Australia UFO Sighting Files Mysteriously Disappear

In what will likely become fodder for conspiracy theorists, Australia's military has mysteriously lost its "X-Files," a host of records which detail sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting.

The nation's Department of Defense made the revelation after a two-month search in response to a newspaper's Freedom of Information (FOI) request proved fruitless, and officials were unable to locate the files. "The files could not be located and Headquarters Air Command formally advised that this file is deemed lost," the department's FOI assistant director, Natalie Carpenter, is quoted as saying.

As Reuters is reporting, the department had been able to locate was a folder called: "Report on UFOs/Strange Occurrences and Phenomena in Woomera," a military weapons testing range in the centre of Australia's vast outback. The single remaining file detailed a sketchy series of sightings from around the country and overseas, including people living in towns near Woomera, in South Australia state.

UFO study officials said questions needed to be asked about the country's decision to destroy the files. “It would be interesting to know if they have throw anything else out," Doug Moffatt, spokesman for UFO Research New South Wales, is quoted by the Telegraph as saying. "If not, it starts looking dodgy.” Considered by many in the field to be Australia's leading UFO researcher, Bill Chalker also expressed his dismay and claimed to have accessed the archives just a few months ago. "Some of those UFO documents would still be classified, and would not be available for viewing,'' he told the Sydney Morning Herald. ''But the Department of Defence would have surely found the hundreds of other files if they just headed down to National Archives and looked.''

Meanwhile, according to GlobalPost, Australia’s military said it stopped taking reports of UFO sightings in late 2000, and began referring such claims to the police.

Comments

[lhanderson86]

08:05 PM on 07/06/2011

Ugh. I can tell you exactly what happened. Either a lazy file clerk didn't put them back where they are supposed to be, or they were scheduled for disposal and their disposal wasn't documented. It's just the cost of doing business for any bureaucracy.

[fredgladys]

08:30 PM on 06/10/2011

It is probably more interesting to make up a conspiracy but I think that the reason for many supposedly strange events are just human error/carelessness or incompetence.

[Ramkshrestha]

06:06 AM on 06/10/2011

Why every Aliens story mysterious? They just want to play with us?

[Edward Standley]

08:54 PM on 06/09/2011

IMO, if any proof of extraterrestrial life existed, we'd all know about it. It would be one of the biggest events in human history, impossible to keep secret.

[Hypnos Rises]

07:13 PM on 06/09/2011

...it was Cancer Man...

[cagog]

06:26 PM on 06/09/2011

BATTLE: AUSTRALIA, coming soon to theaters.

[cdhj12000]

03:20 PM on 06/09/2011

People will believe what they want to believe for whatever reason suits them.

[Nelle]

02:41 PM on 06/09/2011

"Australia UFO Sighting Files Mysteriously Disappear..."

It figures.

[bmutia]

11:33 AM on 06/09/2011

Lost UFO files does not change what I have experienced in 1978. It was not human/earth technology.

[cuoi]

08:41 AM on 06/09/2011

Time for truth: all you who have seen UFO or believe in same have really been witnessing FSM. Flying Spaghetti Monster. All ye who scoff, deride, or object, please seek the truth here:
http://www.venganza.org/
There was a sighting in Western Australia on June 5. There is photographic proof at the aforementioned site.
Become a Pastafarian today!

[Ryan Raba]

08:13 AM on 06/09/2011

Nowadays everyone is walking around with a high def cellphone camera in their pocket. If a UFO really were to hover over a town, there would be thousands of pictures and videos instantly uploaded to facebook and youtube.

Since that has never happened, and UFO sightings continue to be captured and reported by only a handful of people at a time, I'm still skeptical.

I love watching the History Channel try to claim UFOs are real by showing some video of a craft hovering over a major city. I mean, really, a giant spaceship hovering right over Houston and a whopping 12 people saw it, with 2 videos taken. Common. If that really happened there would literally be a million videos from a million different people.

[NMLurker]

08:09 AM on 06/09/2011

If they were still available they would be redacted beyond recognition anyway. If one believes in UFOs enough to start a file then one must believe that they can magically disappear at any moment.

[Portal]

10:31 PM on 06/08/2011

HP never reports the Real stories there were Dogfights in the USSR where MIGS would go on Suicide missions on taking UFO's down, One story a pilots Jet was hit by the UFO and the wing glowed for a week look it up.

[cuoi]

08:33 AM on 06/09/2011

So that's who shot me down!

[zelda777]

04:29 PM on 06/08/2011

There's lots of information around about UFOs. You have to hunt for it. It's being suppressed. Nothing is more threatening to world order than the appearance of craft or beings from another realm of space, so all the governments of the world are squelching the info.

[GeorgeWGump]

02:22 PM on 06/08/2011

I Want to Believe!

But I don't. Fermi and Von Neumann were right.