Earth (39 page)

Dr. Greco's diagrams of the various shapes of craft—seen in one day alone—appear below:

Cyprus

During the night of 11/12 September 1992, according to a witness who contacted me the following month, aerial objects, including an enormous structured craft, appeared above Le Meridien Hotel, located some fifteen kilometers east of Limassol, southern Cyprus. I shall refer to the witness (an accountant) as “Andy,” as he insisted on anonymity.

“At approximately 10:50
p.m
.,” he reported, “I went out on the balcony
of my room to listen to the music being played by a hotel group on the ground floor. From the balcony there is a panoramic view of the hills to the north—about three miles away—but the sea is obscured by the east wing of the hotel. It was a completely clear night with an almost full moon. As I sat at the table facing north, I saw a white light approaching from the northwest. I assumed it was an aircraft heading for Larnaca, but it suddenly stopped. I then thought it must be a helicopter, because it rose vertically and stopped again. I then realized that there was no sound coming from the ‘craft' and also that there were no lights….

“I kept watching the object for about twenty minutes, during which time it was stationary. Then it started to move away to the hills directly opposite and stopped above them. Almost immediately it rose vertically, in stages, to a much higher point and stopped again…. After an hour or so it then began to move again and cruised (which is the only way to describe the way it traveled) back to approximately where it started, though a bit nearer to the hotel. The UFO remained in this position for some time, but was not always stationary—it would move
very
slowly at times, so slowly that if you did not concentrate you would hardly notice any movement at all.

“At about 2
a.m
., several other pale yellow lights approached slowly from the northeast—I counted eighteen in all—and [the nearest five] came to halt on a line from the sea past the hotel and inland for about a mile. The remainder were in a [square] formation stretching from the coastline to the hills and back to the end of the hotel…. At this point, the larger white object then moved back over to the hills and stopped. It then rose vertically—again in stages—until it was maybe a couple of thousand feet above the most distant light….

“At 4
a.m.,
all the UFOs began to move extremely slowly, at the same speed, toward the sea [and] as I glanced over the top of the hotel, a huge object appeared out and over the sea, climbing very slowly. It is difficult to describe the shape of this object because of the light, but the moonlight illuminated the right-hand side and part of the side facing me. Also, there was a narrow band of light across the middle of the object, and as it got higher two other bands of light appeared to be switched on above and below the first one.

“I must emphasise that the speed at which this thing was moving was
very slow, as though it was in trouble or very heavy. It appeared to be wider at the base [see witness sketch below]. I would say it was much bigger than the hotel. Meanwhile, all the other UFOs were patiently following at some distance…. It climbed really slowly and was upright, travelling vertically but at an angle above the sea.”

“There was no noise. Then the most extraordinary thing happened….

“When the huge object was just gaining height, a missile appeared to be fired at one of the yellow UFOs which were still over the hills opposite me. It came from behind one of the hills and went sharply up, trailing a yellow flame. As it approached the UFO I prepared for an explosion, but the yellow light of the UFO went out for a split second, there was a white spark, and the missile seemed to be deflected toward the hotel, to the left of where I was standing on the balcony. I watched the missile, which was glowing or burning red, go past and just over the hotel, heading out to sea. It was about the length and half the height of a single-decker bus, and
horizontal in flight.

“When the missile was fired, all the UFOs, including the massive one, stopped moving for fifteen minutes. The latter just remained suspended in the sky. Then they all began moving again, upwards and outwards over the sea, still at the same slow pace. This went on until 4:40
a.m
., when a vivid green and blue semi-circular object appeared over the sea above the wing of the hotel, below the huge UFO and between it and the hotel. It was much lower and was flashing blue and green intermittently; at times the colors intermingled …

“At 4:45
a.m.
another missile was launched at the last yellow UFO (the nearest one to the hills) and the same thing happened as before, except that when the deflected missile came past the hotel, it was not glowing red like the first one, only yellow at the rear end. At 4:50
a.m
. all the UFOs were getting higher in the sky, but it was noticeable that the huge one was
not
getting appreciably smaller the higher it got.

“[The huge object] seemed to me to look like some kind of transporter, because of its lighting, color, and shape: it was dull and workmanlike with only three strips of light—at least that I could see. By about 5:00
a.m
. the UFOs had almost gone.

“It is only conjecture on my part,” Andy concluded, “but I think the huge UFO had landed by the Limassol power station just along the coast or beyond it, and stayed there for about three hours. The smaller yellow ones were a protective force, and the larger white ones were the reconnaissance craft. What the object of the exercise was is purely a matter for speculation, but maybe the power station had something to do with it…. The only other thing I can think of is that the huge object was perhaps being repaired, because the difficulty it seemed to have climbing could suggest some sort of malfunction.”
12

My first line of inquiry was Headquarters, British Forces Cyprus at the Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area, which occupies a large area mostly contained on a peninsula some 25 kilometers to the south and west of Le Meridien Hotel. “I can assure you that the sitings [
sic
] were not as a result of any British Forces Cyprus exercise,” stated Squadron Leader J. A. Bartram RAF, Office of the Commander. “It would appear that other people did sight unusual aerial phenomena on the night in question [and] this was
reported in the Cypriot papers….”
13

In late November/early December 1992, I spent a week in Cyprus and interviewed people in the area, including an assistant manager at Le Meridien. A local researcher had not heard anything about the event, and my appeals for witnesses—on CyBC radio and television and in
The Cyprus Weekly
—drew a blank. I was unable to get an appointment at the Limassol power station, but the following year my friend Graham Sheppard, a former British Airways senior captain, visited the station and was told that nothing unusual had been reported on the night in question. Although there were reports of UFOs around that time, neither of us could find anyone who could corroborate the main event. One possible explanation may owe to the closely knit Greek-Cypriot community who, I gathered, are “quite sensitive about things of this nature.”

I should mention that earlier in the year, on the night of January 24/25, 1992, many residents of Larnaca, Limassol, and Palechori observed a brightly lit craft, estimated at about fifty meters in length. Some said it was soundless, while others thought they detected a low hum. Beginning at 23:00, the sightings lasted for two and a half hours.
14

I met Andy in my apartment in December 1992. He appeared nervous. As he had explained earlier: “I am very concerned about the consequences arising from publication, particularly the security implications, not only for me, but also for Cyprus … especially as missiles are involved.”
15

I wrote again to British Forces Cyprus in 2003, asking if any further information had come to light, querying the possibility that the event might have been related to an air-defense exercise. “Your request has been exhaustively investigated by RAF Akrotiri,” came the reply, “but, regrettably, unit records are unable to throw any further light on the events [and] hold no information on live weapon training for the night in question.”
16

If a hoax, one would have to question the motive. A desire for money and notoriety, at least, can be ruled out. Having met the witness and corresponded with him over a period of time, I retain the impression that he was describing a real event, one that—as in so many other cases—left him profoundly disturbed. Furthermore, reports of this type of craft were very rare in 1992. But as we shall see, sightings of similar types increased in
ensuing years.

Shropshire, U.K.

In
Need to Know
, I cite the penetration in the small hours of March 31, 1993, of two Royal Air Force bases—Cosford and Shawbury—by a large triangular craft, and (in the second edition of that book) reproduced a minute from the Ministry of Defence's [MoD] Head of Secretariat (Air Staff) to the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (ACAS). “Some of the reports state that the object was moving at a very high speed, while some say that it was hovering or moving very slowly,” the minute concludes.

“Many of the reports refer to the object being very large, flying low, and making a low humming sound. My staff have spoken to a number of the military and police witnesses, many of whom commented that the object was unlike anything they had ever seen before; a Met Officer at RAF Shawbury reported seeing the object projecting a narrow beam of light at the ground at a height of four to five hundred feet and estimated its size at somewhere between a C130 [Hercules] and B747 [jumbo]…. If there has been some activity of U.S. origins which is known to a limited circle in MoD [Ministry of Defence] and is not being acknowledged, it is difficult to investigate further….”
17

On the night of March 30, sixteen-year-old Darren Perks had an encounter with what was either the same or a similar craft. “At the time of the incident,” he told me in 2005, “I was preparing to enter the Army Air Corps. Since the age of twelve I had been a member of the Royal Air Force's Combined Cadet Force (CCF), in which I had already made the rank of flight sergeant. Being in the CCF, I had flying experience and extensive knowledge of all military aircraft of the current time and post cold-war era. I also had good knowledge of civilian and/or non-fixed-wing aircraft [and] I was a frequent visitor to RAF Shawbury airbase….

“At approximately 11:00
p.m
., I was walking home from my part-time job at the Shrewsbury Superbowl, in the northern outskirts of Shrewsbury. At the time, my parents owned a local pub called the Harry Hotspur, and it was only six hundred meters from my work along Harlescott Lane. As I got to within a hundred meters of my home, my eyes caught a slow-moving structured object, about three hundred feet up, moving from left to right—
south to north. At the time, the weather was clear and there was no wind and also no traffic passing me on the road, so my surroundings were very quiet.

“It was a black triangle shape, approximately 200 feet in length and 150 to 200 feet in diameter. It was [clearly] defined, and [it] blocked out the stars. As I continued to watch this strange craft, a brilliant white beam of light appeared from it and started to sweep the ground from left to right as if it were looking for something in the fields. On the two rear points of the triangle, I noticed a faint red or orange-colored glow. At one point, the craft stopped moving and just hung in the sky, still not making any sound at all.

“The triangle was moving very slowly—I would say about walking speed—and I could hear nothing but a very low humming sound that was irritating to hear. I also felt warm, and the sense of being watched, or at least that whoever or whatever was controlling the triangle knew I was watching it.

“Opposite my house at the time was rough ground and fields, and the triangle continued to move north over them with the white light flicking back and forth randomly. At this point, I estimated that I had been watching this craft for about two minutes when all of a sudden it shot off to the north at incredible speed, making no sound at all.