A LANTERN tribute to a woman is thought to have sparked a UFO lights mystery over Huntingdon.
:: UFO sighting as public reports 50 lights
Residents had reported seeing a line of up to 50 lights flying over the town, which took almost half an hour to pass.
But Suzanne Southby, from Earith, believes the lights were flying lanterns released as part of the celebrations of the life of her neighbour Kim Huckle, who had died at the age of 53.
Mrs Southby said the lanterns were released at about 10.30pm last Wednesday and then flew off across the sky.
"I am certain that is what it was. When they were going up they looked like a moon," she said. "I didn't see all of it, but you could see them going up and I am certain that is what was being seen.
"They looked like paper lanterns and were going up and up. They were like balloons with flames inside." But Auberon Hedgecoe, of St Peter's Road in Huntingdon, whose family saw the lights, said they seemed too big to be flying Chinese lanterns and were travelling in a line which would have been too straight for wind-blown lanterns.
"I do not think they were balloons because they were not flickering and there was a constant glow," Mr Hedgecoe said.
"I know it is very difficult to judge scale, particularly at night, but they all came from a fixed point over the A14 and were flying very rigidly. They looked to me to be the size of a small airbus."
Mr Hedgecoe said the lights seemed to be travelling at the speed of a light aircraft.
He said the line of lights took between 20 and 25 minutes to pass over his house and that the first two simply shot straight up in the air, which balloons or lanterns would not have done.
Mr Hedgecoe thought it unlikely that the lights were part of military activity because they attracted too much attention to themselves.
"It wasn't at all frightening. It was just extraordinary," he said.
His wife Suzi said her parents had seen similar lights in Bedfordshire and her father, an aircraft engineer, was convinced they were not aircraft.
A former member of the Royal Observer Corps, which had a defence role in aircraft spotting, said he had seen similar lights at Wyton-on-the-Hill, near St Ives.
The anonymous man contacted the UK UFO Sightings website to say he had seen up to 20 lights flying past in the early hours of August 24 last year.
UK UFO Sightings said Chinese flying lanterns were regularly mistaken for UFOs and they had a video of them flying over Halesowen.
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