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Decade of the UFO: Secret files show alien sightings, including an object that buzzed a Lancaster bomber, have tailed off since their heyday in the 1970s
By Tamara Cohen and Nick Mcdermott
Last updated at 2:36 AM on 3rd March 2011
The West was still in the grip of the Cold War.
But rather than scanning the skies for Soviet nuclear missiles, it seems, the British had their eye on a different menace.
Secret documents released yesterday show that the 1970s were the heyday of UFO spotting, with hundreds of people peering skywards for evidence of aliens.
Bomber buzzed: A man contacted the MoD in summer 2002 after a photo he took of a flypast at RAF Coningsby, Lincolnshire, showed 'an unidentified shape … looking decidedly triangular in shape' next to a Lancaster bomber
The Sri Lanka doughnut: A doughnut-shaped phenomenon was photographed by a retired RAF officer in Sri Lanka in 2004 and sent to his old bosses at RAF Fylingdales in North Yorkshire. He described it as ‘a ring like a doughnut… orange in colour with a white/cream finger pushed through, the head of the column glowed an orange colour, behind the doughnut was a second cloud of colour’
Oxfordshire mystery: At 40ft tall and in a fetching shade of pink, it is a wonder farmers never spotted it. The sketch above shows a UFO flattening a cornfield, and was drawn by an Oxfordshire resident who said they saw the hovering ball creating crop circles in the area. The craft is adorned with flashing lights and an ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol of life. The anonymous observer sent the drawing to the MoD in November 1998, with a letter saying: ‘I have developed contact with these craft and their enemy forces.’ The MoD did not investigate
In April 1979 the Home Office issued guidance to all police forces, fire services and councils about what to do in the event of a ‘nuclear satellite crash’ – code for UFO wreckage from space that could be radioactive.
ABDUCTION IN BARNES
In October 1998 a man in Barnes, West London, claimed aliens had landed in his garden and abducted him after he fell asleep and woke to find he had lost an hour.
MoD officials wrote back explaining the clocks had gone forward that night.
It says: ‘There would be a possible radiation hazard… debris from the crashed satellite might be scattered over a very large area, perhaps the greater part of the country.’
People would be ordered to keep 100 yards away from potentially harmful debris and any fragments would be sent to the Ministry of Defence.
A UFO sighting hotline was also set up. The document is among 35 files made public yesterday, containing 8,500 pages of alleged UFO sightings, spacecraft landings, bright lights and alien abductions reported by the public and filed away by the MoD’s Secretariat 2A unit.
As the blockbuster movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind seized the public imagination, UFO sightings jumped from 435 in 1978 to a high of 750 the following year.
