By Abigail Hyslop
First published 25th March 2023
Hello dear reader, as you may be aware we here at UFOIdentified have recently published our report on sightings over the last year, we have been working hard with pestering the relevant agencies for information in the form of Freedom of Information Act requests. It seems to me there is something fishy going on here.
I have spent some time comparing the data from the last set for 2021 and from this set for 2022. It seems to me the powers that be have found themselves a loophole, a way to block the information, keeping it away from our studious analytical skills and out of the public domain. I have also been digging into the differences between other global agencies and our own services. This information is limited. For both the US and the Brits the data from 2022 is not available as yet but going by 2021’s numbers, it is not looking good, and we can speak from personal experience it most definitely is not.
Taking a closer into the UK statistics for 2021 FOI’s in this topic makes for confusing reading, stick with me here. In the UK for UFO/UAP FOI requests the government website states there were 51,502 requests. According to their website 14,775 were fully granted, I have to say that this was not reflected in our replies. Out of the 49 requests we sent out to the police only 6 English police sources returned any information of reports. 20,680 requests were completely withheld, 742 of them were considered “vexatious”, so basically we’re annoying, well excuse us for being serious researchers. 171 were repeated, if they answered us the first time we wouldn’t have to repeat them, are you seeing a pattern here? 14,256 were considered under “other exemptions” which I take to mean they couldn’t even be bothered coming up with a decent reason to deny us the information requested. 1,713 were waiting to be processed and 14,338 were unresolved. Hmmmm?
We had first-hand experience in the “due to costs” excuse as well as “it’s a waste of our time and resources”, which personally I considered to be just plain rude! All of these statistics came directly from the government website statement, you would think we could trust the powers that be but then again with the state of our economy we can see quite clearly that number just aint their thing. I’m only a researcher but even I can see the numbers just don’t add up.
We do not have all the data for 2022 but it looks so far we can see a further drop in our data collected. We only have 3 police sources that returned information, one sent information totally irrelevant and did not include a single thing in our original request. In 2022 we had a whopping 19 out of 45 did not answer us at all compared to 11 from the previous year. 7 did give us information for 2022 compared to 9 in 2021, this year we had 19 refusals compared to 24 from 2021, while the refusals have gone down in 2022 the lack of response has gone up, so basically rather than tell us “No” and come up with a reasonable excuse to deny us our legislated right they will just ignore us instead. We did however receive 1 “we need more time” from 2021, I won’t be holding my breath. What is the point of having a Freedom of Information Act if the powers that be can either ignore you or give you an excuse as to why they are disinclined to acquiesce to our request, to quote a movie pirate.
The whole thing has left me frustrated, more so because when researching the topic for the article my laptop flashed a page warning about a high rate of traffic from my browser just before my WIFI decided to flick on and off for the better part of an hour. I’m not saying it is related to my research but…
We all know that getting information from government agencies can be difficult to say the least, the politicians do not want their names linked to “fringe” topics, agencies refuse to acknowledge they even investigate or record reports concerning sightings, some even scoff at the idea, “we do not waste our time on these issues”, a big fat sod off we are not interested from the English powers. There is hope though, it seems the Scottish police not only log reported sightings but also investigate them, quite openly, much like the Chileans and the more recent admittance from the USA. I can only hope our government and their agencies catch up with the global consensus that there are things buzzing around our skies of unknown origin and these issues need to be addressed and keeping us in the dark, so to speak, is not going to help, it will not stop us and sooner or later our numbers will be too large to be ignored.
Let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later.
