UFO encounter described by Italian pilot
By Nick Squires
The Telegraph
10-21-08
Captain Achille Zaghetti was flying from Milan to Heathrow when he and his co-pilot saw a mysterious khaki-coloured, missile-shaped object streaking across the sky above the Kent countryside.
The 10ft-long UFO came so close to the airliner that Capt Zaghetti shouted "Look out! Look out!" to his co-pilot, who also spotted the object.
"It was shaped like a cigar and passed very close, about 300 metres on the right, or 1,000ft," Capt Zaghetti told Italian newspapers, recalling the incident over Lydd, Kent, in 1991.
"It was military beige in colour. My co-pilot and I estimated that it was about three metres long. It was in the evening – around 8 or 9pm – when it is still light at altitude but dark on the ground," said Capt Zaghetti, who lives in Grosseto, Tuscany.
"It could have caused a terrible accident. If you're flying at 700 kilometres an hour, hitting an object of 1kg is like hitting something which weighs 700kg." The UFO was seen on radar by air traffic controllers at Heathrow, who were guiding a British Airways flight into land.
Capt Zaghetti asked the control tower: "Do you see something behind me?" Twenty or 30 seconds later Heathrow officials affirmed that there was an object near the airliner.
The incident was described in MoD files released this week by the National Archive.
Defence officials ruled out the possibility of the object being a British or American missile and said the sighting had no rational explanation.
"In the absence of any clear evidence which could be used to identify the object, it is our intention to treat this sighting like that of any other Unidentified Flying Object," the MoD concluded.
Capt Zaghetti said the object was definitely not a weather balloon and resembled instead the sort of long-distance fuel tanks that fighter aircraft sometimes carry.
He was later contacted by a counter-terrorism official from an American agency who asked for more details about the encounter.
He said he was glad his co-pilot had seen the UFO too because he did not want to be accused of being a fantasist. "And we had to visit the doctors every six months," Capt Zaghetti added, saying there were no doubts about his health at the time.
+-+The+New+Mexican+3-11-1957.jpg "Pilot Tells of UFO That Almost Hit His Plane Far Over Sea (2) - The New Mexican 3-11-1957")
