They accused the UK Government of failing to take the issue seriously enough and warned that it could have serious implications for the country’s defence capabilities.

Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs for the British military in the 1990s before the unit was disbanded, said it was ‘outrageous’ that ministers are not taking ‘meaningful action’ to probe unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) — more commonly known as unidentified flying objects.

‘The Ministry of Defence (MoD) needs to restart UAP investigations, a task force of some sort needs to be set up, and the Defence Committee needs to start holding the MoD to account on UAP, as the Armed Services Committees are doing in the US Congress, in both the Senate and the House,’ he told MailOnline.

Mr Pope accused defence officials of ‘falling back on a lazy, closed-minded “it can’t be, so it isn’t” mindset’, meaning potential foreign threats to UK shores could be missed.

The MoD closed its UFO desk in 2009 and nothing has ever replaced it.

Prior to this, it carried out what at the time was a highly-secretive and extensive UFO investigation of more than 10,000 possible sightings over several decades — many of which were by military personnel.

Known as the Project Condign report, it concluded that 80 per cent of the sightings were easily explained, 19 per cent were secret military craft and just 1 per cent were mysterious in origin.

However, the MoD accepted that there are always going to be UAP and that those which are unexplained are likely an ‘an unknown kind of plasma’ and not of concern.

‘The MoD has consistently stated that no UFO/UAP sighting has ever shown a threat to the UK, therefore they are of no defence significance and as a result the MoD is not interested,’ said Philip Mantle, the former director of investigations at the British UFO Research ᴀssociation.

He told MailOnline that for this reason it would be ‘pointless’ to set up a UFO taskforce.

‘The MoD are not interested and science in general usually gives the subject a wide berth,’ Mr Mantle added.

‘One thing that is clear, however, is that the UFO phenomenon, whatever it may be, does not recognise any international borders, therefore any such study surely must be international in scope rather than national.’

In the US, NASA last week released its highly-anticipated report into more than 800 potential alien sightings over a period of three decades.

The space agency’s independent panel of experts stressed that there was ‘no reason to conclude’ that any were extraterrestrial in origin, but warned that mysterious flying objects were a ‘self-evident’ threat to American airspace.

Mr Pope said that if the US was worried about this then Britain, as an NATO ally, should be too.

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The newly-formed UFO research division will continue studying UAPs, even though the space agency yesterday ruled out that aliens were to blame for some 800 such sightings over almost three decades. Above, a weather balloon careens through the air following its release from the Cape Canaveral weather station in Florida. NASA’s panel included this image in their report as an example of the striking, highly unusual objects that actually have a terrestrial explanation

He added: ‘The UK can make a significant contribution to the wider search for the truth about UAP, by leveraging its world class intelligence community imagery analysis resources and capabilities.

‘The bottom line is that we need action.

‘Just as lawmakers in the US – Republicans and Democrats alike – are taking up this issue, UK Parliamentarians should start asking the MoD some hard questions, not accept boilerplate responses, and ensure that meaningful action is taken by setting up a task force modeled on the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.’

A peтιтion has also been set up calling for the UK to set up an investigatory office on UFOs/UAPs but has so far attracted just 1,500 signatures since May.

It requires 10,000 for the Government to respond to it and 100,000 to be considered for debate in Parliament.

The peтιтion states that the office ‘would be primarily to research and investigate reports of UFOs (unidentified flying objects) and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) over the United Kingdom and also ᴀssist and support witnesses.’

Even though they poured cold water on the extraterrestrial hypothesis, NASA’s experts did not deny the possibility of a ‘potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth’s atmosphere’.

Their 33-page report called for NASA to utilise its technological might to continue studying UFOs because many cases remain unsolved — and researchers still have no idea what some of these sightings are.

NASA chief Bill Nelson announced that a new director for UFO research would help implement the panel’s recommendations.

A separate UFO investigation by the Pentagon is also under way, but with the intelligence and military communities.