UK shuts desk probing UFO sightings

Britain has announced that it closed its UFO desk in 2009 in budget cuts and because it served no defence purpose.

A hotline dealt with sightings across the country and the last batch of ‘X Files’ issued shows a rise in UFO reports – including one from a man who claimed to be living with an alien, and another who claimed an alien stole his dog.

But a Ministry of Defence report said that in decades of investigations there had been no proven credible threat from extra terrestrials, nor did it have an opinion on their existence, and closed the desk.

Al Jazeera’s Simon McGregor Wood reports from London.