London: Sightings of little green men who tried to abduct a fisherman and the descent of a UFO in the area where Martians came to Earth in the HG Wells novel The War of the Worlds are among reports of extraterrestrial activity released on Wednesday by the UK’s National Archives.

UFO sightings doubled after the film Close Encounters was released in 1977, according to the British ministry of defence files, which also show that the alien craft came in all shapes, sizes and colours but their occupants were uniformly green.

The eight files, from 1978 to 1987, contain reports to the ministry by members of the public and the military who said they saw unidentified flying objects, alien visitors and crop circles. The ministry took an interest in the reports to rule out the presence of Soviet military planes in UK airspace.

The archives (at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk ufos) are the first batch of a four-year release programme of the UFO files.

The ministry dismisses 90 percent of the reports as having mundane explanations and leave 10 percent with a question mark and the assurance they are no defence threat.

A 1983 report from a 78-yearold out fishing at midnight tells of following aliens in green overalls on to a spaceship and then being told to go away as he was too old and decrepit for their purposes.

Two years later, a typewritten letter to the ministry tells of an alien spaceship being shot down in the river Mersey in northern England by another spacecraft and of the author developing a friendship with an alien called Algar.

Just as Algar was about to reveal himself to the government he was killed by other aliens, the author of the letter writes. He was still in telepathic contact with an alien called Malcben from the planet Platone in the Milky Way, the author added.

Written at the top of the letter is the terse comment "No reply". The ministry has files on 11,000 sightings dating back to the 1950s. A few of the sightings made it into the national press and all were checked out in case they were Soviet aircraft probing Britain's defences during the Cold War.

"Clearly some reports remain unexplained but we have found no evidence that these phenomena represent a threat to national security and therefore cannot justify devoting Defence resources to their investigation," said an official letter in 1985.

The term Unidentified Flying Object was coined in a US Air Force report three years after the description 'flying saucer' was applied to a sighting in Washington State in June 1947.

In Britain, so worrying was the spate of reports that a secret Flying Saucer Working Party was formed to check them out. Like the US Air Force, it concluded flying saucers did not exist.

Source : DNA