The Millennium files

Graham Birdsall's wife was not best pleased when the ink from his stencil set left a backwards imprint of his UFO newsletter on the top of her kitchen units.

In those days, Graham and his friends - a group of six like-minded researchers and enthusiasts - worked from the kitchens and living rooms of available homes to produce a pamphlet detailing the various sightings of mysterious objects in the skies above our cities.

But from humble beginnings come great things and now, little more than 20 years later, Graham finds himself in the hot seat as editor of Otley-based UFO Magazine, currently boasting a readership of 100,000 world-wide.

Billed as "the world's biggest selling UFO publication", the bi-monthly magazine is distributed to 32 countries from its base at the Wharfebank Business Centre, Ilkley Road. And business has never been better. "It was a big risk, but in the early Eighties we decided to pool our savings together and pour them into setting up a full-time business," said Graham of his fellow group of volunteer researchers.

"Initially, the magazine was launched as a subscription only publication, but in 1991 it became a news stand magazine, and from then on we've never looked back. The success of the magazine mirrors the dramatic growth in interest in UFOs over the past few years.

"In this area alone, there have been frequent sightings of mysterious objects in the sky - we're currently investigating a case which occurred on February 2 this year when hundreds of witnesses said they'd seen lights passing over Bradford going towards Leeds.

"Witnesses as far away as Manchester said they saw two bright lights passing over the district, which then shot off in different directions. Checks with the RAF and Leeds-Bradford airport show that no aircraft were scheduled to be in the air at that time, so a conventional explanation has yet to be found."

But why the sudden increase in interest in the subject over the past few years? Is it really the case that alien life forms have suddenly created more sophisticated space craft with which to penetrate our solar system or is it more a case of PMT - Pre-Millennium Tension?

Graham said: "Some people have put it down to pre-millennium nerves, and TV programmes such as the X-Files and Hollywood films have helped to maintain an interest and fire people's imaginations. "But there's also been a lot of scientific revelations in recent years which have added to the interest - it's only in the last five years, for example, that we have discovered planets outside our solar system.

"Satellites are now showing that there could be biological life underneath the moon's crust, and there was the recent finding of meteorite fragments on Antarctica, which also contained evidence that biological life forms could exist on other planets outside the earth.

"From all this evidence, I think it would be very difficult to deny that life in some form does exist out there. "

And although there are a hell of a lot of people who claim to have seen UFOs and who in many cases are really only seeing nocturnal lights or satellites, there's still a small residue of sightings which defy explanation."

Dr John Baruch, director of Robotic Observatories and head of Bradford University's Cybernetics and Visual Systems Unit, also insists that life in some form does exist in other parts of the Universe.

"You've got to be a real cynic not to agree to this," he said. "As far as UFOs go, I like to keep an open mind - I used to do a great deal of work with UFO groups based in this area and what I said to them was that to be taken seriously they needed to have two independent witnesses to the same sighting for it to have any credibility in the first place. No-one has yet to come back to me with these independent statements.

"In terms of the wind-up to the Millennium, I think light pollution from cities, satellites, shooting stars and the like fire people's excitement and lead them to think they're seeing something they're not.

"But we still have a lot to discover about the sky and, as a scientist, I think it's what we don't know that's more exciting, rather than what we do know "

Nevertheless, it seems that there are an awful lot of people out there who are convinced that extraordinary occurrences are not out of the ordinary. Graham Sellars, a 24-year-old journalist from Sutton-in-Craven, recalls the night of July 19, 1995, when he and hundreds of other residents were witness to a dramatic explosion coming from the skies above their heads, an explosion which defied firefighters and police who were called to the scene.

"Hundreds of people stood outside their homes that night after seeing the lights across Sutton Moor, yet the police and fire brigade could give no explanation as to what went on.

"It's events like these which generate such interest among the general public. There are so many questions and not enough answers - I'm not saying there were alien crafts above the Moor that night but the lack of explanation leads to a greater curiosity."

And that greater curiosity is what provides the fuel behind Mr Birdsall's ever-expanding business in Otley. "There's a massive interest in the subject and we want to serve that interest," he said.

"It's important for us to get as much information into the public domain as possible because we're as interested in the subject as they are. We may have come a long way from the kitchen table days but there's still a lot more ground to cover yet."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.