A suspicious orange light flying over a Long Ditton home stirred the interest of UFO investigators this week.

The strange sighting was made by Debbie Leigh, 48, and her husband on Saturday, February 21, as she smoked a cigarette in her garden in Oaks Way, south west London.

No strangers to disturbance from planes flying over to Heathrow, they originally thought the object might be a burning aircraft.

But as it passed over their house at a consistent height and speed for several minutes, they were left baffled and recorded it on an online UFO sightings log in the hope that others had seen it too.

It had been an ordinary evening for the Leigh family. Her husband Mark was preparing a Sunday lunch and Mrs Leigh was working on the computer before they made their discovery shortly after 7pm.

The mother of two, who works in music PR, insists that she was not drunk at the time and had never seen a suspected UFO before.

She said: “The weirdest thing is that it didn’t make a sound, which is why we thought it might be something peculiar. My husband is a bit of a UFO geek and when he came out and saw it he got goose bumps.

“I think it would be extremely arrogant of us to think that we are the only people in the universe. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was alien life, I don’t know about little green men and all that rubbish but if we can work it out, why can’t anyone else?”

Investigator David Willey, of the North Surrey Paranormal Group, said it was the first credible sighting he has come across this year.

But he suggested that the orange light could have been a shooting star without a tail or a piece of space debris that burnt up in the atmosphere.

He added: “If it shot off really quickly or if it shot up vertically, then I would be really suspicious.”