London, England (CNN) -- A hovering Toblerone and a silky-white residue
join
near-misses and strange lights in the British government's latest release
of its
files on UFO sightings.

Made public Thursday, the files are the fifth collection of records about
unidentified flying objects to be released by the Ministry of Defence and
The
National Archives as part of a project to open the files up to a wider
audience.

Thursday's release is the largest so far, totaling more than 6,000 pages
of
material from 1994 to 2000.

The files include a sighting by a man in Birmingham, England, in March
1997. He
said he came home from work at 4 a.m. to see a large blue triangle-shaped
craft
hovering over his back garden.

It was silent but caused dogs in the neighborhood to bark, the report
said. It
"shot off and disappeared" after about three minutes, the report said,
leaving
behind a "silky-white substance" on the treetops, some of which he saved
in a
jar.


It was not clear what happened to the jar and its contents.

Another document, from January 1997, is about a man driving home through
south
Wales one night when he saw "a 'tube of light' coming down from the sky,"
which
at first seemed like a "massive star" coming toward him.

The man's mobile phone and car radio failed, the report said, and the man
got
out of his car and was able to walk through the light. It said he got back
in
his car but started feeling sick, and he soon developed a skin condition
for
which he had to see a doctor.

His car was left covered in dirt and dust, the report said.

Other reports are about sightings by groups of people, including one from
August
1997 in which five members of a fishing trawler in the North Sea reported
seeing
a round, flat, shiny object hovering in the sky.

They saw it both with the naked eye and through binoculars, with the
report
noting, "witness very skeptical of UFOs." They tracked the object on their
radar
for several seconds before it vanished, the report said.

Police officers in Boston, England, and Skegness -- both on England's east
coast, caught a UFO on video at the same time that the Royal Air Force
(RAF)
detected an "unidentified blip" on their radar, the files show.

It happened in October 1996, when the officers saw "strange rotating red,
blue,
green and white flashing lights in the sky," the report said. A ship in
The
Wash, a bay near Boston, also saw the lights, and at the same time RAF air
defense radars picked up the blip over Boston, the report said.

Press coverage of the incident led the RAF to look into the lights, later
identifying some as stars and bright planets, and attributing the radar
blip to
a "permanent echo" created by a nearby church spire.

The release highlights how the reported shapes of UFOs have changed during
the
past half-century, the National Archives said. Many of the reports in the
latest
file describe UFOs as big, black and triangular, whereas reports from the
1940s
and '50s tended to be about saucers or disc-shaped objects, they said.

"In the 1950s the next big leap in technology was thought to be a round
craft
that took off vertically, and it's intriguing to note that this is the
same
period when people began to report seeing 'flying saucers' in the sky,"
said
David Clarke, author of a book called The UFO Files and a journalism
lecturer at
Sheffield Hallam University.

He pointed out that in the years covered by the latest file release,
triangle-shaped U.S. stealth bombers and Aurora spy planes featured
heavily on
TV shows like "The X-Files" and movies like Independence Day.


"It's impossible to prove a direct link between what people are reading
and
watching and what they report as UFOs, but one interpretation could be
that the
latest advances in technology may be influencing what people see in the
sky," he
said.

A craving for chocolate may have influenced another sighting, that of a
"Toblerone-shaped" UFO hovering over Annandale, Scotland, in July 1994.
The
Toblerone is a triangular-shaped Swiss chocolate candy bar. The files
include a
sketch of the object, which showed it as 35-40 feet long and about 20 feet
wide.

It hovered silently about 10 feet above a field with no lights and was
"observed
for at least 40 minutes," the report said.

The release also contains several incidents involving UFOs and aircraft,
such as
a near-miss that happened in January 1995 when a British Airways Boeing
737 was
approaching Manchester airport. The captain and a crew member saw the
object,
but an investigation by the Civil Aviation Authority failed to identify
it, the
report said.

An airliner near Glasgow Airport saw white and red flashing lights in
December
1996, but the report simply concluded there was no RAF activity in the
area at
the time.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/02/17/ufo.files/?hpt=C1

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