Sky watchers are stunned

Did aliens visit England in the 1960s? If the newspapers are anything to go by, the answer is a resounding yes. Sightings of UFOs across Britain were continually reported in the press, and in 1968 one of the most interesting occurred. The city of Coventry was brought to a late night standstill by “a high-speed flying object”, described by one observer to be “diamond-shaped, with a long tail”. These “sky-watchers”, as the Coventry Evening Telegraph christened them, watched the object through binoculars as it hovered over central Coventry for approximately 15 minutes, before disappearing “away through the clouds”.

Mr Nigel Coupland, on duty as a security officer, said that at around 10pm he and a colleague had witnessed a “red-glowing star-like object” over Earlsdon. “I thought that it looked about the size of a hovercraft, lit up,” Mr Coupland said. Many people reported the same sighting that night, and questions of a ‘ hush hush’ transatlantic flight were quickly shut down by an official from the Ministry of Technology. So what was it that so many people saw that night? News story sourced from britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and rediscovered by Fern Riddell. Fern regularly appears on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking