A Baffled office worker who saw a strange silver ball hovering in the skies above Harborough has appealed for other witnesses to come forward.

Rachael Berry said she saw the shiny, metallic looking ball moving above fields near to the Brampton Valley Way before it disappeared from her sight near Clack Hill.

Miss Berry (33), of Stockwell Close, witnessed the phenomenon from her office at Cps Ltd, in Sovereign Park off Lathkill Street on Wednesday afternoon last week (June 25).

She said: "This thing hovered up and down and across quite slowly. It was too big in scale to be a simple party balloon. It was quite visible in the distance from my office window.

"I would say it was fairly large but nowhere near the size a hot air balloon would be at that distance, and not the shape of one either - it was perfectly round and very, very metallically shiny.

"The ball moved at a good pace but stopped a few times and went up then down a bit then carried on to the left."

Miss Berry said the ball had a rigid 'tail' about 2.5 metres in length hanging down from it and continued to move until appearing to stop above Clack Hill.

She added: "It hovered there and went up and down a few times, then disappeared. I don't know if it vanished or came down in the field. I lost sight of it."

Miss Berry's sighting comes in the same week that three soldiers captured footage of UFOs flying above Market Drayton, Shropshire.

And this is not the first sighting of mysterious objects in the skies above Harborough.

In August and September 1996 dozens of people came forward to say they saw UFOs above Welland Park Road, De Lisle Close and Farndon Road.

Scores more reported seeing lights in the sky during the summer of 1997 and in January 2006 the Ministry of Defence released a report detailing a January 2004 sighting of a black triangular aircraft with three lights.

In March last year more than a dozen people contacted the Mail after witnessing strange lights in the night sky above Harborough, but the puzzle was solved after it emerged they were Chinese lanterns released during a birthday bash.

*Did you see the silver ball? Contact Mail reporter Ian O'Pray on ian.opray@harboroughmail.co.uk or phone 01858 436005.