Strangers in Our Skies – a Guide to UFO Sightings in Ireland

By Una Sinnott
Athlone Adviser
8-16-06

     Though little has been documented of UFO phenomena in Ireland before now, a new book by two leading Irish UFOlogists claims the country is a hotbed of sightings and unexplained aerial phenomena.

Conspiracy of Silence: UFOs in Ireland is a collaborative text by Dermot Butler and Carl Nally, founding members of UFO and Paranormal Research Ireland, based on eyewitness accounts collected by the group over two decades.

The pair are keen to point out in the introduction that UFOs are merely unidentified flying objects, and recommend that readers make up their own minds as to whether these phenomena can be attributed to otherworldly visitations.

Given their background in UFO research, the authors can hardly be in a position to offer an objective account of sightings and incidents in Ireland, nor do they pretend to, instead proffering dozens of accounts of sightings and invoking everyone from the Tuatha De Danann to the United Nations in their evidence.

Some accounts in the book provide an interesting argument for the existence of UFOs, not least the descriptions of aerial encounters provided by pilots, and the work of an American doctor who removed unidentifiable objects from the bodies of people who claimed to have been abducted.

Most UFO sightings occur in an area which arcs from north of Dublin Airport westwards towards Sligo and Roscommon — reports of a UFO crash in Roscommon in 1996 are pivotal in their argument that the Government and/or others are covering up the UFO visitations to Ireland — with Newgrange experiencing more sightings than any other part of the country.

Galway may be far removed from the country’s UFO epicentre but has not been completely ignored by intergalactic visitors; a glowing moon-shaped object was spotted at Abbeyknockmoy in 1991, and in one very strange incident a man reported watching aliens land on an island off the west coast and collected plant samples from the beach back in 1945.

There are many accounts also of phenomena which were witnessed simultaneously by people in different locations, or clusters of sightings over a short period of time.

Unfortunately while the authors link some incidents in their narrative, these incidents are scattered throughout the book, making it difficult for the reader to relate the events to each other without having to search the book every time the authors refer to previously mentioned encounters.

One of the most striking accounts comes from a young Dublin mother whose son told her of repeated visits from a “bold man” who took him, sometimes along with his parents and baby sister, to a “tent in the sky with lots of lights”.

She and other members of her family subsequently had experiences of being abducted.

However, such accounts are offset by claims which sound like very earthly phenomena, such as one by a motorist who witnessed two bright lights side by side in a field.

As the authors say, readers can make up their own minds.

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See Also: SPAIN: UFO PHOTOGRAPHED OVER CASTELLON