Recent U.K. UFO Reports
From
Burnley Today
5th September, 2003
UFO
IS SPOTTED
WAS
it a bird, was it a plane or was it really a UFO?
Burnley cabbie Mr Steve Haworth and a passenger watched a mysterious
flying object suddenly appear, perform a series of mind-boggling
manoeuvres and then simply disappear without trace above the town, early
on Saturday morning.
I thought it was an aircraft at first, said Mr Haworth, of Burton Street.
Then, when I weighed up all the pros and cons, I decided it couldnt
possibly be.
The part-time taxi driver was taking a customer from his Hufling Lane home
to work in Waterfoot. They were travelling along Bacup Road when they
turned a corner and first saw the object in the sky.
It was only 7-45 in the morning, but there wasnt a cloud in the sky. It
was beautiful and clear, he said. I immediately thought the object was a
plane, but it wasnt small, it wasnt high up and it was moving slowly.
The silver cigar-shaped object with a small pulsating light in the middle,
stopped and hovered. Then it changed shape as it started going forwards
and backwards in a perfectly straight line.
It did this twice before vanishing into thin air.
There was no noise and no vapour trail, added Mr Haworth. If it had been
an aircraft we would have heard it from where we were. It did not
take-off, it just simply disappeared.
This is not the first time an unidentified flying object has been spotted
in the sky above Burnley. Sightings date back to 1869 and have been
reported at regular intervals throughout the decades since.
Descriptions have varied from a round, glowing disc and a line of bright
lights, to a pulsating cigar-shaped object just like Mr Haworth described.
He added: The whole experience only lasted three minutes. I remember
looking at the clock in the car, it was 7-45 a.m. and by the time the
object had disappeared it was 7-48 a.m..
Im so glad I had someone with me who saw what I did, otherwise I would
have been doubting my sanity. Im just curious to know what it was. I have
considered and dismissed all the sensible options, a UFO is the only
logical explanation I can think of.
l Did any other Express readers see the mysterious object last Saturday?
If you did, then call the newsdesk on 01282 426161.
From
Evening Express
3rd September 2003
MYSTERY AFTER UFO SIGHTINGS PUZZLE EXPERTS
Strange
lights in the North-east night sky have baffled the experts.
Sixteen lights travelling rapidly across clear
skies were spotted over two nights by a Fyvie resident.
Air traffic control bosses and aviation experts
have ruled out aircraft or satellites, because the lights were travelling
too fast to be planes or orbiting objects.
Astronomy experts say the lights could not have
been "shooting stars" because they were travelling too slowly and from
different directions.
One North-east UFO expert was at a loss to offer a
straightforward explanation and said the mysterious sightings should be
logged as genuine close encounters with unidentified flying objects.
The high-level Fyvie flyovers first appeared on
Thursday about
10.30pm and
were still crossing silently overhead more than two hours later.
They took only seconds to cross the sky, then gave
a repeat performance on Friday night and into Saturday morning.
Resident and Evening Express reporter Graham
Lawther said he spotted the first lights at
10.35pm on
Thursday.
He said: "I had stepped outside for a good view of
Mars, which is closer to the earth now than it has been for thousands of
years, on what was a crystal-clear, moonless night.
"But I also saw a small white light, high in the
atmosphere, appear in the southern sky and fly extremely fast to the
north.
"It was far too rapid for an aircraft. It was
across the whole sky in under 10 seconds and a plane would have taken
several minutes."
Mr Lawther saw seven identical, fast-moving
pinpricks of light between
10.35pm and
11.20pm, and six more from 12.15am-12.45am.
Three more were witnessed on the Friday night,
between
10.20pm
and 10.35pm, the first heading south and two more quickly heading north.
The lights, which appeared to be at the altitude of
a high-flying aircraft gave off a white glow.
A RAF Kinloss spokeswoman said: "We had no activity
in that area on either day."
A National Air Traffic Services spokesman said: "I
have checked with our colleagues in
Aberdeen and
Prestwick, which covers the upper air space.
"There are no reports of any sightings from either
night."
A spokesman for the Royal Observatory in
Edinburgh
said the lights could have been satellites in high orbit.
He said large satellites were occasionally seen
with the naked eye, though never 13 in less than two hours.
He said they were almost always observed shortly
before dawn or after dusk, when sunlight reflected off their highly
polished surfaces.
Our skies are hotspot for saucers
The North-east is a global hotspot for UFO
sightings.
Aberdonian Ian Taylor, who has been studying the
subject for more than 50 years, said folk travel to this region from all
over the country in the hope of a close encounter.
Lights and objects were regularly seen near
Muchalls, Portlethen, Deeside and the area north of
Aberdeen, he
explained.
The ex-RAF man said it would be difficult to
explain away the sheer number of the latest phenomena in the skies above
Fyvie as aircraft, satellites or shooting stars.
"These were obviously aerial objects, either
generating their own light or reflecting light," said Mr Taylor.
"What was seen was straightforward UFO activity."
Mr Taylor said no one should jump to the conclusion
that the sightings were necessarily "craft from another planet" but said
they were certainly unexplained observations of unidentified objects.
"The frequency of sightings up here is immense,"
said Mr Taylor, who lives in
Aberdeen's
West End.
"If you are willing to go out and look in the
evening, particularly in the winter time, you would be able to see things
you would not believe."
Recent North-east sightings have included:
A hovering ball of
light seen from Kincorth for two hours last January.
A silent red light
following a couple in their car on the A90 just south of
Aberdeen in
December 2002, which shot off vertically.
Two "bright globes"
spinning above
Cruden Bay in
October 2001, which faded after 10 minutes.
A black wing-like object, which glowed
and buzzed a couple's home in Aboyne - and which was also seen by a man
driving between Daviot and Oldmeldrum.
From
Preston
Today
3rd September 2003
UFO
street
When
Mary Carter saw lights flashing outside her home she did not think twice
about going to investigate.
To her
surprise, when she left her living room on Percy Road, Lancaster, and went
outside to have a look, she discovered the twinkling lights were coming
from a low flying aircraft.
A couple of minutes later the lights were gone and she went back into her
house.
But to her absolute astonishment Mary realised that she had been outside
for 50 minutes, not just the two that she thought.
Mary, a nurse, could not explain what had happened to make so much time
vanish.
For years the mystery nagged at her leaving her with a great sense of
uneasiness.
Visions drifted in and out of her mind. She felt she had been cut, had
something placed on her forehead and had floated in the air.
She thought she would never unravel the mystery surrounding the events on
that chilling Saturday night.
That was until she got in contact with supernatural author Peter Hough,
who was chairman of the Northern Anomalies Research Organisation.
When Peter heard Mary's story he agreed to help her and suggested hypnosis
as a way to unlock any suppressed and trapped memories.
Peter, from Leigh, nearWigan, has been a writer, researcher and
investigator of the unexplained for more than 20 years and accompanied
Mary through her journey of discovery.
"When I first went to see her she had a problem and the problem was that
she had this very strange experience a few years previously and it had
been niggling away at her over the years. She knew there was more to
remember, she wanted some sort of closure on it and she thought I could
give her some answers.
"She was hoping I would be able to tell her it was all a fantasy or an
illusion, which is interesting.
"Most people not involved in the subject assume people like me want to
believe in what has happened, but it is quite the reverse."
Mary underwent three sessions of hypnosis with Peter by her side.
"In some respects this brought elements to life which had previously been
vanished."
The details these sessions brought to light shocked Peter and left Mary
even more uncomfortable and traumatised.
During the sessions she talked about small people dressed in silver with
slitted eyes appearing before her.
She remembered standing on her doorstep then being paralysed, enveloped in
a beam of light and finding herself in a strange room lying on a table.
She then described a series of medical experiments being carried out on
her. Wires were attached to her forehead, blood was taken from behind her
ear and her palm print was recorded.
While Mary found all of this disturbing, it was nothing compared to what
she revealed in the final session.
Peter explained that she said that this had all being happening since she
was a baby and that the abductions had taken place every four years or so.
The hypnosis was stopped as it was becoming too distressing for Mary, who
was determined not to believe what she was saying was true.
Peter says that some people are keen to simply say they have been abducted
by extraterrestrials while others will say it is all a dream.
"The thing about hypnosis is that it does not act as a truth drug.
"I always tell people it does not necessarily give the objective truth it
shows what you believed happened to you, not necessarily what actually
happened.
"It is a usual tool to use when you are investigating a case like this.
"Quite often it does fill in the gaps, in some cases people feel better
because they now know what happened during their missing time.
"What is usually worse is not knowing at all.
"In Mary's case I did try and see if anybody else remembered anything
about what happened, but we did not get anything.
"That is what usually happens when there has been a large passage of time.
"The way I go about investigating is to take every case on its merits.
"Quite often people report seeing a UFO and at least 90% of the time they
have seen aircraft landing lights, weather balloons – people do
misidentify things a lot."
In Mary's case the events that she described had a ring of truth to them.
"In some respects the story that unfolded particularly under hypnosis was
fairly typical of abduction cases that have emerged around the world.
"It was not a great surprise. It has a lot of common elements to it
including missing time, undergoing some kind of medical exam and the
feeling of paralysis."
e-mail:
laura.kennerley@lep.co.uk
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