UFOs, UAPs, and ABCs, are out there. Confused? Read on...

Most of us are more used to the occasional UCS (Unconfirmed Celebrity Sighting) than UFOs and ABCs (Alien Big ats).

But there are plenty of people among us who have seen strange lights in the sky and wild beasts in their gardens. Within the last month alone the SNJ has reported sightings of both.

So what is behind these apparitions and how do the powers that be explain them away? Anna Parry reports.

*Alien Big Cats (ABCs).

Hundreds of people in Britain have reported sightings of ABCs since the 1970s. The most common description is of a black cat the size of a labrador.

These animals are most likely to be black leopards, which were popular novelty pets in the 1960s. They are often mistakenly called pumas. Black pumas are extremely rare, even in the USA, and if there are pumas roaming Britain they are likely to be light coloured.

Other big cats that may inhabit our countryside are lynxes, which have tufted ears. Most big cats are solitary animals and there is enough wild prey (rabbits, deer, rodents and birds) in the British Isles to support them.

Between 2001 and 2005, DEFRA declared 31 official big cat sightings and although none of the sightings was confirmed, 24 of them could not be otherwise explained. It is this inability of the government to deny the existence of big cats that leads many people to conclude that they are here and real.

Local big cat enthusiast Frank Tunbridge says that between April 2004 and July 2005 there were 2,000 reported accounts of ABCs. He believes that animals released after the Dangerous Animals Act of 1976 have interbred and that people are now seeing is a naturalised, hybrid British black leopard.

He stresses that these animals pose no real danger to people or pets and believes that the majority of sheep killings attributed to big cats have been carried out by dogs.

Cats kill their prey with a bite to the neck or throat and then drag the carcass away. Dogs are less meticulous and tend to tear at animals before leaving the remains behind.

So far, so convincing. But if these cats are here, why are there no clear photographs of them and why has nobody been able to produce a road-kill carcass?

Frank says: "They are very elusive and prove difficult to trap. There have been knockdowns on the roads but so far the bodies have been removed and no disclosure has been forthcoming. They are nocturnal and, like all cats, masters of stealth and concealment."

*UFOs.

Cover-ups and disappearing bodies have also long been part of UFO lore. Since the second world war, stories of contact with extra terrestrials and sightings of strange lights in the sky have become commonplace.

In 1952 Winston Churchill contacted the Ministry of Defence and asked, "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? Let me have a report at your convenience."

Those early reports were kept secret and it became official policy to debunk the idea of UFOs and dismiss sightings as weather balloons or optical illusions.

In the summer of 2005 there was a UFO flap over Gloucestershire. Scores of witnesses saw unusual lights over the county on many different occasions.

Three types of sighting seem to have been most common: The first was of a single light with no beam and no noise, which travelled fast across the sky and yet did not resemble a plane or a satellite. The second was an elongated triangle formation of three orange lights which could change their positions in relation to each other.

The third type, which was witnessed by many people in different locations around Cheltenham was a cluster of orange lights that flew in changing formations and remained visible for up to half and hour.

UFO conspiracy theorists have always maintained that we are constantly visited and watched by alien intelligent life forms. But to date, there has been no tangible evidence to support this theory.

Other explanations for UFO sightings include meteor showers, satellites, searchlights, unusual cloud formations, fire balloons and secret military aircraft. But these explanations fail to explain some of the things that people report seeing, such as the orchestrated movements of some UFOs.

In 2006, after a Freedom of Information request, the MoD released a classified report into what the Ministry prefers to call UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena). This 400 page document attempted to answer two questions: What are UAPs? And do they pose a security threat to the UK?

Based on all reported sightings from 1959 to early 1997 (when the government instructed the MoD to stop looking into UFO reports) the authors concluded that, "No evidence exists to suggest that the phenomena seen are hostile or under any type of control, other than that of physical forces and .....electrical and magnetic phenomena.such as meteors forming buoyant plasmas."

So UFOs are not a threat. But if they are caused by natural phenomea, why are they so rare? According to the report, because these atmospheric conditions are equally rare.

Then why are UAPs capable of changing direction at high speed and whizzing off? Because, the report states, these unstudied forms of energy can probably do all kinds of unlikely things.

And why do people insist that they have seen UFOs repeatedly? Because the electromagnetic fields from these buoyant charged masses can affect people's brains.

The problem with these explanations is that, when looked at closely, they explain nothing.

Many people who have seen strange lights in the sky are certain that they are not caused by natural phenomena. An extra sense seems to indicate to the observers that they are seeing something alien to the physical laws and human technology of our world.

Again lack of evidence is the problem. Just as the absence of big cat carcasses makes it difficult to be sure that they exist, so the fact that there is no physical evidence of extra terrestrial UFOs makes certainty about them impossible. For that matter, if there are so many flying around, why has not a single plane, or even a hang glider, crashed into one?

Frank Tunbridge and Rick Minter will be giving a talk on big cats, organised by the Stroud Valleys Project, at the Subscription Rooms on May 17, at 7.30pm.