The pictures drawn by the pupils ended up on the Ministry of Defence's UFO desk
UFO files released by the Ministry of Defence have revealed children's sketches of what appears to be an alien spaceship at a Cheshire school in 1977.
The pictures drawn by school pupils at Upton Priory School in Macclesfield were made public by the MoD's UFO Desk shortly before it closed down in 2009.
The documents reveal that the sighting occurred in October 1977 when 10 children at the school, aged between seven and 11 years old, had gone out for their lunchtime break.
They came back and told a teacher, Mrs Hindmarsh, that they had seen something hovering around the trees before it vanished into the sky.
The teacher told the children to draw what they had seen independently of each other using crayons and coloured pencils.
The images were so striking that she passed the dossier to police in Cheshire before it ended up at the UFO desk at the Ministry of Defence.
In a covering letter, the police officer said there was ‘a remarkable similarity in these sketches with regard to the UFO and its location between two trees’.
Macclesfied is a little town near Manchester
Dr David Clarke, a former journalist and
currently a professor at Sheffield Hallam University, was involved in
transferring the ministry's files into the public domain between2009 and 2013.
Speaking to CheshireLive, he said: "When I opened this particular one, it struck me as more interesting than the usual, because it was full of all these crayon drawings by these schoolkids from Macclesfield.
"I suppose kids say all kinds of things about things they've seen in playgrounds but the teacher must have thought this was something to be taken seriously and sat them down to get them to draw what they had seen independently.
"Then because the drawings were so similar she actually gathered them together and took them to the police station in Macclesfield.
"Then this copper had written a report about this and sent it to air traffic control in Manchester to see if they had anything on the radar.
"Then this dossier ended up being sent to the Ministry of Defence in London and passed to the UFO desk. It really is quite something."
The images were featured in Dr Clarke's book UFO Drawings from The National Archives, which was published in September 2017.
He added: "The Macclesfield case was one of the ones I selected to go in the book because the images are just so amazing."
The 53-year-old speculated that the children could have been inspired by the boom in science fiction films around that period.
He said: "1977 was a big year because that's when Star Wars was released. I remember really clearly at the time being really into space and science fiction.
"Then Close Encounters of a Third Kind was out the following year and Dr Who was very popular at the time.
"There could have been something there that might have inspired them to see this."
Alex McIntyre
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