SECTION: Pg. 21
LENGTH: 669 words
HEADLINE: Tiny, huge stomach - and an amazingly capacious snout

IT IS reassuring to learn that the European Parliament is taking a serious interest in Unidentified Flying Objects and that there is a proposal for the EU to fund a permanent UFO tracking centre. I certainly intend to make a report to my own MEP about a strange experience I had the other week. I am convinced that I had a close encounter with ...

SOCIAL AFFAIRS

-- it is reported that the European Parliament is considering funding a permanent UFO tracking facility. The item's author, Oliver Pritchett, proceeds with a humourous article in which he relates a discussion with an alien delegation from the

SECTION: Pg. 24
LENGTH: 694 words
HEADLINE: Eurocrats' close encounter of the expensive kind
BYLINE: Steve Doughty

IT is the achievement of a dream for determined UFO -watchers. But more sceptical earthlings are bug-eyed over a bizarre scheme from Brussels for spending even more money.

A report for the European Parliament will recommend that the EU establish a noffice to track UFO sightings. In short, Brussels wants to set up its own X-Files investigation into flying saucers and little green ...

The scheme, which horrified Euro-sceptics yesterday, has sprung from the persistence of a British UFO researcher.

Retired printing consultant Derek Sheffield, 67, has harassed officialdom for three years over an incident ...

... in the mid-Seventies, agrees that evidence for the incident is strong an djoins in accusations of a British cover-up of UFO incidents.

Lord Hill-Norton, 80, who has said he is prepared to write a foreword for a book by ...

... Mr Sheffield to petition for an inquiry.

Now its energy, research and technology committee is understood to have advised setting up the UFO centre so the issue can be studied scientifically. The report, The Creation of a European Observation Station for the Sightings o f Unidentified Flying Objects, goes to MEPs shortly.

Mr Sheffield, from Rolvenden, Kent, said: 'This has been going on for a couple of years. You'd have ...