A UFO hunter has shared stories of his close encounters and offered advice for people who want to spot something unexplained in the sky.
This week former detective Gary Heseltine announced the UK's first UFO tour, through Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk in August this year.
The committed paranormal investigator has spent the past five years looking into a string of notorious incidents at the site, where a number of witnesses reported seeing unexplained lights in the sky in December 1980.
He has just published Non-Human The Rendlesham Forest Incidents: 42 years of Denial which digs into the case and includes a number of his interviews with members of the public and military who were in the area at the time.
Ahead of the tour, Gary spoke to the Mirror about his close encounters and his advice for those who want to track unidentified flying objects.
People who want to "see strange things" should get serious and set up their own cameras, as he has done, Gary said.
He told the Mirror: "I've been conducting my own private night vision camera research, and I have hundred of hours of mostly satellites being tracked."
"I've seen triangular formations across the sky, four or five objects moving across the sky, and captured strange objects with infrared. There are many strange things that can be seen on night vision.
"Last summer I went out for a two hour session, putting the night vision goggles through the laptop. I caught almost 200 objects (in the sky). "
In terms of the best destinations to see UFOs, Gary said locating hotspots in the UK has been difficult since 2009, when the Ministry of Defence stopped its centralised reporting facility.
"Since then it's very fragmented, there is no accurate record of anything," Gary opined.
"Warminster in Wiltshire was famous for sightings starting in the 1960s. In the 70s and 80s, it was a big area in Yorkshire - a triangle from West Yorkshire into Lancashire. There were a lot of sightings then."
Gary, who is vice president of the International Coalition for Extra-terrestrial Research, had his first of a number of sightings when he was 16 and he saw a "strange white light" above his home town of Scunthorpe.
He was on a walk with his then girlfriend on a warm summer's night when they saw a "really big blob of white light" in the sky before the street lights went out around them.
He said: "The whole area had a power cut. We kept watching it. It moved very slow in the direction of my home."
Gary said he cycled his girlfriend back to her home on his handlebars and then rushed back to his.
"I dropped my bike outside my house and rushed inside to my parents and said 'Come outside there's going to be a power cut'.
"I ran out the back door to my semi detached garden, just in time to see the same object moving silently above me at the end of the garden. I put my hand up like I was in class, straight up, to make a 90 degree point. As soon as it went past my arm the entire area was plunged into darkness."
Before he immersed himself in the topic in later years, Gary largely left the experience behind, joining the air force and having two kids.
In latter years he has become a leading authority among those who believe the truth is out there.
"I've never seen a definitive space ship, but the closest I came to a close encounter was in the early 2000s," Gary said. "I used to live on a flight path to Leeds Bradford, and of an evening towards dusk you'd see planes flying in.
"One day I saw an object coming low on the horizon, not on the usual flight path, maybe a mile away. There were no navigation lights.
"As it came towards me I saw it looked like a sphere. It was a silvery ball. I got my binoculars and managed to get four seconds looking through them.
"It was a silver sphere, with no tail, no markings, and no noise. It disappeared behind the houses."
In recent years a problem for UFO hunters has been the rise of videos designed to trick viewers.
"A lot of people put CGI stuff out there, but the basic rule is if it looks too good, it almost is," Gary continued. "We get a lot of that. Some websites have made hundreds of thousands of pounds peddling false information. I class the internet as the Wild West. Gone are the days when people did serious research and read books."
In terms of how many UFO reports he believes are something without a "mundane explanation", Gary said 3 to 5%.
"There have been many thousands (of reports) over the decades from high quality witnesses," he claimed.
"From military pilots, police officers. I believe that some UFOs are extra-terrestrial. I'm a detective, I know what evidence is."
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