As previously stated the start of our investigation was to put a report in the Citizen newspaper after our own sighting. This report featured in the July 28th edition and can be read by clicking on the cut out opposite.

As stated in the report we also contacted the Ministry of Defence just to see if their view point on Unidentified Flying Objects has changed. Sadly it is still a closed door and all we came away with was this standard courteous reply from them. (click letter to enlarge)

Thankfully we did get a response from people in the local area a selection of emails received are as follows:-

Received 28th July 2005

On 9th july 2005 late at night (11pm) a strange orange glow moved slowly across the sky no sound could be heard from it at all. It suddenly came to a halt and hovered for approx.1 minute and all of a sudden it shot of at great speed and disappeared within seconds  We were at a family bbq when this occured there was 6 witnesses there.We saw this strange object in   Hatherley., Cheltenham

Anon

Approx 2 weeks ago on 4 consecutive nights we also saw strange lights in the sky which appeared at first to be stars. But looking closer they were moving one of which suddenly changed direction at a right angle and sped off quite fast. While it sped off an apparent star that was stationary moved with it as it sped by. On other instances We saw apparent stars move quickly and then stop for 10 minutes or so and then move a bit further and then speed off. All of the sightings took place between about 10 to 12 in the evening. We very often sit outside last thing at night to have a cigarette and we see planes go by but these lights are nothing to what we have seen before. My girlfriend reckons that they were American spy planes that are disguised to look like stars checking whatever for Fairford air show because it was a few days before the show that we saw them. I hope this have been some help to you.

Steve Baker
Mel Wheeler

Received 20th August 2005

I spotted your request for information in the Echo/Citizen website relating to the incidents in July.
I can't comment on those, but I have another sighting you may be interested in:-
On Saturday night, 20 August 2005, around 10.30, I was with my wife and 6 friends at a house in Warden Hill Road, Cheltenham.  The only two smokers in the group went into the back garden for a cigarette.  After a few minutes they excitedly called us out to see something in the sky.
Drifting across the sky at apparent slow speed (possibly wind speed) were eight brilliant orange flickering/twinkling lights.  Seven were in a loose group formation whilst the other was some distance away.   Direction of travel was roughly West to East.  It was a clear night, but their brilliance and apparent size was well above that of the stars and a commercial aircraft that passed in the distance.
We watched them for about 5 minutes.  Each eventually dwindled out to nothing with about three taking a bit longer than the others to disappear.    At that point, they had passed the overhead position and were maybe 30 to 40 degrees off the vertical to the East. 
Amazingly, the group seemed at one point to slowly take on the positions of the stars in "The Plough" or "Big Dipper", not unlike those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, before drifting apart again, but that could have been just a coincidence or illusion.  
First thoughts were fireworks but we discounted this because they lasted so long.  Another thought was model hot air balloons (it is very unlikely that real ones would be flying at that time of night), but we discounted this because they were so consistently bright as if producing their own light.  That made us wonder about parachute flares, but there were no aircraft sounds and there was no obvious descent in their flight path.  However, about five minutes after, we heard sounds like fireworks exploding in the distance across Cheltenham, which returned us to the flare theory, wondering if flares had been fired from some sort of launcher perhaps. 
Height?  Difficult to say -usual depth perception problem with night sky sighting.  Their brilliance and speed suggested fairly low - 1 to 3000 feet.  However,  one of our friends fetched his binoculars, but the objects appeared no larger or different when viewed that way, suggesting they may have been much higher and therefore travelling much faster.   These were not conventional aircraft.
I have had a keen interest in aircraft since a boy and have held a private pilots licence for the last 33 years.  I am also a retired police officer.
We all agreed that these objects were remarkable and unlike anything any of us had ever seen before.
There were other witnesses it seems - I caught the back end of an interview on BBC Glos the following day.  The man had managed to take some video footage apparently.

John Creed

Thanks to Lynn at PARASOC and PIRT Paranormal Team who forwarded on this email from Bruce Kuk regarding his sighting of Friday 15th July.

Did anyone see 3 lights in the sky, tonight (Friday 15th) They were reasonably large like car spot lights but not so intense,they were a dull orangey brown colour, like car headlights on a flat battery, and flying quite low in an elongated triangular formation they were heading away from Cheltenham and towards Hatherley. they stayed in formation I could hear no sound at all from them, whereas if they were planes or helicopters I'm sure I would have considering the distance, they changed course towards Shurdington road but then stopped, still holding formation the one appearing to be top right seemed to be moving away towards and into cloud, so elongating the triangle formation, they seemed to get smaller and then I realised that they were moving up, they carried on going up and I am sure they went too high to be helicopters. I lost track of them one by one as a large cloud moved in the way.  ( I did  manage to get some photos)  I live not far from Staverton airport and so I am used to seeing all sorts of planes and helicopters flying around here day and night... these were not any planes or helicopters that I have seen the likes of before. maybe you saw them and can tell me different?
 

I did get in touch with Bruce who kindly emailed me the pictures he took please click on the images opposite to enlarge

The one theme that has been coming together from all the emails we have received is the colour of the lights being orange and that is highlighted very well in Bruces photos.

This led to trawling through other newspaper articles for more information. The following is from the Gloucestershire Echo

10:30 - 23 August 2005

Mysterious orange lights have been spotted above the skies of Cheltenham. Gloucestershire police are investigating the sightings and treating the incident as suspicious.
Physics teacher Kevin Downes was running with his wife Alexandra in Winchester Way, Warden Hill, when they saw the lights at 10.30pm on Sunday.
Kevin, 52, who used to teach at Dean Close School, said: "At first I thought they were fireworks.
"Being a physicist I was fascinated what these orange lights were. There were about 12 of them and they kept moving across the horizon.
"I then saw somebody pulling into their drive and approached him to look up at the sky, just in case we were seeing things.
"He saw the lights too and got out the binoculars he uses for watching the horse racing.
"The lights, which were shaped like the plough star constellation, stopped and hovered above us."
He said they then dispersed and faded out.
Ian Statham, managing director of Gloucestershire Airport in Staverton, said: "Lights on aircraft are red, white or green - not orange."
Ursula Hughes saw the lights from Malvern Road, where she was hosting a dinner party with her husband Malcolm.
Mrs Hughes, 67, said: "I looked out and saw these beautiful orange lights moving from the east. They flew in formation and look like little lanterns."
Rod Salisbury, secretary of Cotswold Astronomical Society, said: "The only things that can be seen moving are meteors and they're not orange and they only move for a very short period before they burn up.
"Satellites move but appear white, reflecting the light from the sun. They wouldn't appear for as long as 20 minutes."

Comments received by the Gloucestershire Echo following the report are as follows:-

About 2 weeks ago during a sunny afternoon I saw 6 objects high in the sky in the direction of Cirencester. Five of the objects were a white\grey in colour and looked like golf balls hovering in the formation of the plough. The sixth caught the Sun and reflected as it approached the rest of them. I watched them for about 5 mins until they all faded away or moved out of my range of sight. I was excited upon reading this story as Kevin also mentioned the plough formation.

Marc, Charlton Kings

We were having a birthday party in the garden when we all saw about 5 or 6 lights in the sky. They were unlike anything I have ever seen in the sky before and noone could think of an explanation for them. They did not flash or twinkle like other bodies in the sky and had no trails behind them. The lights were very bright and glowed orange for quite a time before fading away until they could no longer be seen, perhaps after 15 minutes. In this time, they had not travelled far across the sky, but they were moving slowly. When they first appeared, they were slightly scattered, but then appeared to move closer together as though moving in formation until they had formed a distinctive pattern in line with each other. Their colour was very bright and distinctly orange. The sight of them was so remarkable and inexplicable that some of us were actually quite spooked and a little afraid. I would love for someone to be able to come up with some sensible explanation. They were clearly not satellites or comets or shooting stars. They were not aeroplanes. Someone suggested helicopters, but we would have heard the blades. Someone else has said it could have been fuel burning up after being dumped by a plane, but this would burn up in no time at all and not hang around in the sky so long.Perhaps it was something military that noone wishes to admit to?

Al, charlton kings

More from the Gloucestershire Echo:-

10:30 - 25 August 2005

Dozens of people have reported seeing mysterious orange lights above Cheltenham.
The Echo has been inundated with calls from people who saw the unexplained lights on Saturday night. John Day, 48, took the picture of them while hosting a party at his Up Hatherley home.
He said: "There were about 19 people in the garden and one of the small girls noticed the lights in the sky.
"I was taking a picture of our friends who were celebrating their anniversary and thought these lights looked strange so I started taking snaps.
"We thought it was a balloon with lights in at first, but when it passed over the house we weren't too sure.
"The girls think it was a UFO. The lights were strange."
Coach driver Pamela Bailey, 48, pulled over when she saw them.
She was driving the Megabus back from London when she saw the lights from the A40 at Golden Valley.
Mrs Bailey said: "I stopped at the Arle Court roundabout and the passengers were all looking up at the sky.
"I then moved on to to the Westal Green bus stop and three men jumped out to have a look. All the passengers were totally amazed.
"When I got to the depot in Cheltenham all the other drivers had seen them."
John Creed saw the lights with his wife and six friends while at a house in Warden Hill Road, Warden Hill.He said: "Amazingly, the group seemed at one point to slowly take on the positions of the stars in The Plough or Big Dipper, not unlike those in a scene in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, before drifting apart again.
"These were definitely not conventional aircraft.
"I've had a keen interest in aircraft since a boy and have held a private pilot's licence for the last 33 years, so I'm well aware of the sort of lights displayed on conventional aircraft.
"I'm also a retired police officer. We all agreed that these objects were remarkable and unlike anything any of us had ever seen before."
Kevin Downes, 52, was running with his wife Alexandra in Winchester Way, Warden Hill, when they saw the lights at 10.30pm. He said they stopped, hovered above them then faded and dispersed.
Gloucestershire Airport managing director Ian Statham, told the Echo on Tuesday: "Lights on aircraft are red, white or green - not orange."
Rod Salisbury, secretary of Cotswold Astronomical Society, says the lights could not have been meteors.

Again More reports of Orange lights were reported in the Stroud news and Journal:-

17th August 2005

ALIENS may already be among us after an eerie revolving light was spotted hovering over Stroud and Chalford on Saturday.
Several eyewitnesses saw the unworldly glow in a vaguely circular motion in the clouds at around 11pm and are convinced it was not a helicopter or spotlight.
Stroud shopowner Emma Hannaway,30, saw the lights over Chalford.
"It was just like a spotlight from a club or helicopter but there was no beam. It was a kind of smoky green and it was moving in a circle but really erratically. My friend wouldn't let me leave the car because she  thought Iwas going to be beamed up"
Prunella Walker,20, from Rodborough, saw the light above Stroud.
"It was a white light. It looked like a strong torch or a spotlight but there was no beam. It looked like it was searching for something."
Another eyewitness told the SNJ he had spotted the mysterious light above Stroud police station at around 11.00pm.
"I was just taking the bins out and I saw a white light just shining on the bottom of the clouds. It was mechanical in the way it kept to the same path but it wasn't moving in a circle."
Matt Ford spokesman for Gloucestershire police said there had been three reports for the Stroud area of an unexplained light in the Sky on Saturday night. But he added "There is no evidence to suggest that it was martians."
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said there were no military aircraft flying in the five valleys at the time. She said "There were no exercises in that area over the weekend and we have had no reports of anything that has compromised national security."

It appears that the sightings moved east and the south into the month of September the following is an excerpt from Louth Today:-

UFO mystery leaves experts baffled
13th September 2005
REPORTS of bright, orange orbs over Louth have left experts baffled.

The balls of multi-coloured light were seen by residents in St Bernard's Avenue around 10pm last Sunday.
Two weeks ago three similar sightings off the coast of Trusthorpe were explained as being made by afterburners from military aircraft on exercise.
But RAF bosses said this time there had been no fighter jets around the Louth area at that time last Sunday.
Steve Whittleton, 34, from St Bernard's Avenue, said: "I saw two UFOs - I'm certain of that.
"There were two massive orange balls right above me, moving slowly.
"I wanted to rub my eyes but I did not want to miss them. I told my wife, but she thought I was bonkers but I know what I saw."
A spokesman at The Coastguard HQ in Great Yarmouth said the strange lights seen over Trusthorpe, last week, were nothing to be concerned about – and were likely to have been made by military aircraft.
But an RAF spokesman said Sunday's orange balls were a mystery.
They said: "We don't think there were any jets in the sky at the time. It's very unusual."
The spokesman said Air Traffic Control had been closed on Friday night, which meant private aircraft flights were likely to have gone unrecorded.

And finally a report from the Guardian Series

UFOs above Loughton

By Guardian-series

LOUGHTON was visited by aliens in bright triangular orbs on Saturday night or so some residents believe.
Lit, flying objects were reported in the sky over the town at around 9pm.
Shelley Ginn, 17, of Barfields Gardens said: "I was sitting in the front room with my mum, when my brother came in and told us about these strange things in the sky.

"We went to see what they were, and watched them from the window for about an hour. During that time, about seven of our neighbours were out watching them as well."
Miss Ginn said that she was unsure what the objects were, but said they were moving too quickly to be planes. She said: "They were lit, orangey objects moving at real speed across the sky. They disappeared and re-appeared a lot, and there were about ten in total."

Saturday evening saw patchy cloud, but Miss Ginn said that although she was no expert, it was an extremely strange sight. She described the lights as "phenomenal" and "extremely bright".
A report on international website ufoinfo.com described a "triangular formation of reddish/orange lights" and said they were orb-shaped.
The website also noted that they made no noise, unlike aircraft, which can clearly be heard on the ground when passing over residential areas.
A similar sighting was made in Epping in March this year, but it turned out that the floating objects were Thai lanterns that had been released at a wedding.

Miss Ginn said that this had been mentioned to her as a possible explanation by a neighbour. She added: "It was like nothing I've ever seen before totally weird."

Summary

There ends the current reign of sightings so far. The most interesting aspect as I have already said is that the majority of the sightings are of orange lights. The other interesting thing to note is that the two photographs of the Objects taken show a formation of three orange lights in a triangular formation. This brings us on to our first theory in that most modern day UFO sightings are now triangular shaped craft. The Stealth fighter when still in secret testing was often mistaken as a UFO. The latest project under wraps is the so called Aurora. Could this still secret aircraft be the subject of our sightings and could that be why the Ministry of Defence are seemingly not interested ?

The second theory is that the sightings could simply be caused by a phenomena called 'Min Min Lights'. This is where under certain atmospheric condition a light source which may be several hundred miles away, gets refracted.  Its like the way light travels through a fibre optic cable, no matter how you bend the cable.
With Min Min Lights the fibre optic cable is an atmospheric condition caused by a temperature inversion. This is where cold dense air is trapped next to the ground under a layer of warm air. A certain shape of temperature inversion will mean that light near to the ground will be refracted in such a way that it travels in a curved path. The further away from the light source you are the higher it will appear in the sky.

Conclusion

Just to round off this report it is certain that people have witnessed some sort of phenomena this summer over our county. The truth is we will never know the truth about what caused our latest UFO flap. I have steered away from the more controversial theories such as the supposed UFO freeway that is said to exist between the star positions of Arcturus and Muphrid anybody interested in these more way out theories can get more information by clicking here.

Chris Howley GPRG 8th November 2005