“I think that gets to the heart of the phenomenon. These people have nothing to gain and potentially quite a lot to lose by coming forward – reputational damage and adverse reactions from family and friends.

“It takes a lot of courage to come forward. It is hardly fame and fortune for these people.”

Tony, 70, says his life has been consumed by UFOs, and he doesn’t just believe in them – he knows they exist after his close encounter in Cambridgeshire back in 1974.

Tony, founder of the East Anglia UFO Group, explains: “I have been so close to one, it was huge. I don’t need any proof they are real, I know they are, I have seen one.

“In all my years of investigating this I have heard such similar descriptions of what happened, how people felt, the smells, the tastes, so I know there must be something in it.”

Life-changing night

Tony, then 17, stayed home alone one night, and his parents had instructed him not to let the fire go out.

But he fell asleep, and when he woke, he realised he had to top up the coal, or he would be in trouble. His life was changed forever when he went outside to the coal scuttle.

He recalls: “As I bent down to put the coal in, my ears all went all ᴅᴇᴀᴅ like when you are coming into land on an aircraft. So I popped my ears a couple of times and nothing seemed to happen and as I looked up, I saw what I can only describe as a craft.

“I went to go into the house to look for a camera, and the craft sH๏τ up into the sky, and that was the last I saw of it.

“I wasn’t scared – I had this overwhelming feeling of calm, almost love, which I found quite strange, and I certainly wouldn’t be afraid if I saw one again.”

Tony was convinced that what he had seen was a UFO, so he told his parents, who were dismissive. He then told his friends, who made fun of him, so he investigated his experience secretly.

“It has consumed my whole life. It has been around my life ever since I was 17 years old, and here I am at 70, and I am still researching it”, he says.

The advent of the internet and conversations with others who have had similar experiences have solidified Tony’s belief that something else exists.

“As time’s gone on, it’s become more and more of an obsession. Then comes along the internet, and not only am I not alone, it’s been going on for thousands of years,” he says.

“It’s happening to so many people, and that’s without the ones that are maybe too afraid to come forward. So I find it helps me, knowing what I’ve seen with all these other people that have seen these, that I’m not alone, whereas in the first few years, it was lonely.”

Key detail

Desperate to find out what happened to him that night, Tony underwent regression hypnosis.

And despite his scepticism, he now believes he was taken on board the mysterious craft and met alien creatures.

He explains: “Through hypnosis, I found myself on board this craft. The walls were all made of fog, and they were all moving a little bit like oil on water.

“They gave out light, but there was no source of light, and I have since found out that this is a common description people have.

“Throughout the fog were these little creatures, about four or five of them just wandering round a little bit like the little characters in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

“I walked through the fog, and there was a guy sitting on what looked like a throne. He looked like old Viking royalty. He had long blonde hair and a bandanna across his head.

“The next thing I knew, I was holding the coal scuttle again. I don’t remember those memories without hypnotic regression, but how much is true or not, I don’t know.

“But that was told to me in regression, and I can’t undo what was said so I have to believe it to some extent.”

Nick Pope says that at one time, the MoD received 700-800 reported UFO sightings each year, but that this was the tip of the iceberg, as many people were reluctant to report or did not know who to report a sighting to.

He adds that around 80 per cent of these had conventional explanations – aircraft lights, lanterns, satellites. In 15 per cent of cases, there wasn’t enough information to make ᴀssessments, but five per cent were unknown.

“Most of these cases are UFO cases, obviously the close encounter, alien abduction cases are much more rare and understandably people are even more reluctant to come forward”, he says.

“It is one thing to say you have seen a UFO – many pilots and police officers have gone on the record saying they have seen them so you are in good company, to say you might have been abducted by aliens is a bridge too far for a lot of people.”

‘Bewildered’

Like Tony, Adam King was a teenager when he had his own close encounter.

In the summer of 1994, he and his girlfriend lost track of time whilst on an evening drive near his home in Sawtry, Cambridgeshire.

Realising it was almost time for his girlfriend’s 10pm curfew, they tried to find a phone box to call her mum and tell her they were returning.

He says: “We found the phone box and made the call to her mum and I remember it was 9.55pm because it was five minutes, she had five minutes to be home. So I specifically remember it was 9.55pm that she called and her mum.”

After making the call, Adam went to turn the car around in a clearing, and then his mind went blank.

“I don’t remember driving back up the road,” he remembers. “The next memory I have is we’re both sat in the car at the top of the road with music playing in the car and it was playing the other side of the cᴀssette.

“I thought it was really odd because I knew every song in order on that tape. I recorded it myself and it was towards the end of the other side as well so I asked my girlfriend, I said, ‘did you turn the tape over?’ And she said no she hadn’t.

“So it was an auto-reverse tape, so I ᴀssume it had been playing for quite a while for it to have been playing the other side, and that’s what made me look at the car clock and it said 10.50.

“I then looked at my watch, and sure enough it was 10.50 but we’d only just phoned her mum five minutes before that and drove through the village so how can it be 10.50?

“If you got 50 minutes of lost time there must have been something that happened during that time. There must be, but I can’t remember it.”

The bewildered couple then spotted a red light moving across the sky in front of them.

Adam says: “It was just like an orb, like a glowing light in the sky. It didn’t seem like there was a light on a craft of some sort. It was more like the whole thing was glowing.

“While I was looking at it, behind it, I saw another one and then another and I think in total there were five or six of these red lights in a line just moving up the hill.

“We were just in awe of what we were seeing. And I know that my girlfriend felt the same because I remember looking over to her and I actually asked her, ‘are you seeing this?’

“It was obvious it wasn’t anything that we’d seen before or experienced. It was something totally new, something totally unknown to both of us.”

Adam is utterly convinced that they weren’t seeing planes or helicopters. Add to that the missing hour, the memory loss and a strange souvenir from the experience – he is convinced he was the victim of an alien abduction.

“I must have been taken away aboard those lights, but I can’t remember anything”, he explains.

“It’s the not knowing. You don’t know what their intentions are. But the very fact that I’m still here, I’m still able to talk about it, is a positive.

“So their intentions couldn’t have been totally bad; otherwise, I wouldn’t be here talking now. So that leads me to believe potentially it was a neutral experience.

“It didn’t seem to harm me in any way. I should mention that after the experience, I had this weird thing in my upper chest area. And it was like a little black dot, a little black grain under my skin. It looked like about the size of a grain of rice.

“I went to my doctor about it, and she actually pulled it out and threw it away in the bin. But I wish I probably should have kept it.”

Adam also underwent regression hypnosis to try to get to the bottom of what happened in his missing hour.

Under hypnosis, he also described being taken onto a craft and meeting creatures.

He says: “It’s like replaying a memory in your mind. I was in my body looking out through my own eyes and feeling the same feelings that I felt at the time and the same thoughts.

“I just felt like myself when I was 18. Possibly, this information isn’t for everyone, and it’s natural that some people will have a guard up against certain information that seems almost unbelievable.

“No matter what the proof or what the reality, some people just will not accept it, and I think that’s just a fact of life. That’s just how people are.”

‘Earth-changing’

Despite his personal experience and the hundreds of reports of UFO sightings he hears each year, Tony Buckingham says he isn’t surprised people are sceptical, as he often is, too.

But he remains convinced they are real – and wants the authorities to properly investigate, openly and honestly.

He says: “When people come to me with their UFO sightings, I am quite sceptical because I know from years of experience that a huge proportion of the sightings are misidentifications.

“It could be Venus if it is bright in the sky that night, Chinese lanterns, aircraft in certain positions. Real sightings are not as common as we first think. I would get maybe half a dozen genuine ones a year.”

He adds: “People in the know are aware of these things. It is just what they are that we don’t know. I have my own beliefs, and I think there are aliens, and I think they are not necessarily here for the good of mankind.”

The MoD axed its UFO project in 2009, and Nick Pope agrees with Tony that it should be relaunched. There may well be civilisations in the universe exploring the cosmos just as we on Earth are.

And he says the UK should be taking the UFO issue as seriously as the US where NASA and the Pentagon are doing full studies.

He says: “These people deserve answers. Whatever has happened to them – whether there is a conventional explanation or not – these people are almost always sincere and have often been profoundly impacted by their experience.

“After years of denial, the US government is fully engaged with this, delivering regular reports to Congress. They are saying pilots are seeing things, they are being tracked on radar, something is going on.

“You can be as sceptical as you like about aliens, but we want you to look at this. That is what should be happening in the UK.”

UFO researcher and author Philip Mantle says: “These individuals have got more to lose than they have to gain by going public with such statements.

“So on that aspect alone, I think we should take what they are saying seriously and listen to them. A lot of the time, that is all they want.

“The sceptics will have you believe that these things only happen to some redneck out in the desert in New Mexico.

“That is not the case. It happens to everyday ordinary people who are going about their daily tasks – going to work, walking the dog – when these experiences take place.

“Previous documentaries have shown people from the US mainly, when you watch this series these are everyday ordinary individuals from the UK.