Pilot spots ‘flying saucer’ from cockpit of plane near London Gatwick Airport

It wasn’t a bird. It wasn’t a plane and, no, it definitely wasn’t Superman.

A pilot spotted a ‘flying saucer’ narrowly close to their plane near London Gatwick Airport.

Aviation officials say the pilot was behind the wheel of an Airbus A319 when they saw an ‘unk obj’, or unknown object, at 11.30am on April 29.

‘The A319 pilot reports that descending, turning left, a disc or “flying saucer” type ­suspected drone was seen flying very close in the opposite direction, at the same level to them, past their right wing,’ a report by the UK Airprox Board published in June said.

The disc was spotted soaring over the Sussex countryside near Hangcross, a village roughly seven miles south of Gatwick.

The UK Airprox Board examines incidents of ‘airprox’, or when something is close enough to a plane that it could be a safety risk.

And this ‘something’ was just 100ft or so from the aircraft wing as they were 8,500ft in the air and about to land, the board was told.

‘The object looked like a disc with darker markings on the rim, a suspected possible drone but not sure,’ its monthly meeting report said.

‘It was very close to the aircraft, but no evasive action was required as they were in a turn already.’

Investigators cross-checked the sighting with radar data to see if it was a known drone, but came up short.

No other pilots in the area saw the unknown object, though air traffic controllers issued a warning about it.

‘In the Board’s opinion the reported altitude and/or description of the object were such that they were unable to determine the nature of the unknown object,’ the report concluded.

‘..The Board considered that although safety had been reduced, there had been no risk of collision.’

Officials don’t specify the flight or airline carrier but said it was a ‘CAT’ operation, or ‘commercial air transport’.

Nearly 90 unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have been spotted this year, according to the UFO Identified database.

Witnesses have claimed to see, among other things, ‘glowing orbs’ jittering over Heathrow Airport to ‘orbs with halos’ glowing behind trees in Peterborough.

There is no central system, like a government or police hotline, that records and investigates UFO sightings.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) once operated a dedicated UFO desk but it was shut down in 2009 due to budget cuts.

Nick Pope was among the civil servants tasked with probing reports of UFOs, now often called unidentified aerial phenomena, in the 1990s.

Speaking before his death last year, Pope told Metro that many of the eerie lights and blinking balls were nothing more than stray weather balloons or paper lanterns.

‘Almost all of them came from people who were utterly sincere in their belief,’ he said. ‘People are less likely to hoax the MoD, probably because they were worried about the men in black.

‘In the end, we found about 80% or so of these sightings were misidentifications, 15% had insufficient data and 5% were unknown.

‘That 5% doesn’t mean extraterrestrial, but as I always remind people, neither did we rule that out. It means unknown, no more, no less.’

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