This article was published in the daily newspaper Ipswich Evening Star, U-K, on August 30, 2003.
UFO investigators are targetting Suffolk in their quest to find alien life.
The county has become the focus for alien hunters, in a case worthy of X-Files agents Mulder and Scully, after a strange sighting of an apparently alien craft in the skies over east Suffolk.
Eagle-eyed residents living along the banks of the River Orwell may have witnessed a close encounter of the third kind if they had glanced up at the starry sky.
A strange yellow D-shaped object was spotted overhead by a man in his garden at Freston. He watched in wonder as the UFO changed shape before it altered course and flew off at around 11 p.m. on August 5.
But instead of phoning home, like Steven Spielberg's E.T., the man called the operator, who put through his call to Contact, an organisation based in Oxfordshire that records and researches UFO sightings.
Contact spokesman Michael Sopher said, "It will be interesting to see if anyone else saw the same thing."
"Any sightings over the Ipswich area are of great interest to us due to the events at Rendlesham. New evidence recently released by the government admits that this event was a proper UFO landing."
Rendlesham is reknowned worldwide for the event in 1980 when American airmen claimed a UFO landed in the forest at their airbase.
He added, "In East Anglia, reported sightings differ from other areas. There are lots of reports of strange objects flying inland from the sea and then back again."
"There was a wave of UFO sightings in Birmingham in June. Many people reported seeing lights zigzagging in the clear sky near the airport."
"At the same time, there was a geomagnetic storm which, we believe, causes people to be more spontaneous and tends to make people who see something more likely to report it."
