I was just taking pictures of the Thunderbirds practicing by our facility and DIDN'T NOTICE ANYTHING. When I went to my computer to see the photos I came across this one and THERE IT WAS! A real UFO, it can't be the other jets because they were flying in patterns behind the two in front doing the manuever, and this thing looks nothing like an F-16.

This is genuine and freaky. If you are a photo analyst please look at this photo with professional scrutiny and let me know what you think, thaanswerv@hotmail.com

MUFON Submitter 7377

It's 60 years since the term flying saucer was first coined, and I have to admit I hold a rather cynical view when it comes to UFOs and alien life.

But no matter how much of an unbeliever you are, the idea of extraterrestrial life cannot fail to quicken the pulse and the notion has captivated the imagination of people all across the globe for decades.

And it's not likely to go away - the lure of the unexplained has long proved irresistible and, with space tourism becoming a reality, our fascination with close encounters can only grow.

Thirty years ago, a corner of south west Wales was caught up in a "flap" - a wave of sightings in an area - that became known as The Broad Haven Triangle.

So when details about these cases were released at the National Archive in Kew recently, I couldn't resist some Mulder and Scully action.

Leafing through the documents at Kew, the story began to unfold. It was April 1977 and Rosa Granville, who runs the Haven Fort Hotel in Little Haven, was in bed at around 2.30am when she was awoken by strange noise and lights.

Looking out of her window, she described seeing an object which looked like an "upside-down saucer" in the field next to the hotel and two 'faceless humanoid' creatures with pointed heads.

The incident, she said in a subsequent letter she wrote to her MP Nicholas Edwards, left her "agitated and disturbed and not the least bit desirous of another encounter".

"I would be pleased to hear of an explanation, it would greatly help to relieve the sense of shock I feel since my encounter," she added.

I shouted 'Hello, what are you doing there?'. They looked faceless. I couldn't see their features

Speaking to BBC Wales' news website, Mrs Granville recalled the object: "It was a bit like an upside-down saucer - it looked like a jelly to start with."

"There was so much heat - I was by the window - my face felt burned.

"There was light coming from it and flames of all colours. Then [the creatures] came out of these flames, that's what I don't understand.

"I shouted 'Hello, what are you doing there' - they looked faceless. I couldn't see their features."

She said she went to find other people in the hotel to show them, but that when she returned to the window a few minutes later, the objects and the men had gone.

When she visited the site of the alleged landing in the morning, she added there were "two inches of burned ground there".

On receiving Mrs Granville's letter back in 1977, Mr Edwards contacted the Ministry of Defence and Flight Lieutenant Cowan, an officer from RAF Brawdy, then visited the hotel.

In his report to MoD chiefs, Flt Lt Cowan wrote: "[Mrs Granville] told me that one night in April of this year she saw a round object 'like the moon falling down' land in a field at the back of her property. Two very tall, faceless 'humanoids' got out of this object (about the size of a mini bus) and appeared to 'take measurements or gather things'."

Flt Lt Cowan said he examined the landing site but "could find no evidence of a landing" and could offer no further explanation.

He added finally that, "should a UFO arrive at RAF Brawdy we will charge normal landing fees and inform you immediately".

Other incidents reported in the Broad Haven area at the time included a class of schoolchildren who claimed to have seen a spacecraft near their playground. Then a family said they saw several UFOs in the space of a week, as well as several sightings of silver suited creatures.

In his report, Flt Lt Cowan did mention the possibility that "a local prankster" was at work, and when contacted recently, he said the description of aliens from many witnesses "fitted exactly the type of protective suit that would be used in the event of a fire at one of the local oil refineries at Milford Haven".

This indeed seems to have been the case as in 1996, the Western Mail carried a report in which a 44-year-old businessman Glyn Edwards admitted he had wandered around the area in a silver suit in 1977 as a prank.

The fact the RAF did an investigation of a UFO encounter is unique, as far as I'm aware Dr David Clarke "Alien sightings were all the rage, so I took a stroll around for a bit of fun," he is reported as saying.

However, Mrs Granville remains insistent that she had not been the subject of a hoax.

"You will always get silly people pretending, but what I saw was definitely humanoid," she said.

Looking back now, Mrs Granville said she wished there had been an explanation from nearby RAF Brawdy, but that they had always denied their plane or their men were involved.

Researcher and lecturer Dr David Clarke, who has written a book called Flying Saucerers: A Social History of UFOlogy, said Mrs Granville's account was a big part of "a UFO flap" at the time.

"Despite the fact we know there was hoaxing in the area, the fact that Mrs Granville's account has remained consistent over 30 years shows she did see something unusual," he said.

"The fact the RAF did an investigation of a UFO encounter is unique, as far as I'm aware."

The truth is still out there...

A new documentary called "Out of the Blue" examines the history of alien spacecraft sightings.

July 6, 2007-As the documentary "Out of the Blue" rightly points out, brilliant and reputable scientists believe that the conditions for intelligent life exist on thousands of planets. But then there's that other question that separates the scientists from the believers, the witnesses from the skeptics — if aliens are out there, have they come to visit?

James Fox, the producer of "Out of the Blue," says that aliens are out there. "They're flying around. They're here and they've been here."

He also believes that they have incredible technical ability, saying that they can "fly rings around our fastest jets. Yes. That's what I've been told. They can literally almost disappear in place."

"Out of the Blue" is an attempt to weed out the wackos and present credible witnesses who say they saw what looked like alien spacecraft. Witnesses like former President Carter, who said, "I saw one, but I don't know where. It just disappeared." And Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, who says he saw "this typical saucer shape, double-cylindrical shape, metallic."

Flying Saucers

"I looked up and all of a sudden there was this, you know, I got to say it, flying saucer," said Sean Thackery, from Marin, Calif., one of the eyewitnesses in the film.

"You've got this phenomenon taking place that's never been properly explained," said Fox. "You know, people — people wanna know."

The subject of UFOs is one of those things that never gets a satisfactory answer, and never quite seems to go away. Now, 60 years after the reported crash of a UFO in Roswell, N.M., and with the French government releasing its UFO archives, there are new efforts to prove alien spacecrafts really exist.

The documentary begins with an odd, but in a way undeniable, incident that occurred in Phoenix in March 1997, known as the "Phoenix Lights."

Hundreds and possibly thousands of people, many of them looking at the Hale-Bopp comet, reported seeing an array of lights and an enormous delta-shaped craft. The first report of a strange flying object came about 8:20 p.m. from a former police officer in Paulden, Ariz. Over the next 40 minutes, people gave similar reports of an object along a 20-mile route south to Phoenix and Tempe.

"It's coming across the sky," said witness Tim Ley of Phoenix, "and as it's moving, it's blocking and unblocking the stars. There was actually a shape."

"It passed right in front of us. It was just about right above eye length," said Mike Fortson. "My estimate of the size of the craft from the nose as it passed us where we lived to the end of the left wing that passed in front of us was over 5,000 foot long."

There was such an uproar about what people described seeing that ABC News did a story about it back in 1997. At the time, then Arizona Gov. Fife Symington called a news conference, spoofing the whole thing by bringing an "alien" into the room.

'I Know What I Saw'

What Symington did not say then was that he also had seen the object over Phoenix. But in "Out of the Blue," he says that "we all experienced a very exciting sighting of some kind of a craft of unknown origin. Nobody's ever been able to explain it. … Most of us feel that it was definitely, you know, of alien origin. Enormous. Inexplicable."

Symington is an Air Force veteran, and a pilot. When asked whether he was worried about speaking out, he said, "I know what I saw and what I believe and I'm not afraid to say it publicly. … I'm, I'm really not concerned about somebody's opinion about that, frankly."

Among other claims, Fox focuses on a 1980 report of UFO sightings at an American air force base in England — the so-called "Bentwaters" incident. Three former Air Force security officers told Fox about actually touching a small, strange craft that landed outside the base.

"There's no doubt about it, there's some type of strange, flashing red lighting ahead," said Lt. Colonel Halt in the documentary. "The closer we got, the more the white light dissipated, but what appeared was a triangular craft. When we approached it, it was, I'd say it measured probably about nine feet long, maybe six feet high."

Sgt. Jim Penniston made drawings of what appeared to be symbolic drawings that, he said, were on the skin of the craft.

'That's Not How Science Works'

But when it comes to UFOs, there are plenty of skeptics. One man who makes his living as a professional skeptic is, well, skeptical.

Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic Magazine, says, "The parade of astronauts or police officers or politicians like Jimmy Carter — it's irrelevant. Because they're human and they're brains and nervous systems and sensory apparatus are structured just like the average Joes."

Shermer spends a lot of time with reports of UFOs and space aliens, and has this to say about the documentary: "Um, the facts are true. The, uh, the story is well told and well produced. But that's not how science works. In science we have to have some way of testing to get an answer. It's this or this. And we have to have some way of weighing the evidence. And short of an actual experiment to run you have to have debate."

UFO sightings, even the most interesting ones, tend to share similar characteristics. There are no pictures, or the pictures are blurry. Or maybe there are pictures, but they disappeared into government archives never to be seen again.

That's what the late astronaut Gordon Cooper said, but the documentary says that, "Not every government chooses to deny the existence of UFOs. Since the fall of communism in 1989, information surrounding the subject has become much more accessible in Russia."

A Leap of Explanation

The documentary ends by saying that, "The discovery that we are being visited by extraterrestrials would be one of the greatest in human history. Such a discovery would profoundly alter the perception of ourselves and our place in the universe."

But Shermer remains unconvinced. "You can't discount the fact, unfortunately, that people lie … or they misperceive and then tell the story incorrectly or exaggerate. Everybody knows about the human foibles of deception and self-deception and exaggeration. We all do it. So unfortunately we can't just, we can't always count [on] eyewitness accounts being reliable."

Shermer says the problem comes in a kind of leap of faith — with UFOs it's a leap of explanation.

"In science it's OK to just say, 'Let's just withhold judgment for now and do more research. We don't have to commit to some big, grand theory of aliens visiting us. Let's just say we don't know what it is.' … But we have to follow the standards of evidence in science that we apply everywhere else. In no other science would anybody accept just a few random anecdotal stories and grainy videos and blurry photographs."

"The question itself I think is legitimate," he said. "It's interesting, it's fascinating. It's mythic in scale … one of the grand questions. It's like the God question or, you know, the meaning-of-life question. It's one of those, on that scale. So you'd have to be made of wood not to be interested and, you know, have they come here? Are they up there?"

DIDIM became the UFO sighting capital of Turkey when several people reported seeing strange lights in the skies.

The strange yellowish melon-shaped ball was spotted by the Police Academy in Yesilkent, while regulars at the Ark Cafe Bar, in Hunters Valley, spotted the same UFO-style lights at about 9.30pm last Saturday night.

Phil and Lorraine Quibell said they spotted the strange lights heading towards them but hundreds of metres off the ground as they walked on the Yesilkent road, close to the police academy at about 9.30pm.

They described how the melon-shaped object was moving fast and in a straight line before swerving towards the police academy direction and towards the sea before disappearing over the horizon.

Mr Quibell, aged 52, formerly from Preston, said the object was a bright sun colour at the top but faded to a yellowish-moonlight colour below.

There was no noise coming from it either before or after they had seen it.

He said: “It was something that I had never experienced in my life and I am still trying to explain it away rationally 48 hours after we had seen it.

“But both of us have said that we have never seen anything like it in our lives.”

The UFO-sighting ironically comes nearly 60 years to the day when the unidentified flying object phenomena began.

Mr Quibell said: “There were two guards at the police academy who saw it and they were looking in the air and could not believe it. The object did not have wings or landing lights so it was definitely not a plane.

“It was probably the size of a plane. It is very difficult to explain it. I only wish I had taken my camera with me. I watched the object for what seemed a few minutes but may have been only seconds before it veered away and out to sea.”

Meanwhile, Mark and Alana Weatherall , who were with children Paige and Josh, had been with friends at the Ark Bar when they spotted the bright light over the Yesilkent area at about the same time.

Alana said: “It was like a bright light but nothing like a plane or a helicopter. It seemed to hover for a number of seconds and burn like a white ball of light and then it just faded out altogether.”

Mark added: “What surprised us was that it seemed to go vertically up from its original position. It was a weird experience but it definitely wasn’t a plane. It must have been a UFO.”

Did you see the UFO? Then give our reporters a call now on 0505 851 1943 and tell us your experience.