Flying Saucer Working Party (or FSWP) was the name of the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) first "official study into UFOs", which has its roots in a study commissioned in 1950 by the MOD’s then Chief Scientific Adviser, the great radar scientist Sir Henry Tizard. As a result of his insistence that UFO sightings should not be dismissed without some form of proper scientific study, the Department set up what writer Nick Pope has described as "arguably the most marvellously-named committee in the history of the civil service"