A ' UFO expert' says that he prevented a hoax alien invasion that was so organised it would have sparked mass panic.
Nigel Watson has written several books about aliens and is an expert on the subject, so he was alarmed by what he read online, as the Daily Star reports.
On a public forum for drone pilots, there was a plan for people to adorn their crafts with lights and fly over major cities in a coordinated 'invasion' to fool people on April Fools Day.
Nigel said that had the plan gone ahead, people around the world would have believed aliens were actually invading and it could have caused mass panic.
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Nigel, who wrote UFOs of the First World War and Captured by Aliens, said: "At the time, it was publicly accessible, but now you have to be a member.
"I don’t agree with hoaxing. Nonetheless, some people have secretly conducted hoaxes to ‘scientifically’ test the reactions of UFO investigators and the public."
The hoax organisers asked drone owners around the world to rig LED lights on their devices and fly them in areas where they could be seen by the public at a designated time in April, 2014.
At least 30 drone hobby groups were involved, in the USA, the UK, France, South Africa and the Netherlands.
Nigel says the hoax was originally planned for April 1, but the date was later changed to April 5 "so that it will not seem like an obvious prank."
Nigel wrote about the hoax plans but due to an unfortunate misunderstanding was briefly suspected of being behind the plot himself.
Nevertheless, by publicising the hoax, he encouraged the drone operators to give up on their plan.
With social media to boost the effectiveness of any hoax, there’s no way of knowing how far, or how fast, the news would have spread.
Nigel says that one or two “social experiment” UFO hoaxes were conducted in the Warminster area years ago.
He speculates that one of these experiments could be behind his own “sighting”. Nigel classes himself as an “optimistic sceptic” with a strong interest in UFOs but he’s never actually seen one.
He said: "The nearest I got to a UFO encounter was in the late 1970s, when I visited the famous Cradle Hill near Warminster, which was a UFO hotspot in the 1960s.
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"A group of us went up Cradle Hill to look for UFOs but we saw nothing spooky except the staring eyes of sheep in a nearby field. It was only when we were driving to Frome that we saw a UFO in the distance.
"Along with two other cars, we stopped at the side of the road to watch a group of lights slowly flying towards us, it just looked like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind!
"After a few minutes, much to our disappointment mixed with relief, we heard the sound of engines and saw that the object was an airship with lights attached to it. If it had not got closer we would have been convinced that we had seen a flying saucer."
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