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Dr. David Clarke - Condign Report (Deep Dive)
568 Plays2 years ago
Project Condign was a secret UFO study undertaken by the British Government's Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) between 1997 and 2000.
The results of Project Condign were compiled into a 400-page document titled Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region that drew on approximately 10,000 sightings and reports that had been gathered by the DI55, a section of the Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence (DSTI) within the DIS. It was released into the public domain on 15 May 2006 after a September 2005 Freedom of Information Act request by Dr David Clarke.
Dr David Clarke is one of the UK's leading authorities on contemporary legend and folklore. He is a co-founder of the Contemporary Legend research group at SHU and combines his interests in folklore with his teaching and research in journalism and media law. He is an experienced broadcaster and has acted as a consultant for The National Archives and the BBC.
David Twitter: https://twitter.com/shuclarke
David blog: https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/
THE CONDIGN REPORT: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.g...
DI55 documents and additional materials: https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...
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Disclosure Team Merch:
The results of Project Condign were compiled into a 400-page document titled Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region that drew on approximately 10,000 sightings and reports that had been gathered by the DI55, a section of the Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence (DSTI) within the DIS. It was released into the public domain on 15 May 2006 after a September 2005 Freedom of Information Act request by Dr David Clarke.
Dr David Clarke is one of the UK's leading authorities on contemporary legend and folklore. He is a co-founder of the Contemporary Legend research group at SHU and combines his interests in folklore with his teaching and research in journalism and media law. He is an experienced broadcaster and has acted as a consultant for The National Archives and the BBC.
David Twitter: https://twitter.com/shuclarke
David blog: https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/
THE CONDIGN REPORT: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.g...
DI55 documents and additional materials: https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...
!! SUPPORT DISCLOSURE TEAM !!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/disclosureteam
Buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/disclosu...
Disclosure Team Merch:
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Anomalous Podcast Network
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Anomalous Podcast Network. Multiple voices, one phenomenon.
Main Topic Introduction: The Condign Report
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Disclosure Team YouTube channel. I am really looking forward to this conversation. We're going to be discussing the Condign Report. Now, I have been advertising this as a deep dive, which I realized today that maybe I shouldn't have done because it is a very, very long and extensive document. We're not going to be going through it page for page, but we're going to be talking about the background leading up to when the report was written. So a lot of stuff focusing on the 1990s.
00:01:09
Speaker
SecAS, DI55, and all the intricacies about that, how it was discovered, and then we will be talking about certain aspects of it. And yeah, I think you're going to enjoy this one. David's done a lot of prep work. He knows it inside and out. So yeah, if anybody does have any questions, please pop them in capital letters. We'll try and get to them as and when we can. If it's relevant to that particular moment in the conversation, then I'll try and get it in. If not, I'll save them to a bit later on.
00:01:39
Speaker
So yeah, keep it nice and polite in the chat and let's enjoy this one. So, excuse me.
Guest Introduction: Dr. David Clark
00:01:45
Speaker
Let's bring in my guest, a monthly appearance now on the channel. My good friend and colleague, Dr. David Clark. David, how are you? I'm fine. Thank you. Looking forward to this. Yes, absolutely. We met the other night, didn't we? And I think it's worth mentioning that you handed me the only surviving original copy. Is that right?
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, a colleague of mine who I was working with at the time when we got this release called Gary Anthony has a second copy, but I don't know what's happened to Gary. I haven't been in touch with him for years. So if I got run over by a bus or someone, the men in black came and stole my copy, there is still another one out there as well. Somewhere. I should say these are redacted copies. The original unredacted one is a different story altogether that we'll touch upon.
00:02:37
Speaker
We will. We'll definitely get into that because that is an ongoing Pallava, let's say. But yes, I do have the original here. And it's an absolutely incredible story about how it came about. And we'll get into that as well. So I suppose the first point would be, let's touch upon the kind of early to mid 90s, because we know from Nick Pope that, you know,
UK UFO Investigation Departments
00:03:02
Speaker
Well, we know from Nick Pope and other areas that the UFO subject was kind of worked upon in two different departments. We had SEC AS taking reports and we had DI 55 doing the legwork, let's say. So do you want to take? Well, there's actually three. OK, yeah, let's take it from there. There was a right. There's an RAF branch as well called RAF GE, which is ground environment. And they were the section of the RAF.
00:03:29
Speaker
that receive all the data from the various radar stations. And also from the AWACS, you know, from the airborne radar. So they were the people who SEC-AS and the I-55 would immediately say, if something was seen, particularly quite from aircrew or something, they would go to that branch and say, did you see anything? Was there anything seen on radar at
RAF and Technological Confirmation of UFOs
00:03:52
Speaker
the time? And that was really the sort of deal breaker for a lot of the
00:03:56
Speaker
of the stuff that they looked into. A lot of the reports from the public, if there was nothing seen on radar then it was just right waste paper bin then not interested. What was it like for the pilots throughout the decades for reporting sightings then?
Pilot Reporting Challenges in the UK
00:04:10
Speaker
Because we know that in the US it was kind of frowned upon for fear of reprisal and
00:04:15
Speaker
all sorts of repercussions but was it that bad here in the UK? Definitely and he does actually mention this interestingly in the section on air-miss incidents because he looks at
00:04:29
Speaker
part of the report that I think in volume three he puts together a list of all the because he was looking for the database that he did 1987 to 1997 10-year period and he did actually look at all the reports filed by civil aircrew of near misses at that time and there was a very famous one you most people listening to this will remember the one at Manchester airport in 1997 where there I think there was a
00:04:56
Speaker
think it was a 747 coming into land from full of holidaymakers coming in from Italy and they were coming in low to Manchester and the pilot and the co-pilot both saw this thing coming towards them like a Christmas tree all lit up zooming past well that was one of the one of the near-miss cases that he looked at and interestingly he also sort of had access to the RAS records of fatal accidents involving
00:05:22
Speaker
RAF aircraft and I think you put together a collection of those from this same period and see if there was anything that they could link it with where an aircraft had crashed in unexplained circumstances where the pilot presumably had taken evasive action to avoid something seen coming directly towards them.
00:05:44
Speaker
But he didn't find any correlations that he could sort of say were indicative of there being a UAP involved. But the fact that he looked at that was interesting. But then there were a lot of them that were unexplained or unresolved.
00:05:58
Speaker
Yeah, a lot. We'll get into that maybe a little bit further down the line. He does say it's under-reported that basically aircrew aren't reporting it because of the media sensationalism about the subject, which is interesting because this is exactly the same thing as being discussed in the congressional hearings in the US just this last few months. Yeah, yeah.
Nick Pope's Role and Background Discrepancies
00:06:20
Speaker
So I guess the first thing to do is let's talk about the study itself when it was discovered, but leading up to it, we know that this is not going to be a Nick Pope bashing episode. I just want to say that his name's going to come up a little bit because
00:06:35
Speaker
One thing that Nick Pope has stated publicly and probably more than once is that he had, he kind of kick-started the initial discussions about formulating this report, the Condein report, but we know that that's not true because there were at least two other times that it was talked about but it didn't go through for lack of funding. So do you want to start there and then we can work our way through the timeline?
00:06:58
Speaker
Well, I mean, there's literally hundreds of background documents that have emerged quite separate from the report itself. And if you just look at the two in and throwing, what Nick says just doesn't stand up, because he was told by his opposite number, DI-55C, who was the DI-55 UFO officer who I've actually spoken to. I know who he is.
00:07:22
Speaker
they were pursuing funding to do a study, a computerized study of data, UFO data, that they'd been copied by SEC-AS ever since the 1970s. So their files had built up and up and up and they were saying, well, we've never had time to look at this stuff or do a proper analysis. If anybody ever asks us a serious question about it in parliament, how are we going to answer it? And this is when
00:07:48
Speaker
some of the folks who are listening might remember the very first computers in the 1980s, the Amstrads and all that business. The MOD were using those sorts of computers. And some bright spark said, why don't we start inputting some of these UFO reports into an Excel database and see if we can come up with any information that might help us to explain cases and answer parliamentary questions. So they initially tried to get this database going as far back as 1988.
00:08:17
Speaker
And it was SecAS who was saying, do not do that under any circumstances. And two or three attempts to actually set up this database were kiboshed by Nick Pope's predecessors. The head of SecAS just said, if you do this, we're saying publicly that we don't investigate this subject. We don't spend any money on it. If it then emerges that you've been doing this study, we're going to look as if we've been lying, which we have been.
00:08:44
Speaker
Yeah, so don't do it. So second, yes, didn't do anything other than act as a clearinghouse for people reporting publicly. And they were copying everything to the I-55. And it was the I-55 who were pushing for funds to do an actual study because they took the subject seriously. So all that happened in 1993, when Nick Pope was the desk officer was his opposite number in the I-55 said, right, we finally got some money to do a study. And I'm telling you off the record,
00:09:14
Speaker
that's what we're planning to do. But that study came to nothing.
Funding Challenges for UFO Studies
00:09:20
Speaker
As you know, Vinny, from looking at it, Nick left that post in 1994 and there was at least two, possibly three other attempts by DI55 to get the study funded and off the ground that failed.
00:09:36
Speaker
And the original study that Nick was told about wasn't anything like what eventually Ron Haddow got to actually do. They'd scaled it down massively. They weren't even going to look at any incidents, specific incidents like Redblesham, which was in the original terms of reference. That got kicked out. So by the time it eventually got commissioned in 1996, which was long after Nick Pope had moved on,
00:10:01
Speaker
It was a completely different study that was done. Yeah, and even then, anything that DI55 were doing with relations to UAP and UFOs, SecAS would not know about it. No. Information didn't go back. It only went up.
00:10:16
Speaker
And as a result of Nick Pope's activities, publishing books and coming out on the subject, it made that schism between the two departments even wider, because Di 55 was saying, don't tell SACAS anything, because they're leaky, they leak stuff, you know, look what Nick Pope's been doing, you know, with his media campaign. And so when the report was completed and delivered in 2000, they didn't even tell
00:10:42
Speaker
the UFO desk about it. This is the UFO desk that we have been told is the central clearinghouse for all Ministry of Defence statements on the subject. Well, they weren't even told that this report had been completed. So when I put in a Freedom of Information Act request in 2005 to see it, the desk officer then, Linda Unwin, who I knew really well, she was doing that job for about five years, she had to go looking for it because she'd never seen it herself.
00:11:09
Speaker
And she went back to the files from 2000 when they should have received it. There's nothing in the file. So I said, well, how do you know it was even done? Well, she said we don't. Maybe they told us by telephone. So this is the this is the UFO desk. Nothing about it.
00:11:27
Speaker
That's amazing. How did you first hear about it? Because you were doing a lot of work with the National Archives at the time, so you were fully embedded in the UFO kind of world when it came to documents and that. And, you know, so when did this combine report first come to your radar? Well, this is interesting because this makes me feel like a dinosaur because it's so long ago now.
MOD's UFO Desk and FOI Act Impact
00:11:49
Speaker
But, you know, like I'm a member of UAP Media, UK UAP Media now. Well, back in
00:11:56
Speaker
20 years ago I was like you Vinny and Graham and Dan and all the rest of it I was I was in another little sort of group of individuals then we didn't call ourselves anything but it was basically me Gary Anthony who I've mentioned already who was a really active researcher he was putting in lots and lots of freedom of information requests
00:12:16
Speaker
Joe McGonagall, who is still on the scene, he, Joe's exile British army, he's got a lot of knowledge about the military, he was really pushing the FOI thing as well. Andy Roberts, who was one of my writing partners at the time, so the four of us
00:12:31
Speaker
We were going to the National Archives in Cuba constantly, every January when they released the files, the 30th anniversary, 30 years, which we then add the 30 year rule. And we were also tracing some of the people who were mentioned, whose names are in those files.
00:12:51
Speaker
and interviewing them. I was talking to Linda Unwin who was the UFO desk officer at Whitehall. We got, I mean she was great, she was brilliant and this was when freedom of information was actually working properly when you could ask for things and if they got them they would go and find them for you and say yes you can have it, we may have to take something out, it's national security but
00:13:15
Speaker
completely different how it is today and you know i was on such friendly terms with them that they invited me down to white out to the minister defense main building two occasions
00:13:26
Speaker
I went there and one occasion with Joe, we had a whole set of questions, three or four pages of questions about specific cases and about how they investigated UFO incidents and they invited us in. We actually went and sat on the UFO desk, which looked exactly like the desk I'm sat at now. There was nothing special about it.
00:13:49
Speaker
And we're able to sort of do a Q&A with Linda and her boss, Rob Lincoln, at the time, who was the head of Sec.A.S. They wouldn't allow us to record the conversation, but they did send us like a list of answers to our written questions.
00:14:05
Speaker
and the second time I went down was I think it must have been April or May 2006 so this I requested a copy of the Condign Report on the 1st of January 2005 which is when the Freedom of Information Act it was implemented and
Discovery and Acquisition of the Condign Report
00:14:21
Speaker
I already knew
00:14:22
Speaker
the report existed because I'd found out from talking to Linda and going back through some of these old documents. I knew they'd commissioned it. I knew that DI55 in the year 2000 had pulled out of the subject altogether and had told Seck AS don't send us any more reports. So I asked Linda, why? Why did they pull out of it? And she sort of went and looked and said, well, they pulled out of it because they did some kind of study.
00:14:52
Speaker
that concluded they no longer needed to receive reports. And as soon as I heard that, I thought, study, right, there must be a report then. So let's see it. And so I put in the FOI request for the report in 1st January and it took them a year. I think it took them until like May 2006.
00:15:11
Speaker
to go through it line by line to see what had to come out. And then Linda rang me up and said, would you like to come down to London? We've got a copy for you. So I just hopped on a train, went into the Ministry of Defense main building through the big bubble thing where the bodies scan you with the guys standing around with some machine guns and what have you. And she just, she was just waiting with a big brown envelope. Here it is, handed it over. I couldn't believe it. I just could not believe it.
00:15:39
Speaker
So I walked out of MOD main building, sat in a coffee shop in Trafalgar Square, took this thing out and here it is, I can't believe this is the top secret report on UAPs that they've done in secrecy and kept under wraps for how long was it, five or six years.
00:15:58
Speaker
yeah it was yeah and so at that time when you were around that time early 2000s did you have any connections or sources in di 55 or was that just they just definitely were just very very quiet and
00:16:13
Speaker
No, yeah. Because you obviously want good terms with SecAS. Yeah. Well, from the materials of the National Archives, because this was before they started redacting names from the documents, this is before GDPR, this is before data protection. So everything up to 1984 had been released.
00:16:36
Speaker
with no reductions. You can go there now and you can order it up in the reading room. You've done this with Dan and the others in Graham. The names are in there. So the people who were in DI 55 in the 1960s and the 1970s, their names are there. So I'd track some of them down, the ones who were still alive and talk to them. And most of them were quite happy to talk. I mean, they'd probably not be around anymore, but I spoke to some of the
00:17:05
Speaker
They are all men who were, they were defense scientists. They're not military people. They are the people who were technical intelligence specialists. And this is where the author of the Condign Report, maybe want to show a picture of him. I'll bring him up. Yes. We found, we didn't know this immediately. It took some digging, digging around and talking to people, but
00:17:32
Speaker
Yeah, let's talk about that because that was secret for a long time. Yes, they would. They would not tell me. Blinder Underwood would not tell me who the author is, who the author was. And this is Ron Haddow. And if anyone could be described as the Minister of Defence, as UFO expert, it is Ron. And the reason they brought him in to write this was they didn't think anyone else was qualified to do it.
00:17:57
Speaker
He had worked for Di-55 for many years. He'd had his own UFO sighting in the 1950s when he was flying a Canberra secret intruder operation, presumably over the Soviet Union. He'd actually filled in one of the
00:18:12
Speaker
UFO report forms he says this in his in his letter that's in the files, you know about the setting up of the study Yeah, and he worked for GC Marconi, which is like one of the premier electronic companies in the UK I think it's now I'm part of kinetic He'd flown in the RAF from the 1950s. He'd been involved in intruder missions as I say over the Soviet Union His expertise is radar
00:18:42
Speaker
and that's probably why he was qualified and he is Professor Ron Haddow and I did a bit of digging and I thought well what was his PhD in and I found his PhD at the University of Loughborough
Ron Haddow and His Preconceptions
00:18:57
Speaker
Guess what the PhD is about? I've got the title page here. It's the probability of detecting and tracking radar targets in clutter at low grazing angles, which is quite a mouthful. What his PhD was about is how you can use radar to track and identify flying objects at low altitude. So flying under the kind of radar. Flying under radar cover.
00:19:26
Speaker
Isn't that what UFOs do? Exactly that. Or UAPs, as we now call them. Well, they say you now call them. They called them that for this study, didn't they? Yeah, they preferred UAPs. They used the UAP thing. And if you look in those documents, when they were commissioning the report in the late 90s, and there was this to and fro between them and SEC-AS,
00:19:52
Speaker
They were using the phrase UAP, and Sec.A.S. were using UFOs, and the head of Sec.A.S. was saying, why are you using UAPs? What's that all about? Just a quick mention to the live chat. I've seen your question, Jonathan. I've got yours. In fact, I'll ask Jonathan's now, because that is a really important question. Did DI55 really close, or was it a change of name? Was it taken into the private sector to avoid FOIA and government scrutiny?
00:20:20
Speaker
Great question that Jonathan and they say it no longer exists and I'm sure they're right because like with all these you know like if we go back to the UFO desk
00:20:34
Speaker
It was called S6 Air back in the 1950s. Then it became S4 Air. Then it became DS8. Then it becomes SACAS. Then it becomes DAS. These departments are moving around, changing the names, merging with each other. So I'm pretty sure that DI55 no longer exists. But there will be another branch or agency of the defense intelligence staff that are doing exactly what DI55 were doing under a different name. And I think you've hit the nail
00:21:04
Speaker
right on the head when you say it's been moved outside into the private sector. They've got some kind of private sort of contractor, a bit like Ron Haddow, because what had happened with Ron was
00:21:20
Speaker
had been in DI 55 he retired about the time that they commissioned this study and they thought well we'll get him back one final job you know get him to write the the report and so he was brought back from retirement he wrapped it up within another defense contract so that he didn't have to say it was very specifically about UAPs and that's how they hid it from the public for the length of time they did but
00:21:44
Speaker
They didn't hide it very well because we've got it. But I think that as a result of all the publicity and all the upset that we've caused, I think they've obviously got into a huddle and said, how can we avoid all this stuff coming out again? And they'll come up with some dastardly plan.
00:22:04
Speaker
to hide whoever it is who's now responsible for UAPs and to make sure that Nosy Parker's making freedom of information requests, they can just say, we don't have anything on this subject. We don't have any records. And strictly speaking, it's true because
00:22:21
Speaker
They only have to admit to records that are held by a public body. That's what the FOI covers. So if they've paid a private contractor to look after their paperwork and look after any investigations they're doing, they can just move all the paperwork to the private contractor and they don't then have to respond to any freedom of information requests. So I think that's what's happened.
00:22:46
Speaker
Absolutely, and it's very clear. You mentioned that there's a lot of documents that were flying around at the time as well from Di55 that are available. Some of them are redacted. I've got copies of all of those and it's very clear that they were concerned about the UFO community and the researchers. They knew they were going to get questions so they were very much toeing the line trying to do what they can to keep the information away from the researchers. What I'm going to do
00:23:15
Speaker
maybe later after this video, I am going to create a folder with all these documents for anybody that wants to go in to do that. Well worth the read. This is separate from the actual report and it's all about the study and how it's created and why and it's really interesting. So I will create that and put a link in the description below after the fact. I suppose the next point to make, in fact, do we have any of the documents that we want to show just yet?
00:23:43
Speaker
doesn't matter if we don't I'm just looking we've got lots of documents open that we want to show throughout the video so I just want to make sure we don't miss the timing of them do you want to show that one where Ron is is basically saying what he's gonna what his report is gonna find before he's written it that's conclusion isn't it yeah that's a document yeah which
00:24:06
Speaker
Explain that again that he actually basically the whole point that I have to explain this to students all the time who are doing dissertations. The purpose of research is not to prove something that you already think is the case. It's like it's like saying, you know, I think the sky is blue. Therefore, I'm going to go and prove it's blue. You know, you do research to in a totally objective, open minded way.
00:24:30
Speaker
to explore questions that you think haven't been answered. So if you set out with a preconceived idea of what you're going to find and you set out specifically to prove that, of course you're going to find evidence to support your contention. That's exactly, it seems, what he did.
00:24:52
Speaker
He literally did. He kind of claimed that he was going to poo poo the whole subject, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, I mean, we haven't even got onto the methodology. I mean, how he went about actually doing the study, fatally flawed. Yeah. So here you see, I'm just going to close my window. I'll be back in one second. I'll let you go through this. This is brilliant. If this was a student submitting a dissertation proposal, it'd be failed straight away.
00:25:19
Speaker
So he's basically saying the second sentence could cause considerable embarrassment if it was discovered in the future that DI55 have done some research. I am particularly looking ahead to my expected recommendation that DI55 should no longer be involved in UAP monitoring.
00:25:37
Speaker
So think about it, folks. He's been told to go off and look at what they've got on this subject and decide whether there's any evidence in the data that suggests that UAPs or UFOs or whatever they are, wherever they come from, whatever they are, are they a threat to the UK? So what he's saying here is before he's actually done the research,
00:25:59
Speaker
He's already decided what the conclusion is. And that is that they don't pose a threat to the UK air defense reason. And that basically means that his former employer, the MOD and DI-55, don't need to be monitoring the subject anymore. So that to me, what you're looking at there says what was really going on. They were saying to him, Ron, here's 50,000 pounds. We know you're interested in this subject. Off you go. Do a bit of research on it.
00:26:28
Speaker
You can say what you like, but as long as you come out with a recommendation that we should no longer be involved in it, that's all we want to hear. That isn't the way folks to do research, is it really? So he's saying there, someone will have to explain why this is so, assuming the recommendation is accepted. So he hasn't even done the research to reach the recommendation, but he's already knows what the recommendation is going to be.
00:26:52
Speaker
So he's saying, when and if the ufologists discover this, they will inevitably ask, is there no further intelligence interest? Because MOD now know for certain what these phenomena are. How could this conclusion have been reached without doing research or having some sort of intelligence confirmation? If there was nothing to worry about, why couldn't this conclusion have been reached earlier?
00:27:16
Speaker
And this is a key one, I think. Were MOD aware that black covert aircraft in the UK air defence region have visited the UK air defence? I think that's a specific reference to Calvin. Yeah, because of the safety aspects. And if so, why were the public not reassured? And he's also saying that the name black, I'm absolutely sure is Nick Pope. And he's saying
00:27:40
Speaker
He realizes that there's a lot of public attention now on this subject because of the fact that Nick Pope's written a book, one of our former people who used to work for us, or still did at that time. And he also mentions Nick Redford as well, because he was another one who was writing, but obviously a member of the public who was causing them a lot of trouble.
00:27:59
Speaker
around this period late 1990s. I will just say the reason why you say that it's Nick Pope in that blacked out box you have been told that from someone it's not I mean it'd be great if it's an educated guess but you have actually been told that from someone. Yeah and there are other documents where he's mentioned by name specifically that that's the reason why B.I. don't trust SEC AS anymore because the fact that his activities have been that they don't trust them
00:28:26
Speaker
with information. So that's shocking. So already, before the report's done, we know that they are going to be honing in on a conclusion that's pre-specified, let's say. Yeah, but to be fair on Ron Haddow, he clearly thought that there was something in the UFO. I mean, because I'll just read you a paragraph, which I think is key.
00:28:49
Speaker
If you go to vol 1, I think it's the first page of vol 1, he says, it just introduces the subject, and he says, that UFOs or UAPs exist is indisputable, credited with the ability to hover, land, take off, accelerate to exceptional velocities and vanish, they can reportedly alter their direction of flight suddenly and clearly, can exhibit aerodynamic characteristics well beyond those of any known aircraft or missile,
00:29:19
Speaker
whether manned or unmanned. He says that in his first page. That's the line that most people pull out of that entire report and go, look, the UK thought there was definitely something to it. When you look at the big picture of the whole report, that's exactly the opposite of what they were saying. And this is something I mentioned to you the other night when we met up, is that
00:29:40
Speaker
Do you think there's many contradictions in the report? And you said? Lots. Yeah. I mean, he he said he he talks about it as if it's this is a scientific report and he's using scientific data and he's not getting involved in the UFO topic. And yet he if you look at Vault 2 where he's got all these different working papers, he actually uses Paul Devereaux Earthlight's book.
00:30:02
Speaker
and a book by Jenny Randall's calls how UFOs and how to see them so he says he's tried to keep out of that and yet he clearly has read bits of the UFO literature so he's contradicting himself all the way through it so they're trying to stay away from the UFO community but at the same time utilizing the UFO community yeah and also I mean I mean I'm not as you know I'm not a believer in the extraterrestrial hypothesis
00:30:26
Speaker
But he says that he's trying to be open-minded and objective and he hasn't reached any prejudicial conclusions. And then within 10 pages he said, forget ET, there's no evidence of it. And you just think, okay, but where's your evidence? On the basis of what, if you've been open-minded?
00:30:47
Speaker
Because if you'd been truly open-minded, you wouldn't reject that as a possibility. I don't know. I was going to say not that early, but not in fact, not at all, unless you've got conclusive evidence to show that it's definitely not that. So yeah. Yeah. So I guess going through the whole report,
00:31:08
Speaker
He obviously, you know, we talked about that he was going to have this preconceived conclusion. And I guess that's that's what he came to. He was being paid to reach that conclusion. Yeah. So he was doing it just as a job. But he obviously had a personal interest, because if he didn't have personal interest, he wouldn't have actually put together a four hundred and sixty five page four volume study. He could have done it in six pages like they did for Winston Churchill. You know, the one from the 1950s. Absolutely.
00:31:38
Speaker
So let's go into some of the sections of what he did look at, because it's not like he didn't put some work in because he certainly did. And there was some very important aspects, sections, you know, you mentioned plasma and black projects
Project Name 'Condign' Explained
00:31:52
Speaker
and that. So I'll leave it up to you which area we look at first, but it'd be interesting to see your take on those.
00:31:57
Speaker
Well, the thing on the work, I mean, a lot of people sort of ask, why is it called Condein? Why did they use that code name? And I did ask Linda Underwin about that. And she said, well, whenever we do a project, we just have a random computer thing that churns out a word. So she said, there's nothing significant about Condein. It's just a word that was churned out. But for the project, I mean, lots of people said, well, is it something to do with Condein? You know, the American Condein study. And if you look up, as I did,
00:32:27
Speaker
calm down in the Oxford English Dictionary, it actually means a severe and well deserved beating. Goodness, which is a bit of a coincidence, isn't it? Because the Minister of Defence constantly referred to the subject as a problem that they need to deal with, you know, these irritating ufologists and the fact that we even have to waste any of our valuable time answering their troublesome questions. It's odd that they decided to call this the calm down project, I guess severe beating.
00:32:58
Speaker
Wow. And they've been given a severe beating as a result of all this coming out, haven't they? So it's all very amusing. It is. So the points, Vinny, that you're talking about, I think they're important, is although he reaches that conclusion, and this is where you might want to bring up that document, you know, the two page one, this is a document that was written in 2000. Is this the report form?
00:33:26
Speaker
Or is this the unredacted version? Yeah. If you bring that up, it summarizes what's in the report. Can you imagine all the different departments of the MOD would send a copy of this huge study? And anyone working in the civil service, if you get sent something that's four volumes thick, you're going to think, bloody hell, when am I going to have time to read this? So this is the covering node.
00:33:54
Speaker
that summarises what the study is about and as you can see it says the DIS have been receiving copies of citing reports from SACAS for about 30 years and we've never really looked at them in any great detail but it was obvious I mean don't forget when this study was commissioned 1996 massive interest in the subject it was the 40th anniversary of Roswell, 40th
00:34:20
Speaker
anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold site in the media was constantly brilliant. I mean, I was writing a lot of the stories at the time. And it was you've got to see the fact that they commissioned this because of the public interest in the subject. So after putting this off and knocking on my head all these earlier attempts to get some funding, finally, they found 50,000 pounds, which is compared to what the American government is spending on this, a drop in the ocean.
00:34:48
Speaker
They basically paid for Ron to have a computer and a personal assistant who would input all these citing reports. So this is what they did. Did a sample of the reports and we'll have a look at the reports in a minute. So he spent two years, as you can see, under low priority tasking.
00:35:07
Speaker
compiled a database. So he chose a 10 year period. And the interesting period thing here is he chose 1987 to 1997 because he said that that was neatly on either side of the end of the Cold War. Because the Cold War ended in 1989 with the Berlin Wall coming down. So he had a sample of reports from before and a sample reports from afterwards. Carried out a computer analysis. Here's the report.
00:35:32
Speaker
and you can see who it was copied to above. Shall we go through that now or in a bit? Because we're going to come back to that. Yeah, let's come back to that. Yeah. So if we can you see the section two and section three. So the main conclusion is the study provides nothing of value
00:35:52
Speaker
to the defence intelligence staff in our assessment of threat weapon systems. So all they're interested in is whatever these things are, we don't really care what they are, but are they a threat? Are they Soviet? Are they Russian?
00:36:06
Speaker
and the conclusion is no, they're not Chinese, they're not Russian, they're not earthly of any kind. Taken together with other evidence, we believe that many of the sightings can be explained as misreporting of man-made vehicles, aircraft, white project in some cases, natural but not unusual phenomena, and relatively rare and not completely understood phenomena. And this is where he goes deep dive into all this bizarre stuff about atmospheric plasmas, dusty plasmas, earth lights,
00:36:36
Speaker
this is what he really buys into all that to try and explain the residue of sightings that can't be easily explained and he basically says we don't know what these things are but we he thinks personally that the MOD should do a lot more research on the plasma side and this is the bit that they initially redacted now Vinnie we were looking at a version of an earlier version of this where they wouldn't let me see
00:37:02
Speaker
and what was under paragraph 3 that I managed to get this redaction removed. As you can see he says in addition to the major conclusion which is we don't need to be concerned with it anymore we can stop receiving reports, he says there was some subsidiary findings
00:37:22
Speaker
The potential explanations of UAP sightings, the characteristics of natural atmospheric phenomena and the consequences of sightings from aircraft will be of interest to those responsible for flight safety. And again, this has now come up again with all the American task force stuff, the near misses, the air misses with these things that they can't explain. What are they?
00:37:45
Speaker
The characteristics of some of the phenomenon with respect to their detection by radar systems will be of interest to air defence ground environment, which if you remember is the other branch that we mentioned along with the RAF one and flight safety.
00:38:01
Speaker
Finally, Director General Research and Technology will be interested in those phenomena associated with plasma formations, which have potential applications to novel weapon technology. So he's basically saying, if these things are some kind of natural atmospheric phenomena, plasmas in the atmosphere,
00:38:25
Speaker
that move around, possibly they could be harnessed and used as battlefield weapons and we should be looking at how we could use those things against a potential enemy like Russia.
00:38:36
Speaker
you know so that's why he was recommending did they do anything with that i get that but surely within those potential rare phenomena surely that's where uap would fit as well but he doesn't seem to want to go there he doesn't want to go there no and he then says um although we intend to carry out no further work on this subject we would value any comments that the people copied in would like to make and then the thing i loved at the end that runs into page two he says
00:39:06
Speaker
While most of the report is classified as only restricted, UKIs only, we hardly need to remind addresses, that's people who've received a copy of it, of the media interest in this subject and consequently the sensitivity of this report. Please protect the subject accordingly and discuss the report only with those who have a need to know.
Critique of Report's Methodology
00:39:30
Speaker
Very, very significant.
00:39:32
Speaker
So they really knew that kept, you know, secret. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I mean, this is the thing that we're literally showing so many flaws in this report that it's almost pointless. It doesn't mean anything. Let's have a look at what the report, the conclusions were based on. Bring up the UFO report form. Yeah. And if you look in the files,
00:40:01
Speaker
that have been released that you can get from the National Archives website. This is what he was using as his raw data. So this is a standard report form. He says that he filled one in himself in the 1950s when he had this sighting, when he was flying with the RAF. So this was a form that the Air Ministry actually stole from the US Air Force, because it's based upon a US Air Force pro forma. They were using Project Sign or Grudge or something at the time.
00:40:30
Speaker
And as you can see, it's basically split into a list of numbers, date and time, description of object, location, how observed. And what would happen is a member of the public who'd seen something would phone either their local RAF base or the MOD in London, usually out of hours because people tend to see UFOs late at night. So all your civil servants will have trooped off home with the bowler hats and their umbrellas at five o'clock in the afternoon.
00:40:56
Speaker
and come back at 9 o'clock in the morning. So they'd come back, the guy in DI 55 and the guy or woman who was doing this AKS desk job, and every morning there'd be a whole stack of these reports left on the desk. And the guy from DI 55 was moaning about this and saying, bloody hell, every morning I used to get into work. Before I could do anything, there's a huge pile of UFO forms waiting for me.
00:41:22
Speaker
I had loads and loads of other tests far more important than this one, so I just sort of glanced at them. Oh, the latest set of reports. Put them in a filing cabinet and forget about them, basically, because there's no time. And this is the quality of the siting reports. I mean, look at it. Description of object, like a puff of cloud, then circular, very light with a red light flashing.
00:41:51
Speaker
It's very basic, isn't it? Yeah. So when he was doing this study, he was importing several thousand of these citing report forms. And despite what Nick Pope says, as you can see, it wasn't investigated. Very, very few of them got anything, went any further than that form. So someone
00:42:13
Speaker
On the man in the 24 hour desk at whitehall, someone would ring up and they'd fill in the form, send it off to sec.js, and they'd look at it and think, all right, what can we do with this? Put it in the file with all the others. So that's the raw data that was sent to DI55. That's what Ron had to use to create his database. Anyone doing that kind of database needs reliable information.
00:42:41
Speaker
If he'd done it properly, he would have taken a sample of sighting reports and he would have actually gone out and interviewed the people who made those reports and said, right, what was it? Where were you standing? Where were you looking? Check it with an astronomy program. Were there any balloons in the area at the time? Oh, there was. We can eliminate that one then. And he would have boiled it down to a group of sightings, maybe Rendlesham, you know, some of the unexplained ones that were evidential, but he didn't do that.
00:43:10
Speaker
So if you think about it, most ufologists, whether you believe in aliens or not, will accept that from raw data, raw sightings, 90% of them are not UFOs, they are IFOs, potential IFOs. I don't think anyone would disagree with that, would they? That's bang on, absolutely bang on. So what Ron Haddow was doing, he was inputting all this raw data into his database, 90% of which was rubbish. Yeah.
00:43:39
Speaker
So you will have heard the phrase garbage in garbage out. So the so the analysis he then ran on the database is worthless because it's totally contaminated with balloons, aircraft, ordinary things. You know, to do a proper study, you've got to eliminate all those and you've got to look at the percentage, two percent, three percent, four percent that are genuinely inexplicable or can't be explained.
00:44:08
Speaker
Yeah, so this is what his conclusions were based on faulty data. And it was because he was operating in a top secret environment. He wasn't the contract for the study was was never advertised because they didn't want the media to find out about it.
00:44:23
Speaker
He wasn't allowed to talk to scientists. If he had done, scientists would have said, Ron, don't do it like you're planning to do it because the conclusions are worthless. And all he had was those 22 files that he had top security access to that weren't even top secret because he'd been copied and by Sec. S. Yeah.
00:44:45
Speaker
So it's one of the aspects that I think one section that I found really interesting was obviously a couple will get to the black projects one in a bit I want to talk about these near misses because that was quite it was quite a lot of detail in that to a degree He had access to a lot of stuff and a lot of those were kind of inconclusive So if you just want if you can mention that for a couple of minutes, I'm just gonna take a bathroom break there with me Yeah, the near miss stuff
Analysis of Near-Miss Incidents
00:45:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's in volume three. And he he had access to I mean, you can you can access this material yourself. It's the Civil Aviation Authority have published, they used to publish a list of all the sightings that had been made by aircrew, civil aircrew. They stopped doing that again, because they say it's again, data protection, GDPR. But
00:45:36
Speaker
The actual incidents where crews report a sighting of something that's come within close proximity to the aircraft, they are all published and they go on the CAA's website. And the sample that he looked at, there was a sighting from Gap Week Airport, which is interesting given the fact that there was the incident
00:46:00
Speaker
only a few years ago where Gatwick was effective with clothes for 48 hours when you remember the drone case where supposedly two low level drones were seen over Gatwick. So Gatwick is an interesting place where there's been lots of of these sightings over the years. So that's it did look at two sightings at Gatwick that were reported as near misses and the Manchester case as well that we mentioned earlier.
00:46:29
Speaker
So yeah, it's definitely a, we need more from the report. That's what I mean. I think they could have investigated them more. I mean, I guess they, time was a thing and lack of being asked about it basically. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, the original terms of reference was to look at some specific incidents, you know, like Rendlesham or any, I mean, he only talks about one particular case, a radar case,
00:46:55
Speaker
in the entire radar section. And we were talking about this earlier, if you look at the section on radar, he basically says, whatever UAPs are, they're not seen on air defense radars. And to him, that proved his contention that they weren't solid objects. Clearly, there's something, but he's saying the fact that they're not being detected by radar suggests that the natural atmospheric phenomena and not craft
00:47:23
Speaker
like you'd expect an intruder aircraft to be picked up. These clearly aren't craft. That's why there isn't any good radar data on them. But again, that's not a conclusion based upon proper scientific evidence. And the radar section is the one that's got the most redactions. And again, if you want to look at this in a conspiracy sort of way, you might think, oh, what they're trying to hide.
00:47:51
Speaker
But the reason why they've taken so much material out is because it reveals the weakness of our radar.
00:47:59
Speaker
in that the cover is not very effective. It's the switch the radars off at certain times of day. I mean, the Rendlesham incident, for instance, some of the documents about that reveal that the radar was switched off over Christmas. I mean, maybe they didn't want it interfered with by Santa Claus in the rain, the North Pole or something. But embarrassing things like that. You don't want your enemy
00:48:29
Speaker
the Russians to know the capabilities of our radar to detect their intruder aircraft and that's why those sections of the report have been redacted and you can't really argue about that can you because it's not it's like you don't reveal the identity of our spies because they'll get assassinated if we do so FOI can only go so far
00:48:53
Speaker
No, absolutely. I just want to highlight that a complete schoolboy error is that I forgot to link the Condign Report in the description.
Access Challenges to Unredacted Report
00:49:01
Speaker
After this finishes, I will link it below so that everyone can have a look. Funnily enough, it isn't the easiest thing to find because I've got another computer which I use, a laptop.
00:49:12
Speaker
And I was trying to look through stuff today and it throws you around some weird links to actually get to the download for the full report. You get like parts of it. So Jonathan, thank you for bringing that up. I just saw your comment. I will link that after the video has ended. My apologies. This is a key point Vinny, isn't it? Because what happened was there were so many FOI requests for the report after we got it released.
00:49:39
Speaker
They couldn't release it in paper format because it's such a huge document. So what they got what happened was and the National Archives scanned it The redacted version of it So there is a big long URL where you can just click on it and you can get a download and it's from the National Archives. Yeah so that that's what happened but This shall we now move on to what we've discovered and
00:50:05
Speaker
Well, just before you do, one thing I will say about that is when you find it on the National Archives, it gives you the executive summary volumes one, two and three. But when you click into volume one, it then breaks it down again into about another eight sections. So it's really complicated and all. You have to piece it together yourself almost. It's very bizarre. But I will link that.
00:50:29
Speaker
it's strange the original version i've got has got pull out maps and all sorts yeah i don't know how you would get them in a in a scanned version of it what you do if you google the condyne report there are national archives links that will go straight to a pdf but you'll find that it's there's eight pages and then another one will be nine pages you're like wait a minute this is a really long document and so yeah you've got to be careful because you might miss something if you don't know what you're looking for so yeah really bizarre
00:50:58
Speaker
I mean, what are the other little interesting little points that's often not mentioned? You know, there is this idea that's been promoted by Robert Hastings in America, that there's a connection between nuclear bases and sensitive nuclear storage facilities and UAPs. Well, Haddow, actually, there's part of, I think it's Vol 3, where he spends a lot of time and attention on this.
00:51:22
Speaker
And he looks at all this data that he's put together about in the UK, and he says, is there any evidence that these things are seen around the Oldham Aston, for instance, and around some of the sensitive RAF Royal Navy facilities where there's nuclear weapons found?
00:51:38
Speaker
and basically he says there's no evidence at all from the UK data and he says there's a few examples where there are more sight there there's a cluster of sightings i think around one of these sensitive facilities and he says the simple answer to that is is that they are guarded 24 hours a day by people who are on the lookout for anything unusual therefore if
00:52:00
Speaker
There will be occasions in which security guards and Ministry of Defence Police see and report odd things in the sky, but that's simply because of the fact that that's what they're employed to do. And they're going to be a lot of them. There's going to be a lot of them that just simply won't say anything because for like what we discussed earlier, fear of ridicule and and all that. But we were talking about air crew there. So security guards and memory police are going to be much more
00:52:28
Speaker
inclined to report odd things in the sky that could be you know threats I guess but then you look at the cases like Rendlesham and we know that that was a nuclear storage wasn't it so you know oh well they can't deny and they can't confirm that the nuclear bombs were stolen well maybe that's the case along a lot of these places you know maybe it's it's like well we can't say anything because I don't know it's sensitive isn't it
00:52:52
Speaker
and speculative to a degree, so we have to be careful there. Do you want to move on to the Black Project section? Yes, I mean this is the bit that intrigues me. I mean we're back to Kelvin here. I'm absolutely convinced that there's a section on Black Project aircraft where basically he talks about the ones we know about, so he talks about the
00:53:20
Speaker
the SR-71. Yeah, Section 1. Yeah, the Blackbird. Yeah, so he talks about that and there's an image of that. He talks about the B-2 bomber and the F-117, all of which are in the public domain and were used in the Gulf War, but he talks about two other secret programs
00:53:39
Speaker
And it specifies them. Program one or is it program two and program three? And all those sections are redacted. And under section 27 of the Freedom of Information Act, which is international relations. So what that is, it's secret information about flight project aircraft.
00:53:58
Speaker
prototype aircraft that have been flown by the U.S. Air Force or the CIA that any effectively says they have visited the UK and have been seen and reported as UFOs. And there is one, I don't know whether you can find the page, but there's one section that looks as if you could almost like drop the Calvin photo into it. One of these
00:54:24
Speaker
This is me speculating, but I just think... Well, you say that as you're speculating, but if you piece that together with a discussion you've had with DI55C, and we won't go into detail on that, that fits exactly with it as well. So it's not just we want it to be Calvin. Well, it makes sense that it's Calvin. It points to a few things that we've
00:54:48
Speaker
discussions we've had, let's say, let's leave it like that, you know. And people have said to me, you know, how can you make out that this thing in the Calvin photograph is sort of secret technology? It can't possibly be, you know, we don't know about it. So why then are these two programs redacted from a report that was released in 2006, if it can't possibly exist? It doesn't make any sense at any level.
00:55:14
Speaker
Exactly, because even if Carvin is one of them, there's still another one as well. Yeah, and then the B-2 bomber and the F-117 didn't just suddenly spring into existence like that. You know, there'd be all sorts of different prototype versions of these aircraft, some of which probably didn't perform very well, so they just tried it out.
00:55:34
Speaker
you know, tested it somewhere, it crashed into the sea or something, and then buried it in the desert and forgot about it. Exactly. Prototypes that didn't work quite simply. It must happen, you know. And also, we're talking here about hypersonic aircraft. I don't think for one minute that the object in the Kelvin
00:55:54
Speaker
photograph is a hypersonic aircraft. I mean, the whole Aurora thing is just a word like UFO that is applied wholesale. I mean, it could be an unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV, you know, a drone of some kind, a prototype drone, you know, that they were testing out. And someone has suggested that it could be an airborne radar platform. Yeah, like like a blimp that was being used as an aerial platform for radar for some kind of exercise.
00:56:24
Speaker
There's all kinds of explanations for it. It doesn't have to be some super duper technology that was able to sort of zoom away at some fantastic speed. You know, we don't know that that's what's happened. Well, that's the thing, you know, that's a whole nother conversation, which we'll probably cover again maybe at the end of the year or early next year when investigation when we have more to report on because yeah, it is.
00:56:50
Speaker
I mentioned this earlier on a chat I had with someone that there are many lines of or many avenues that we have to look on with the investigation. And it's time consuming. We do what we do. We ask the questions, but we wait for people to come back to us. We wait for this and that. And it's it's massively time consuming. Yeah. And people want answers immediately. It took us 13 years to actually get the image.
00:57:15
Speaker
You know, I'm sorry, folks, but you might have to wait another 13 years before we get anywhere. Yeah. So, you know, I've been getting this a lot recently. People like looking at the watches, obviously going, hey, it's been a couple of months. Let's say what's going on with Calvin? It's like, yeah, well, I hear your frustrations, but please understand that the investigations are, you know, we're dealing with something so old with very few people that were either there or know anything. So.
00:57:44
Speaker
please anybody that's listening or watching just bear with us because we're doing the best we can. A lot of the key people who would have been able to tell us something are dead. Absolutely and we keep coming across that a bit too often unfortunately. We feel like we've got a few steps down a line or an avenue of investigation and
00:58:06
Speaker
person's debt. We have to then go down another one and and these are taking weeks at a time. So it's just it's gutting and it's very very disheartening to a degree but I mean we're still gonna keep going but please bear with us and so yeah we'll get to that another day. Let's so the Black Project thing I think is is fascinating when it comes to Condign.
Rendlesham Forest Incident Mention
00:58:29
Speaker
Rendlesham let's we keep mentioning Rendlesham and obviously it's like it's you know it's the biggest case in the UK but
00:58:36
Speaker
It wasn't touched upon enough, let's say, in the report. Eventually it was. Yeah, it throws up so many questions really to me and I think to a lot of people.
00:58:46
Speaker
He mentions it once in passing in the volume two, which is the one with the working papers And I think he's in the section under electromagnetic field effects on human beings So there's a whole section in there about what happens it he's talking from the plasma point of view So he's saying like if these plasmas exist and don't forget this the plasma theory is as unprovable as ET visitations. Yeah, it's just he doesn't want to talk about ET so it prefers plasma and
00:59:16
Speaker
he basically says if these plasmas exist and his theory is that meteors are impacting on the planet and scientists know that meteor impacts create plasma in the upper atmosphere this is proven you know i mean and there's all these photographs that have been taken there from the international space station of these amazing plasmas above thunderstorms they're called blue jets and sprites and they are amazing they look like UFOs you know they're just sort of
00:59:44
Speaker
We don't understand what they are and they're up in the atmosphere and these kinds of plasmas we know exist.
00:59:50
Speaker
But for them to explain UFO reports, he's talking about plasmas in the ionosphere and the mesosphere. How do you explain the things that are seen at ground level? Exactly. And if you came close to something like that, you would literally be fried. You're talking about vast amounts of energy. So where are these things? Why has no one ever measured them or reported them? Maybe they have. I don't know. And they've not lived to tell the tale.
01:00:18
Speaker
It's these things, you know, this is similar to what we experienced in Colombia and the investigation we did there. There's so little known about it around the world, you know. You look at Project Haestalen in Norway with, you know, the work gone out there since the early 80s and there's still no really any further to forming any kind of concise conclusion.
01:00:36
Speaker
Well, you mentioned Hestalen, but in Hestalen, one of the theories is the same as Ron Haddow's theory, you know, dusty plasmas, which are these sorts of like cold energy that sort of sucks into it dust from the atmosphere, and then it somehow sort of sustains itself. So this, this is, I mean, if you look up, if you're interested, just Google dusty plasma,
01:01:00
Speaker
It's something that plasma physicists are talking about. It's a theoretical concept. They do exist. But whether they could explain things like the Hestal and lies is something that needs lots and lots of scientific investment to actually say whether it could be something entirely different that's creating those lights that you saw in Colombia, and that have been reported in Norway and other places.
01:01:25
Speaker
I mean, there's the whole earth lights thing, you know, lights created by piezoelectricity, you know, from rocks crushing against each other in geological faults, which is another thing that another thing he talks about in the report. Yeah. So this is the thing. It's crazy that he just doesn't want to say UAP or UFO. He just always points to something else. And it's quite blase about it. You know, this is such a flawed report.
01:01:55
Speaker
The more I read about it, the more... It's flawed, but it's an important historical document. Oh, absolutely. A hundred percent, yeah. The fact that the British government used £50,000 of public money to do a study of UFOs or UAPs at a time when they were saying in Parliament, in response, if you wrote a letter to them at that time and said, what are you doing on this subject? They'd say nothing. We haven't spent any time and energy on it.
01:02:21
Speaker
which is untrue. So the document itself is, whatever you think of the conclusions and whatever you think of the methodology and what it was for,
01:02:34
Speaker
the fact that that document exists or existed, is it surely in historical terms, you know, like the condom report in America, or the the report Project Blue Book, it's, it's, it's part of the history of the subject, regardless of what you think about how useful it is.
01:02:54
Speaker
in the same way that you know it was if you think about it going back it's it's probably the last time that the british government will ever spend any time and attention to this subject however much we want them publicly yeah publicly yeah i mean the only other one is the the one that they did in 1951 you know the flying source of working party yeah so there's 50 years separating those two which i find fascinating exactly because there's so many interesting cases between those two yeah so many
01:03:24
Speaker
And that's why I thought, that's why I mentioned to you before about the radar cases and why they weren't really featured and they weren't that important in Condein. But I guess times change and radar changes. Yeah. And the thing is, when he did this study, he was given access to what was then the documents that were in the top secret archives. And the earliest DI55 file that he could find was from 1974.
01:03:52
Speaker
So they destroyed a lot more previous stuff before all the good stuff had been destroyed. I mean, we've talked about this video and we on the earlier programs, you know, like, yeah, Lake and Heath, Lake and Heath, all the files on those, on those cases, no longer existed when he started doing the study. In fact, he didn't even see the flying saucer working party report because it was missing at the time.
01:04:19
Speaker
So if you read the report, he says he found the references to the fact that a report had been done for Winston Churchill. They never got the report. I found it because they'd lost it. They'd put it inside another file. So where you found it physically in the National Archives? Well, I found a reference to it and I contacted them and said, look, where's where's this report that I know was produced in 1951? And they said, oh, well, we've looked for it several times and I've been able to find it. And I said, well, go look again.
01:04:50
Speaker
And eventually, after going through various files, I think it was a scientific intelligence file. It was inside another file. And he was like, oh, we found it. Would you like to see it? But this was after the report. This was after Ron Haddow had completed the Condein report. So he never saw that himself because he'd already completed his study by then. I don't know whether it would have changed anything. Well, that's the thing. You know, we look at these sort of
01:05:19
Speaker
the minutia and the details in certain aspects, but even if they were focused on more, nothing would have come of it. And it's a pity that he's never spoken himself. I mean, I've tried to get him to talk to me. I've written to him politely. I even went to where he lives on one occasion, knocked on his door and pushed a letter through his letterbox. But he's obviously been told, don't speak to David Clark under any circumstances.
01:05:47
Speaker
Yeah, there's that. But there's also the way his whole life changed, his belief systems. And I mean, maybe we should speak about that, the book he wrote. And he went quite off onto the side of religion and stuff like that, didn't he? Yeah, he wrote a book, a novel about the Third World War that he believes he's a member of a particular Christian sect. He wrote a novel called No Weapon Forged.
01:06:13
Speaker
And the interesting thing is, is a two page biography of him in there that effectively, it says, it doesn't say that he worked on UFOs, but if you read his biography, it's very clear that he is the person who wrote the Condign Report, because his description of his job, it almost fits the template precisely, you know, that he worked for this GEC, Mark Marconi.
01:06:36
Speaker
He's interested in radar, he flew during the Cold War, et cetera, et cetera. The book doesn't mention UFOs at all, disappointingly. But the interesting thing is, this is one of the things that I managed, one of the little clues that identified him. I found the reference, and I don't think it's online anymore, on a news group discussion. And it was about a meeting that had been held in Israel
01:07:04
Speaker
in I think 2000 shortly after he'd completed the report and it was a conference called the conference of the tabernacles and it was someone who had attended this meeting who said we had a really strange report and talk by someone who was a former British government scientist who
01:07:27
Speaker
his talk was on UFOs and UAPs and about dusty plasmas and how these things in the atmosphere were causing pilots to see UFOs. And this guy who I think he was a Canadian bloke and he was talking about that he'd attended this meeting where this British government scientist was talking about UFOs in 2000 and in Ron Haddow's book he says he was at that conference. Now
01:07:55
Speaker
I don't call me Hercule Poirot, but I put two and two together. It's clearly Ron Haddow. And after delivering the report, he attended this religious conference in Israel. And for some reason, they must have been asked to talk about whatever they'd done in their career. And he decided to talk about UAPs.
01:08:19
Speaker
So I mean, all the stuff about you shouldn't be revealing people's identity and privacy and that he actually was speaking in public. So he's effectively outed himself as far as I'm concerned. And he wrote this novel as well, in which he published a biography of himself. So a number of different things came together to identify him as the author.
01:08:39
Speaker
And you mentioned, I think briefly earlier, that you have tried to get in contact with him over the years, but to no avail. I mean, was that because he didn't want to speak or it was just... We don't know, but I do know because there are several documents in the files that have been released. Other defence intelligence officers who I have approached to ask them about UFOs, there's actually their letters to the MOD saying, this guy from Sheffield University has contacted us
01:09:07
Speaker
What should we do? And there is one where they say to this guy, and this was a guy who had worked on UFOs in the 1950s for defense intelligence. And I remember contacting him. He lived in Lincolnshire.
01:09:21
Speaker
And he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'd love to talk to you about it And you know, let's fix up a day and then I got back to him and he suddenly clammed up and it was like I've decided I don't want to talk to you and then in the files there's his letter to MOD saying should I speak to David Clark and they sort of say no don't Because you might reveal something that's some secret, you know, don't forget you've signed the official Secrets Act. So I'm 100% certain
01:09:49
Speaker
that Ron Haddow will have gone to the MOD and said this guy who's discovered I'm the author has contacted me wants to talk to me should I speak should I should I talk to him about it and they'll have said no the breach of official secrets act so Ron Haddow is now 86 years old
01:10:07
Speaker
He's not going to be around for much longer, is he really? And when he's no longer around, his knowledge of this subject is going to be gone forever. And he's never going to speak about it in public, is he? And I think that's a tragedy.
01:10:22
Speaker
I mean, Ian Cobain wrote a book called The History Thieves, which is all about how the Ministry of Defence and the National Archives and some of these other government departments conspire to hide material from the public. And not only by redacting names from documents, back to Calvin again, they just ensure that people who might say something about subjects that they don't want the public to know about are never going to be able to do that.
01:10:48
Speaker
And that's effectively stealing our history with the history of these subjects, as far as I'm concerned. I think it's inexcusable. Yeah, I mean, there's two ways of looking at it, isn't it? Like they're doing their job. They've signed the Official Secrets Act. But surely there should be some kind of time scale on that, like there is with or there was with the release of documents, you know, 20 year rule, 30 year rule. It should be something similar along those lines, I think.
01:11:12
Speaker
but also is contradictory because they're saying and they've said on the record numerous times that the subject of UFOs itself is not subject to the Official Secrets Act, that they're not trying to hide anything. There's nothing to hide. Therefore, why can't these people speak about what they did when they were studying the subject and what they found? The only reason is that these people were subject, they'd signed the Official Secrets Act, they were involved in all kinds of other
01:11:40
Speaker
activities to do with espionage, to do with Cold War, you know, Russian technology, that kind of thing, and they don't want their identities published, and their identities, by talking about UFOs, would then make them the target for enemy agents. I can understand that, but I think there are ways of allowing their
01:12:04
Speaker
what they know about the subject to emerging public without putting them in a vulnerable position. Yeah, I agree. But I guess they take the easy way out of that. It'd be best just not to talk about it at all, then what trouble can we get into? And I suppose here is we ought to say what the latest developments on this on the combine.
Disappearance of the Original Report
01:12:24
Speaker
I guess that's a great place to finish it off with. Wow. Absolutely. Right. Well,
01:12:33
Speaker
As with all documents, public documents like this, I mean, and this is a hefty document, as we've seen, it's four volumes, 465 pages. Although lots of it have been withheld and have been redacted, as with all public documents, this should eventually be sent to the National Archives to go into the National Archives so that you can order it up when you go to Q and see the document. Even if bits of it have to be retained,
01:13:03
Speaker
So because it's quite recent, that's not going to happen for a long time. So in my correspondence with the MOD, I've sort of over the years said, right, well, when is this the original copy of the report going to be transferred or reviewed for transfer to the National Archives? And they'd already said that UFO documents because of the enhanced public interest in them and the number of people that are asking to see stuff
01:13:28
Speaker
and now one of the areas topics that if they've got something on the subject, it mustn't be destroyed. It's alongside like the Royal Family now in their list of priority documents that shouldn't be destroyed, that should be transferred to the National Archives. So I sort of waited and I think it was in 2018, I contacted them and said, no then, calm down report. When are you gonna review it for release of the National Archives? And I got a very unequivocal reply, it's coming up for review in 2020.
01:13:59
Speaker
And this is the full unredacted version. Yeah. Coming up for review. And that's when we'll look at it and see when it can be transferred. It's a public document under the public records act. So I just thought, yeah, great. Okay. I'll leave it. And then of course, COVID came along and Calvin and all these other things have distracted me now. Um, I'd forgotten about it, but Matthew Hillsley, who was part of our little team, um, looking at the Calvin photograph, he, he, he was interested in, um,
01:14:27
Speaker
the report. So he wrote to the Emodians and asked the same question, not knowing that they'd told me it was coming up for review. And it was a public document. And well, Vinny, what did they tell Matthew? There was no trace of it. There was they couldn't find it anywhere. It no longer existed. Yeah, didn't exist. Gone. Gone. Gone.
01:14:52
Speaker
and they told him basically that when they'd scanned it you know we were talking about the the version you can click on and download that's so annoying that whoever had scanned it had accidentally destroyed it when he was scanning it or she was scanning it it's unbelievable
01:15:09
Speaker
And quite naturally, Matthew was like stunned to hear this because the document itself, if you actually look at the cover, it says this is a secret document under the, you know, the Official Secrets Act. Under no circumstances should it be destroyed and anyone trying to destroy it will be prosecuted. And yet somehow they'd managed to lose it and completely destroy the whole thing. So when Matthew told me this,
01:15:38
Speaker
because they tried to fold him off. I sent him what they told me in 2018, that it did exist in 2018, that it was a public document, therefore it's illegal for it to be destroyed. And so I immediately went back to them and said, hold on a minute, you know, how can you have destroyed it? This is a criminal offense for it to have been destroyed. Anyway, this has obviously caused mayhem, because we've now been told
01:16:08
Speaker
um that there's a an investigation going on in the MOD by the um departmental record officer into how this could possibly have happened and they've written to all these different organizations that we've just seen on that list. I've got them now if you want to have a look at them and go through them let's go through them because there are many like so these are all people that had the original unredacted version so if you could break them down for us because I don't know the acronyms
01:16:37
Speaker
And I'm open I could deputy DC DI is the deputy chief of defense intelligence. So he's he or she is the person who is Second down in the pecking order from the head of defense intelligence, which is a very senior military role So that person is a civilian a civil servant that the the head of defense intelligence is a military officer either an RAF Royal Navy or army
01:17:05
Speaker
Um, but the, the one who would, I don't know who that was in 2000, but it was the deputy who would be a civil servant. So deputy chief of defense intelligence. Um, I'm not sure what the other one is, but it's something to do with research and research and technology, research and technology. So whoever it was, it was involved in sort of cutting edge technology, like projects and UAVs, that kind of thing.
01:17:29
Speaker
ADGE is that branch, you know, the one where we said there was SEC-AS-DI55. So Air Defense Under RAF? Air Defense Ground Environment. So they are the
01:17:42
Speaker
part of the RAF that runs RAF Filingdales, for instance, you know, the ground radars and stuff like that. Ewax as well. IFS RAF is, I think they're based at Bentley Priory. So they are the part of the RAF that investigate aircrashers, no RAF aircrash investigators. And that they're copied in because of the thing about the near miss incidents.
01:18:07
Speaker
Um hq me to that's military air traffic organization that no longer exists. That was based at uxbridge. I believe in 2000 and it was like a An intermediary agency that that was sort of like a halfway house between the military and the severe civil aviation authority So they make sense radar They no longer exist right ad di 55 di 51 is um
01:18:31
Speaker
DI-55 was the Space Weapons Branch and DI-51 was the Electronic Surveillance Branch. So they were involved in all kinds of spooky activities as well. You know remote viewing, they did a remote viewing study at DI-51 and they were interested in UFOs as well. So they were all copied, they all got a copy of the full report and they've all
01:18:54
Speaker
some of those organizations no longer exist or the you know like they're constantly changing the names and the acronyms are changing so they've tracked down who are the successor organizations and they said have you got a copy of this and apparently they've all come back and said no so i i said to them in my last letter why don't you go and ask ron haddow he wrote it maybe he's kept a copy of it and of course they don't even want to talk about ron haddow because you know it's nature protection you know
01:19:24
Speaker
know, but he would be the obvious person to go and ask. Absolutely. I mean, so it's kind of a dead end again. They promised me a copy of their investigation report. But I just think it's embarrassing. And if you if you want to see this as a conspiracy, please be my guest because he does look suspicious. Well, how have they destroyed this thing?
01:19:51
Speaker
But just knowing what chaos civil service departments are like, no one keeps paper records anymore. I mean, you go and ask any department of government, have you got any paper records? And they'll say, no, we got rid of them all years ago. So our corporate memory only goes back two years. Everything else has been destroyed. And I think this is an example of pure and utter incompetence.
01:20:20
Speaker
You know, but why someone would destroy a document like this, which is clearly of historical importance, which they themselves have said, because they said in 2011, the subject of UFOs now, because of the number of FOI requests we get, and the general interest in the subject means that if listed UFOs alongside the royal family, this and the other, all these different topics,
01:20:46
Speaker
under no circumstances should documents that refer to this subject be destroyed and yet someone's apparently destroyed it and even knowing how the MOD works a top secret document to destroy it you've got to get it's you've got to get the decision to destroy it signed off by a senior ministry of defense official so they have a destruction certificate yeah that someone has to sign before that document goes into an incinerator that says right you know
01:21:16
Speaker
Um, yeah fair enough. We no longer need to keep a copy of this destroy it and it's signed by someone And that destruction certificate has to be kept for a minimum of five years. So if it was destroyed in 2018 That destruction certificate should still exist This is one of the questions i've asked him. Where's the destruction? Well, that's the thing I think this this I mean you've been back and forth with them a couple of times in the past six months I know that but it is ongoing still we're still
01:21:43
Speaker
Yeah, we're still waiting to hear. They promised to keep me updated on the subject. Yeah, they'll drag that out as best they can, I'm sure. Yeah, so they might actually come and say, can we have your copy back because we've lost it.
01:22:01
Speaker
Well, I think we covered everything there. Looking at my notes and that, like I said to everyone earlier, I've got a load of these kind of back and forth documents from Di 55 and the letters that are not part of the report. I'll pop them into a drive and make them accessible to everybody, along with the full 400 page report, but
01:22:19
Speaker
Yeah, fascinating stuff,
Podcast Conclusion and Future Updates
01:22:21
Speaker
it just shows. We've only just skimmed the surface here, haven't we really? But we'll keep, I mean, with this investigation, this appeal that we've got going on, we'll keep people updated. Same with Calvin, you know, as and when, if we get any groundbreaking news, we will of course, you know, do a show on it.
01:22:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's pretty much it for this evening. I mean, I dare say David will be back next month to talk about another case that he's covered or something in the past because, you know, he's full of the information. We've covered most of it now, really. Oh, we can always find something. We can always find something new. You know, people do appreciate it. I appreciate it. So so, yeah, I think we covered all the questions.
01:23:04
Speaker
A quick shout out, Davey Johnson, thank you for the £10 donation. Lara, glad to see you re-joining the channel. Really appreciate it. All the support goes a long way. And yeah. I've just seen in the chat somebody's asking, is there a critical analysis of the report Dizzy Vision? Yes, there is. I wrote one for this magazine. Is that the one I've got as well?
01:23:27
Speaker
Yeah, International UFO Reporter, which is the publication or was the publication of the Center for UFO Studies, you know, Alan Inex organization. Yeah, I did. I did a critical paper on this with Gary Anthony back in when was it? Vault 13 number four. There it is. I'm sure you'll be able to download that.
01:23:51
Speaker
I'll pop a link to that as well in the description. I will put everything we've spoken about that's not already in the description. I will add it for everybody. So yeah, there we go, everyone. Well, I guess that's it, David. Thank you, as always. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
01:24:10
Speaker
Thank you to everybody in the chat. Yeah, I appreciate you all being here. All the great questions and keeping it nice and cordial. I'm going to be back next week. Go follow me on all my social media things. You can find out what's coming up. But for now, take care, everyone. I'll see you soon. Bye bye.