Alien spacecraft and little green men remain elusive figures in the latest trove of official UFO files released July 12 by the United Kingdom government.
There's no smoking gun anywhere in the 6,700 pages, which represent the ninth collection of government UFO files made public by the U.K.'s National Archives in Kew. But the new batch, which contains documents dating from 1965 to 2008, are full of interesting tidbits nonetheless.
For example, the files recount the story of a hotel owner on the Welsh coast who said she spotted a UFO in 1977. She claimed to see an object the size of a minibus fall from the sky and land in a field at the back of her property.
As she watched, two "faceless humanoids" clad in silver suits emerged from the mysterious craft, unnerving her so much that she asked the local authorities to investigate.
Somewhat surprisingly, they did. An officer from a nearby Royal Air Force base checked out the field, and other military personnel made some inquiries locally to get to the bottom of the mystery.
While the investigation didn't produce any definitive results, it did zero in on one likely explanation, said David Clarke, senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University and author of the book "The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-life Sightings" (The National Archives, 2009).
"It turned out that they suspected, as a result of this investigation, that someone had been involved in a practical joke, and that they'd borrowed a firefighting suit that had been on display in a local shop," Clarke said in a video produced by The National Archives to accompany the new release of UFO files.
"It was sort of white with a big black visor over the face," Clarke added. "This person had been walking around in this suit late at night, and maybe this had been what caused some of these weird sightings."
