SOMETHING strange was seen hovering in the skies above Radcliffe at the weekend.

Eye-witnesses reported seeing unidentified flying objects in Bury Road at about 10.30pm on Saturday.

Lorna Brown, aged 32, from Bury, was in a car with four others when she spotted lights in the sky above the Newbank Garden Centre.

Miss Brown said: “They were orange and red. At first there were two, then about eight or nine and they were in a perfectly straight line. They made a triangle shape and then a line again before they vanished. Then one appeared on its own. It was a red colour and looked like a ball of fire in the sky. It was amazing to watch; we were all gobsmacked. I didn’t believe in UFOs before but there was no mistaking them for anything else.”

Mrs Brown’s son Thomas Prime, aged 11, said: “I saw these big lights in the sky but they weren’t making any noise. They must have been UFOs.”

Police confirmed a report was made on Saturday by a woman who said she saw about nine orange and red lights in the sky. No other sightings were reported. A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said: “The last UFO sighting reported in the borough was on Christmas Day last year when someone said they saw an orange light moving low in the sky. But this was the only one we have had.”

A new book, The UFO Files, by Dr David Clarke, looks at official government reports and eye-witness interviews to reveal the story of more than a century of UFO sightings in Britain. A Ministry of Defence report says 394 mysterious flying objects have been seen in British skies between January and August this year.