UFO hunting in Area M62, Yorkshire - by 'eck the truth is out there

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UFO hunting in Area M62, Yorkshire - by 'eck the truth is out there

Oct 28, 2008

By Alun Palmer

Think UFO-watcher and the image that often springs to mind is a jobless, unshaven man with lank greasy hair.

He will also have body odour that could fell an ox at 50 paces, and all the social airs and graces of a cripplingly shy librarian.

But here, at a slightly down-at-heel Pontefract hotel just off the M62 in my native Yorkshire, that image is well and truly shattered.

There are company directors, secretaries, policemen and building society managers all gathered in this mock-Tudor function room for Britain’s UFOlogists’ annual shindig.

This is, truly, a close encounter of a Yorkshire kind – and these people certainly know their alien onions.

Secret Ministry of Defence documents were released last week which revealed a US pilot was ordered to fire on a UFO in 1957.

Old news. Everyone here has known about that story for years – and are mildly amused by it.

Aircraft designer and businessman Colin Saunders, 50, reminds me of Richard Dreyfuss in Spielberg’s movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Just as the actor crafted a huge alien mountain out of mashed potato, Colin made a triangular model of a strange craft he saw one night in March 1999.

After a meal near his Hinkley home, Colin says he was driving back with his wife, daughter and mother-in-law when they all saw four lights in the sky.

Parking their car beneath them, the night sky rippled and a triangular craft materialised – or “decloaked” as Colin puts it – above them.

“It was so close to the ground and it tipped at 90 degrees, pointing up at the sky,” he says, using his model to re-enact the strange events of that night. “If it had tipped downwards it would have crushed the car.”

Colin has worked with Swedish aircraft maker Saab and helped design the Airbus. This is a man who knows his aircraft – and he says the experience has changed him profoundly.

“I’m a more spiritual person now,” he says. “I care more for the planet and other people. I’m less materialistic.”

Like any two-day festival, the event organised by UFO Data Magazine, had two big headliners.

On Saturday it was retired RAF Squadron Leader Alan Turner.

He told a rapt audience about his experience manning his radar terminal at RAF Sopley, Hampshire, in 1971.

Over the course of 25 minutes the air traffic controller tracked a succession of objects that skimmed the Welsh/ English border, then shot upwards to 60,000 feet in the blink of an eye.

He explained that the RAF’s Lightning plane was the only craft capable of such a feat at the time. Yet every plane guarding Britain and Europe from the threat of Russian nuclear bombers would have had to have been used – and that is unlikely.

Speaking for the first time in public about the incident, he would not let guesswork or supposition overtake rational analysis. After laying out the events, he was asked what he believed he saw. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I will not hazard a guess.”

Sunday’s headliner was UFO researcher Haktan Akdogan who came bearing the equivalent of a worldwide hit single – the Leona Lewis of little green men.

The host of a UFO TV show in Turkey, he had 30 minutes of footage shot this summer in a Turkish holiday resort by bored security guard Yalcin Yalman. The film, trumpeted as the most convincing evidence of aliens ever captured, shows a series of different craft, all wavy lights and changing shapes.

To the untrained eye it looks remarkable and would take a fair few quid to knock up.

However, the dialogue between the guard and his friends seems staged – the Turkish equivalent of “Cor. Will. You. Look. At. That. Thing.”

Haktan is pretty composed given the dynamite material he has uncovered. “This was shot over many nights this summer,” he says in a corner of the bar. “I went down and saw it myself over two nights. It is the most incredible thing. The clarity of the pictures is incredible. Look there.”

He freezes an image on his laptop and points to two dark blobs silhouetted on the craft. “You can see entities there.”

That’s some holiday. Sun, sea, sand and entities.

Haktan gets a lot of material sent in for his show – a kind of You’ve Been Beamed Up. But 90 per cent he bins, attributing them to natural phenomena.

Indeed, one speaker at the conference spends most of his slot rubbishing a particular TV documentary and said that the footage of an “alien spacecraft” was, in fact, the back of an aeroplane. There is little unquestioning acceptance here. Speakers and audience alike are keen to sort the wheat from the chaff, saving for examination only the truly unexplained.

And the truly incredible, such as Italian academic Dr Roberto Pinotti discovering documents of a secret committee set up by fascist dictator Mussolini in 1933.

Sightings

RS 33 was formed after sightings by Italian pilots of strange, fast-moving cylindrical objects.

Mussolini, desperate not to fall behind in any arms race and suspecting the craft belonged to Germany or Britain, formed RS 33 to find out what the machines were and how they could develop the same technology. “There is no secrecy about these things in Italy,” says Roberto. “The Government is very open about it and pilots always report these things. So far 400 pilots and crew have reported strange sightings.”

Local copper Gary Heseltine is British Transport Police’s very own Mulder, the FBI agent in The X-Files. As a 15-year-old lad he watched a craft cross his home town of Scunthorpe, leaving a power cut in its wake.

Now the Leeds-based detective constable has set up a website for officers across the country to report sightings. More than 650 have told of their experiences.

“Seventy five per cent of the cases are corroborated by other officers with them,” he says.

It’s finally time to leave and, as the UFO-watchers trail out, they all do exactly the same thing – look up at the Yorkshire sky.

And they’re not checking the weather.

Source: Mirror

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