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News and observation reports, June 2008:

U-K TABLOID THE SUN TALKS OF "ALIEN ARMIES SPINNING IN THE SKY":

U-K tabloid The sun continues to promote sightings and images of things in the sky that appear to be nothing more than groups of small hot air balloons, or "Thail lanterns".

They offer an image of possible ordinary balloons filmed by Bonnie Lewis, 29, at Bromsgrove, Worcs, last Friday, calling it "seven UFOs" and "strange shapes seen by Bonnie". The image is copyrighted and reproduction is forbidden.

They also mention that a Corporal Proctor saw "the amazing craft" on June 7, 2008, apparently a sighting of a group of about 30 slow drifting lights with nothing substantial to really suggest they were not thai lanterns. The Sun headlines this as "an alien army spinning in the sky".

The Sun now also claims that the so-called UFO chased by a police helicopter that same night was "huge."

The Sun also say that they quote British ufologist and former UFO-desk MoD officer Nick Pope saying that the MoD needs to look into the military sighting because "the military tend to make good UFO witnesses" and that "this object" tends to "pulsing virtually through the whole spectrum" so it's "no shooting star" or "meteors".

Not one word is said about Thai lanterns as possible explanation.

See The Sun's article and images at: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1336870.ece

BBC REPORTS ON MOBILE PHONE FOOTAGE OF "LIGHTS" OVER MERSEYSIDE, U-K.:

The BBC said on June 24, 2008, that a Liverpool man "claims" to have seen several UFOs hovering in the sky around the city and filmed them on his phone. Other people apparently reported the lights to the BBC, whereas Merseyside police said they received no report.

The man obviously told the truth and really filmed what he thought were UFOs, but what the film shows actually does not look at all different from a group of Thai lanterns. The man's description fits this explanation just right as well. He defines himself as a skeptic about UFOs but however thinks what he saw came from another planet.

The BBC says that "Sceptics suggest aircraft or unusual weather phenomenon could be behind the sightings" without source as to who these alleged skeptics are. I do not believe skeptics really suggested anything stupid like that about this sighting. I think any sensible ufologists, as opposed to incompetent ufologist or crackpot ufologists, whether claiming "skepticism" about UFO sightings or not, would readily suggest that the man filmed Thai lanterns. It is obviously media people, who are generally certainly not competent in UFO matters, who still have apparently not yet heard of Thai lanterns and continue to report on such sighting without even a word about this classical cause of UFO sighting reports.

See the video and the BBC report at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/7472421.stm

UFO SIGHTING IN TOURNEFEUILLE, FRANCE:

"La Dépêche", a newspaper of Toulouse, France, erported on a testimony which was described by their journalist Jean-Michel Lamotte, on June 24, 2008, on their site web, from a resident Tournefeuille, the Haute-Garonne, France, a pensioner from the Semvat company, Michel Saint-Marc, who in the night from the June 22 to June 23, 2008, could not fall alseep because of intense heat and set himself at the window of his bedroom and looked at the sky while hoping sleep returns.

At the end of a half hour, at 04:53 a.m. precisely, he heard a loud whistling sound and saw an object going down fast from the direction of Lèguevin, its color changing from green to purple. His heart fast beating, the man called his wife who also saw that, and he took his camera, always within reach, and had the time to take two pictures, unfortunately with a wide angle setting.

The object had stopped suddenly, and was then described as shining, with small dots points on the side, like port-holes. The witness estimated that it was at 500 or 600 meters away of him and was to be as large as a bus. After a few seconds, the object set out again as quickly as it had come, in direction of Portet this time, and still making a whistling sound, while a red gleam had appeared at its bottom.

The witness explained that according to him, the displacement, the speed, the noise, did not match ordinary aircraft, or plane, weather-balloons, rockets, nor atmospheric phenomena.

La Dépêche shows one of the images taken by the witness, but without precision as for its possible cropping or enlarging or smoothing.

Voir: www.ladepeche.fr/article/2008/06/24/460985-Tournefeuille-J-ai-vu-un-ovni.html

MAN SAYS HE SAW THE UFO TOO, BRISTOL, U-K:

Again, British tabloid The Sun reports on a so-called UFO: John Clamp, aged 25, from Montpelier, Bristol, U-K., contacted the newspaper to report that he too, like the police helicopter crew that day, saw a UFO on June 7, 2008.

His statement as reported by The Sun is particularly interesting as it is a perfect description of a Thai lantern:

"A brilliant golden flame inside a crystal square" that "floated slowly in the sky".

The man added that he saw it already in January and again on April 10, 2008. On June 7, he managed to snap it on his phone camera.

Unfortunately, one "UFO expert and chairman of the London UFO Studies" was apparently "excited by the sighting" but instead of providing the obvious explanation, decided that the witness "knows what he's talking about" and that the UFO is "definitely not and aircraft" and is "something that shouldn't been there."

Not a word about Thai lanterns is said in the Sun's article.

"HELICOPTER CHASING FLYING SAUCER" TABLOID STORY LIKELY ONLY ANOTHER THAI LANTERN SIGHTING, U-K.:

On June 7, 2008 from 11:00 p.m. GMT to 2 a.m. in the following morning, at a wedding party in England, a couple released the ones after the others Thai lanterns, small hot air balloons, which went to float above St Athan. The couple had bought 100 of these luminous hot air balloons and released 30 of them that evening.

In the night, an helicopter crew of three spotted an unusual object in this sector and reported it as unusual and unidentified object.

The tabloid The Sun then told that the helicopter crew had observed "a flying saucer" which would have flown straight onto their helicopter, and that the crew chased the saucer until they were out of fuel, details contradicted by the police force - but it did not prevent the story to be reproduced worldwide in the media as "helicopter police chausing a flying saucer".

UPI SAYS A MIG 21 FIGHTER WAS "HIT BY UFOs" IN ROMANIA:

On June 6, 2008, United Press International reported that "UFOs hit Romanian plane". According to UPI, the Romanian Defense Ministry confirmed that a fighter plane was struck by four unidentified flying objects, and that they released a video of the incident. Apparently a MiG 21 was struck by the objects in a check flight on October 31, 2007, but was able to land safely, according to a report by "Hotnews.ro".

A Lieutenant Colonel Nicolae Grigorie said a video recorded by cameras onboard the jet shows "two solid bodies, which are not translucid", and that authorities are working to determine what the objects could have been. They discarded birds because there are no birds in Europe able to fly so high, they discarded ice bodies because it was a clear sky, and they discarded pieces of another plane, rocket launches, ground artillery fires, and meteors, Grigorie reportedly said.

A French ufologist tells me that it is weird that the news surfaces again now - I think that UPI looked for a UFO of their own after the recent hullaballoo on the "UFO that exploded in Vietnam" by the other news agencies. My correspondent informs that he had contacted a USAF veteran who looked at it video and thinks that the MiG probably ran up against a bird. The object was very small, small fragments of plexiglass from the cockpit are seen falling down. The altitude of the plane could not exclude a bird, as my correspondent found, they are quite daring when they cross the Himalayas: http://audubonmagazine.org/birds/birds0011.html

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This page was last updated on August 14, 2008