UFO Drawings from the National Archives (Four Corners Irregulars, 2)

Excellent resource - documented and detailed with background on UFO sightings and encounters. Some were very high profile and remain completely unresolved. Interesting to note attempts to direct the cases elsewhere - simply to get the matter off the desk.

Great book, great drawings. UFO cases I had never seen before.

As with their American intelligence and military counterparts, the UK Ministry of Defence did their best to explain away most UFO observations as mistakes of perception and overactive imaginations responding to explainable atmospheric phenomena or human technology, with photographic evidence resulting from distortions or hoaxing or other fakery. Included among the roughly 11,000 reported sightings in the Ministry’s decades-long investigation of the UFO phenomenon (1940s-2009), when the Ministry’s UFO desk and telephone hotline, initiated in 1962, were closed, are hundreds of eyewitness-provided illustrations featuring puzzling and at times unexplainable imagery, consisting of everything from hand-drawn recreations to professionally-produced and incredibly detailed diagrams, to photographs of varying quality and detail.Notwithstanding the Ministry’s efforts, a not insignificant percentage of reported sightings remained truly unexplainable. In UFO Drawings from the National Archives, a co-publication between Four Corners and the National Archives, Dr. David Clarke, researcher and author of the recent history of the UFO phenomenon, the excellent, precise How UFOs Conquered the World (2015) and consultant on the public release of the Ministry of Defence's considerable holdings of UFO files, presents a carefully curated sampling of drawings (some of them are photographs) that accompanied these reports. Included here are familiar images – including the now-discredited ‘Solway Spaceman’ photograph – as well as more obscure yet no less fascinating and unsettling anomalies.Clarke presents the material in chronological order with prefatory, matter-of-fact summaries of reports, largely without editorial comment. The chronological ordering provides the reader with a general sense of the UFO phenomenon's complexity, and the bewildering variety of its manifestations, including the different shapes, sizes, colours, sounds, and movements, as well as a sense of the ways in which the phenomenon has remained consistent over time in the face of significant social and cultural transformations over a sixty year period. At the same time, Clarke's straightforward presentation serves to illustrate the phenomenon's growing complexity, with decidedly technological cigar and saucer-shaped objects making their appearance during the 1950s and 1960s, followed by more high strangeness, close encounter-oriented reports documented in the 1970s and 1980s, and finally a swath of abduction-related and crop circle accounts popping up from the late 80s to the late 90s.Clarke's introduction provides a useful, concise history of the Ministry of Defence's involvement in collecting data on the UFO phenomenon. Though most of the drawings provided by eyewitnesses to the Ministry are mostly without pretence, comprised primarily of pragmatic attempts by earnest eyewitnesses (some crackpot but mostly sober) to document apparently unexplainable atmospheric phenomena, some of the artwork included here approaches a kind of folk art. Indeed, despite Clarke's journalistic approach, there is much here of interest to the sociologist, folklorist, or UFO historian, making UFO Drawings from the National Archives are worthy addition to any Fortean library. -- Eric Hoffman, Fortean Times

Beautiful little book. Fine paper and quality reproductions. Would recommend for those genuinely interested in the phenomena.

Gorgeous little book. The illustrations are fascinating

A slim Hardback its only 128 pages long, and surprisingly uncritical considering the Author.The title is a somewhat misleading considering it also contains a handful of photographs, including the infamous "Cumberland Spaceman" which is rather odd considering it has now been successfully debunked (This isn't mentioned in the accompanying text- why?). See attached pictures.I was also disappointed that the Broad Haven school case is mentioned but none of the children's drawings are included, pictures from a similar, less familiar case in Macclesfield Cheshire are given instead. it would have been nice to include drawings from both incidents.Overall an attractive little book containing some interesting cases but in my opinion not particularly essential.

Lovely book. The pictures and the stories about the sightings are a mix of funny, beautiful and down right strange - one of drawings looks more like an avocado than a UFO - even if you’re not convinced about life beyond the planet this is a charming book. The background to the manner in which the government first suppressed then revealed this information is also really interesting.

Todo muy bien.

Wasn't sure how this was going to read or look. I am so pleased. Lovely book, really nicely produced and smarly edited to include the most representative pictures and explanations. A great find.