A number of US Presidents have expressed an interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials but only one has ever reported a sighting: Jimmy Carter. The 39th President held office from 1977 until 1981 during a period of intense public interest in UFOs. Jimmy Carter in 1977 (credit: US DoD) Soon after Carter took office Sir Eric Gairy, president of the small Caribbean island republic of Grenada, called upon the United Nations General Assembly to make 1978 ‘the year of the UFO’. His attempts failed to gain any traction but the release of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie Close Encounters of the Third ..read more

The summer of 2023 may mark the highpoint of a renewed resurgence of interest in UFOs both in the corridors of the Pentagon and for the world’s media. But all the online debate around whistleblowers and imminent disclosure obscures the fact that UAP are a global phenomenon. Cover image from vol 1 of Project Condign report So far the response of the UK government to US intelligence interest and NASA’s separate, ongoing study, has been muted. The official line is that MoD closed its UFO desk in 2009 after some 50 years acting as the focal point for sightings reported by members of the publi ..read more

Much has been written about the dread experienced by J. Robert Oppenheimer following the detonation of Trinity in 1945, depicted in Christopher Nolan’s new movie biopic of ‘the father of the atomic bomb’ But one of the most chilling outcomes of the Cold War nuclear stand-off that followed was the fear that a nuclear device could be smuggled into the West by air or sea…and there was no effective method to detect its presence – until it was too late The innocuous cover of the report commissioned by the British Government in 1950 to investigate the threat posed by the clandest ..read more

How a classic UFO ‘mystery’ was solved by a cold case investigation. Three decades ago in the early hours of Wednesday 31 March 1993 dozens of people across western Britain saw UAPs in the night sky. Read my latest SubStack post for the full story of the Cosford UFO flap ..read more

Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) have long been SETI’s elephant in the room. Astronomers seek evidence of ET intelligences by searching for exo-planets and listening for signals from alien civilisations. But should the search effort be restricted to outer space? What if anomalous phenomena exist in the Earth’s atmosphere or even on the surface of the planet? Are SETI looking down the wrong end of the proverbial telescope? Read more about my adventures at the Durham Law School symposium on UAPs and SETI in my SubStack blog ..read more

Folklore experts from across the world will gather in Sheffield this summer to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the birth of urban legend studies in Steel City. Sheffield Hallam University was chosen to host the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) conference in 2023 due to its high profile as an international centre for research excellence in folklore and cultural heritage. Scholars who specialise in supernatural legends, rumours, conspiracy theories and ‘friend of a friend’ stories first met at Halifax Hall at the University of Sheffield for the very first confere ..read more

They say that nature abhors a vacuum and that is definitely true in the case of the mysterious Calvine UFO photographs Last week the Scottish Daily Record reignited the hunt for the elusive photographer when it revealed the name Kevin Russell. That name appears on the reverse of the print that was processed in their Glasgow office in August 1990, before the paper turned over the negatives to the Ministry of Defence. To continue reading this post visit my Substack account here ..read more

From 9 March 2023 my postings will move Substack where my domain is DrClarke.substack.com My first Substack post examines the recent UFO and spy balloon shoot-downs over North America in the context of the long history of covert aerial reconnaissance that dates back to the early years of the Cold War. U2 pilot’s selfie of Chinese spy balloon 3 February 2023 (credit: US Department of Defense) drdavidclarke.co.uk will continue to host new free content. It will also provide access to some of my most popular archive pages and past posts that date back to 2011. Initially access to my new Substack c ..read more

The shoot-down of a Chinese ‘spy balloon’ and three other mysterious objects over North America has kicked off a flurry of renewed media interest in UFOs. Image of Chinese balloons over Billings, Montana by Chase Doak, 1 February 2023: Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128439300 But current speculation about the military value of balloons for long-range espionage ignores the long history of balloon systems employed by the US intelligence agencies. These top secret Cold War programs triggered off UFO flaps during the 1950s years before the arrival of the U2 ..read more

It’s official folks: legend scholars are coming home to Steel City! The 40th conference of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) will be held at Sheffield Hallam University, 26-30 June 2023. The conference is ‘coming home’ because the very first conference, organised by the former Centre for English Cultural Tradition was held at the University of Sheffield in July 1982. The Perspectives on Contemporary Legend conferences effectively launched the academic study of this new genre of folklore. Contemporary legend includes the study of all kinds of modern legends, ru ..read more