The 19 files, which date from 1986 and 1992, show the extensive records of strange sightings by members of the public and unexplained radar images from air traffic control.

In one instance, an Alitalia flight coming into land at London's Heathrow Airport reported a near miss with a UFO, which the pilot described as "similar to a missile - light brown or fawn - about three metres in length but without any exhaust flame".

Captain Achille Zaghetti was so concerned about a collision he shouted "Look out! Look out!" to his co-pilot who then spotted the same object.

A corresponding image appeared on the Air Traffic Control radar and the MoD was brought in to investigate.

In the files released by the National Archive, the military admitted that the sighting in April 1991 could not be explained, having ruled out a British or American missile.

It concluded: "In the absence of any clear evidence which could be used to identify the object, it is our intention to treat this sighting like that of any other Unidentified Flying Object."

Two further near misses were reported in the summer of 1991 when one aircraft flying in to Gatwick airport reported a "wingless projectile" passing the left side of the plane and another flight leaving Gatwick spotted a "small lozenge-shaped object" speeding past the cockpit.

The newly released files also go into detail about two American Air Force pilots who were scrambled in 1957 and ordered to fire upon a UFO target flying above East Anglia.

Dozens of previously unseen doctors' reports, diaries and prescriptions show that people visited hospitals with symptoms including depression, inflamed bodies, excessive erotic desire, irrational thoughts and a loss of self control.

The term love sickness would now be considered to be unrequited or forbidden love or the distress of being broken-hearted.

Doctors prescribed remedies including potions, diets, mental exercises and listening to music.

In drastic cases, surgery known as bloodletting was performed to release blood and semen from the body.

However, doctors believed that the most successful remedy was simply to have sex.

Dr Lesel Dawson of the University of Bristol, who carried out the research, said that feelings of love sickness were particularly prevalent when people weren't allowed to express love which caused anger and frustration and then turned into a mental illness.

For all Barack Obama's talk about change, there are signs that in style — if not substance — a new White House under Democrat Obama would operate much like the current one under President Bush.

Think discipline, efficiency and secrecy. These are hallmarks of Obama's campaign, just as they have been for the last eight years in the leak-proof, tightly managed Bush administration.

If Obama becomes the nation's 44th president, however, the extraordinary history-making aspects of his ascension could for a time overshadow almost everything else.

The nation would have its first black leader, one of its youngest presidents ever and someone with a varied, even exotic, background. The book on the United States' checkered history of race relations would add a new chapter. And even if Obama's honeymoon was short-lived, the world would see America in a new light.

There are other ways, small and large, that an Obama White House promises to usher in newness.

Obama's two daughters, at ages 10 and 7, would be the youngest residents to roam the White House since 9-year-old Amy Carter tagged along with President Carter and his wife in 1977. Obama's poise at the podium would end an era of water-cooler jokes about presidential malapropisms.

On issues, Obama's approach on everything from Iraq to health care would look much different from the last eight years. He has pledged to preside over an unconventional style of politics and policy development virtually blind to party, an intriguing possibility even if hard to trust after years of divisive partisanship.

Circumstances often spring game-changing surprises on a new president. But how candidate Obama has managed his campaign, and what he's promised along the way, offer hints of how a President Obama would govern.

Obama, like Bush, demands an orderly shop.

Aides are expected to be both tightlipped and tight-knit. They get a "no drama" speech upon hire. And even if that rule is violated, histrionic disagreements over strategy, policy or personality are expected to stay behind closed doors, and they actually do. Most events come off like clockwork.

Obama's style as a candidate predicts a CEO-style president, one who delegates rather than micromanages.

It's the same model as for Bush, the nation's first MBA president. It derives in part from something the two men have in common: natural political gifts that set them on a path to the White House that took shortcuts around much government experience. That means policy experts are needed for heavy lifting.

The 47-year-old Obama hasn't finished his first term in the U.S. Senate, and before that had just eight years as a state lawmaker under his government belt.

Obama, like Bush, relies most on a small, hard-to-penetrate inner circle. It's been a successful formula, but can irk power players in his party and in Congress, who sometimes see Team Obama as too insular. This image was only fed by the decision to place Obama's campaign headquarters far from Washington in Chicago and the way his campaign used the Internet and grass-roots supporters, more than party bosses, to capitalize on the Obama phenomenon.

Obama's discipline is less about the importance of secrecy and more about making the organizational trains run on time, said Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer.

Bush and Obama stand for very different things, says Zelizer, but Obama "runs his campaign with the same sort of methodical efficiency and closed nature of the Bush White House."

South Korean and American officials are to search the border dividing North and South Korea for the remains of troops killed in the 1950-53 Korean War.

It will be the first ever search in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) - which in spite of its name is the world's most heavily armed frontier.

The move was announced by South Korea's defence ministry.

It said more than 13,000 South Korean troops and about 2,000 US troops were believed to be buried in the zone.

The search of the DMZ - a 4km (2.5-mile) thick ribbon that stretches across the waist of the Korean peninsula - will go on until 25 November, the South Korean defence ministry was quoted as saying.

Life appears to be imitating art in a drama convulsing the Czech Republic: the charge that when he was a 21-year-old student, Milan Kundera, now one of eastern Europe's most celebrated writers, denounced a Western intelligence agent to Czechoslovakia's communist police.

The denunciation resulted in a 22-year jail sentence for the agent, Miroslav Dvoracek, including hard labor in a uranium mine.

In Kundera's first novel, "The Joke," a mordantly comic satire of Stalinist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, the protagonist, Ludvik Jahn, a staunch communist, is expelled from the party and forced out of his university after being denounced by his comrade and friend Pavel. For the unlikely crime of possessing a sense of humor, Ludvik is sent to work in the mines as a laborer.

Few here have failed to notice the eerie parallels in a modern-day morality tale suffused with Kundera's favorite themes of denunciation and betrayal.

The accusation - published Monday in the Czech political weekly Respekt - has spurred a national soul-searching and threatens, however unfairly, to tarnish the reputation of a writer who has long sought to remain aloof from both his art and the country of his birth.

"Kundera has always tried to hide and to distance himself from the characters in his work, but now he has become a character out of one of his own books - and he is being manipulated by fate," said Petr Tresnak, one of the authors of the Respekt article.

While Hawaii’s surf-loving chiefs ruled from Waikiki because they liked its steady waves and idyllic weather, European and American ships turned nearby Honolulu Harbor into a forest of masts, spawning a mariner’s village that eventually became the Pacific archipelago’s capital.

The ship carrying the last of those masts — four to be exact — was sold recently for a symbolic dollar to a group of cash-strapped enthusiasts who hope to save that 266-foot square-rigger, the Falls of Clyde.

Next month, the ship, built in Scotland in 1878, is to leave the slip it has occupied for 25 years near the landmark Aloha Tower and Honolulu’s cruise ship terminal. Its destination, and whether the group, the Friends of the Falls of Clyde, which is starting out with just $35,000, will find the millions needed to repair her, remains in doubt.

RIVERTON, Wyo. — At 69, her eyes soft and creased with age, Alvena Oldman remembers how the teachers at St. Stephens boarding school on the Wind River Reservation would strike students with rulers if they dared to talk in their native Arapaho language.

“We were afraid to speak it,” she said. “We knew we would be punished.”

More than a half-century later, only about 200 Arapaho speakers are still alive, and tribal leaders at Wind River, Wyoming’s only Indian reservation, fear their language will not survive. As part of an intensifying effort to save that language, this tribe of 8,791, known as the Northern Arapaho, recently opened a new school where students will be taught in Arapaho. Elders and educators say they hope it will create a new generation of native speakers.

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 the night of 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 - something that came as a sobering shock to him.

Night after night they climbed into their cramped and freezing aircraft to strike at Germany's cities and factories.

And each time they flew, the odds of them surviving the night-fighters and flak grew longer and longer.

Yet the sacrifice and seemingly inexhaustible bravery of the young men of Bomber Command has gone almost unrecognised for 60 years.

Even Churchill snubbed them, though they faced some of the worst losses of any branch of the British military.

However, it emerged that the heroes of Bomber Command are at last to be recognised with their own memorial.

Campaigners have won the struggle to raise funds for a £2million memorial in Regent's Park to honour the 55,000 who lost their lives during the war.