A PASSENGER jet coming in to land at Heathrow Airport had a near-miss with a UFO, newly-released Ministry of Defence files revealed today. Airman had encounter with alien spaceship' FORMER US Air Force fighter pilot Milton Torres is convinced he had an encounter with an alien spaceship in the skies over England in the 1950s.

He was warned to keep quiet about the incident, but eventually talked about it 31 years later, the newly-released Ministry of Defence files show.

On May 20 1957, Dr Torres, then aged 25, was on standby at RAF Manston in Kent when he received an urgent order to scramble.

He was told to intercept a UFO with "very unusual flight patterns" over East Anglia that ground radar operators had been tracking for some time.

It was so cloudy he could not see anything, but the object showed up clearly on his radar as similar in size to a B-52 bomber.

He was then ordered to fire a full salvo of 24 rockets at the object.

But before he could carry out this instruction the UFO suddenly darted off and disappeared from his scope in a matter of seconds.

The next day a man claiming to be from the US National Security Agency threatened him with losing his flying status if he told anyone what happened. Dr Torres, now 77 and living in Miami, Florida, said he was flying at about Mach 0.92, while the UFO was travelling at over Mach 10.

He said: "I think it was an alien spacecraft. It had a propulsion system that was beyond us -either magnetism or anti-gravity."

The captain of the Alitalia airliner was so concerned he shouted "look out" to his co-pilot after seeing a brown missile-shaped object shoot past them overhead.

The mysterious incident near Lydd in Kent in 1991 was thoroughly investigated by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the military.

But having ruled out the object being a missile, weather balloon or space rocket, the MoD closed the inquiry.

The unexplained close encounter is one of many recounted in military UFO documents made available online today by the National Archives.

Covering sightings from between 1986 and 1992, the 19 files include an MoD request that Army and Navy helicopters should not take photographs of crop circles for fear of undermining the official line that the military did not investigate unexplained phenomena.

A letter was also received from a woman claiming to be from the Sirius system who said her spacecraft - also containing two "Spectrans" with "Mr Spock ears" - crashed in Britain during the Second World War. But one of the most intriguing episodes is the near-miss involving the Alitalia airliner at about 8pm on April 21 1991.

The McDonnell Douglas MD80 aircraft was en route from Milan to Heathrow at 22,000ft with 57 people on board when pilot Achille Zaghetti saw the strange object some 1,000ft above him.

He recounted: "At once I said, look out, look out,' to my co-pilot, who looked out and saw what I had seen.

"As soon as the object crossed us I asked to the ACC (area control centre) operator if he saw something on his screen and he answered I see an unknown target 10nm (nautical miles) behind you'."

A CAA document notes that Southern TV broadcast a story about a 14-year-old boy who reported seeing a missile flying at low level before climbing through the cloud and disappearing on the same evening.

By July 2 the MoD had concluded that the object had not come from the Army firing ranges in the Lydd area.

There were, however, a number of other similar incidents recorded the same year.

On June 17 1991 four passengers on board a Dan Air Boeing 737 saw a "wingless projectile" pass beneath the aircraft as it climbed from Gatwick Airport.

Then on July 15 the pilot of a Britannia Airways 737 reported seeing a "small lozenge-shaped object" travelling at speed as they approached Gatwick.

Dr David Clarke, a UFO expert, said the documents would shed new light on relatively little-known sightings.

He admitted that some conspiracy theorists will already have decided that the release of the papers is a "whitewash".