A top secret report by the MoD into UFOs has been made public for the first time and features a documented case in Portaferry in 1969.
The Ministry of Defence paper details what for many in the sleepy Strangford Lough village was the strangest incident to intrude into their lives up to that time.
A rocket-shaped object hovering over the village was detected on radar screens at Bishopscourt RAF base and an alert was immediately released that went all the way to Washington via Whitehall in London.
At first RAF technical staff believed the object could be a Russian intercontinental missile bound for Portaferry or themselves at the Bishopscourt facility.
Up to that time Portaferry was, understandably, not thought to have been high on the list of potential targets in the West compiled by top brass Kremlin military chiefs in the then communist regime in Russia.
But, taking no chances, the RAF reportedly scrambled aircraft and personnel to Strangford Lough to check out the strange radar readings.
The coastguard was also alerted and lifeboats launched to deal with any possible falling aircraft into the waters of the lough.
After some considerable time the object simply disappeared off the radar screens and Portaferry heaved a collective sigh of relief that nuclear carnage had not been wrought just at the start of the tourist season.
This case and hundreds of others are documented in the MoD report entitled ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK’ which was only released after a university academic made a request for it under the Freedom of Information Act.
Its conclusions are that ‘no evidence exists’ to confirm that UFOs are alien spacecraft and attributes most sightings to weather conditions, flocks of birds, or, intriguingly, to interference with witnesses’ brains by the presence of ‘plasma fields’.
These fields, which occur naturally in the atmosphere, distort the workings of the human brain, leading to firmly held false memory and can also interrupt the normal running of machinery and car engines.
So was Portaferry visited in that summer of 1969 by a huge plasma field which affected the RAF and which somehow formed itself into a seemingly solid object detectable on radar?
We may never know, but present day Portaferry councillor Joe Boyle, said that people in his neck of the woods are not easily duped or adversely affected by the weather --even by plasma fields.
“This was a very weird incident, there is no doubt about that, and whatever was hovering over Portaferry, it was something that I don’t think we can properly describe, or explain today.
“As far as plasma fields are concerned, well I’ve never heard of them, except with plasma screens on TV sets.
“That technology is proving more popular, but I’ve never heard of anybody hallucinating to the extent that aircraft are scrambled - even during episodes of The X-Files!” he said.
(Original headline: Portaferry’s secret UFO history )
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