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Incredible archive footage has emerged of eye-witness accounts of a UFO landing in a field in Stoke-on-Trent.

The year was 1967 and space fever was at its height and flying saucers and alien spacecraft were the talk of the pubs, offices and factory floors of the Potteries.

There were dozens of sightings of flying saucers in the skies above North Staffordshire as summer neared an end.

But one particular incident on night of September 2 - with dozens of independent accounts of a red glowing craft - seemed to have even the experts puzzled.

Now StokeonTrentLive has acquired a clip from ATV Today where housewives, children and even a police officer reveal exactly what they saw that mysterious night in Bentilee.

It starts with presenter Gwyn Richards doing a piece to camera about an 'extraordinary event which was witnessed by a great many people'.

Two of those he interviews are neighbours Mrs Bowen and Mrs Stephenson who both saw the UFO land next to the estate.

In a matter-of-fact tone Mrs Bowen recalls: "It seemed like a saucer, you know. It changed in different colours - a red, a greenish and a blue. I did get frightened of it when it dropped."

Mrs Stephenson adds: "The object glowed bright red as if someone had lit a bonfire in the middle of a field. It spanned half a field. We could see the outline of it clearly like a dome but we couldn't see no door. There was no heat it was just a red glow.

"We couldn't even hear a bird, everything was dead.

"There was a man standing behind us. He said 'Did you two see it?'. We said 'yes'. He said 'I was in the bedroom and we thought the field was on fire because the bedroom was illuminated red. I came down because I thought I was seeing things'.

"While me and Mrs Bowen were at the bottom of the close we saw the object in the sky going the same was as it had come. The colours were glowing and it was going at a high speed."

A group of four young boys including Malcolm Bowen also shared what they saw on the night, while a policeman admitted he was so alarmed he asked the younger children to return inside.

Malcolm recalls: "The rest of them ran off and I just stayed there. It was just like an ordinary saucer with a round sort of thing on the top. We thought it was an aeroplane at first but we all kept quiet.

"We saw it going round and then we said it couldn't be an aeroplane. We didn't hear any sound.

"We saw a very bright glow and it went straight up in the air and it went spinning round. Ten or 12 seconds later it went out of sight."

Meanwhile, a circumspect local policeman also gave his account of the Bentilee UFO - and offered a possible explanation.

He says: "We got there and we were met by a gang of children and one or two adults who informed us that they had seen this glow in the sky travelling from east to west or west to east, I can't remember exactly which. And that it had disappeared over the brow of the hill we were facing.

"We started climbing this banks. We were a little apprehensive and we did send quite a few children back who were quite small.

"These things could happen but I don't actually believe in them but I can't prove it one one way or the other.

"The parents of the children were so adamant that this thing had happened we thought we'd be on the safe side. We carried on to the top of the hill and could see no signs. We could see nothing at all.

"In the distance there was a public house that had all yellow signs around it. I assumed that this lighting up for the first time could have been what they had seen."

UFO investigators Roger Stanway and Tony Pace were also interviewed for the piece at Newchapel Observatory where they described the Bentilee landing as 'quite incredible'.

They revealed how they took their findings to the Ministry of Defence which confirmed something happened on the estate that night.

Mr Pace says: "The fact that quite a few witnesses were quite worried and disturbed at what had occurred convinced us that something really strange had happened on that Saturday night in September 1967."

Mr Stanway adds: "We couldn't find any explanation from the sources we contacted; air traffic control, the police, things of that nature.

"And as people on the estate wanted an explanation and we wanted something as well, we thought we'd go down to the MoD in London.

"We discussed the Bentilee episode as there was a terrific amount of evidence and independent witnesses.

"I then faced them with the bold question - 'Well gentleman, do you think in fact what is described in this report actually did take place?'. The reply was 'yes'.

"Well this somewhat surprised me as I expected them to have a number of explanations.

"My next question was 'What is the explanation, what were these objects, these phenomena?'. Much to my surprise they said 'we have no idea'. My immediate reaction was to say 'does this worry you?'. And they said 'yes'."

The report ends with Mr Richards telephoning Manchester Airport from a public call-box to report his own sighting of a strange craft in Derbyshire.

Not surprisingly, The Sentinel closely followed all the strange happenings from that time with Mr Stanway and Mr Pace logging more than 70 separate incidents of UFO activity within a 20-mile radius of Stoke-on-Trent for their report ‘UFOs: Unidentified, Undeniable’.

Speaking to the newspaper in 2006, Mr Pace said: “In 1967 there were many reports of UFOs in the Potteries, and many seemed to be centred over the Bentilee area. At the time it was a country-wide phenomenon, there were sightings all over the country.

“You can’t just dismiss things like that when so many people saw things.”

North Staffordshire historian Bill Cawley has also looked back on the bizarre events in and around the Bentilee estate and further afield.

He said: "Reports of strange things in the sky stretched from Cannock to the hills above Leek.

"But the centre of much activity was the Bentilee estate, and the local media was full of sightings of UFOs in the skies of the city.

"On September 2, there were eight different sightings between 1am and dawn, with a lack of sound being a feature of all the sightings.

"An object like a spinning top was spotted by a resident of Beverley Drive.

“There was a very interesting account given by a Mrs Becanin. As an accomplished artist, she provided line drawings of what she had seen from her home in Hethersett Walk in the early hours.

“She couldn’t sleep, and at 1am, after a drink of water, she looked through a window to see three orange lights lying on common ground some distance away.

“One of the lights seemed closer to her and larger, and was flashing with a brighter light.

“It began to ascend with a shower of green sparks, disappearing to the north east. The other two lights also vanished. The whole incident took two minutes.

"Another group saw a basin-shaped object fly overhead. It was glowing red and yellow, and appeared to land in fields off Beverley Drive.

“Children and adults ran in the direction of the landing site and one of the children said the area seemed on fire. Something had landed in the field and remained.

“A woman rang the police, who duly arrived. They saw nothing, but on leaving the area, a man in an upper room window called over that the saucer was taking off. It rose to about 300ft and then disappeared.

“When they were interviewed, the police remained sceptical and said the lights might have been reflections from street lighting or from the windows of a local pub.

"Then, on September 4, Terry Bagnall, aged 15, of Beverley Drive, saw a brightly coloured cigar-shaped object fly over the area with a bright light, which increased in intensity as it rose in the late morning sky.

“The report pointed out that jets using Manchester airport flew over the area, and that this would account for some of the sightings.

“It was also possible that many would have confused UFOs with satellites. A person mistaking the planet Venus was another possibility, as was freak weather conditions.

“However, Stanway and Pace concluded that 10 per cent of the sightings were unexplained.”

Whatever happened on that night in Bentilee, the truth is out there.