Reports of bright lights and mysterious hovering objects suggest Kent’s skies may be host to more than just the birds.
Information released by the Ministry of Defence shows there have been 56 recorded sightings of UFOs over the county in the last decade, with 10 last year alone.
Examples include a report of a huge disc-shaped object “approximately 20 times the size of an aeroplane” that was spotted flying above Rainham, and a bright orange upside-down light bulb shape hovering near Ashford.
Other recorded sightings last year were not so detailed, with some members of the public notifying the MoD of UFOs without providing dates, times, locations or descriptions.
Gerald Webb, 46, from Meopham, near Gravesend, spotted something strange in the sky above his home late last month.
He did not report his sighting to the MoD and said he would not be surprised if the number of people who had seen UFOs in Kent was actually a great deal higher than official figures suggest.
Mr Webb said: “I live at the top of a valley where there are no street lights and no houses, so on a cloudless night you can see the sky very clearly.
“On this night I was looking out the patio window and I could see three orangey-red orbs flying in formation.
“There was no noise at all and I thought ‘Oh blimey, what am I seeing?’. It was like something out of a Steven Spielberg film.
“I went to the local pub to see if anybody else had seen it but they thought I had been smoking something. I think that’s why more people don’t report these types of things, because others look at you as if you’re a crank.
“I later went on the internet and found that a couple of other people had seen the same as what I had, and one of them was from Beckenham. There must have been lots of other people who saw it too.”
The number of UFO sightings throughout the UK has risen dramatically over the last few years, from 97 in 2006 to 285 last year.
The figure of 10 in Kent was also the highest in 10 years.
Nick Pope, the MoD’s former UFO project head, told the BBC the very fact the ministry was now publishing its files on sightings was generating interest in the phenomena.
He added: “UFOs are a subject that almost everyone has an opinion on.
“It is one of those great subjects which if you mention it down the pub, someone will claim to have seen one, another will claim it’s all a big Government cover-up and someone else will say it’s all a load of rubbish.”
Nineteen files covering sightings between 1986 and 1992 were made available to view for the first time last October.
They included a mysterious near-miss between a UFO and a passenger jet in the skies above Lydd.
According to a report of the 1991 incident, the captain of the Alitalia airliner shouted to his co-pilot in surprise as a brown missile-shaped object shot past them overhead.
POSTED: 12/04/2009 12:00:00
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