1991 A Vintage Year for UFOs?
Newly-released files from the Ministry of Defence reveal a UFO sighting of alarming proportions in 1991 – plus a number of other incidents. The military UFO documents have now made available by the National Archives online, for all to see..
In the 1991 incident, an Alitalia passenger airliner en route from Milan to Heathrow at 22,000ft readying for landing at Heathrow had a near miss over Lydd in Kent. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD80 aircraft with 57 people on board. A brown “missile-shaped object” shot past them overhead and the Captain, Achille Zaghetti, was sufficiently spooked when he saw the object about 1000 feet above him that he shouted “look out, look out” (presumably in Italian) to his co-pilot.
Zaghetti reports that the copilot also saw it, and states; “As soon as the object crossed us I asked to the ACC (area control centre) operator if he saw something on his screen and he answered ‘I see an unknown target 10nm (nautical miles) behind you’.”
The incident was taken seriously enough to be thoroughly investigated by both the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the military, but the MoD closed the inquiry after ruling out missiles, weather balloons and space rockets(!). The incident remains unsolved to this day.
Another archived incident now exposed on the same evening reports a Southern TV broadcast about a boy aged 14 who reported sighting a “missile” at low level that climbed up and disappeared into the clouds.
An unnamed Whitehall official wrote: “It is our intention to treat this sighting like that of any other Unidentified Flying Object and therefore we will not be undertaking any further investigation.”
In 1991, there were a number of other such events and sightings:
June 17, 1991 four passengers on a Dan Air Boeing 737 saw a “wingless projectile” go under the plane as it left Gatwick Airport headed for Hamburg. On July 15 a Britannia Airways 737 pilot reported a “small black lozenge-shaped object” coming in to Gatwick.
If you want to find out all the latest news on tech why not subscribe to our RSS feed?
Leave a Reply