'We saw UFO while getting a takeaway, I remember thinking we were going to die'

As World UFO Day approaches we bring you a Close Encounter…Of the Teesside kind. Paul Jones and his mum Daphne are sharing their story for the very first time. They reveal how an everyday trip to the fish and chip shop four decades ago turned into a terrifying encounter with an otherworldly being. Their story is being told as part of Blaze TVs day of programming to celebrate World UFO Day, on a show called We Are Not Alone. And for Paul and Daphne - We Are Definitely Not. It was July 1981 when the pair left their home on a small council estate in Hemlington. The sun was out, and they had decided to treat themselves to fish and chips. “It was just your average English council estate,” said Paul, who was nine-years-old, at the time of his extraterrestrial contact. But on their way back from the chippy, the sky filled with unusual colours and a thunder-like noise began, although no storm followed. "No lightning. No rain. Just thunder noises," Paul said. Daphne said the sky frightened her and she told Paul to hurry home. They locked the door behind them, and Paul went to the kitchen window, which looked straight down the road. There, he said, a glowing ball was hovering at the bottom of the street. He said it looked as if "you took the sun and you shrunk it down and then the surface is spinning, almost like lava or oil on water," with "tentacles of light”. Daphne said the object then began to move, slowly at first and then quickly up the road towards the house. She said it terrified her as it bore down on them, adding: "And it was like wow, why, what the heck, this is heading for the house, this big ball of fire.” They ran to the staircase which Daphne said she judged to be the safest place. Paul, despite his young age, feared the worst. He said: "I remember sitting at the top of the stairs thinking, we're all going to die.” Paul said the object had seemed aware of them. "It felt intelligent and controlled. Because it was at the bottom of the road there, doing its thing. But it almost felt like as if once we all came to the window to see it, then it decided oh, oh I'll come and check you out," he said. After a few minutes they went outside to look for any sign of the object, and found nothing, not even a mark on the garden fence. But the menacing orb had left one indelible trace. Paul said: "I remember the chips being cold. So I think there was some level of time change.” Neither Paul nor Daphne will say for certain what they saw. "We're not saying it is a UFO, we're just saying it's a weird phenomenon that happened, it's unexplainable," Daphne said. It was decades before they spoke about it in public, and having other witnesses in the family mattered to Paul. "If I'd have seen that on my own and I'd had no other witness, I would have questioned my sanity," he said. Daphne said sharing it kept them grounded. "The fact we could all, you know, keep it within the family, and talk about it, it was good because we didn't sound stupid," she said. Their experience is far from unusual, at least in terms of how often people report such things. Preston Dennett, a UFO researcher and author said sightings turn up almost anywhere - not just in north-east England. “You can name any town, any location on this planet. And I bet you I can find a case there," Dennett said. The largest public database of sightings, run by the US-based National UFO Reporting Center, has logged almost 170,000 accounts since 1974, most of them in the United States, though the reports are submitted by the public and are not verified. In Britain there is no longer an official tally. The Ministry of Defence stopped investigating reported sightings in 2009 and has not classified any new material on the subject since, passing all of its UFO files up to that point to the National Archives. The year it closed the desk was also its busiest. Britons reported around 600 sightings to the MoD in 2009, the highest number since 1978, when there were 750. Despite that official silence, more people are coming forward. Marc D’antonio, an astronomer and top UFO researcher, links the rise to the recent wave of official interest in the subject. "We've seen a sharp rise in reported cases since congressional hearings and so forth. And much of that is historical. Because people are saying, well, I did have a sighting I haven't talked about, okay, but now I feel more comfortable talking about it," D’antonio said. A wider review, published in March 2024 and covering US investigations going back to 1945, said it had found no evidence that any sighting represented extraterrestrial technology. But the pressure for openness has continued. In September 2025 a Congressional committee held a hearing on UAP transparency and whistleblower protection, and in February 2026 President Trump said he would direct the release of government files on UFOs, UAP and extraterrestrial life. Paul said he had kept it to himself for years. "I was very self-conscious about how weird I'd sound if I said it to other people so I didn't really tell many people," he said. He links his own decision to speak now to that shift. "If you've got people of higher level governmental positions talking about it, you don't really sound as crazy. There's less of a stigma, I think," he said. Not everyone is convinced the orbs are anything extraordinary. Dantonio, who has examined footage of them, said he had seen nothing to persuade him they behave intelligently. "They aren't spelling out hello," he said. The Joneses are not the only British witnesses in the series. Holly Wood said she first saw orange orbs as a child in Wiltshire, while sitting inside one of the white chalk horses cut into the hillside, as her mother performed what Holly said were "magical rites" nearby. Holly said her mother stood out. "My mother was there in her usual magical garb, doing something very occult and rebellious," she said. As a child, Holly said, she assumed the orbs were her mother's doing. "I thought it was linked to my mother's activities because she was a magical creature," she said. Holly said the objects looked like "small orange suns" and appeared "within the eye of the horse." They returned, she said, at significant moments throughout her life. "They often appeared at real emotive or transitional times, passing exams at 11, they appeared. When I met my first boyfriend, they appeared," Holly said. Her interest later led her to a practice known as CE5, or Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, which the programme presents as human-initiated contact through collective meditation. Holly said she would "lead groups of people out into the countryside." She said one experience at home was very different. During a meditation session her dog began to growl, she found she could not move, and figures appeared around her bed. "They were not humanoid. They were almost triangular shapes," she said. Holly said she was given a message to stop, and that when it was over she had lost several hours. She said the instruction had been clear. "You have to stop this communication with them," she said. "That's when I made the decision to not do as much," she said. Dennett said an encounter could stay with a person for life. "When someone has a UFO encounter, it affects them on multiple levels, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, psychically. So this is a really profound, really kind of peak experience in a person's life," he said. And Paul agrees. He said: "I got into Ufology immediately after that," Paul said, before settling on a blunter word for it. "Obsessing, you could say," he said. "Obsessing, yes," Daphne added. And more than four decades on, his certainty has not faded. "I know that these things exist,” said Paul, “I know they're really there.”