British spies planned to capture a flying saucer and use its alien technology to build superweapons, secret files reveal. Even after the Cold War, there were fears that the Soviet Union or China had impounded a UFO and were harvesting its secrets to develop superfast warplanes that could hover in mid-air and be invisible to radar.
Intelligence service chiefs urged the Government to be on the alert for sightings of strange foreign aircraft showing sinister signs of extraterrestrial tinkering.
The dossier, obtained by British XFiles expert Dr David Clarke, reveals the Government was running two UFO desks.
The public UFO desk was only set up to gather reports of sightings.
The real work was being done by experts from Defence Intelligence.
For half a century, spy bosses pored over the reports convinced they represented “as grave a threat to the Realm as the Soviet Union”.
But by 1997, the word had come down from Whitehall that the security services investigating “X-files stuff such as alien abductions” had become “a diversion from their main duties”.
A review was ordered to confirm the desk should be shut down, but also to determine whether anything had been learned over the years which could be useful to military.