By Berny Torre
The Ministry of Defence's secret ET hunters "didn't trust" civil servants with their information, claims Dr David Clarke who uncovered the Defence Intelligence Staff's study in 2005
Britain's secret UFO investigators kept their findings hidden from the Government, an academic has claimed.
Dr David Clarke, of Sheffield Hallam University, said the Ministry of Defence team tasked with hunting ETs "didn't trust" civil servants briefing ministers with their data.
The lecturer and investigative journalist uncovered the Defence Intelligence Staff's 400-page study into 10,000 UFO sightings in 2005.
He has now said its military officials often kept their findings secret from civil servants over fears the information would be leaked.
Dr Clarke added former Government UFO investigators who have gone public over the findings such as Nick Pope "didn't investigate anything".
He told the UFO Podcast with Martin Willis: "There was a UFO desk where he was an incumbent for three years but he was just one of dozens of different people who did that task and he didn't actually investigate anything.
"He just received reports and filed them. He was a civil servant, there was a body that investigated cases and it was known as the Defence Intelligence Staff, DI55, and they were the people who were tasked to investigate UFO incidents that were deemed to have some kind of military significance."
The UFO investigator added: "The system was extremely complicated and there was at various times two or three different departments of the British Ministry of Defence who were involved in investigating UFOs or responding to the public.
"He might run a few checks with a local radar station but that's as far as time allowed.
"If there was anything deemed to be of potential military significance or something that needed further investigation it was passed to DI55 to do the investigation.
"I've interviewed most of the people who worked on this subject in DI55 at that time and they tell me, 'well Nick Pope didn't have any involvement in this, we did the investigations, we didn't share information with them because we didn't trust them'.
"He was a civilian who was briefing ministers, he was doing PR work and during that time in that job he thought, 'well I could make a living from this'."
Officials at the Defence Intelligence Staff investigated some 10,000 potential ET sightings in the UK from 1997 to 2000.
It concluded that UFOs had an “indisputable” observable presence but there was no evidence to suggest they were "hostile or under any type of control".
