"I touched a UFO": ex-air force pilot

A group of former pilots who have recounted seeing strange phenomena in the sky has demanded the US government reopen an investigation into UFOs. Several pilots offered dramatic accounts of witnessing UFOs - including a transparent flying disc and a triangular craft with mysterious markings - as they insisted their questions needed to be taken seriously more than 30 years after the US file was closed. "We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms," said Fife Symington, former governor of Arizona and air force pilot who says he saw a UFO in 1997. "Instead our country needs to reopen its official investigation that it shut down in 1969," Symington said. "We believe that for reasons of both national security and flight safety, every country should make an effort to identify any object in its airspace," said a statement from the 19 former pilots and government officials from around the world. The subject of UFOs came up in a recent debate among US presidential candidates, with Democrat Dennis Kucinich saying he once saw a UFO - making him the object of ridicule and jokes by late night television comedians. Sceptics say UFO sightings are merely aircraft, satellites or meteors re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. But the retired pilots spoke to a sympathetic audience of UFO "believers" who heard them recall their encounters with seemingly other-worldly objects appearing out of the sky. "Nothing in my training prepared me for what we were witnessing," said James Penniston, a retired US Air Force pilot, as he described seeing and touching a UFO when he was stationed at a British air base in Woodbridge.

He said he saw an inexplicable triangular craft in a clearing in the woods with "blue and yellow lights swirling around the exterior". The UFO was "warm to the touch and felt like metal," Penniston said. One side of the craft had pictorial symbols and "the largest symbol was a triangle, which was centred in the middle of the others," he said.