Lights Over London

[Trudi G]

At about 5.40pm this evening, my mum and sis were in the back garden uprooting a bush that had been blown over in the recent winds, when my mum started shouting for us (Meena, Raina and myself) to come out in the garden.
We came out to find loads of orange lights in the sky, coming from a north-westerly direction, and heading south-eastwards.
They were very high up, and quite large, and when they stopped glowing you could see them still floating overhead, silhouetted against the clouds.
They were closely followed by a helicopter circling round and round for about 20 minutes after.
I have scanned the news and can find nothing as to what these were. My guess is that it was space debris - possibly from the recently destroyed Chinese sattelite, but it would be nice to know for sure.
As we saw them when they had stopped glowing, i'd imagine some debris fell to Earth, maybe in the sea.
Did anyone else see this, or know of someone who did? I'm very intrigued now!

[Jeff]

Ever see that movie 'Signs'?

[Trudi G]

Yes - but i'm ok, i live on the 2nd floor, with an intercom and 2 doors to get thru!

I'll just get my tinfoil hat....

[WhiteCrow]

Could be a straggler from the Quadrantids ...

http://www.geocities.com/~starwanderer/janmetor2006.htm

[Trudi G]

Could be a straggler from the Quadrantids ...

http://www.geocities.com/~starwanderer/janmetor2006.htm

No, we saw a couple of those, and i've witnessed about an hour of a heavy meteor shower some years back.
This was different, it was almost in formation - at one point looking remarkably like Orions Belt!

[WhiteCrow]

No, we saw a couple of those, and i've witnessed about an hour of a heavy meteor shower some years back.
This was different, it was almost in formation - at one point looking remarkably like Orions Belt!

Dunno - it doesn't take much to make something totally mundane like navigation lights on an airplane look spooky and unworldly.

I'm reminded of this because of the time me and my wife saw an alien. We'd gone to the moors of Yorkshire for a trip to where I used to live. The area is very wierd, mist kind of changes lights around and sometimes makes things also sound different - so no surprise it's supposed to be the UFO hotspot of Europe because everything gets messed around.

Anyway we went out on the moors at night, you know as young lovers do. On our way back came accross this really strange white shape which just was so unearthly. It moved in the strangest way imaginable, but definitely towards us, I can still hear my wife in terror going "what the hell is that", yeah I felt gripped in a moment of woken terror like a nightmare you can't get out of.

So what was it? A horse. But not as silly as it sounds. It was a black and white horse - simply the black bits you couldn't see at all, and with only the white bits moving it wasn't recognisable as a horse at all. But it taught me an interesting lesson about the gulf between what you think you see and what's really there.

[Doctor Vendetta]

I doubt it would be space debries burning up. As I understand it, all objects that enter the atmosphere do so in an east-to-west direction due to the Earth's rotation.

[Paul Monk]

Where's Jason Thompson when you need him?

"Come on boffins, SORT IT OUT!"

[Trudi G]

I'm not the sort of person that gets sucked in to believing in aliens and the like, i'm quite level headed and sensible, lol! This was really like nothing i'd ever seen before, and was witnessed by 4 other adults and 2 children. We are on the Heathrow flightpath, and a plane went over when these lights were in the sky, and they must've reported seeing something strange becauase the helicopter circling came within 10 mins of that.
I've been scanning the news and there's been nothing at all about it so i'm well and truly perplexed now!

[Dave Tudor]

Could be a straggler from the Quadrantids ...

Sounds painful...

[michael]

i did not see any but you seem to not be the only one?

DOZENS of mysterious lights were spotted hovering in the sky above Archway - spreading panic among residents below.

Unidentified flying orange objects stopped traffic and left residents staring skyward in disbelief at around 5.30pm on Thursday.

Islington police received four calls within a matter of minutes.

Witness Alix McAlister, 34, a market stall trader from Bredgar Road, Archway, said: "I just picked up my son from nursery in Bredgar Road. I had just come out of the door when I noticed what was going on in the sky.

"There were a group of them - 10 to 15 of them moving together. My first impression was that they reminded me of a squadron of aeroplanes in formation. But they didn't have a proper formation and they were all moving at the same speed.

"I thought for a while that something was happening in the centre of London. Bombs and planes crossed my mind. But I realised very quickly that they didn't look like any aircraft I'd seen before.

"They were coming from the north and moving south. And then they kind of stopped and they were hovering. There was no sound. They seemed to fade away and I saw more coming and then they stopped. It lasted about 10 minutes."

Islington police informed Contact International UFO Research about the sightings. Soon after another witness contacted the Oxford-based organisation, which is devoted to solving the mystery of UFOs, and described what he saw.

A spokesman for Contact International said: "He told me he was picking his daughter up from school and he saw many people looking up in the air. Traffic had stopped and people were staring.

"He said he saw between 12 and 15 orange lights travelling across the sky. Then they would stop and then they went upwards.

Chinese New Year maybe

[Trudi G]

YES!!!!!

[Andrew Curnow]

Are there any plastics factories near where you live, Trudi?

[Trudi G]

Not that i'm aware of...

[Andrew Curnow]

Given that there's been no reports of shop window dummies killing cyclists wearing stupid hats, I have to assume it wasn't the Autons.

More seriously, did you ever find out what the lights were, Trudi?

[WhiteCrow]

Perhaps one of the local schools are going to have a new headmaster?

[michael]

flying Chinese lanterns
have been see be for
more info
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/4369232.stm

[Jonno]

Sounds intriguing - alas, at that time on that day the only lights in London I saw were those on my tube train home!

[Trudi G]

flying Chinese lanterns
have been see be for
more info
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/4369232.stm

My little boy thought that's what it might be. I'm still waiting for something in the local papers to give some kind of explanation, as of yet there's been nothing though.

[WhiteCrow]

The best scare we've ever had is when our son woke us at 6:30 to say there were lights hovering in the sky.

Looking out of the window there were indeed 3 of them silent and motionless with just enough light of day for us to see they weren't helecoptors or airplanes. A real war of the worlds moment ... til we realised they were in fact army flares.

[Paul Monk]

Was this in the seventies?

Army flares... Oh please yerselves.

[Trudi G]

Well i've bought a copy of the Islington Gazette, and they've dedicated a whole page to this, but sadly it seems we are no nearer to solving the mystery.
Apparently these things were tracked on radar, were definitely not a comet, shooting stars or weather balloons, and are not believed to be sky lanterns because of the size and movement of them. There was no weird weather occurrences on that night either.
The mystery deepens...

[Trudi G]

A little bit of video footage of the strange lights - that no-one still seems to have any idea about what they were.

http://www.islingtongazette.co.uk/co...FOArchway.aspx

[Ralph]

Here's a close up shot earlier in their journey: