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In New Zealand, mysterious lights pursue pilots through the skies.

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Within a matter of weeks, we had two strong and unexplainable UFO incidents.

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While a camera crew captured a baffling phenomena on film.

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There are six unidentified objects coming straight towards us. Let's hope they're friendly.

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I still don't know what they were. I wish I did.

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Deep in the jungle of Vietnam, a group of US paratroopers have an extraordinary encounter.

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But here, from the back of my neck stood up, I thought, oh, look at that. What's going on here?

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The soldiers fear it's a secret weapon.

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Never saw anything like it before, that, or ever again.

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And the UK appears to be under siege as a wave of unknown objects sweeps across the country.

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The government was absolutely inundated with UFO reports, which involved orange balls of light.

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In one encounter, a police helicopter narrowly avoids a mid-air collision.

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The public demand an explanation.

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There was media and public panic, and this just played into a whole obsession with the UFO phenomenon.

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Does anyone know what these phenomena are?

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And do our governments know more than they ever reveal to us?

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The answers may lie in the untold stories of UFO conspiracies.

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South Island, New Zealand. December 20, 1978.

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At Woodburn Air Force Base, warrant officer Ian Uffendell and Flight Service Officer Bill Frayme are on duty.

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As the men make their final checks, something strange suddenly appears in the sky.

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And I said, well, what are those lights? And he said, well, I don't know.

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He said, I'll ring really Wellington radar.

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And that was when Bill said, oh, perhaps we're going to get a visit from the little green men.

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Senior air traffic controller John Cordy picks up the call.

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He said, have we got any airplanes out of Cape Campbell?

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Well, we didn't have. We asked him why.

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He said they got a lot of lights in that area.

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We looked on our radar and we could see some little targets moving around.

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As the mysterious lights travel across the sky, the unidentified radar targets follow them.

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The movements were so exact and so precise.

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They were being controlled by something or somebody somewhere.

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So we had a joke actually. We said it was Father Christmas testing the slave of Christmas Eve.

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For John and Ian, it's all a bit of a laugh until they suddenly have a terrifying realization.

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Two pilots and a 20-tonne Argosy cargo plane are speeding through the sky at over 200 miles per hour.

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The radar shows there's something in their path.

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Any mid-air crash would be deadly.

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As the plane flies over the Kaikoura coastline, an unidentified radar trace speeds towards it.

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This object tracked that Argosy 90 degrees to it right on its wingtip for 40 miles.

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It was airborne. It was at the same altitude as the Argosy, 14,000 feet going south.

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What follows are the original recordings of the pilots and radar operators as the dramatic events unfolded.

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We've got a science-brewing target of South-East of Wellington.

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There's definitely something there.

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I've tried to find practical explanations and there's a big idiot.

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At 3.25 a.m., a bright light the size of a house appears and keeps track with the plane.

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At the time, there was quite an air of tension.

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If the Argosy had said, this thing's now in front of it, it's the biggest metallic, it's open the door and we're going in, we wouldn't have been surprised.

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Unknown objects in controlled airspace would pose a serious threat.

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In their thousands of hours of flight experience, the pilots have never seen anything like this.

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They file a report of their UFO sighting, but the Air Force takes no action.

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I got teased something rotten about the night of the 21st. Nobody wanted to know it was Christmas.

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Ex-Air Force pilot James McGehey can see why the pilot sightings weren't followed up.

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As a pilot in the Air Force for over 20 years, I can say that pilots and lots of people do not want to hear this make mistakes.

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They make mistakes in flying airplanes, but they also make mistakes in identifying objects outside the cockpit.

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It happens all the time.

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The Ky-Cora lights is an interesting pace, but when you look at it, it's really about pilots' misperception.

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But the lights can't be so easily explained. Air Force personnel aren't the only witnesses.

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Police sergeant from in town said, boy, did we have a night last night. He said we had lights down the coast.

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He said no, we're sending down beams of light and people were ringing up about it all the time.

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He said, don't want another one like that.

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By morning, the unexplained lights over Ky-Cora are a media sensation.

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Journalist Quentin Fogarty cuts short his vacation to investigate.

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I didn't really see it as being a particularly serious story. It was the silly season. It was Christmas.

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Just before midnight on the evening of December 30th, Fogarty and a local camera crew boarded the very same Argosy aircraft and retraced the route of the encounter 10 days earlier.

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When we boarded the Argosy, I thought we were going to get some good nighttime footage basically of the flight crew, two people at the controls.

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I was going to do a couple of pieces to camera and then we'd shoot a little bit of footage out and see what would happen.

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Maybe we might be able to see the coastline. That's all we thought we'd be getting.

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We're now approaching the Clarence River where the highest concentration of UFOs was sighted on the morning of December 21st.

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We're at an altitude of 14,000 feet and we're on exactly the same route taken by Captain Powell when he encountered those mysterious objects.

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Almost half an hour into the flight, the Argosy is approaching the town of Ky-Cora.

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I was in the cargo area doing a couple of pieces to camera. When Bill started, the pilot put his head down the stairwell and said,

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you guys should get up here. There's something happening. We're up the flight deck, up the little staircase, up on the flight deck.

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That's when the crew pointed out these lights towards the town of Ky-Cora. So the show began.

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As they fly over Ky-Cora, balls of gold light start to appear and hover beside the plane. Then they disappear.

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They were quite hypnotic. There would start as a black sky, then this little pin point of light would start and then it would just blossom up into this huge ball of light,

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sort of gold with an orange and red tinge and then it would disappear. And there'd be three or four on a row and then they'd all go out again.

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As if somebody was sort of switching them on and off, which, you know, this is about 14,000 feet in the day of the night.

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Just as before, air traffic control picks up mysterious radar returns.

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Sierra, Africa, the strong target, right in formation with you now, your target has doubled its height.

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Cameraman David Crockett desperately tries to film the mesmerizing sight, but these distant lights are all his 16 millimeter camera manages to capture.

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We have an object confirmed by Wellington radar. It's been following us for quite a while. It's about four miles away and it looks like a very faint star, but then it's a very bright, white, red light.

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When you've got professional pilots who are showing some concern, it's not surprising that you as a mere journalist out of this comfort zone is going to feel a bit apprehensive.

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Air traffic control have no idea what's following the plane or if it's the same object John's radar picked up before.

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I control the airspace covering a third of the area of New Zealand and anything that wanted to fly at night, it had to have a clearance from me.

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And the strange object that we got didn't have a clearance. It wasn't an airplane.

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We've just heard from Wellington radar that we've got an object about a mile behind us and it's following us.

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Let's hope they're friendly.

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Suddenly realize that we had stumbled into a pretty major news story. So, I mean, it was exciting professionally from that point of view.

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It was exciting to be there physically and it was just exciting to see this. We had no idea what they were, but we knew this was highly unusual.

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Fogarty has the story of his career, but for the rest of the crew, it's terrifying.

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We can now see the lights of Christchurch in front of us. We've just been informed by Christchurch radar that there are six unidentified objects coming straight towards us.

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It's really getting a bit frightening up here.

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Despite their fears, the plane lands safely, but the Kaikoura event is far from over.

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I was excited. I knew I was on to a big story and the chance of an encore was too much to resist.

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Quentin is going back for more. The extraordinary footage he captures and the extensive government investigation that follows will make Kaikoura one of the most famous UFO cases in history.

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1.45 a.m. December 31st Christchurch Airport.

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Ten days after the initial sighting, reporter Quentin Fogarty has just witnessed more strange lights in the sky over Kaikoura.

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Despite the terrifying encounter, Quentin is obsessed with getting more footage. If he captures the strange phenomenon on film, he'll have the story of a lifetime.

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It's about a quarter to two and in about another 20 minutes we intend to take off again in the Argosy and retrace the route we took only a few moments earlier.

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We've just heard from Wellington radar that there are still targets in the Kaikoura area. So this time we're hoping to get better film than we did last time and all I can say is we'll see what happens.

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At 2.16 a.m. the Argosy takes off from Christchurch Airport.

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Shortly into the flight, they're joined by the mysterious large white lights that seem to show up on radar once again.

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David Crockett has his camera at the ready and captures these perplexing images.

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We have an object confirmed by Wellington radar. It's been following us for quite a while. It looks like a very faint star but then it looks very bright, white and green light.

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This is just a little bit frightening but you can try to get something that has no logical explanation.

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So what did the cameraman capture at 14,000 feet?

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This is probably the single best frame from the entire film. This is when the camera movement stopped and we finally found a frame that wasn't moving, that was fairly stationary.

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And let's face it, that looks classic flying saucer shape. So when we saw that in the edit suite back at the station we thought we've got it.

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Quentin's UFO encounter is headline news.

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What you have just seen, we believe, is the best documented evidence ever of an unidentified flying object.

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The encounter is unique because it was seen by five people in the cabin of that plane.

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It was visible on radar in both Wellington and Christchurch. It was also visible on the aircraft's own radar system.

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Perhaps more importantly, it was finally recorded on television film.

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Seeing no obvious threat to defense, the government are initially dismissive of the sightings.

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But as global interest in the event grows, so does public pressure on the Prime Minister to respond.

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Finally, on the 2nd of January 1979, the government launched an official investigation.

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The country's top scientists put forward all sorts of earthly explanations for the sightings, from navigational beacons to city lights.

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It turns out, extraordinarily, the most likely cause was to do with something thousands of feet below the surface, rather than above.

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New Zealand squid exist at depths of up to 1600 feet.

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But for reasons unknown to science, they are attracted to bright lights at night.

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Squid fishermen have taken advantage of this behavioral quirk by decking out their boats with the biggest, brightest lights they can find.

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The brighter the lights, the bigger the catch.

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These squid fishing boats have a bank of 54,000 watt lights on them, raised on booms pointed down at the water.

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They can be seen from space. They're incredibly bright, and there were a whole fleet of them out there that night.

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On the night of the sightings, the New Zealand squid fleet was joined by 50 Japanese squid boats, making the fishing lights even brighter.

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But John Cordy finds the suggestion of squid boats absurd.

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I've never seen a squid boat doing 140 knots at 14,000 feet.

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Earthquakes, earthquakes, but this is getting ridiculous.

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Another likely explanation put forward by the government was that the lights had come from an object in the night sky.

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Astronomer Professor Nigel Hynbest agrees.

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The brilliant planet Venus is often mistaken for a UFO.

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When it's low in the sky, it can look like an object that's flying close to the Earth.

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So that is an obvious candidate for the UFO seen from New Zealand.

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And in fact, on this particular night, it was visible in the early hours of the morning.

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As Venus' orbit brings it closer to Earth, it shines brighter than every star in the night sky.

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It turns out on these particular nights, Venus was super bright.

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It was about four times brighter than its normal brightness.

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Both Venus and the squid fishing boats were in the exact direction that the pilot was looking at these lights.

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But on closer inspection, a hole opens up in the Venus theory.

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On December 31st, the lights were first witnessed at 12.13 a.m.

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But Venus didn't rise in the sky until 3.28 a.m.

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How could Quentin and the pilots have seen a planet below the horizon?

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James McGehey believes rare atmospheric conditions hold the answer.

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Venus was either just on the horizon or slightly below the horizon.

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But even if it's below the horizon, you can actually still see it because of refraction effects.

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Under certain atmospheric conditions, light can be bent or refracted.

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When light is bent down below the horizon, objects that would normally be hidden by the curvature of the Earth are brought into view.

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You have a situation where the atmosphere of the Earth actually sort of acts like a lens.

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You see this in the sun when it comes up and sets every day.

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You can actually see the sun above the horizon some amount of time before it actually is above the horizon

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because the atmosphere is refracting the image of the sun above the horizon.

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Venus or squid lights are the most widely accepted explanations for the Kaikoura UFOs.

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But they still only address half the story.

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There are, Franco, the strong target. Right in formation with you now.

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Nobody but nobody correlated the radar returns with the things that the airplanes had seen.

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Can we move it towards them?

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Boat lights, or a planet millions of miles away, fail to account for the objects detected by multiple independent radars.

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For radar expert Chris Mooreshead, the evidence is hard to dismiss.

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Radars extremely reliable. If you get two radars plus an airborne radar all giving a response in the same location,

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then you're fairly safe to assume that there is something there.

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What that object is, is up for grabs really.

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You know it's far too fast for a boat and birds and you know that or... I don't know what it is.

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The experience level of the radar operators also makes misidentification seem unlikely.

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I'm confident the radar was 100% online and working perfectly.

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Generally it's fairly obvious aircraft will be flying at fairly high speed.

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100 miles an hour, 200 miles an hour.

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Of course the ship would be just doing 10, 15 miles an hour.

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So very rapidly they'd be able to differentiate between the two.

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But the New Zealand radar was far from perfect.

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This radar scope was notorious for producing spurious targets, angels, noise.

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It had been known to pick up ships in the bay and other things.

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It's not just radar that can be unreliable.

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Some studies have shown that up to 70% of the time, eyewitness testimony is unreliable.

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Despite the many explanations put forward by the government, the Kaikoura incident continues to be hotly debated.

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I've never seen a horrible light in Wellington move south at 140 knots

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and Jupiter or Venus has never appeared on my radar.

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No other sightings have been reported before or since.

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So for Quentin there may never be an answer.

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Unless whatever these things were come and tell us what they were, if they're capable of it,

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I think this will always remain a bit of a mystery.

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The jungle of Vietnam is now a tranquil haven for wildlife.

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But not so long ago, this forest was a killing field.

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Southern Vietnam 1967.

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America enters its third year of active conflict.

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Over 450,000 troops are already on the ground

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and the latest recruits from the 173rd Airborne Infantry have just arrived.

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Paratrooper John Leppleman is among them.

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I knew it was for real right away.

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The guys walking by, dirty fatigues, they're tired, their rifles were over their shoulders.

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They looked like they'd been through hell and a lot of them had.

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The paratroopers barely have time to unpack before the order comes to move out.

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As part of the defense of Saigon, they are to root out Viet Cong strongholds in the Mekong Delta.

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Oh my God, I've only been here a few days and I have to jump out of an aircraft into the jungle.

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In the early hours of February 22nd, Leppleman and his unit begin their long trek through the jungle.

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Over the next couple of months, the brutal conditions will test them to the limit.

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Hot human clothes were rotting off of us. It wasn't easy. It wasn't like in the movies, trust me.

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The paratroopers are unfamiliar with the climate, the terrain and jungle warfare.

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Vietnamese historian Lien Heng Nguyen believes this gave the Viet Cong the upper hand.

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American soldiers, I'm sure, were terrified of not being able to see the enemy in the dense foliage and for the host of booby traps that awaited them.

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In contrast, the Viet Cong forces would have had a lot of local bandages because they were much more familiar with the terrain and climate.

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But after months in the jungle, the 173rd are closing in.

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They summit a hill near the village of Duc Hoa and receive intel the Viet Cong are camped on the hilltop opposite.

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Being so close to the enemy, everyone is on edge. The men arm themselves to the teeth, but nothing will prepare them for the strange encounter ahead.

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I was up about 2.30 in the morning, dark, really, really dark. And I couldn't hear any noise or anything.

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I saw this light down in the valley. And other guys did too. We're all looking at each other like, what the hell?

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Levelman watches the strange light between him and the Viet Cong growing brilliance until it is blinding and the jungle is lit up as bright as day.

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It got brighter and it got brighter. And it went straight up out of the valley.

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I went over here and went from the back of my neck stood up. I thought, oh, look at that. What's going on here?

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He watches the lights silently rise up from the valley floor and zoom off into space.

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It disappeared. It was like, damn, you know, pretty scary, pretty scary stuff.

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Lien Heng believes the enemy would have been just as stunned.

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The Viet Cong would have been extremely terrified as well. Although the idea of extraterrestrials would have been uncommon in Vietnamese culture and society at the time, the concept of malevolent spirits seeking to harm humans would not have been.

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Darkness returns and the jungle is eerily silent. John recalls the men's confusion.

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We've never seen anything like it. Some of the guys looked at me and said, it's probably a helicopter.

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I said, yeah, a helicopter that doesn't make noise. Show me one.

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The men are too scared to sleep, but sunrise will bring an even greater threat.

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Just before dawn in the Vietnamese jungle and the 173rd Airborne move out, still mystified by the strange light in the forest, they must now wage war on the Viet Cong.

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They approach warily, expecting a bloody fight, but the enemy camp is completely abandoned.

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Their gear was scattered everywhere, pots, pans, belts. They didn't know what it was and it took off.

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The Viet Cong probably abandoned the camp because they interpreted the light as some sort of revolutionary new American weapon or aircraft.

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We have to remember that the Viet Cong were fighting the biggest superpower in the world with advanced technology, so you can just imagine how terrified they would have been.

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According to John, the American soldiers are just as confused.

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Fellow paratrooper Steve Welch even wrote home about his inexplicable encounter.

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Last night I saw UFO. It came out from behind the mountain and I watched it until it went so high you couldn't see it. And no sound either.

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So what could have been the source of the mysterious light?

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Helicopter pilot David Higgins considers the possibility of a military aircraft.

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One of the comments from one of the witnesses was saying that the aircraft or the object then actually started moving vertically upwards, which could indicate to me the afterburner of a fast jet.

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Afterburners inject fuel into the turbine of a jet engine, giving it sufficient power to go supersonic.

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The application of afterburner would produce a flame effect or orange glow.

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And again on the application of afterburner that does produce speed, so the aircraft actually then would be flying away at a very fast speed indeed.

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But for Leppleman there is a major problem.

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No noise, not a sound. I saw all kinds of aircraft coming and going over the years. They're all noisy.

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Blindingly bright, yet totally silent, the object seems to defy explanation. But Higgins has another idea.

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The fact that eyewitnesses on the ground say that it almost turned like daylight. The fact that the whole area was lit points initially to the fact that it is some sort of illumination flare to actually illuminate an area of land beneath it.

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Burning at over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, a magnesium flare emits an extraordinary amount of light and burns almost silently.

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During the Vietnam War we know that there were several types of military aircraft capable of deploying flares from fast jets to tactical military transport.

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It's very easy if you witness an object that you're not expecting and you haven't got that experience in your database to actually misidentify, possibly jump to conclusions to what you think it might be.

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Could the whole encounter have been nothing more than a flare?

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We knew what flares looked like. My god, we'd seen them months after months after months dropped out of aircraft or we'd fire them ourselves.

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No, no, no flare I guarantee it.

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Leppleman is convinced he saw something from another world.

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UFO, that's all it could be. Because with no sound and it was so bright.

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I mean our flares aren't that bright, our aircraft aren't that bright. I never saw anything like it.

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But experts believe fatigue, the unfamiliar terrain and the threat of a vietnam attack may have prevented a more logical interpretation.

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You have to remember that these guys had been in a jungle at night hiding on surveillance in complete darkness for quite a while when all of a sudden this object, this bright object appeared.

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And we're between, was it a flare, was it afterburner and we're really just going around the two options at the moment.

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The truth is we don't know what those guys on the ground saw.

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But there is one other plausible explanation. Bright, silent and capable of tracking rapidly across the sky, a military searchlight is a good fit for this UFO.

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The 100 million candle power M151 searchlight used in Vietnam can shine up to 10 miles and light up an entire platoon.

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Had them in mistake in a searchlight being for a UFO or had they encountered something truly unexplained.

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Whatever it was that flew out of the forest that night, it may have saved John Leppleman's life.

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Let no firefight thank God because the enemy took off running. We'd have taken casualties.

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Yeah, we were all going. Good deal.

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Deep within the walls of the Ministry of Defense or M.O.D., the British government investigated UFO sightings for over 50 years.

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Few know more about this secret research than former M.O.D. operative Nick Pope.

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I worked for the Ministry of Defense for 21 years. I had to investigate the two or 300 UFO sightings I received each year and determine was there any potential threat to the defense of the United Kingdom.

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After decades of UFO investigations, Nick thinks he's heard it all. But in 2008, a new mystery begins.

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The summers of 2008 and 2009 were incredibly busy for the M.O.D. in relation to UFO reports, many of which involved orange balls of light.

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One eyewitness is Liverpool-based news photographer Barry Mills.

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I had the lights off so the night sky was visible. I suddenly noticed a single kind of orange light outside just in the edge of my field of vision. So I was a bit perplexed.

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I genuinely wondered, is this a UFO? Have I finally seen one?

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Thinking he might be onto a news story, Barry grabs his camera and photographs the mysterious light.

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I used the washing line in the back garden as a kind of a sling to steady it because I didn't have a tripod available and filed off a couple of frames of the light.

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Moments later, the hovering phenomena disappears, leaving Barry with only this blurred image.

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The following morning, the Echo newspaper where Barry works is inundated with calls from people who have seen the same thing.

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I felt a lot more positive that other people had seen it, that I wasn't actually going mad and I had not been hallucinating or dreaming.

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The Echo runs the story and before Barry knows it, his photo is being shared around the world.

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That, believe it or not, is the picture I took and a couple of national papers in the UK picked it up and I was surprised to find it even on a Vietnamese news website about a day later.

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Global media interest in the incident continues to spread, but the British authorities remain silent.

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The government doesn't say much about the UFO phenomenon because the media and the public tend to get over excited about UFOs and the government doesn't want to encourage this kind of panic and hysteria.

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Whatever it was Barry and the others witnessed that night, they're not alone.

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Reports of glowing orbs are pouring into the MOD from around the country.

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Recently declassified files reveal the bizarre accounts being made.

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25 of these amber objects were seen flashing lights flowing from my house and out of somewhere.

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My wife and I recently witnessed six UFOs.

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One 2008 sighting had even been captured on video by a student on his way back from the pub.

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It was about coming up to 12 o'clock midnight and I looked into the sky and I saw these strange lights moving right across the sky and it was like they were on a route.

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They definitely were controlled by something.

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I just grabbed my camera and I just stood there and just filmed it. Disbelief really.

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Stephen watches the glowing spheres for over 10 minutes before they suddenly disappear completely.

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I didn't mention it to anyone. I just thought nothing of it until I heard these other sightings that were in the paper.

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Perplexed, Stephen turns to his video footage for clues.

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This is the footage I shot. As you can see there's two of the bright lights by there.

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I just saw these still images up as well. I found a red ring going around like a flying saucer.

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Very strange.

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So just what did Stephen film and was it the same object witnessed by others around the UK?

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Between 2007 and 2009 the number of UFO reports to the M.O.D. tripled.

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As around 20% of all UFO sightings can be explained by astronomical events,

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Professor Carolyn Crawford says the answer could be in the stars.

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There certainly are aspects that are very familiar to the idea of meteors or even fireballs streaking through the sky.

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The idea of the colours, the bright light, the larger the meteor, the more energy that's produced.

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It can glow incredibly bright and if that disintegrates it can perhaps create several objects

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each glowing following the same trajectory across the sky.

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The timing of Barry and Stephen's sightings also adds weight to the idea the unexplained objects were meteors.

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One way that you can get several moving lights in the sky at once is when we have a meteor shower.

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And these happen because there are trails of debris in space usually left behind in the wake of comets.

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The Earth passes through debris fields of rubble at the same time each year,

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giving rise to dramatic meteor showers on specific dates.

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The May sightings in the United Kingdom coincided perfectly with the Eda Aquarid meteor shower.

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You're much more likely to see a whole load of shooting stars during one of these meteor showers.

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It's possible you could mistake it for some kind of UFO activity.

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But the UFO witnesses are unconvinced.

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The meteor strike was straight to the ground.

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Well, I assume it is. It doesn't stay in the sky.

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I've seen quite a few meteor showers. That wasn't the case in what I saw at all.

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The police are still skeptical until another incident threatens the lives of their own men.

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In 2008, the UK is besieged by a series of strange lights. But the most dangerous is yet to come.

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Cardiff, Wales, June 8. A police helicopter returns from a routine night patrol.

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As the crew approach St. Athen Air Force Base, something extraordinary appears.

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An unidentified object flies toward them, narrowly avoiding a mid-air collision.

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Cardiff resident Amanda Berry claims to have witnessed the aftermath of this extraordinary encounter.

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When I saw these lights through the window, just traveling across the top of the rooftops, I thought, well, that's unusual.

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Meanwhile, this helicopter appeared and appeared to be chasing the lights.

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I could hear the buzz of the engine sort of straining to sort of keep up with whatever this thing was.

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The incident bears a striking similarity to the previous sightings.

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Although police do confirm there is an unidentified aircraft in the sky that night, they deny chasing it.

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South Wales police can confirm the South and East Wales Air Support Unit sighted an unusual aircraft on the 8th of June, 2008.

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The helicopter crew's encounter shocked the authorities. A meteor shower is the most likely explanation for the orange spheres,

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but the low altitude of the sighting poses a major problem for this theory.

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Where a meteor is burning up in the sky, it is a huge height above the ground.

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We're talking tens of kilometres, 18, 90, 100 kilometres up in altitude, and in a very different part of our atmosphere from where you get aircraft, for example.

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So what were the strange spheres of light hovering over England?

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One theory about some of these sightings was that we were dealing with military flares.

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Now the description on the face of it sounds quite promising. Military flares will appear as orange or red balls of light,

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and they will sometimes just appear to hang in the air, and then when they burn out, they'll vanish.

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Military flares have been responsible for UFO sightings in the past. Could this be the key?

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What doesn't fit with the flare theory is the location. Many of these sightings were over built-up areas,

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and the military would be dropping flares exclusively in rural areas which are used for military flying training.

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The mysterious event continues to baffle the M-O-D, and to the couple come forward claiming to know the truth.

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Not for one minute did anybody that was involved in the wedding think that it was any relation to what we were doing.

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On the same night of the police helicopter UFO encounter, Lynn and Lucy Thomas are celebrating their wedding.

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We decided that year not to go to Glastonbury, we were going to spend the money on our wedding instead, so we wanted to have a festival vibe wedding.

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We had an outside stage, we had fire dancers, and we had an outside fire, and we'd also bought some lanterns.

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Lit as a symbol of good luck in ancient China, paper lanterns had become increasingly popular in the UK as a way of marking an occasion.

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We let a load off. It was really pretty just seeing them all floating away in the sky.

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They watch their lanterns drift away, oblivious to the fact that a police helicopter is heading straight for them.

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At one stage the brice maids are saying, look at that, there's the police helicopter, but it was just hovering there.

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It was a weekend, it was a Saturday night, and the police helicopter is hovering, it's doing something else.

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We didn't cross my mind at all actually, that it was a problem. It was in addition to the wedding actually.

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We've got Skyland, we've got a police helicopter as well, that's nice.

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The happy couple head off on their honeymoon, unaware of the UFO frenzy unfolding back home.

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I can remember I flipped open the laptop and the news page came up and I could see that there was UFO sightings in south Wales, and I can remember originally just saying, oh, look at that.

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And then I'm reading through, the 7th of June, 11 o'clock, police helicopter over the Bristol Channel, and it was just, oh my goodness.

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That's a lantern.

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Its estimated 200,000 Chinese lanterns are released each summer in the UK.

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Had the Ministry of Defence finally solved the mystery of the spheres of fire.

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The summer months are very popular for Chinese lanterns. People are outside, for example, having barbecues, and very often that's the perfect place to let these things off.

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Lots of people are doing it in lots of different locations. You'll get reports of waves of UFO sightings over built up areas.

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Lynn and Lucy are sure they're responsible for the carnival sightings.

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I've got no doubt in my mind at all that that was our skylightings. Absolutely none.

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Yeah, guilty.

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But other eyewitnesses reject the lantern explanation.

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So what we're looking at here is a normal Chinese lantern. And as you can see, that, that, that colour is just orange or yellow.

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But the footage I've got is all multi-different coloured lights and stuff. So that just proves again that it's definitely not a Chinese lantern.

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Chinese lantern or not, one thing is for sure. As the popularity of lanterns rose, the number of UFO reports to the MOD rose with it.

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From about 2005 through to 2009, maybe 60, 70, 80% of UFO reports received and investigated by the Ministry of Defence turned out to be Chinese lanterns.

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The number of these reports and requests for information proved too much for the MOD UFO project to handle.

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In 2009, the government UFO desk was closed down.

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Chinese lanterns killed the Ministry of Defence's UFO project.

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With the government no longer watching the skies, it's up to others to find the answers to the unsolved UFO conspiracies.