by Martin Jefferies

Flying saucers, a 'spinning top' and an aeroplane's close encounter with a missile-shaped object are among the weird and wonderful UFO sightings in Kent, revealed for the first time today.

Dozens of sightings in the county are contained in the latest batch of previously top secret documents, released by the National Archives.

They include letters between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and a TV journalist, who was investigating a 'War of the Worlds' incident in 1967, in which six small 'flying saucers' were spotted flying in a perfect line from the Isle of Sheppey to the Bristol Channel.

Officials were treating the incident as a real 'alien invasion' of the UK, until it emerged the objects were in fact a student prank.

But the documents reveal the MoD intervened in the journalist's investigation, amid fears that intelligence interest in UFOs might be jeopardised if a retired RAF captain was interviewed for the programme.

A separate file tells how one person's breakfast at a Folkestone cafe was interrupted in January 2001, when he saw a silver 'spinning top' yo-yoing in the sky.

On the same day, he also saw unidentified 'air jets' zooming around above the town's harbour, while in April that year, he reported three more UFOs, which he said looked like 'silver tinsel stars', bobbing above the Tesco store in Ashford.

Another person reported a near miss involving an Alitalia Airlines flight and a brown, missile-shaped object, as the aircraft - en route to London Heathrow from Milan - flew above the Lydd army ranges in April 1991.

And a motorist called police after a cluster of UFOs up to 50ft wide appeared to hover over his car as he drove along the M2 from Chatham to Faversham in April 1999.

The 35 files published by the National Archives today contain around 8,500 pages of UFO sighting and reports, including some colour photographs and drawings.

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