News

Newly-released Ministry of Defence (MoD) files reveal a passenger jet approaching London had a near miss with an unidentified flying object over Lydd on Romney Marsh.

The captain was so startled by the experience, he shouted "look out" to his co-pilot, after seeing a brown missile-shaped object shoot past overhead.

But investigations by the military and aviation authorities, found no explanation, and the inquiry wound down, leaving the matter unsolved to this day.

The encounter was among a number of incidents in British airspace in the spring and summer of 1991, part of MoD documents charting supposed brushes with the unknown throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s which has been made available by the National Archives.

It is, however, the experience of the crew aboard an Alitalia flight that is the most intriguing. Having set off from Milan on 21 April, the airliner was over Lydd, coming in to land at Heathrow Airport. Flying at 22,000ft with 57 passengers on board, Achille Zaghetti, spotted the strange object some 1,000ft above him at about 8pm.

"At once I said, 'look out, look out,' to my co-pilot, who looked out and saw what I had seen," he recalled.

"As soon as the object crossed us I asked the ACC (area control centre] operator if he saw something on his screen and he answered 'I see an unknown target ten nm (nautical miles] behind you'."

Mr Zaghetti and his crew on the McDonnell Douglas MD80 aircraft were not the only people to catch sight of an unusual object in the skies above Kent that evening 17 years ago.

A Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) document notes that Southern TV broadcast a news item about a 14-year-old boy's reported sighting of a missile flying at low level, before it disappeared through the clouds.

Radar images showing the UFO were initially labelled "cruise missile??" but it was quickly established it was not a military weapon.

By 2 July, the MoD had concluded that the object had not come from the Army firing ranges in the Lydd area and that there was no known "space-related activity" that night.