Last updated 12:25, Monday, 05 January 2009

THE truth is out there after the Evening Mail solved the UFO mystery which has gripped Furness.

We were inundated with calls and letters from readers who had spotted unidentified flying objects in the skies above Furness during the festive period.

Reports of strange orange lights appearing in the sky on December 25 and December 27 flooded in, as more and more were eager to find out what the strange phenomenon was.

But today we can reveal that the UFOs were in fact Chinese lantern balloons which were released as part of the wedding celebrations of an Askam couple.

Bride Andrea Hodgson, 36, contacted us to solve this X-File.

Mrs Hodgson, her husband Ronnie and their wedding guests released 50 orange, candle-lit lanterns into the sky from the reception at Abbey House Hotel, Barrow at 6.45pm on December 27.

She said: “I saw the letter in the paper and had a bit of a chuckle to myself when I read it because I knew straight away that people had seen our lanterns.

“We set off 50 of the lanterns from Abbey House.

“We arranged it as a tribute to my husband’s late father, who passed away in August.”

The case may be closed on the sightings from December 27, but there is still no explanation for the objects which appeared on Christmas Day.

Mrs Hodgson said that the candles on the lanterns usually burn for 10 or 20 minutes.

She said: “People spotted the strange lights in the sky just after we let them off.

“They are biodegradable so they tend to just disappear after a while.”

A number of orange flickering lights were spotted by keen-eyed readers floating in the sky on Christmas Day.

Mavis Lakeland, of Cloisters Avenue, Barrow, got in touch to say that her family had also set off a number of the lanterns from her back garden, which explains the numerous sightings over Newbarns that evening.

She said: “My son brought them back from Thailand and we set them off.

“We found it funny that so many people thought they were UFOs.”