COULD this be a case for Mulder and Scully? The authorities are struggling to come up with an explanation after bizarre orange lights were seen hovering above a North-East town at the weekend.

Darlington residents spotted the five glowing orbs floating in a V formation on Saturday night. Rebecca Hall filmed the incident on her mobile phone at 10pm, during a night out at The Dalesman pub on Victoria Road.

She said: "I was standing outside having a cigarette when I noticed them.

"We told everyone in the pub, but they thought we were pulling their legs. Curiosity got the better of one of them and he came out and saw them too.

"We were all standing in the street looking up at the sky.

"It was bizarre. It didnt look like planes or helicopters because there was no noise. They seemed to be in a fixed formation, and after two or three minutes the lights disappeared."

Bouncer Gary Lunt, 32, was on duty at the Boot and Shoe pub, next to the Market Place in the town centre, when he saw the lights.

"Four or five objects were floating over the top of the Dolphin Centre," he said.

"It definitely wasn't stars, or aeroplanes, and there was no noise at all.

"The other doorman I was working with saw it too, and people in the Market Place were looking up at them.

"I've never seen anything like it. I think they were UFOs, they certainly weren't natural." A spokeswoman for the nearby Durham Tees Valley Airport watched the footage but said staff had no record of any unexplained activity in the skies on Saturday night.

She said: "It is certainly nothing to do with the airport. It's not aircraft lights or anything like that."

A spokesman for Darlington police said: "We have nothing logged of anyone reporting such sightings."

Last night, UFO expert Nick Pope offered a more mundane explanation for the lights. He said: "I strongly suspect these are so-called Chinese lanterns - small balloons with a burner underneath that are increasingly popular in this country and are let off at parties, barbecues and so on.

"Most UFO reports of red or orange lights drifting in formation are attributable to these lanterns."