{"it":{"id":"REC-CDG2006","name":"Project Condign (DIS, 2000; released 2006)","kind":"gov","sub":"Released record","place":"Defence Intelligence Staff, London, England","lat":51.504,"lon":-0.126,"date":"1997–2000; 2006-05-15","rep":"DIS study, 1997–2000.","off":"Most are misidentifications; the rest attributed to plasma-type phenomena (a hypothesis).","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Project Condign","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Condign"},{"t":"UK Ministry of Defence (National Archives web archive): UAP in the UK Air Defence Region, Volume 1","u":"https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20121110115057mp_/www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FreedomOfInformation/PublicationScheme/SearchPublicationScheme/UapInTheUkAirDefenceRegionVolume1.htm"}],"tags":["Records"],"sum":"Project Condign, a secret UK study completed in 2000 and released in 2006, accepted that UAP are observed and offered a natural explanation for the unmatched ones.","nsrc":2,"new":1,"qs":["Britain's defence intelligence blamed unexplained UAP on unproven plasma. Is that an explanation, or a label?","Condign only became public through a Freedom of Information request. How many studies like it are still sitting unrequested?","If a government admits something real is in our skies but says it's not hostile, how much should we take on trust?"],"yt":"Test the plasma hypothesis against one case.","rel":["GOV-UK"],"hook":"A secret UK study called UAP 'indisputable', then traced the oddest reports to buoyant plasma from meteors.","why":"It is a rare official study that both accepts the sightings and offers a physical cause for them."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"REC-CDG2006","sum":"The cover carries an instruction for anyone who might find it lying in the street. The document, it says, is the property of Her Britannic Majesty's Government, and whoever picks it up should hand it to a Service unit or a police station for return to the Ministry of Defence, Defence Intelligence Staff, London SW1. Below the warning are the markings UK Restricted and UK Eyes Only. Inside, before a single finding, comes a picture captioned \"An example UAP formation of the triangular type,\" and a note from a British prime minister: \"What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience.\" W. S. Churchill, 28 July 1952.\n\nNearly half a century later, Britain's defence intelligence service tried to answer him. The study, later known as Project Condign, was carried out by the Defence Intelligence Staff between 1997 and 2000. Its results filled about 400 pages under the title Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region, and its executive summary, Scientific and Technical Memorandum No. 55/2/00, describes itself as the first detailed analysis of the subject by the Defence Intelligence Staff in more than 25 years. UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena, was the official term for what the public calls UFOs. The work drew on about 10,000 sighting reports gathered by DI55, a section of the Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence. The name of the author, or authors, was blacked out and was never made public.\n\nThe report was built in three parts. Volume 1 set out the background, the database and the statistics. Volume 2 held 25 working papers, many of them on things that might be mistaken for a flying object: ball lightning, meteorological balloons, airships, satellites, optical mirages, sprites and blue jets in the upper atmosphere, even ley lines and earthlights. Volume 3, classified Secret, dealt with radar performance, the hazards to aircraft, the military potential of what had been found, and UAP work in other countries.\n\nThe aim was narrow. The Ministry wanted to know whether sighting reports had any value to defence intelligence: first, whether they showed a threat to the United Kingdom, and second, whether they pointed to any military technology worth having. The analysts built a database, studied a statistically representative sample of the reports from 1987 to 1997 in detail, and read hundreds of others by hand. They examined every unexplained fatal accident to a Royal Air Force aircraft, to see whether a startling sight ahead of a jet flying fast and low might have caused one. They also checked near misses in which the second object was never identified.\n\nThen comes a sentence few would expect from a ministry. \"That UAP exist is indisputable.\" The same paragraph lists what witnesses credit them with: the ability to hover, land, take off, accelerate to exceptional velocities and vanish, to change direction suddenly, and to show aerodynamic characteristics well beyond those of any known aircraft or missile.\n\nThe explanation the report offered was not visitors. Most sightings, it found, were man-made vehicles, often seen by perfectly credible witnesses in unusual circumstances, or ordinary natural events misunderstood at the time. The rest, it argued, were rare natural phenomena in the atmosphere and ionosphere, and there seemed \"a strong possibility\" that some were triggered by meteors that neither burned up completely nor struck the ground as meteorites, but formed buoyant plasmas, glowing masses of electrically charged gas. Such a mass could be seen by the eye but not by radar, or by both. Between several of them flying in loose formation, a field \"with, as yet, undetermined characteristics\" might leave a dark region that reflected no light, and that, the report suggested, was the key to the black triangular craft, sometimes said to be hundreds of feet long. Close to such a mass, a magnetic or electromagnetic field might act on the brain's temporal lobes, giving witnesses vivid but mostly incorrect memories of what they had seen. It might also briefly upset car engines and radios.\n\nThe report was frank about the gaps. \"The conditions and method of formation of the electrically-charged plasmas and the scientific rationale for sustaining them for significant periods is incomplete or not fully understood.\" It found no evidence that the phenomena were hostile, or \"under any type of control, other than that of natural physical forces,\" and no evidence that any were incursions by air objects of intelligent origin, extraterrestrial or foreign. Despite thousands of reports, no artefacts of unknown origin had ever been handed in. The key recommendation was that the Defence Intelligence Staff should no longer be required to monitor the reports at all.\n\nThe public learned of it on 15 May 2006, after a Freedom of Information request made in September 2005 by the UFO researchers David Clarke, a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, and Gary Anthony. Clarke said the release added nothing new about UFOs, but showed that the Defence Intelligence Staff had studied the subject far more than it had admitted. Because the report was secret, it was apparently never peer reviewed, and it has been suggested that the plasma hypothesis would not have survived independent scrutiny.\n\nWhat remains strange is what the study did next. Its section on exotic technologies noted that the reported speeds and turns would require \"an inertia-less vehicle\" and \"a completely new understanding of materials, forces and fields,\" then took that very behaviour as support for the plasma idea. It recorded that attempts by other nations to intercept the objects, which \"can clearly change position faster than an aircraft,\" had reportedly already caused deaths, and advised that no attempt be made to outmanoeuvre one during an interception. It noted that scientists in the former Soviet Union had linked the phenomena to plasma technologies and were pursuing them for military purposes. And having concluded that the reports held no intelligence value, it recommended further research into plasmas for \"novel military applications,\" adding that the implications had \"already been briefed to the relevant MoD technology managers.\" Several lines in that part of the summary are still a solid wall of typed X's.\n\nLast of all comes Figure 1, a chart of the annual totals of UAP reports to the Ministry from 1959 to 1996, the totals rising and falling for almost forty years, and beneath it a note that the 1997 value covers only the first quarter.","qs":["Buoyant plasma from meteors: is that an explanation, or a label for what could not be explained?","Why would a report that found nothing hostile still recommend military research into the same phenomena?","Does a study lose weight if no one outside the ministry ever reviewed it?"],"gal":[],"ms":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Project Condign","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Condign"},{"id":"VREC-CDG2006-2","t":"UK Ministry of Defence, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region: executive summary (Dec 2000), PDF copy","u":"https://files.bluebookfiles.org/pdfs/unknown.00%20-%20NARA%20-%20BritishUFOFiles%20-%20uap_exec_summary_dec00.pdf"}],"pts":[{"p":"DIS study, 1997–2000.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Project Condign","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Condign"},{"p":"About 400 pages; drew on about 10,000 sightings.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Project Condign","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Condign"},{"p":"Released 15 May 2006 after a 2005 FOI request.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Project Condign","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Condign"},{"p":"Found no evidence of hostility or intelligent control.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Project Condign","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Condign"}]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/REC-CDG2006-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Illustration: setting associated with Project Condign (DIS, 2000; released 2006), Defence Intelligence Staff, London, England","by":"Illustration made for The Nommo","lic":"","lu":"","p":"","g":true,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":null,"hs":{}}