Readers report seeing 'UFOs'

9:21am Friday 6th June 2008

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STRANGE lights soaring through the skies of South Lakeland have been reported by readers of The Westmorland Gazette in recent weeks, reports Natalie Stewart.

Some believed them to be UFOs, others have searched for a more logical explanation such as weather balloons, but astronomer Stuart Atkinson has revealed that the lights are nothing more sinister than two spacecrafts orbiting Earth.

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A man from Holme saw two faint white balls of light on Saturday night and three other sightings were reported in May of several orange lights flying through the night skies.

Mr Atkinson, of the Eddington Astronomical Society, at Kendal, explained that the International Space Station (ISS) had been clearly visible from Kendal and across the UK for the past few weeks: "It is very visible on clear evenings and looks like a bright star that rises in the west, crosses the sky and sets in the east.

"It doesn't flash like an airplane, it just shines a steady light and can look amazingly bright if caught at just the right time."

Mr Atkinson also suggested that the orange lights could be unusually bright shooting stars, called fireballs, or an old satellite or piece of space hardware or junk re-entering the Earth's atmosphere and burning up.

As for the two strange lights in the sky on Saturday night, the US space shuttle, Discovery was launched from the Kennedy Space Centre at 10pm and around 20 minutes later it passed over the UK.

Mr Atkinson explained that the shuttle was on a mission to attach a Japanese laboratory to the ISS.

Moments earlier it had discarded its huge external fuel tank, which carried the fuel it needed to get up into orbit - around half a million gallons. The tank continued to fly through space just beneath the shuttle, before re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.

The lights that looked like two bright stars moving across the sky were the shuttle and its fuel tank, he said.

The Discovery space shuttle was the blue-white star' on top and the fuel tank was the star' on the bottom, which was reddish in colour, he added.

Mr Atkinson said: "We knew in advance that it was going to happen and lots of us saw it. However, anyone who didn't know what was happening could easily have thought they were seeing a UFO.

"It was particularly great for me to see it on Saturday night because I've been waiting to see a shuttle-and-tank fly-by ever since the shuttle started flying in 1981!"

The ISS will soon fall out of sight but will be visible again in early July, when it can be seen before dawn, rather than in the evening.

Story by Natalie Stewart.