Fresh from reports in last week's Berwickshire News that a suspected UFO was spotted hovering over Berwick, we have received more calls and e-mails to suggest that there might well be something out there.

Last week a local driver told the paper that when traveling through Paxton last Monday, March 17 at around 7.30pm, he spotted five lights in the sky above nearby Berwick.

The driver said that the lights reminded him of lights you'd see on a motorway but what he found strange was that they were big and disappeared into thin air after 30 seconds.

Since the story went in last week, a host of callers have responded to the driver's sightings and shared in his confusion over what the lights could have been.

Alan Archer from Spittal said he saw the lights heading north towards Berwick from Holy Island.

"The lights were in a v-shape and there were definitely five of them. I looked out onto Spittal Bowling Green and saw orange lights hanging just above from the floodlight. What startled me is that they were so low in the sky and large in size.

"Before and after I spotted them I noticed that there was some activity in the area.

"I noticed a jet and helicopter fly over and a lifeboat out at sea in a short space of time."

In fact it is one of these appliances that could go some way to explaining the phenomon of the bright lights in the sky.
Tom Wakenshaw, operations manager at Berwick Lifeboat Station, said that rather than being a UFO, the lights were actually flares released as part of a lifeboat training exercise.

" I was very surprised when I read that people thought they saw a UFO hovering over Berwick on Monday.

"At the time when people say they saw the bright lights, we were firing five out of date parachute flares into the sky at the same time. It was a simple training exercise."

Another keen-eyed reader, Ruth Adcock, admitted that although at first she was surprised by what she saw, she thinks there was probably a more straight forward explanation.

"I have to admit to seeing the same lights myself, when I was driving past Paxton, on my way into Berwick on Monday evening.

"Thinking logically, I came to the conclusion that it was either something to do with the RNLI (a flare perhaps), or more likely, the RAF doing one of their usual flypasts, but with five aircraft switching on their afterburners at once. I'm not averse to thinking it was UFOs, but we should rule out other possibilities first."

However, someone else who saw the lights last week was Geordie Carr from Wooler and he is adamant that what he saw was something out of the ordinary.

"My friend and I were in the car coming from Wooler to Berwick for a darts match and were just coming up Wrangholm Road when we saw some rectangular lights. As we were climbing a bank I first thought that they could have been a tractor, combine or street lights, but they were in some kind of sequence and after watching them for a minute they disappeared all of a sudden."

Someone who shares in Mr Carr's view that the lights weren't just flares or fireworks is a resident from Freeman's Court, Berwick, who said that she may have even seen them on two consecutive nights. She also used her digital camera to capture exactly what she was looking at.

Local researcher for the British UFO Research Association, George Niedzwiedz, said that there are daily reports worldwide of odd flying aircraft that remain unexplained. He added that a number of photos, both genuine and fake, are taken and in the case of the 'Berwick lights' we'll just have to wait and see what transpires. George is interested to hear from anyone who saw the lights last week or any other strange activity. You can contact him on: 07968696259.