Flying Saucer Working Party (1950–51).
official-recordgovernment_programRendlesham Forest (RAF Bentwaters/Woodbridge)
The UK government's first official UFO study, established October 1950 by MoD Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Henry Tizard; reached a debunking conclusion in its June 1951 report.
A small, highly secret DSI/JTIC working party whose six-page SECRET report (DSI/JTIC Report No.7, 'Unidentified Flying Objects') concluded every studied case reduced to astronomical/meteorological phenomena, misidentification, illusion, or hoax, and recommended no further investigation. The CIA's chief scientist H. Marshall Chadwell attended its final 1951 meeting, linking it to US Cold War debunking policy. Its skeptical posture set the tone for British official UFO discourse for decades; the surviving copy was released to the National Archives in 2002.