‘It looked like a floating Darth Vader’: Your alien encounters

 Do aliens exist? Few debates have proved as enduring – or as divisive – as the question of whether there is life beyond Earth.

Last month, Barack Obama unwittingly reignited it during a podcast interview, casually declaring that aliens are “real” (albeit not housed in Area 51).

Obama’s comments sparked a media frenzy, prompting the former president to clarify his position shortly afterwards. “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens are low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

Really. And yet… Many people remain unconvinced, believing that not only do aliens exist, they have actually made contact with people on earth – even the majority of The Telegraph’s sensible and sober-minded readership are in agreement.

A recent poll, voted on by 15,000 readers, found that 84 per cent believe aliens are real – some of whom wrote in to tell us about their extraterrestrial encounters.

‘I felt like it wanted to approach us – we ran like hell’

Lucia Gillot was 17 when she came face to face with something she still cannot explain. On a late-night walk in 1982 near her family’s second home near Nefyn, on the Llŷn Peninsula in North-West Wales, she saw a mysterious figure.

“My friend and I had driven out late at night to a remote stretch of countryside for a walk,” she says. “We parked up and started down this narrow lane, barely wider than a car.” The road ran straight ahead before dipping gently out of sight. About 100 yards away, she saw something approaching. “It looked like Darth Vader, but with really long arms that hung below the knee. They looked like tubes with a soft, white fluorescent glow. They didn’t bend. They just swayed.”

This strange sighting couldn’t be put down to alcohol, as Gillot and her friend were “completely sober.”

The being, she recalls, was coming directly towards them. And although they could hear heavy footsteps, it appeared to be floating. “My friend tried to reassure me,” says Gillot. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, Lou, I’ve got my Stanley knife!’”

The pair remained frozen for two minutes until headlights appeared from behind the figure. As the beams swept forward and caught the being in their glare, it vanished.

The lane was bordered by high hedges on both sides. There was nowhere for the figure to go, so Gillot believes it must have “disappeared” into thin air.

“There was no sense that it was trying to catch us, but I felt like it wanted to approach us,” she says. Still spooked after it vanished, the two ran “like hell” back to the car and quickly drove away.

Now 61 and living in Derbyshire, Gillot has never forgotten – or been able to explain – the encounter. “It’s something that always stuck with me, but I never talked about it until now”, she says.

“I would define an alien as something that is not of this earth. That being definitely wasn’t of this earth. A few years ago, I came across a book [The Uninvited: The True Story of Ripperston Farm by Clive Harold] about a family in the same area who kept getting alien visitations. I felt it supported my experience.”

Despite her eerie encounter, Gillot isn’t disturbed by the prospect of alien life. “I sense that the ETs are looking out for us”, she says.

‘It must have been moving at 12 miles a second’

David Pope, 66, a former air traffic controller from Southend-on-Sea, was walking home one night in his mid-teens when he saw a “piercingly bright light in the sky”, which he suspects was a UFO.

“It travelled at high speed from east to west before it stopped, made a 90-degree turn, and travelled downward,” he recalls. “I’ve seen meteors before, but this was unlike anything I can explain. It was an unnatural thing to see, but I wasn’t frightened of it.”

The strange route the craft took ruled out the possibility that it was any kind of normal aircraft; he privately suspected it was a UFO. “I’ve always thought there is more to the world than one can see, as I’ve had several strange experiences in my life. I have an open mind, but an analytical one as well,” he says.

The incident would set the tone for another unusual encounter five years later. By the late 1970s, Pope had a job at a London-based airfield as an air traffic controller assistant, providing flight data scripts, conducting meteorological observation reports every half hour and generally observing movement across the airfield.

“We had a call from another London-based air centre asking if we could check our radar for any unknown objects heading east. The guy on the radar said that their tracking system had recorded something that had been picked up from the west moving at lightning speed towards the east before disappearing. I did some calculations and worked out that, whatever the object was, it must have been moving at 12 miles a second. There was no explanation for this.”

Pope never told anyone that he believed both incidents were the result of extraterrestrial life. However, in light of recent events, he believes the tide is finally turning against sceptics and is feeling increasingly emboldened to speak up as a result.

“Whilst there are regrettably a number of ‘tin-foil-hat-wearing’ people out there who are prepared to argue that the lenticular cloud they witnessed was most definitely a Venusian battle cruiser, the subject of UFOs has achieved a greater degree of authentication and official recognition than I ever thought I’d see in my lifetime,” he says.

“I’m certainly not someone who spends every spare moment ‘watching the skies’ or scouring the internet. I like to think I’m pretty level-headed, but I’m equally sure that I’m not alone in wanting to know, ‘What the hell was that?’”

Another reader, Jo Hardy-Bishop, also had an unnerving experience with an unidentified craft.

“Thirty years ago, I observed a UFO whilst driving over some open country at night,” she says. “It hovered for several minutes with gyroscopic movements. It was lit and seemed partly obscured by a cloud around it. After some time I became frightened, got back in the car and drove to the safety of home.

“I have told very few people. I have no proof. I do not feel the need to convince others, but I know that what I saw was not man-made.”

‘Some believe me, some don’t. But I know what I saw’

Paul Gil, 65, from Dorset, says he saw a UFO in 1988 while backpacking in rural South Australia.

“A friend and I were sitting on the porch looking at the stars after we had been picking some grapes while on a walk,” he says.

Gil describes a silent, cigar-shaped object about 30 metres long whizzing past at a distance of perhaps 300 metres, claiming it had multiple porthole-like lights along the side. “We both saw it,” he says. “We looked at each other, jumped in the car and headed in the direction it was going. But we found nothing.”

The following morning, they mentioned the sighting to the farmer who employed them. His response, Gil says, was unexpectedly matter-of-fact.

“He casually said, ‘Oh, it must have been a flying saucer.’ Then he told us there’d been a burn mark down the road a while back where one had landed.”

The vineyard was, Gil later realised, situated roughly 100 kilometres from the Woomera Rocket Range – the vast, highly restricted weapons testing and aerospace facility operated by the Australian government.

“I’m not embarrassed to talk about it, and I never hesitate to tell people. I take it as a matter of fact,” Gil says. “Some believe me, some don’t. But I know what I saw.”