* Astronomy

Close encounters of the Broxbourne kind

Was it a bird, was it a plane, a shooting star or a real life UFO? Mercury readers have flooded our newsdesk with calls to tell how they spied a mysterious object in the skies over the borough.
After we told how a 29-year-old Hoddesdon man spotted an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) from the Tower Centre flats in Hoddesdon, which he described as "six times the size of a shooting star with a massive tail like a fireball", plenty more readers have come forward to reveal they also saw the spectacle.

And to spook things up even more the Mercury has discovered that earlier on that SAME day, a UFO was apparently sighted in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, just 30 miles (48km) from Broxbourne borough.
On this occasion - around 3pm in the afternoon - according to the UFO sightings website UFO INFO, a local resident saw a "silver grey object coming from the south which was very high and slow moving".

Could the sightings be connected? Perhaps, but the Broxbourne UFO seemed to tear through the sky at a much faster pace.

Read more