GIANT flashing snakes in Selby. Bright balls of light heading in from the North Sea. Mysterious disappearing aircraft at Scarborough.

If you think this sort of stuff goes way over your head, you are absolutely right.

As our report tonight reveals, the British Government has been secretly logging UFO sightings above North Yorkshire for years.

But more worryingly, there has been a record increase in the number of strange goings on in our slice of the heavens.

Russ Kellett, a UFO investigator of some 15 years standing, told the Diary that he had logged 48 reports in the past year. That bucks a national trend where sightings have become rarer.

"We have had the biggest number of sightings on record, around Selby, Norton, Filey and Scarborough, all the way up to Cloughton and Whitby," he said.

The most recent took place near Scarborough last Tuesday night. "A gentleman was walking his dog at Cloughton and saw 200 objects coming in from the North Sea," Russ explained. "They were whitey-yellow balls of light."

A few days earlier, on January 10, something odd was spotted above Selby. It looked "like a snake in the sky, with lights all over the bottom and top".

Back in Scarborough a flying saucer has been seen and filmed by Russ's colleague Jodie Holden. It landed somewhere behind the McCain Stadium, but a later investigation found no trace of it.

"There's different sorts of things being seen," Russ added. One extremely odd sighting over the West Riding was captured on video. It looked like "somebody falling out of the sky," said Russ. "You are waiting for the parachute to open.

"But then you realise if it was a person falling out of the sky he would have to be 20ft tall."

That mirrors a similar sighting reported in Mexico.

Late last year the British UFO Study Group named Russ's home town of Filey as a hotspot for this sort of thing. So why the sudden increase in activity?

"If I knew that I would probably have the key to the universe. We have got no idea. It's worrying to be quite honest."

But if you are keen to see a UFO, head over to the East Coast, he says. And "just keep watching".

WHEN the Post Office Ltd first announced that seven York branches were earmarked for closure back in August 2004, the company's "head of area" David Mellows-Facer told us this: "The harsh reality is that many urban offices are struggling to survive because there are too many branches for the amount of business."

We went back to him for a comment last October, when it was confirmed that six out of the seven were definitely to shut. What did he think?

"The harsh reality is that many urban offices are struggling to survive because there are too many branches for the amount of business."

Yesterday the axe fell on the last of the bunch, Bishopthorpe Road Post Office. What new insight could Mr Mellows-Facer shed on the issue?

You've guessed it. He said: "The harsh reality is that many urban offices are struggling to survive because there are too many branches for the amount of business."

Each time we were asking for a response to the anger and inconvenience our readers were suffering as a result of this ill-considered closure scheme. The fact that all Mr Mellows-Facer could be bothered to do is recycle the same old soundbite reveals a lot about Post Office Ltd's attitude to their customers and their communities.

Updated: 09:08 Thursday, January 27, 2005