On the evening of Thursday January 18 1979, the eighth Earl of Clancarty rose to his feet to address the House of Lords. "It is with much pleasure," he began, "that I introduce this debate about unidentified flying objects - known more briefly as UFOs and sometimes as flying saucers."
Up to now, this bizarre episode in the recent political history of Britain has been neglected. But thanks to a new series of books dedicated to uncovering hidden gems among government papers held by Her Majesty's Stationery Office, we can enjoy once more Clancarty's finest hour. His message was simple: UFOs were a fact of life and governments worldwide were guilty of covering up the truth. "Just suppose," he invited their lordships, "that the 'ufonauts' decided to make mass landings tomorrow in this country - there could well be panic here because our people have not been prepared."
As a matter of fact, there was already a degree of "panic" in Britain. As Clancarty took his fellow peers through the history of UFO sightings from 1500 BC to the present day, there were many who believed that the nation was on the brink of collapse. The winter of 1978-79 was to become famous as "The Winter of Discontent", a period of industrial disruption that proved crucial in Margaret Thatcher's rise to power. There was even talk of bringing in troops after the declaration of an official State of Emergency.
There is something brilliantly British about the House of Lords wrestling with the problem of flying saucers while all this was going on around them. But the debate, published in its entirety in the new book, did not come entirely out of the blue. A few weeks earlier three ducks, a goose, a swan and two baby wallabies were found dead in mysterious circumstances at Newquay Zoo in Cornwall; on January 3 it had been reported that their bodies revealed significant traces of radiation. This was being linked to sightings of UFOs in the area.
On January 1, eight UFOs had been seen over New Zealand, followed by another, three days later, which was said to resemble "an illuminated ping-pong ball".
Clancarty, who died in 1995, was 67 when he initiated his debate, calling for an inter-governmental study of UFOs. He was a heavyweight in the field, an editor of the Flying Saucer Review and author of seven books on the subject. Clancarty believed that the human race derived from aliens from several galaxies (this accounted for our various skin colours); they had landed here 65,000 years ago and some of them still inhabited the centre of the earth. Asked what had happened to all these aliens, he once replied: "Well, you do see a lot of strange people around, don't you?" In the Lords debate, Clancarty was careful to stick to what he took to be well-documented sightings, including one over Iran in September 1976. In this incident a large glowing object was seen over the capital, Tehran, and a Phantom jet was scrambled to investigate; when the pilot tried to fire an air-to-air missile at the object, said Clancarty, he found that "the weapons control panel was not working and all electronic systems were out of action".
The time had come, Clancarty told their lordships, for the British Minister of Defence to make a public broadcast about UFOs: "That would go a long way to discredit the view held by a lot of people in this country that there is a cover-up here, and that in some way we are playing along with the United States over this."
All this was a little too much for Lord Trefgarne, a qualified pilot, who had never seen a UFO in 2,500 flying hours. He said: "Since time immemorial, man has ascribed those phenomena that he could not explain to some supernatural or extraterrestrial agents. Today, no one takes witchcraft seriously, and there are no fairies at the bottom of my garden."
Clancarty himself never saw a UFO, although he once spotted what he called an "eerie white light" crossing the night sky over his flat in South Kensington. To the end of his life, however, he stuck to his beliefs; and you feel that his fellow peers, however scornful, were grateful to Clancarty for raising matters which, in Lord Gladwyn's words, "take one's mind off the absolutely frightful everyday events" of the Winter of Discontent.
UFOs in the House of Lords
In 1979, the Earl of Clancarty addressed the Upper House on the subject of flying saucers - while Britain was on the verge of collapse.[Original headline: Good Lords! - it's a UFO]
The Express / London | By Jay Iliff - June 3 2000
