In this issue:-

UFO caught on film say experts. (Malvern & Birmingham)

Family claim UFO sighting. (Hinckley, Leicester)

I saw lights and lost 15 minutes of my life.

(AAIB) Air accident investigation board.

Spike metal spheres.

Close encounters with an alien.

US Air Force masters disguise.

Will we ever be told?

How to smell an angel, or cut up an alien.

New fears of comets on collision course.

Bizarre ‘copters in Casper.

UFO experts in Birmingham are celebrating their first ever ‘flying saucer’ captured on film.

Marilyn and Rob Aldworth say the video, shot in the Malvern Hills last December.

"We’ve got to have it analysed, but it’s pretty exciting, and it definitely isn’t a star," said Marilyn.

"We have had a few other cases out there, but this is the first one on film."

Birmingham UFO Society has also been contacted by another life form - American researcher Linda Moulton-Howe who specialises in animal mutilation.

She is keen to find out more about a farmer in Polesworth who claims to have seen a UFO disturbing his horses last December.

"This farmer kept on experiencing power cuts, ten times in one month, and he saw two objects fly over the fields and disturb the horses," said Marilyn.

"It’s quite a coupe for us," she added.

Bemused Brummies are also keeping the Aldworths busy; two sightings of a red light over Washwood Heath and Balsall Common last weekend, as well as a woman in Moseley who claims to have seen a UFO resembling the Star of Bethlehem.

A Hinckley family has reported a UFO flying near their Stapleton Lane home last Friday (26th April) evening.

The family claims to have seen a white light moving silently slowly back and forth over nearby woodland at about 9.15pm.

The sighting lasted more than 30 minutes then the light moved North and vanished before investigators from the Leicestershire UFO Research Society could arrive.

The society would like others who may have seen anything unusual at about the same time to contact them on Hinckley 614013.

When Elsie Oakenshaw saw brilliant lights and a curious dumb-bell shaped object in the twighlight sky, she viewed it analytically. After all, Elsie was married to a Police Inspector. She knew he would demand a detailed description and dismiss it with a rational explanation.

Elsie saw the lights over the busy A5 towards Towcester on her familiar drive home from work.

On November 22, 1978 at 5.15pm, Elsie, then 49, drove with dipped lights from Daventry Teachers Centre, where she was head, to her home in the Northamptonshire village of Church Stowe. Then she saw two very bright lights: one red, one green, immediately above the A5 coming from an object in the sky unlike anything she had ever seen before. "It was grey and appeared to be made of very smooth plastic-type material", she said. "As I approached it I felt compelled to stop and find out more. I was completely intrigued."

Elsie recalls turning right into her village, putting her foot on the accelerator, and hearing no noise from the car engine. It seemed to be stopping.

She released the pedal again. Again the car faltered. Then, unaccountably, the engine burst into life and Elsie drove on for a further 100 yards, before stopping dead. And suddenly the half-light of dusk turned to absolute, impenetrable blackness. "Suddenly a brilliant white circle of light shone on the road. It lit up the road and I could see I had stopped beside a farm gate. Later I realised I had negotiated a right angle bend and travelled 100 yards without being in control of the car.

The light went off and the velvety blackness returned. Then another circle of light shone towards the left and went out. Lights continued to flash on and off in a semi circle. I counted 15, each light a pure white, perfect circle with no beams. Finally a last light shone in the garden of a cottage and went off. Again I sat in pitch blackness. Then, just as if someone had pressed a switch, the total blackness was replaced by the normal light of dusk. I did not turn the ignition key. I did not put the car into gear; I just found myself driving along normally. It was as if it had all happened by remote control."

When Elsie arrived home she realised her journey had taken double the usual time. What had happened during the 15 minutes she had lost - and why?

She can never know what happened during the lost minutes of her abduction, but says: "I feel it was a spiritual experience and I am very grateful. I feel privileged; singled out. Now it seems logical to me that we are not the only people within the universe." Elsie believes she developed a ‘spiritual awareness’ following her encounter and has discovered healing powers which she is convinced are related to it.

From: Air Accidents Branch, Department of Transport.

If you wish to report an accident or incident please call our 24 hour reporting line. 01252 512299

Important Notice - INTERNET

AAIB Bulletins are now published on the Internet using the CCTA Government Information Service.

Forestry worker Robert Taylor encountered a large dome-shaped object in a clearing near Livingston, Lothian in 1979. He was the attacked by two spiky metal spheres, which rolled along the ground, attached themselves to him and dragged him towards the craft. He lost consciousness and, when he recovered, the objects had gone.

Retired Army Captain and former Republican Ernest ‘Scottie’ Scott was a lieutenant when he saw a UFO 32 years ago. He reported it to his superiors, who said that if he valued his career he should forget it.

He duly kept silent about the experience for more than ten years. Nevertheless, he can still recount it with military attention to detail. Spreading maps across his dining-room table, he shows you the exact spot where he saw strange lights on the road between Berhamsted in Hertfordshire and Wendover, Buckinghamshire.

"I had just come back from Cyprus and had fallen for an RAF nurse called Frankie," he recalls. "We’d been out for a drink at a pub called the Three Horse Shoes at Letchmore Heath near Elstree aerodrome. I was driving Frankie back to her quarters in my brand-new MG Midget - she had a curfew of midnight. It was about 11.05pm when we stopped to talk by the side entrance of a golf club near some woodland. It was a moonlit night with clear skies.

"At about 11.40pm I pulled up the hood of the car because it was getting chilly and lit my pipe before getting ready to drive Frankie back to her camp, which was about a mile along the A4011."

"I was about to start the car when a huge light descended slowly, at roughly the same speed as a parachute. It was so blindingly bright I could hardly look at it. It travelled in a controlled arc and was revolving."

"I was astonished and intrigued, but not in the least frightened. Frankie grabbed my arm and we watched in complete silence until whatever it was disappeared behind the trees in a wood. I wanted to go and look."

"This is the point at which it becomes difficult to come to terms with what happened next. I recall getting out of the car and Frankie screaming. She was terrified, hysterical. I remember running across the road, coming to a wire fence and thinking: ‘This wood is thick.’"

The thing I recall is sitting in the car and saying to Frankie, who was still hysterical: "I want to investigate this." Frankie was demanding to go.

"I tried to start the car. It was only a couple of weeks old but nothing worked. No electric’s. No lights. I turned the key and nothing happened. (A couple of days later I took it to Middlesex Motors at Stanmore and had it checked over. They could find nothing wrong.)"

"I got out of the car and pushed it down the one-in-ten hill, heading north. It cruised down a couple of hundred yards to the T-junction with the A4011, when everything started working again - as inexplicably as it had stopped. We got back to RAF Halton within a couple of minutes and the guard at the gate house gave Frankie a roasting. He said it was 2am. and she would be on a charge."

"At that moment the significance of the time did not strike me. Then, after I’d dropped Frankie at her quarters, I asked the guard if he had seen a very bright light. He said: "Yes, I did. That was hours ago." I asked him the time again. He said 2.15am. I replied: "It can’t be." Two hours were simply unaccounted for.

Ernest drove back to his aunts home, where he was staying on leave. Unaccountably, although he was very fit, he felt debilitating tiredness which remained for several weeks. The next day he reported his sighting at police station closest to the incident. "The police man made some notes but I suspect he thought I was an idiot. Two weeks later I picked up Frankie and we went back to the police station to see if there had been other reports of the lights. The duty officer said there had been none. When he checked the incident book for entries, the page on which my statement had been taken was missing.

I spoke to some senior people in my regiment about it and they said:

"If you want to pursue your career, forget it." So I did.

Although Mr Scott did not speak further about the strange lights, he is still plagues by a recurring dream. In it, a dwarfish creature crouches under a steel couch on which Mr Scott is lying and looks up at him with a disconcerting grin.

Five or six years later Mr Scott was driving home on the A4155 from Henley On Thames, Oxfordshire, to Marlow, Buckinghamshire, just before 1am when he saw more lights - dazzling and multicoloured, emanating from an object the size of a telephone kiosk with a conical top.

"The thing hovered and touched the ground 20 yards away from me. There was a whistling or humming. I remember thinking: "I am going to get out and look at that." I put my foot on the brakes.

The next thing I remember, I was driving through Marlow. The trip from Henley to High Wycombe used to take me 40 minutes. That night I lost about an hour and a half. Mr Scott, 54, who has a degree in physics, could offer no explanation for the strange lights or the lost hours.

"At the time I could not equate the two incidents. Often I though I must be going nuts. How can two hours just disappear?"

It was not until four years later when he overheard a group of people talking about UFOs in the Sussex pub he used to own that he revealed his experience. "I was surprised that they took me seriously - and rather comforted," he says.

He has studied martial arts since the age of seven and is a second dan and instructor. Although he already possessed healing and comforting skills, he believes they have been enhanced and extended into a spiritual dimension.

He cannot prove that there is a link that there is a link with his close encounter; he only knows that he now has the ability to cure by touch.

"After the second incident a friend had a painful shoulder," he says.

"I went to massage it but before I had even touched it, he said: ‘That’s better.’"

Mr Scott makes no extravagant claims about the sightings. To sceptics, he says simply that he is telling the truth. "I don’t talk about it often, neither do I care if people laugh. I know what I saw," he says.

When it comes to warfare, disguise and stealth can mean the difference between life and death. That is why the United States Air Force is looking into new ways of fooling anti-aircraft missiles. It has developed a shimmering aircraft coating to confuse scanning sensors.

The coating is electrically charged and its pattern of shimmering is controlled by a rapidly varying electric field. To a missile scanner using visible light, the image of the aircraft would become visibly distorted, hamporing the missiles ability to lock onto its target. The shimmering does not, however, confuse the human eye or cameras to the same degree.

Another project in the pipeline, according to a report in Aviation Week and Space Technology, concentrates on tricking infra-red sensors. An aircraft coating similar to the one described would allow infra-red hotspots to be shifted around the plane. Shifting them to the tips of the wings, say, could throw a missile off-course.

More futuristic attempts to deceive the enemy include developing more sophisticated decoys which can be towed by planes, or devising lasers powerful enough to destroy the scanner.

Letters Special

The Defence Ministry’s denial that it has a section permanently dedicated to studying UFO reports, and the Daily Mail’s British X-Files series, have tapped a rich source of experiences among those who are aware of out-of-the-normal happenings all around us. Critical readers may note that although these stories are more numerous than one might think, they are also fairly homogenous and break down into only a few recognisable types. Is this evidence of their human reality, in the realm of the unconscious, or of their super-reality, as aspects of another existence ‘out there’?

Read on for some of the many stories you have sent to the Daily Mail.

Thirty years ago, as a ten year old boy living in Conisbrough South Yorkshire, I saw a strange light in the twilight sky and felt a strange tingling sensation go through my body. My parents and brother saw it, too.

Several people in our street, including a family called Dainty, had been watching the aerial spectacle for some time before from hills above the town.

My parents told my elder brother Stephen to go into the house and bring out the camera, a Kodak Instamatic, with the lens set for cloudy conditions. Stephen took one photo but, strangely, not one object but three appeared on the picture.

South Yorkshire has had its fair share of UFO sightings but that one is its most famous, proven genuine by the top experts and Kodak scientists, though there are many cover-ups and sceptics who have caused our family much heartache and pain over the years.

This was a genuine UFO and it will always remain to me one of the best British UFO sightings of the past 30 years.

Kevin Pratt,

Tamworth, Staffs.

Simply Powerless?

The Ministry of Defence would have been better advised to stick to the habit of 50 years and keep its mouth shut rather than make an ‘unprecedented statement’ in RAF News that there’s no evidence to substantiate the existence of UFOs (Mail).

There’s more evidence for their existence than would normally be needed to convict a murderer in a court of law. My own experience began in 1960 with a half-hour-long sighting of a glowing cigar shape which hovered in the broad daylight of a March morning over the local air weapons establishment, north of Portsmouth.

Two noisy RAF Meteor jets were scrambled from a nearby airbase, whereon the object changed from horizontal to vertical and then vanished, leaving the jets to stooge around vainly. In a quick phone call to the airbase I was told I had seen neither the object nor the jets.

This has remained the pattern throughout the succeeding years and has failed to convince me that my experiences, about which there’s nothing vague, never happened. And there are thousands of similar reports from people far more experiences than me. The lid is coming off this phenomenon.

The things we’ve seen exposed lately which have caused an uproar and threatened government stability are nothing to what’s on the horizon.

The Ministry of Defence had representatives at the Beijing World Conference on UFOs and space exploration not so long ago.

Can it be true that the U.S., UK and other world powers are struggling to decide how to release the truth to the people, because it would expose them as simply powerless?

Ernie Spears

Netley Abbey, Hants.

Red Alert

I served with the 2nd Battalion, The Seaforth Highlanders, as a front-line soldier of the 51st Highland Division from January 1940 to July 196. At that time I was to battle-hardened and trained in observation to suffer from delusions.

We had been out of the line for a while, stationed in a small Belgian village near Liege, when I saw a very strange object in the sky, about the size of the setting sun.

I calculated it was about a quarter to half a mile away, fairly low and travelling quiet slowly. I watched this red object for a few minutes before it disappeared from view behind some buildings. I didn’t know what it was and, to avoid ridicule from my fellow soldiers, I kept quiet about it.

Many years later I was amazed to see references to similar objects in Harold F. Wilkin’s book Flying Saucers On The Attack, which detailed objects seen at the that time by British and American pilots. They were christened ‘FooFighters’ and each of the opposing forces thought they must be some secret enemy weapon.

P.McPhail,

Prestwick, Scotland.

Off My Guard

My story goes back to autumn 1943 when my battalion, the 2nd Battalion the Somerset Light Infantry, the 13th of Foot, was stationed on Gibraltar.

That night, I was on guard duty on the drawbridge position, near Europa Point, when over my shoulder I observed a bright light which rose, steadied and moved again.

Helicopters were not unknown then, but no plane could move as this did, suddenly changing direction, one second going left to right, hovering and changing again, then making off or circling above the rock as I stood there, completely transfixed.

I was so engrossed that I didn’t think to call the guard. Suddenly the thing, with it’s bright light, took off southwest at a fantastic speed and I called out my mates. No plane of the time was capable of attaining that sort of speed, I would guess 2,000 or 3,000 miles per hour.

By the time the guard came tumbling out of the wooden hut the flying object was just a tiny bright blip in the sky over Africa. The rest of the guard didn’t believe me, but I know what I saw.

W.C. Fownes

Southampton, Hants

THERE was no evidence of vampires in the lecture theatre. No sign of aliens at the bar. But in the foyer of the University of London Institute of Education yesterday one man was convinced he had "smelled" an angel.

Most of the 1,500 people who attended the third annual "Unconvention" of Fortean Times, the magazine which delves into the paranormal, the unexplained and things that go bump in the night, wanted to believe in something.

And there were plenty of people to help them do it. David Heppell, a curator at the Royal Museum of Scotland, spoke on recent reports of modern mermaids. Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator for the Ministry of Defence, himself a new believer, was content to preach to the converted.

Downstairs, Dr Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire, a researcher into paranormal activity, was conducting Victorian-style seances. "We’re not trying to help people get in touch with the dead," he explained. "But we are interested in the phenomena of seances; what does occur and what those who take part believe has occurred are often very different."

There were lectures on the Evolution of the Vampire, the theme at the two-day event; discussions of footage showing the autopsies of aliens; and a debate on What Are Ghosts? Inevitably there was a hall full of products to go with them.

David Lomax, the man who smelled an angel, is a minister of Greenhill New Church in Barnet, Herts. He said he had encountered the presence last year. He has now researched a book on the subject and says his life has been "different" ever since.

But Samantha Hamilton, 23, of Hertfordshire, who has an animal science degree, was interested in vampires. "I find them fascinating and erotic," she said. "Does that sound strange? My mother thinks so."

Marina White, 50, of London, who is compelled by the night skies and her search for UFOs, went so far as to divorce her husband because he did not share her interests.

"I’d be out looking for UFOs and studying the stars and he only wanted to sit and drink," she said. "I think that’s perfectly reasonable grounds for divorce."

THE number of asteroids and comets that could be on collision course with Earth is much greater than previously believed.

Using a new kind of computer chip in a 39-inch telescope at the summit of Mount Haleakala in Hawii, astronomers said yesterday that they had found a hitherto unknown comet and four asteroids.

The discovery was disturbing because although the skies had been searched for 25 years for small but potentially dangerous objects of this kind, this was the first time that these particular ones had been potted, said Dr Eleanor Helin, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California.

"Since these objects that cross the Earth’s orbit have not been seen before, that is strong evidence than many others are near the vicinity of our planet," Dr Helin said. "These discoveries suggest that we could face a surprise encounter with a large, unseen object."

The March run of the camera called NEAT camera - Near Earth Asteroid Tracking - detected 2,400 objects of which only 45 percent had hitherto been known. When the camera is upgraded next month, astronomers expect to detect four times the number of comets and asteroids that at present can be observed.

With its short exposure time and ultra-fast electronics, NEAT is able to achieve wide-sky coverage and detect objects much fainter than was possible with earlier asteroid-hunting telescopes. It detects sunlight shining on small objects 100 times more efficiently than the most sensitive photographic film.

Just off Hat Six Road, dozens of men huddle in the unforgiving winds blowing off of Casper Mountain, peering through night vision glasses, scanning the sky. Some unknown force has been flying helicopters, sometimes in formation, through the darkness, they say, three nights a week, three hours a night, for more than a year, even when spied through $5,000 night-vision goggles, the men must identify the aircraft by their strobe patterns alone.

Reports of the sightings have reached the governor’s office, the sheriff’s office, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Wyoming Naitonal Guard. None of the agencies can explain what’s going on. The FAA says it’s investigating eyewitness reports, according to Mitch Barker at the regional office in Seattle.

Whatever the lights in the sky are, they’re not U.S. military - or, presumably, any other military, says Wyoming National Guard Adjutant General Ed Boenisch, who says he’s exhausted every imaginable lead and turned up no proof of training missions or operations, period. He thinks the huge sky and curvature of the Earth may be playing tricks with the men’s eyes, fooling them into thinking commercial aircraft hundreds of miles away are something else.