Published: Tuesday, 10th February, 2009 12:00pm

UFOs sighted over rural Mullingar

by Olga Aughey

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Tracks in the snow: Catriona found this unusual paw print in the snow which is unlike a dog’s print with four small digits and one larger heel pad to the back. This track just has three large digits and is “four times the size” of a dog’s print.

UFOs were prominent in the news when a Clare family witnessed unusual lights in the sky, but closer to home, Catriona ni Duill also thought she saw unidentified flying objects pass over her home at Clonlost, Killucan.

A third generation dog trainer, Catriona was checking the skies for stars on Tuesday, February 3. She spoke to Gerry Ryan on Friday morning, in the hope that he and his listeners could provide some reasonable explanation for the two multi-coloured aircraft she witnessed fly overhead.

'It was Tuesday evening, shortly after six o"clock, and I was checking the skies,' says Catriona.

'I"m quite into astronomy and I treated myself to a book recently, so I was looking to see if it was going to be a frosty night and see what stars were out,' she explains.

'I noticed a white light in the distance, over Clonlost woods, which seemed to be moving upwards into the sky from the horizon line.

'It kept getting higher and higher, and then it began to move in my direction,' she added.

Catriona said she just could not believe her eyes when she witnessed what she thought to be a UFO passing directly overhead.

'As it got closer I could see that there were four different lights, red, green, yellow and white. I could barely make out the outline of a craft, but it was moving very slowly.

'It didn"t look like a plane, but it was very large in size, and it sounded like a heavy aircraft. Small planes do pass over here, but never any big planes, and this was moving much slower than a normal plane would. It took about ten minutes to reach me.

'About ten minutes later, another craft with very same coloured lights, passed overhead.'

After witnessing what she believed to be two UFOs flying overhead, Catriona went to tell her son all about what she had seen in the sky that evening. But things were about to get even more strange.

She woke the next morning, Wednesday, February 4, to find a covering of snow around her home. Catriona, who keeps greyhounds, went out to feed them as normal but discovered tracks across her yard that were unlike anything she had ever seen before.

'The next morning I got up to find tracks in the snow. We keep greyhounds but they are kept in a 6ft high chain enclosure,' she said.

'The paw prints were four times the size of normal dog tracks.'

But it was the shape of these prints that left Catriona baffled.

'A normal dog"s print has four small digits where the nails are, and then a bigger heel pad at the back,' Catriona explained. 'What was unusual about these tracks was that they were made of just three large digits.

'I"m a third generation dog trainer and it"s unlike anything I"ve seen before,' she continued.

'The prints seemed to come from nowhere, as something either jumped into the yard or landed there. They just started in the middle of the yard, and continued in a straight line into the barn, and on out into fields behind the house.

'Whatever it was, it didn"t run around the place.

'That"s why I rang Gerry Ryan, so that I could send him in the pics and see if anyone from the Zoological Gardens could explain what made those tracks.'

However, Catriona, who is wondering if the two incidents are connected, is still without any explanation as to what she saw in the sky that night, and what type of 'animal' could have made those unusual tracks.