope, there’s people out there that will listen. You’re not going to be alone forever.’”
