Australian Government Loses All Its UFO Files

Two months ago, an Australian newspaper submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to its government seeking files pertaining to UFO sightings across the country.

Government officials have just come back empty handed. The UFO files, they said, seem to have gone missing.

"The files could not be located and Headquarters Air Command formally advised that this file is deemed lost," the Australia Department of Defense's FOI assistant director, Natalie Carpenter, told the Sydney Morning Herald, the newspaper that made the request.

Two months spent (presumably) thumbing through drawers turned up only one UFO-related file, Carpenter said, called "Report on UFOs/Strange Occurrences and Phenomena in Woomera." It documents a series of sightings in and around a military weapons testing range in the Australian outback.

All other files had been lost or destroyed.

According to the Herald, Australia's military stopped taking UFO sighting reports in late 2000. For the past decade, members of the public have reported incidents to the police instead, and those recent reports are presumably still extant.

This isn't the first time in recent history that a government body has misplaced UFO files. Earlier this year, Britain's Ministry of Defense released thousands of reports related to UFO sightings in Britain over the past few decades. All files from 1980 to 1982, however, were missing. The omission raised some suspicion among conspiracy theorists.

This article was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @LLMysteries.