Last week Seven News had a scoop almost as fabulous -

Make what you will of these pictures shot by an amateur cameraman in the English countryside. It's definitely a UFO ­ an unidentified flying object - but whether it came from outer space is yet to be determined.

- Channel 7 News, 18 August 2003

The only reason for Seven putting this on the national news was the possibility - let's face it: the extremely faint possibility - that it might be a flying saucer.

Two days later a Wiltshire newspaper shot the story out of the sky.

A Spooky sighting over stone circle

UFO spotters will be dismayed to learn that the object was not being flown by little green men, but by a pair of pranksters in a disguised microlight.

Winterborne Monkton resident John Pearce, 21, drinking outside a local pub, gave chase to the flying object in his truck and saw what turned out to be a microlight land in a local field.

There were two men dismantling it and loading it into a white van They seemed worried, as if they wanted to get it packed away before anyone saw them.

- Evening Advertiser, Swindon

So did Seven follow up this rather charming prank? Of course not. They never bothered to tell their national audience this just another UFO hoax. And why not? In the words of Wiltshire UFO enthusiast John Hanson, 57: ... some people get a kick out of winding people up.

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s931664.htm

Additional Information:

An article appeared in Saturday's Daily Mirror (page 29) which apparently reveals what happened.

The following is an excerpt:

'This is the "UFO" that got the world asking if aliens were about to land in Britain. But those pictured beneath it are hardly the little green men many had feared were on board. They are the hoaxers who ran the stunt in a bizzare TV experiment.

The 25ft "flying saucer" stunned villagers on Saturday as it spun across the sky 200ft above their heads. The outlandish sighting made headlines as far away as Australia. But the down - to - earth truth behind the "space craft" emerged yesterday.

TV firm Cnrysalis had it built for a Channel 4 documentary with the working title How To Build a Spaceship.

Danny Cohen, of Channel 4, said: "We were trying to see whether we could build a convincing looking spaceship and in that regard undoubtedly we succeeded. Dozens of people saw it and couldn't quite understand what they had seen. So I think it did work. It stayed quite high in the sky and looked harmless, so it frightened nobody. I think people were more bewildered by what they were seeing. People were left rubbing their heads, wondering what was going on". It took eight months to research, design and build the £50,000 aircraft.

Model flight specialists Cutting Edge effects - veterans of four Bond films - built it using a carbon fibre hoop as the skeleton. This was set in a reflective-plastic balloon filled with helium.

After a US military engine was didtched as too heavy, electric fan engines from Germany proved the key to making the "saucer" fly at just the right speed - 20mph. It was tested in the aircraft hanger shown above at a secret location.

The out-of-this-world con included using seven pilots to fly the aircraft by remote control for three miles.

Suspicion for the hoax first fell on UFO buffs holding their annual skywatch in the village, Avebury, Wilts. But producer Mark Raphael said they weren't fooled - despite the eerie setiing of a stone circle. He said they spent the rest of the night "looking at nothing, and yet when the craft flew over they hardly got out of their seats".

----

Here is a similar "UFO" construction, available for commercial advertising.... you'll find the video on this page on the far right column, #9 down from top, labeled 'The Ultimate Advertising Tool')