Subsequent to my first posting on this blog, I can now give a slight update to it: the information which I quote below, is taken from UFO researcher David Clarke's latest book; which includes a very brief, sentence-long quote (highlighted at the very end of the quoted sections below) which is taken from Duncan Sandys' note of August 1952, to the then Chief Scientist (which I made reference to in my original post) :
“[In the 1950s] a number of senior figures in the British military establishment [began] to treat the subject [of flying saucers] seriously... At the forefront of these was Churchill's son-in-law and future Minister of Defence, Duncan Sandys. He took a fairly pragmatic view, believing the evidence for flying saucers to be no different to the first reports of the German V-2 rockets during 1943, which the government's scientific advisors 'declared to be technically impossible'.
“Alongside Sandys there were others such as Lord Mountbatten, who began collecting accounts of sightings in 1950 and encouraged his friend Charles Eade, editor of the Sunday Dispatch, to publish them without naming him as the source. . . .
“On 28 July, [1952] . . . the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had sent a memo to his Secretary of State for Air and copied it to Lord Cherwell, one of his most trusted scientific advisors. This demanded:
'What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience.' (PREM II/855)
“The Prime Minister received a reassuring response from the Air Ministry on 9 August 1952. Preserved alongside Churchill's memo at the National Archives, it said UFOs were the subject of 'a full intelligence study in 1951' that had concluded all incidents reported could be explained by natural phenomena, misperceptions of aircraft, balloons and birds, optical illusions, psychological delusions and deliberate hoaxes. Churchill was told that an earlier investigation, carried out by Project Grudge in 1948-9 had reached a similar conclusion and that 'nothing has happened since 1951 to make the Air Staff change their opinion, and, to judge from recent Press statements, the same is true in America.'
“The government's Chief Scientist, Lord Cherwell (Frederick Lindemann) said he 'agreed entirely' with the Air Ministry and, in a minute circulated to Cabinet members, dismissed the American saucer scare as 'a product of mass psychology'. But not everyone was so convinced. A 2009 release by the Churchill Archives [University of Cambridge, Lord Duncan-Sandys papers, DSND 15/4] included a letter from Duncan Sandys, then Minister of Supply, to Cherwell that stated: 'There may, as you say, be no real evidence of the existence of flying saucer aircraft, but there is in my view ample evidence of some unfamiliar and unexplained phenomenon.' ”
(From: The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-Life Sightings by David Clarke; published by, The National Archives, 2009; pp. 41, 47).
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