Thursday, 02 February 2012

By Charles Thomson

CANVEY coastguard Gary Fulger thinks he might have caught a UFO on film.

Gary, of Surig Road, unwittingly filmed the object flying over Priory Park but spent more than 18 months researching before going public.

He said: “I didn’t want to look like an anorak. I wanted to see if I could identify it first.”

Gary was in the park with his wife on July 24, 2010, when he saw an object in the sky and filmed it. Looking through the footage later he decided that the object was a helium balloon.

However, while watching the footage frame by frame, he noticed another object shoot through the sky in the background.

“It crosses the screen in the wink of an eye, like a bullet,” said Gary. “There’s no noise and no vapour trail. I can zoom in on my TV and it doesn’t look like there’s a tail fin, either.”

The object crosses the sky in less than a second, remaining on screen for just 16 frames. It moves so quickly that it is impossible to get a clear image of it.

He said: “I’ve been a coastguard since the 1990s so I know all about weather phenomenon and Chinese lanterns. It’s not either of those and it’s much too fast to be a plane. The only thing I could compare it to is a cruise missile – but faster.”

Gary said he was mainly concerned about air safety and had even reported the sighting to Castle Point MP, Rebecca Harris. He said: “This thing’s humping it across the sky in commercial airspace. If another plane comes into its path, it’s not exactly going to be able to do a handbrake turn.”

He added: “I’m not saying it’s little green men. I’d just like to know what it was. Maybe someone else has seen or filmed something similar, or maybe they were filming the same thing that day.”

Email: castlepoint@yellowad.co.uk