THEY never seem to show up on civil aviation or military radar, and Cypriot pilots say they have not seen any.
Yet Cyprus appears to be a hotbed of UFO activity given the number of sightings reported by members of the public.
The latest incident was some two weeks ago over Pervolia near Larnaca, which happens to be near the airport and close enough to the British base of Dhekelia.
Before that, there was a well-documented sighting over Kyrenia last November that was witnessed by a number of people.
One of those witnesses told the Famagusta Gazette: “It was an oblong shape, like a rugby ball on its end and was glowing very bright orange. It moved in small but rapid zigzags, then stopped and hovered for approximately 30 seconds before making a smooth ascent at 45 degrees up to the east. It then disappeared. A friend had sighted a similar event at the same spot a month previously.”
Prior to that, a sighting over Limassol in September was recorded on video by a Russian man and posted on YouTube. A few weeks earlier a tourist spotted one while lying on a beach sunbed looking at the stars near Yermasoyia.
In October 2005 in Pyrga: “Dogs barking at it alerted me to something as it was 1.30 in the morning. I noticed a bright light coming towards me which then stopped and hovered. With binoculars I could see it was a triangular shaped object with amber, green and white lights. It moved erratically left and right back and forth and hovered for 45 minutes. On trying to video it with powerful zoom, the camera wouldn’t operate. Checked the camera in other parts of sky and house and it operated perfectly, but wouldn’t let me video the object. It went behind the tree which was just to the right in a more westerly direction, and stayed there.”
The witness said he had asked the military to check if they had seen anything on their radar. They hadn’t.
They never do.
“We have checked our records and we have no reports… nothing at all for Cyprus,” said a bases spokesman.
“If they were low flying and very fast we wouldn’t be able to pick it up,” he added.
Civil Aviation told a similar story. “No UFO sightings on record for Cyprus.”
However, when the same question was put to them in April 2005 after another sighting, an official said at the time that their radar regularly registered what seemed to be aircraft but disappeared after three revolutions of the radar. “We call them Angels,” said the official at the time, adding that they generally put these ‘phantoms’ down to weather interference.
Last November, an international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials called on the US government to reopen its generations-old UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security, given continuing reports about flying discs, glowing spheres and other strange sightings.
The panellists from seven countries, including former senior military officers, said they had each seen a UFO or conducted an official investigation into UFO phenomena.
Cypriot pilots say, however, that they have never had an encounter.
“Not me, nor anyone else I know astCyprus Airways,” said pilots’ union spokesman George Charalambous.
Charalambous said a reported sighting would only go on a pilot report if it was something that might affect the safety of a flight. “I have not heard of anyone here encountering a UFO. If they had, the news would have circulated and it would have created a lot of interest,” he added.
But Paphos-based John Knowles, a former pilot and intelligence officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, who is also a member of British and American Parapsychological associations and the local version Psychognosia, is in no doubt about where he stands.
“The evidence over the past half-century and more is unassailable.
Personally, on seven occasions between 1940 and 1992, I have seen aerial phenomena that do not yield to any conventional explanation,” he says.
“But of course, I’m not alone in this. Tens of millions of people have seen them by now.”
Cyprus’ own Roswell incident
ACCORDING to the September 2005 edition of UFO Monthly, not only does Cyprus experience sightings but it even had a Roswell-type incident in 1973 in the Troodos mountains.
The entire incident was witnessed by a British Corporal stationed at Dhekelia.
The magazine’s editor Gary Heseltine, A British police detective, said he had no reason to doubt the account of the incident during an army exercise, as related by Corporal Tom Clarke, one of six soldiers involved.
“We were all awoken at about 2am by a brilliant, but not dazzling bluish, bright light, which we observed for 7-8 minutes. At first, we all thought it must be a helicopter looking for us or something else,” Clarke told the magazine. But there was no sound coming from the flying bright light and no explosion when it went down.
“We were all hit by what I can only describe as a shock wave that knocked us all flat to the floor!”
The platoon’s sergeant reported what had happened, and he and an officer went to check out the area where the light had gone down.
“After about an hour, the two arrived back, they said there had been what looked like a crash of some kind and they had radioed the information to base. We were to help in securing the area and retrieving any wreckage,” said Clarke.
Unmarked black helicopters then arrived and “people in black clothing” with no insignia were seen getting out. “We were only allowed on the site when all the large pieces had been lifted off the area. Our job was to comb the area for anything we thought might belong to the crash site and if anything was found it was to be placed in what looked like large industrial waste bins,” said the British officer.
He said he picked up a piece of metal with gold tiles on one side, some of which had stuck to his uniform, and which he quietly pocketed.
The soldiers were then debriefed and told never to talk about what they had seen. Otherwise they would be tried for treason and shot.
“All six of us were then split into different troops and platoons. I never saw our Platoon Commander or the Sergeant again. After a week or so, all six of the remaining members of the patrol were posted far and wide. To date I have never been able to make contact with anyone who served in this unit from my time with it.”
Asked by email what had become of the gold pieces, Helesltine told the Sunday Mail: “I have not found a suitable lab to approach [given the subject matter], and so the pieces have yet to be analysed.”
