HASTINGS

Opening

Hastings, on the East Sussex coast, appears in the Ministry of Defence's UFO files as the setting for scattered reports of lights and shapes over the English Channel. None of them grew into a named wave, and none produced an object. This report covers what those reports are, and what they are not.

Physical and documentary trail

On the record: the MoD collected public UFO reports for decades, and between 2008 and 2013 it transferred more than 200 files, covering some 11,000 reports, to the National Archives at Kew. They sit mainly in the series DEFE 24 and DEFE 31. Reports from Sussex made between 1997 and 2009 include sightings over Hastings, one of which the witness described as looking like a helicopter.

The files are brief public reports, not investigations. The MoD logged them and rarely followed them up. No Hastings report in them comes with a photograph, a recovered object or a second independent witness.

Competing explanations

Ordinary traffic. Hastings looks out over one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, with aircraft crossing to and from the continent. Ship lights, aircraft and helicopters account for much of what coastal witnesses report.

Something unidentified. Individual reports cannot rule it out, but none of them contains enough detail to test it.

Later life of the case

The MoD closed its UFO reporting desk in 2009, so reports like the Hastings ones stopped being collected at all, and the transfers to the National Archives ended in 2013. The files are now open for anyone to read at Kew. For the MoD case that drew the most attention, a photograph it kept for decades, see Calvine.

Finding

Hastings has UFO reports on the government record, and they look like most of the MoD's archive: short, sincere and unresolved, over a coast full of ships and aircraft. They do not add up to a case.

What still will not resolve: whether any single Hastings report had more behind it than the one-page form. A report with a photograph or a second witness would be worth reopening.