Close encounters… UFOs made 600 visits to the UK in a single year, according to MoD ‘X-Files’

Hundreds of Britons had ‘close encounters’ with UFOs, according to previously-classified documents
released by the Ministry of Defence today.

The sightings were made between 1981 and 1996 from observers including police officers, fighter pilots and school children. They range from lights in the sky to close contact with aliens with ‘lemon-shaped heads’, and include detailed analysis on some of the UK’s most well-known cases.

There’s something in the skies… Observers stand on the edge of Bonnybridge in Scotland, one of the UK’s hotspots for UFO encounters

‘We want you, come with us,’ one alien apparently told two terrified Staffordshire boys in 1995 after appearing from under a hovering UFO.

It is just one of countless mysterious reports released as part of a three-year project between the MoD and The National Archives, aimed at opening up the records to a worldwide audience.

The Government ‘X- Files’, contains 14 files of sightings, letters and Parliamentary Questions - 4,000 pages in total.

The records feature papers relating to the famous ‘Rendlesham Forest’ sightings, often described as ‘Britain’s Roswell’, and the MoD’s final position statement on the incident.

Other highlights include:

• The Belgian Air Force scrambling F-16 fighters to intercept UFOs reported by police officers and others. A report of the incident, in March 1990, confirms the F-16s obtained ‘lock-ons’ with their radars, but could not explain what caused the phenomena.
• Numerous sightings over Scotland as Bonnybridge became the UFO hotspot of the mid-90s.
• A report of wailing noises and mysterious lights being beamed on to a cemetery in Cheshire in July 1996. Investigations discovered four smouldering railway sleepers, one with a hole burnt through it.

Reports of UFOs soared in the 1990s, possibly as a reflection of what we were seeing on our screens - as Will Smith heroically defended Earth from an alien attack in Independence Day and Mulder and Scully opened The X-Files.

Here in Britain the number of UFO sightings leapt from 117 in 1995 to 609 in 1996.

Witnesses drew this image of a UFO, found on one of the 4,000 pages released by the MoD

Dr David Clarke, a UFO expert and journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University who has studied the files, said: ‘I think there has got to be some kind of connection - it was a year when people were absolutely obsessed with UFOs and aliens.

Aside from 1996, one of the busiest years for UFO sightings reported to the MoD over the past half century was 1978 - the year Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released.

‘Obviously, films and TV programmes raise public awareness of UFOs and it’s fascinating to see how that appears to lead more people to report what they see to the authorities.’

In 1997 the number of reported sightings dropped slightly, but remained high at 425, but in 1998 they dropped back to 193.

Most recent X-File: Sue Sill took this picture of a UFO flying across Huddersfield on Sunday at a birthday party. She said: ‘It was only when I looked back at the picture on the camera that I noticed it. At first I thought it was a cloud, then I zoomed in and saw this funny pear-shaped object.’