‘UFO’ spooks İskele expats
AN İSKELE couple were left spooked after spotting a “strange” object dancing in the night sky above Boğaz, İskele.
Tracy Allen, 49, said she was sitting in her garden facing east when she noticed an odd “light in the sky” on Wednesday night.
“I just thought it was the North Star,” she told Cyprus Today. “As it got dark I realised the light was an orange colour and was actually moving.
“I decided to get my camcorder just to see if I could zoom in and see it. To my surprise I could. On the view finder I could see it was a bright blue-red colour.
“Then it started to change size and colour. It was a bright orange and yellow when it changed. It was also moving up and down and side to side.
“It got bigger in size and [changed] shape. I recorded what I saw. It was very weird and strange. I watched it for a couple of hours.
“My partner was also watching through his binoculars. Was it a planet, satellite, meteor? I don’t know . . . It was so strange to see, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Flabbergasted” partner Mike Steward, 73, said: “We have never seen anything like it in our lives. I could see [through my binoculars] craters on it.
“We watched it for two hours, it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Mr Steward said the couple, who moved to the TRNC from South Cyprus in January 2019, spotted the object between 8.30pm and 9pm and stayed up until 11pm, when they went to bed, with the “UFO” still visible.
He said the “pulsating” object appeared in the night sky in the east and was moving in a southwesterly direction.
The couple were “not afraid” but “fascinated” by what they saw, as were neighbours who they showed their video to the next morning.
TRNC Civil Aviation Department director Mustafa Sofi told Cyprus Today that nothing out of the ordinary had been reported in the last few days.
“There was no military exercise in the region on Wednesday, and there was nothing unusual reported”, he said.
Wednesday’s sighting came after a meteor was spotted over the skies of Cyprus on Sunday night. Mike Redman wrote in a public Facebook post that he saw a “massive” meteor at around 7.10pm “tracking east to west, south of [the] Five Finger Mountains”.
The International Meteor Organisation said on its website that it had received 29 reports of a “fireball” seen over Lefkoşa, Gazimağusa, Larnaca, Limassol and Paphos.
A social media post by the South’s Cyprus Astronomy Organisation said that an “impressive meteor appeared in the sky” on Sunday that gave, “for a few seconds, a unique picture to those lucky witnesses” with reports that it was “heading south-west” and leaving behind “an impressive tail”.
Did you see the object in the sky above Boğaz on Wednesday night? Do you know what it was? Write in to cyprustoday@yahoo.com.