The X Files - The real X Files

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprise their roles of Mulder and Scully in The X-Files: I Want To Believe. We take look at the Ministry of Defence's real X Files.

The X-Files may be fiction, but the Ministry of Defence has a division which - among other things - investigates UFOs. The interest dates back to 1950 when the MoD's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Henry Tizard, said that UFO sightings shouldn't be dismissed without some proper scientific study. As a result of his initiative the MoD set up a committee called the Flying Saucer Working Party.

It reported in 1951, concluded that UFO sightings were all misidentifications or hoaxes and recommended no further action. However, the next year there was a high-profile wave of UFO sightings where the witnesses included RAF pilots and where UFOs were tracked on radar. From 1953 to the present day the MoD has collated and investigated reports of UFO sightings, examining them to see if there is evidence suggesting a potential threat to the UK, or anything of any "defence significance". To date, the files contain details of over 11,000 sightings.

In May 2008 the MoD started the process of releasing its entire archive of UFO files. This followed a similar move by the French Government in 2007 and was also a response to the massive public interest in this subject - the MoD gets more Freedom of Information Act requests about UFOs than any other subject. Within a week of the first batch of files having been released, there had been nearly 2 million downloads of the material from the National Archives website. The files are being released gradually and the process is expected to take 3 or 4 years to complete.

Although outside the MoD's terms of reference, as in The X-Files, the MoD finds that because it investigates UFOs, it gets drawn into other mysteries too. The MoD's files contain reports of alien abductions, crop circles, ghosts and other strange phenomena.


The X-Files: I Want To Believe will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on 24th November 2008 by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.