This article was published in the daily newspaper The Northern Territory News, Australia, on May 6, 2003.
By Rajiv Maharaj
Beachside residents thought they were being invaded by aliens when a set of mysterious bright lights appeared in the night sky.
"People were out on the road, pointing to the bright lights and yelling it was an alien invasion," mother of three Yvonne Morris said.
"People were just stunned."
The Northern Territory News was flooded with calls from people who all say they saw the same thing from their Nightcliff homes - eight bright yellowish-orange lights in perfect formation over the Timor Sea.
Brad McDonald, 48, was at the Nightcliff Jetty fishing with family and friends when he saw the lights on Saturday about 9pm.
"I've never seen anything like it - it was bloody strange," Mr McDonald said.
But he said he had a strange feeling before he saw the glowing lights.
"I thought it was odd before that because the fish were biting like hell, and then all of a sudden the tide went out."
He described the lights as bright orange-yellow about 1km away, and in perfect formation.
"My mate reckons they were weather balloons, but I disagree - they were too perfect.
"There were 40 people at the jetty and we were all intrigued," he said.
Ms Morris and her children were sitting on the verandah of their beachfront property when the orange-yellow lights first appeared.
"The eight lights were about 45 degrees from each other, and appeared to be fairly structured."
UFO sightings are fairly common in the NT - no place more so than Wycliffe Well, 1100km south of Darwin, where Holiday Park owner Lew Farkas is the local expert on UFOs, having seen them with monotonous regularity over 18 years.
"The closest look I got of one was the spaceship's portholes, but I couldn't see the alien bloke inside," Mr Farkas, 54, said last night.
He said the formation described by the Nightcliff residents was similar to ones he had seen.
"It sounds like it was one mothership, with the other supporting craft on the side," he said.
Weather bureau senior forecaster Pradeep Singh said the bureau did not see anything unusual on its radar.
