Lanterns cast light on UFO claims

Yet more sightings of strange lights in the sky may have turned Shropshire into the country's UFO capital but some believe the real truth was out there - at a barbecue in Telford.

The latest report of a UFO sighting in the county came on Sunday night when four mysterious lights were seen in the skies above Ironbridge. Lauren Crouch saw the lights and managed to photograph them.

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She said: "We saw strange orange lights in the sky last Sunday at 9.40pm in Ironbridge.

"There were four of them flying one after another. They made no noise but flew over one by one at quite a speed and disappeared in a matter of minutes."

Samantha Roberts may have a more down-to-earth explanation for the lights, as she was at a family barbecue in Wellington Road, Muxton, Telford, the night before. She thinks the cause of the sightings may have originated there.

Samantha, from Denbigh, North Wales, said: "I was at a birthday barbecue at my partner's aunt's home and during the evening we lit some Chinese-style flying lanterns which we let off into the night sky.

"They were quite big, each measuring about three feet long, and there were about eight of them. I remember us joking after we let them go that they looked like UFOs."

Samantha believes some people may well have mistaken the silent, ghostly, floating lanterns for UFO.

The theory is supported by a hotel manager who claimed last month that a series of mysterious lights seen over a Shropshire barracks may have been a similar set of Chinese wedding lanterns.

Three soldiers at Clive Barracks, Tern Hill, near Market Drayton, had seen 13 lights zig-zagging across the sky earlier in the month but staff at the nearby Tern Hill Hall Hotel said the sighting could have been of lanterns which had been let off at the hotel by wedding guests.

Hotel manager Stuart Willatt said the lanterns were about a metre wide and were a balloon with a wax wick at the bottom, which burns. About 40 or 50 were released and he said some must have drifted over towards Newport and over the barracks.

By Simon Hardy

The lanterns taking flight.

One of the strange lights in the sky believed to have been a UFO.