Sighting causes drivers to stop and stare

The Hornsby and Crouch End Journal, UK reports that a dozen mysterious lights hovering over Archway on Feb. 1, 2007 around 5:30 p.m. caused drivers to stop and stare.

The “squadron” of flying orange objects even caused some people to scream and local police received four calls within minutes of the sighting.

"I parked the car and when I looked in the sky between the Little Angels nursery and the trees and there were balls of light in the sky. They were moving together," said designer James Zafar of Palace Road, Crouch End, who watched the phenomena from Bredgar Road.

People also witnessed the spectacle from nearby Magdala Avenue and Highgate Hill, he said. About 30 people stopped to stare in Summerlee Gardens, Fortis Green said Tom Cull, 27, a vision mixer, who had just finished a guitar lesson when he noticed a crowd of people staring up at the sky in Magdala Avenue.

“Cars had stopped. It was kind of eerie. What I found strange about these things was the way they moved,” he said.

A 49-year-old company director, who did not want to be named, was about to enter Archway Tube station in Highgate Hill when he saw the lights.

"There was screaming going on and everything. It was weird."

Less than 30 minutes later, similar "strange orange lights" were seen miles away above Kings Lynn, East Anglia. A 34-year-old market stall trader from Bredgar Road, Archway said he had just picked up his son from a nursery school on Bredgar Road.

"I had come out of the door when I noticed what was going on in the sky,” said Alix McAlister.  “There were a group of them - 10 to 15 moving together. They reminded me of a squadron of airplanes in formation.”

“ He added, “I thought something was happening in the center of London. Bombs and planes crossed my mind but they didn't look like any aircraft I'd seen. They were coming from the north and moving south, then they kind of stopped and they were hovering. There was no sound. It lasted about 10 minutes."

McAlister said he believes sky lanterns" or "UFO balloons" - one-off miniature hot air balloons that can be ordered online for use at parties might have been the cause. A sky lantern consists of a plastic bag about 28 inches tall, which is lit with a paraffin block. It burns for up to 10 minutes and floats as far as 1,000 meters up into the sky. However, experts are at odds as to what the phenomenon really was.

Police told one 999 caller that he was "really really lucky" because he had witnessed a meteor or a shooting star. However, no reference was made to either phenomenon in records filed after the sighting. The Ministry of Defence said it had no reports of a "security incident" and would not attempt to identify the precise nature of each reported sighting.

The Royal Astronomical Society ruled out a cosmological explanation and concluded that the lights were either military aircraft or some type of weather balloon, while astronomer and self proclaimed "UFO sceptic" Ian Ridpath also dismissed any astronomical or climatic explanations.