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A procession of up to 50 mysterious orange lights has baffled eyewitnesses as it swept across Britain’s skies.

Stunned families in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, watched on in shock as they unexplained lights streamed across the night sky for half an hour.

And onlookers watched in amazement as similar orange lights hovered above Lincoln, before moving off in different directions and eventually shooting straight up into space.

In a third close encounter, investigators are probing claims that more orange UFOs seen above Merseyside were connected to a military exercise involving one of the Navy’s top warships.

Unexplained: A procession of orange lights streamed for half an hour across the skies above Huntingdon last Wednesday night

Auberon Hedgecoe, who watched the phenomena with his wife Suzi, woke his son Barney, 10, and a friend Zac to show him the lights streaming across the night sky last Wednesday.

The guest house owner said: ‘They were not planes. These were not balloons. Each one was the size of a building.

‘It was like an armada. There was no sound.’

Another witness said: ‘They were quite low and they weren’t travelling randomly, something was driving them.

‘I do believe in UFOs but I think this was a military operation.

‘They may have quiet aircraft and fly at night so people don’t see them. I don’t think they were aliens.’

A similar eerie sighting was reported in the skies above Lincoln on Sunday night.

Stunned: Families in Lincoln also spotted glowing orange spheres grouped together in the sky on Sunday night
Engineer Paul Slight was returning home from a day out cycling with friends when he spotted the bright orange lights hovering over the town and even flying in an apparent formation.

Mr Slight, 54, said: ‘There were 26 of them at first, dodging and darting in between each other like they were playing a game.

‘After that, seven more arrived from the right hand side and weaved through the crowd of lights like strange kinds of aircraft.

‘After five minutes of moving around, the flickering yellow objects hung in the air for a second then shot off into the sky and disappeared.

‘I have no idea what they were – I’m not usually a believer but what I saw was really weird.’

‘Armada’: The Hedgecoe family, from left Suzi, Barney, friend Zac and Auberon, saw 50 of the orange lights above Huntingdon and described them as being ‘as big as a house’

Phil Hoyle, from the UK-based UFO Investigation Unit, said the way the UFOs moved indicated a form of intelligence.

He said: ‘If these objects were circling one another you would have to rule out that they were fireworks.

‘There have been more and more sightings of bright spheres appearing in the sky all around the country recently.’

Ruth Veron, spokesperson for nearby RAF Cranwell, said she did not know what the phenomena could be.

She said: ‘RAF Cranwell is closed over the weekend so it could not have been any aircraft from this base.

‘I do not have any idea what the lights could be, we did not have any aircraft flying that night.’

Military exercise: Experts are investigating whether orange lights above Merseyside were ‘counter measures’ to test a Royal Navy ship defences

Investigators are trying to find out whether glowing orange lights spotted above Liverpool and Southport were ‘counter measures’ testing the radar systems of anti-missile guns on the HMS Daring.

The warship, which is docked at Liverpool’s cruise liner terminal, is fitted with radar-activated Phalanx guns – capable of firing more than 3,000 round a minute.

A former military source told the Liverpool Echo high-flying jets had dropped the measures along a route to simulate the path of a missile in order to test the guns’ radar systems.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said: ‘We are looking into what activity, if any, was taking place in that area at the time.’

Hi tech: HMS Daring, which is currently docked at Liverpool, uses radar-activated guns which can track missiles and fire up to 3,000 rounds a minute

Other possible explanations for the mysterious orange lights include Chinese lanterns, or meteor showers.

Mark Rosney, from the Merseyside Anomalies Research Organisation (MARA), discounted the possibility of a astronomical event.

He said: ‘Witnesses saw them travelling from south to north. If there are military aircraft in the area, they should be logged.

‘It does sound like this explanation has legs.’

Chinese lanterns, which can be released at family celebrations or for the beginning of Chinese New Year, are able to stay aloft for around 20 minutes before the flame blows out and they float back down to the ground.