CR: T. Good
"Its the strangest thing I've seen in 30 years as a policeman."
Les Leek, now a chief inspector at Walsall Police, is not the sort of man to dream up little green men.
But what Les saw and photographed one August night in 1971 remains the best 'unsolved' UFO case ever in the West Midlands.
Les and three disbelieving colleagues were called to an Aldridge petrol station at 2:20am. They found a stunned crowd staring skywards.
There in the inky darkness hovered an oval craft, shining silently thousands of feet above.
Les dashed for the 35mm camera stowed in his patrol car, and fired off a reel of pictures.
The ship stayed perfectly still for an hour, then moved off slowly towards West Bromwich.
"It was like a very big bright egg," Les remembers.
"I don't think I believe in aliens, but I'm certain it was not man-made."
Four photos came out, and were immediately passed on to the Ministry of Defence.
"Only one was ever released," says Les. "Which is strange, because the others showed the craft much more clearly."
Les will probably never know what he saw. Was it something
the Government could not explain -- or something they chose to suppress? "Experts told us it must have been Venus, but since when does Venus show up on Birmingham Air Traffic Control?" says Les.
"If that was Venus, I'll eat my hat."
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UFO 'EXPLOSION' CAPTURED ON VIDEO
Ashbourne News Telegraph, Derbyshire, England
March 3, 1994
CR: T. Good
The latest UFO sighting in the Ashbourne area has been reported -- and this time there is video evidence to back up the claim.
The four witnesses, who do not want to be named for fear of ridicule, spotted the mysterious object while walking in the town's recreation ground on a recent Sunday afternoon.
They had a camcorder with them and managed to shoot several minutes of footage of the bright light in the sky towards Derby.
At one point the sinister single light, which remained stationary for most of the time, explodes like a firework but then returns to its original shape.
Footage of a recent UFO filmed by three fishermen was dismissed by experts as the iris of the camera.
But the exploding effect of this recent Ashbourne sighting was also witnessed by the three people not looking through the camera's view finder.
The UFO spotters, who were badly shaken by their experience, are currently having their camera checked.
During the five minutes of film, a plane comes into view and the light clearly follows it but then shoots off quickly out of sight.
UFO experts at the ministry of Defence in Whitehall say that 95 per cent of sightings can be explained in terms of known objects or phenomena -- but the remaining five per cent do defy explanation.
Last year 147 sightings of mysterious objects were reported to the MoD.
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SPOOKY GOINGS ON IN CHURCH STOWE
Daventry Express, Northants, England
March 17, 1994
CR: T. Good
A Church Stowe woman who spotted a UFO has had her experience immortalised on video.
Elsie Oaken's trip home from Daventry to the village one May day in 1978 has left her a minor celebrity in UFO circles.
Her appearance in the video, Penetrating The Web, is the latest in a long line of screen spots, radio shows and mentions in at least ten books on the subject.
"It's very flattering to still be invited to go on these programmes," said Elsie, who never gets tired of telling her story.
Her journey home to Church Stowe went wrong as she turned right at Weedon crossroads, where she first noticed a grey dumbbell object with red and green lights.
As she entered the village her car came to a halt.
"By the schoolrooms I was in complete darkness except for
a series of white lights with no beam," she explained. After the lights had circled around for a time, they left and Elsie found herself driving along the road as before, only her journey had taken twice as long as it should have.
A few months later Elsie heard of a group of four Byfield women traveling through Preston Capes a few hours later, who had seen similar lights, which experts believe backs up her extraordinary story.
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SPACE OUT
Spielberg To Expose UFO Cover-Ups
Daily Mirror, London, England
Dec. 22, 1993
by Timothy Good
Ace director Steven Spielberg is deserting science fiction for science fact.
The genius behind movie blockbusters ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jurassic Park is secretly working on a 50 million movie that he claims will unmask a government cover-up of an alien spaceship crash in New Mexico in 1947.
Project X is based on the Roswell Air Force base incident which gave the world the term "flying saucer". Spielberg believes the US military took away alien bodies from the crashed UFO.
Hollywood insiders say the director has got hold of previously unseen film footage of the flying saucer crash scene taken by a military officer. "Everybody is talking about Project X," says a Tinseltown source.
"Spielberg has already got a team at Hamlin Productions working on the script.
"This is going to be a totally different film from the likes of ET which was just a fairy story.
"It's about the UFO crash and the political intrigue that followed."
The movie is due for release in 1997 - the 50th anniversary of the alleged alien landing.
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COSMIC COVER-UP ALLEGED
Independent, London, England
Dec. 19, 1993
by Timothy Good
UFO-Spotters are convinced that Bobby Inman, United States Defense Secretary designate and expert in satellite intelligence, is a repository of vital information about flying saucers, writes Elizabeth Nash.
Bob Oechsler, a UFO enthusiast from Edgewater, Maryland says he apporached Admiral Inman in May 1988 "seeking guidance on how to get access to information on non-human-made disk technology" (a euphemism for UFOs) in government hands, and that the admiral "validated that the government had information, and provided me with the names of people I should see".
Stan Freedman, a nuclear space systems researcher, who has written 62 academic papers and a book about UFOs, believes that Admiral Inman holds the secrects to "a cosmic Watergate", a massive cover-up of a flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
A researcher at the US Center for Military History in Washington yesterday confirmed that the government had been "obsessively secret" about objects crashing in the New Mexico desert in 1947, but suggested that this had more to do with the Cold War space-race.