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US pilot ordered to shoot down UFO over Norwich

A FORMER fighter pilot has told how he was ordered to shoot down a UFO the size of an aircraft carrier over England 50 years ago.

The encounter over Norwich is detailed in one of 19 files declassified by Britain's Ministry of Defence and released by the National Archives yesterday.

RAF controllers told US pilot Milton Torres to "lock on" and launch all 24 of his rockets over the city, The Sun reports.

As the 26-year-old US Air Force lieutenant came within seconds of firing at the alien intruder - the size of an aircraft carrier on his radar - it vanished at 16,000km/h.

Mr Torres, then based at RAF Manston in Kent, told The Sun: "It was some kind of alien snooping over England. I guess we’ll never know what it was".

Speaking publicly about the incident for the first time, he said he was ordered late one night in 1957 to scramble in his F-86D Sabre fighter to attack a "bogey" hovering above Norfolk.

"I was told I would be firing a complete salvo, all 24 rockets. I was pumped up - this was the sort of thing that happened before a war," he told the paper.

He had the UFO on his radar and closed in at almost 1125km/h before the shape disappeared off his screen in a flash.

Mr Torres, now 77, said: "I was smoking, as fast as I could go. This thing had a different propulsion system. It was not an airplane."

He said he was visited afterwards by a sinister security official and warned not to tell anyone.

The files also reveal an incident in which a commercial jet almost collided with a UFO as it began its descent into London's Heathrow airport in 1991.

The captain of Alitalia Flight AZ 284 saw something alarming overhead before the missile-shaped object suddenly veered across the airliner's path.

He shouted "look out!" as he attempted to avert a mid-air collision 22,000ft above the Kent countryside, the Daily Mail newspaper reports.

The object then disappeared.

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