Gosh darn it. After seeing those UFOs over Highcliffe I’ve spent all day researching the effects of environmental distortion on perspective, the flight ceilings of various helicopters, the operational capacities of blimps, balloons and UAVs, the science behind contrails, and the history of UFO sightings in the area, when I should just have visited a site called Flight Radar 24, that shows you real time air traffic control maps, which you can backdate and replay. I therefore know exactly what we saw this morning.

The silver UFOs were, in fact (drum roll!)… a pair of 737s on their way to Tenerife. One was at 35,000 feet, the other at 38,000 feet, too high to see the wings, but they appeared lower because of their brightness and the way the sun bounced off them. The rest of the jets I saw were around 20,000 feet, which is why they looked so different. What a delightful thing this ‘internet’ is. I wrote an entire blog post about a couple of passenger jets!

But it goes to show how easy it is to mistake something in the sky for something else, and why you should never jump to conclusions about alien invasions and crafts from other worlds – these were two of the least plane-like planes I ever did see, and I’ve seen tens of thousands of planes. But what were they? Planes.

Now I’m going to go coz I’m kinda embarrassed…