Cops report UFO above East End, MoD X-files reveal (East London Advertiser, 5-19-2008)

From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project

The Clipping

By Gemma Collins

COPS on night duty spotted a UFO in the skies over East London, it has been revealed this week.

Details have emerged for the first time since the sighting in 2000 in previously secret X-files released by the Ministry of Defence.

The sighting was made by several officers at the former Whitechapel police station in Leman-street, 10 minutes from the Tower of London, who reported flashing white lights at 3.45am while on night shift in March, 2000.

The previously secret 'Whitechapel UFO' file is one of 200 sightings up and down the country which can now be downloaded from the National Archives website, include information dating back to the 1970s with the MoD's evaluations.

Many give details of flying objects and flashing white lights reported by onlookers, including four sightings of strange objects and lights in the East End.

One described "a small, red light moving slowly to the south" towards the River Thames.

"It did a U-turn and moved off to the north at great speed," it reveals. "Then it moved in tight circles."

There was a similar sighting in Bethnal Green in August last year, where there were "20 solid, red lights in the sky."

The spotter reporting it told the MoD: "The lights went up and down in the sky and then just disappeared."

In another UFO sighting, a "round, dim orange object moving north to south" was seen by a passer-by at 4.15am in Bow in 1998, two years before the police officers' report at Whitechapel.

This was also spotted at the same time by another onlooker elsewhere in East London, the X-file confirms.

The files were now available after requests made under the Freedom of Information Act and because of a "proactive move by the Ministry of Defence for open and transparent government," said a spokesman for the National Archives.

There were three sightings of UFOs in London last year. These included one where an "object or objects" landed on the ground in the middle of Streatham in south London.

The report said: "A person was seen and then other people were seen. A lot of phenomena."

Also included in the X-files is a report from a pensioner in Aldershot in 1983 who says he met an alien and actually went on board its spacecraft, before being quizzed by the aliens about his age.

The luckless pensioner was then told: "You can go. You are too old and too infirm for our purpose."