A RADNORSHIRE man has spoken of his shock at seeing a series of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the night sky.
Ken Saunders, 75, from St Harmon, described three pairs of large orange orbs travelling at high speed 300 feet above his house.
“It was eerie, that’s the only way of describing it,” he said; “People obviously think you’re mad when you say things like this but I know what I saw and I’m not likely to be telling fibs at my age!”
It was New Year’s Eve when the sighting occurred. Mr Saunders recalls how he and his wife had gone to bed early, only for his wife to be woken up close to midnight by the sound of the couple’s three cats wailing loudly.
He went to investigate, and noticed the strange lights in the sky. She called to her husband, who didn’t come at first. However, as her calls became more urgent, Mr Saunders thought he should go an investigate.
What he saw in the sky that night shocked him: “There were two orange ‘balls’ in the sky, one immediately after the other.
“They were around 25 yards apart from each other, approximately 300 foot above us. It was a clear, starry night so they were there plain as day. We had a great view of them.
“The lights passed silently above us, and we were just about to move away when another identical pair went overhead. There were three pairs of these lights in total, one pair that alerted my wife and two more pairs that I saw myself.
“What was even more bizarre was how all the lights were a bright orange colour, apart from the final one which was a strong red colour.
“The size of the lights was unbelievable. Each one looked to be around 30-50 feet in diameter, they were going at quite some velocity with no visible means of propulsion – yet in complete silence.
“I have never seen anything like it in my life. It shook me to the core – I don’t like things that can’t be explained.”
Unsure of what to do next, Mr Saunders called the police, but was unimpressed with their response: “I think they have a stock response for things like this, which is to say it was probably Chinese lanterns.
“I can tell you with certainty that what I saw that night was not lanterns,” he said.
Mr Saunders contacted his son, who works as a police officer at New Scotland Yard. Clearly worried, he explained what he had seen and was told by his son that these occurances aren’t uncommon, and that hundreds of similar cases had been reported. A lot of these cases also coincide with reports of mutilated cattle in fields close to confirmed sightings.
The shaken pensioner, a former police officer, said how he was told while serving with the RAF in 1953 that UFOs not only existed, but there was a special division within the force to research them.
He has kept an open mind ever since: “I believe it is arrogant of humans to think that we are the only living, breathing, thinking organisms in the universe.
"What I saw on New Year’s Eve only makes for a stronger belief in the unknown. I won’t say I wasn’t at least a little bit scared, I was wary about going outside again immediately afterwards, but the whole thing was also very exciting.”