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An Italian airline pilot has given a first-hand account of a near-miss with a UFO while approaching London’s Heathrow Airport in 1991.

Captain Achille Zaghetti’s experience was one of the most vivid of the close encounters reported to the authorities in the UK between 1986 and 1992. They’re contained in 19 files recently made public by the country’s National Archives.

Captain Zaghetti was flying an Alitalia airliner from Milan to Heathrow when he and his co-pilot saw an object streaking across the sky over Kent in south-east England. The 10-foot long object came so close that he shouted to his co-pilot “look out, look out!”

“It was shaped like a cigar and passed very close – about 1,000 feet on the right,” he told Italian newspapers, who tracked him down at his home in Tuscany. “It was military beige in colour.”

Captain Zaghetti asked the control tower if they could see something behind him and they confirmed that there was an object. He said he was glad his co-pilot had seen it too because he didn’t want to be accused of being a fantasist.

The 1,500-page batch of documents from the National Archives contains stories from the plausible to the preposterous.

In August 1989, worried callers in the London area told the Ministry of Defence about “two to three lights, green, red and orange, oscillating and moving left and right and around each other.” They turned out to be lasers from a Tina Turner concert.

by Andy Moreton

Berlin’s historic Tempelhof airport, which I wrote about in May, is in its final days.

The airport opened in the 1920s and was then expanded by the Nazis with the construction of a huge terminal building. It became a symbol of West Berlin’s resistance to the Soviet blockade during the Cold War: a non-stop airlift kept the city going with supplies of food and fuel during 1948 and 1949.

But the fall of the Berlin Wall and unification spelled the beginning of the end for Tempelhof. Nowadays just a handful of private airlines use the landing strip. All other flights to and from Berlin currently use Schoenefeld or Tegel while a new international hub is being built.

A referendum was held in April, but there was not enough support to keep the airport going and it will close on Friday.

Berliners are currently hurrying to say their goodbyes and trying to get a final sightseeing flight on one of the 1940s-era planes still operating out of Tempelhof.

The problem still taxing the authorities is what to do with the huge building. Tempelhof is, in essence, a massive bunker system and would simply be too expensive to tear down. So the city government is still accepting proposals from the public about its future use.

One use was found for it recently – a rock venue. The British indie band Bloc Party played a one-off gig in the airport’s dining lounge.

by Andy Moreton

Book luxury hotels in Berlin through Luxique. We have a selection of 19 in the German capital at the best rates available.

Forget ‘Free Willy’ – the cry in Dubai has been ‘Free Sammy!’

Sammy the Shark has been the star attraction for several weeks in a huge tank in the lobby of Dubai’s spectacular new luxury hotel, Atlantis.

But the 13-foot whale shark is apparently a juvenile and a protected species and environmentalists have been waging a campaign against the hotel’s state-owned developers to have her removed. Newspapers, radio stations and schools joined the fray and there was even a petition on the social network, Facebook, signed by 8,000 people.

The hotel has maintained that it rescued the shark off the Dubai coast and that it’s been nursing Sammy back to health. However, former employees have told the local press that capturing a whale shark was always part of the hotel’s plan to provide an added tourist attraction.

Now, the UAE’s Minister for the Environment, Rashid Ahmad bin Fahad, has stepped in, saying the shark will be set free and returned to the sea.

Local journalists say the decision to release Sammy came as a surprise to even her staunchest supporters, highlighting how local sensibilities in the UAE are changing. This is in part because Dubai is attracting growing numbers of expats concerned about the environment.

by Andy Moreton

See the phenomenon that is Dubai – Luxique offers a selection of a dozen of the finest luxury hotels in Dubai.

With Hallowe’en approaching, I was reminded of one of the world’s most famously haunted hotels.
The Roosevelt was at the centre of the Hollywood scene in its heyday and was where the first Academy Awards ceremony was held in 1929.

Opened in 1927 as a luxurious hotel to service the new movie industry, the Hollywood Roosevelt was the place to catch a glimpse of the stars … and it seems a few left an indelible mark.

Marilyn Monroe stayed there for two years in Suite 1200, which looked down on the pool. In Monroe’s room there was a full-length mirror and it was eventually moved to the hotel manager’s office. An employee was dusting the mirror one day and saw the face of Marilyn Monroe staring back at her. The mirror is now in the hotel lobby and some guests say they, too, have caught a glimpse of the movie star.

Montgomery Clift lived in Room 928 at the Hollywood Roosevelt during the filming of From Here to Eternity. It’s said his ghost can be seen pacing the hallway outside his room while rehearsing his lines. Witnesses say they’ve also seen Clift playing his bugle in the hallway. Guests who have stayed in his room have felt an occasional ghostly presence and a pat on the shoulder.

In the Blossom Ballroom, where the Oscars ceremony was born, a cold spot has been detected – about ten degrees cooler than the rest of the room. Psychic investigators have seen the spirit of a man dressed in black. Maybe it was Douglas Fairbanks, who presented the show in 1929.

The Hollywood Roosevelt - now part of the Thompson Hotels group - was refurbished in 2005 by the acclaimed designer, Dodd Mitchell. And as Vanity Fair said at the time, ‘The ghost of glamour past has a new lease of life.’

by Andy Moreton

Luxique can offer the best available rates at the Roosevelt as well several other luxury hotels in Los Angeles.

The Acropolis temples in the Greek capital, Athens, are being given a high-tech makeover.

Over the past two-and-a-half thousand years, the elaborately sculpted stones have fallen prey to a film of black crust from car exhaust fumes and industrial pollution.

Now, a team of Greek engineers and restorers are using innovative laser technology to clean the surface of the monuments, uncovering colours and ornamentation hidden for decades.

The team tested forty different methods, including mechanical and chemical processes, to find the safest solutions to restore the white of the marbles without losing detail.

The winner was the brainchild of Crete’s Foundation for Research and Technology, which created a system that uses two laser beams of infra-red and ultra-violet rays simultaneously. The new system blasts off layers of black film, leaving the marble details intact and without discoloration.

It’s a risky business though, requiring the utmost precision. In the past, restoration attempts have caused damage.

“The cleaning is not reversible,” said Evi Papaconstantinou, the head of the restoration team. “If you remove something, you cannot put it back in place. So we must be quite sure that we remove the unwanted pollutants and leave the substratum intact.”

by Andy Moreton

Luxique offers top-class luxury Athens hotels with views of the Acropolis, including the sumptuous King George II Palace and Grand Bretagne.

Paris’s most iconic landmark, the Eiffel Tower, is having its display of sparkling lights reduced to set an example of energy saving.

The tower has twinkled for ten minutes on the hour every hour during the evening since 2000. Now, to reinforce an environmental message, it will be for only five minutes.

The tower’s managers said the measure was largely symbolic as the 20,000 flashing light bulbs that produce the effect consume relatively little energy.

Watching the spectacle has become a popular activity for tourists who gather during the evening on bridges and squares.

by Andy Moreton

Luxique has a top selection of luxury hotels in Paris including a number close to the Tower.

Teenage girls sunbathing on beaches at the start of the Australian summer have been warned against the practice of painting their cell phone numbers on their backs to attract boys.

The stunt has been seen on at least two beaches in Sydney. The 14- and 15-year-old girls use blue zinc sunblock cream so that the impression of the number is left on their skin after tanning.

Child protection agencies are horrified. One spokeswoman said: “We’d never advise girls to broadcast their phone number on the internet or anywhere that could make them a target. They’re in their bikinis, showing off their bodies, objectifying themselves in a way that is, to my mind, a bit trashy.”

Local police commander, Dave Darcy, agreed. “To me it is risky, you have no control over who gets your number, it is merely inviting trouble,” he said.

by Andy Moreton

Luxique has an unrivalled selection of chic luxury hotels in Sydney.

Property developers on Spain’s holiday coasts were already feeling the pinch well before the present credit crunch.
Hundreds of estate agency offices have closed in the past year since the bubble burst on a construction boom that had been powering Spain’s economy for some ten years.

One company on the Costa del Sol recently resorted to desperate measures in an attempt to sell new homes – offering two for the price of one.

At the Malaga property fair, the company said that buyers of one of its £620,000 ($1 million) beachside homes would also get a one-bedroom flat at a golf resort.

Organisers of the fair reported a significant drop in exhibitors at this year’s event and added that the price of homes on offer had fallen by up to 20 per cent from last year.

The President of Spain’s Association of Constructors and Developers, Guillermo Chicote, said the industry desperately needed government help to aid its recovery. “If the government doesn’t react, this situation could last for another three or four years,” he said.

Even super-rich celebrities are not immune to the property squeeze in Spain. David and Victoria Beckham have apparently been trying to sell their luxury villa in the capital, Madrid, since last year when the couple moved to the US. The price has reportedly come down from £5 million ($8.6 million) to £3 million ($5.2 million).

The five-room villa in the chic suburb of La Moraleja is ‘incredible’ according to the selling agent. It includes two acres of land, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a small soccer pitch and a children’s playground.

by Andy Moreton

Luxique offers a selection of luxury and boutique hotels throughout Spain, including two boutique hotels in Malaga and 12 luxury hotels in the Costa del Sol region.

Figures recently released here in the UK show that air travel is declining for the first time in twenty years.

The number of passengers at eighteen leading British airports dropped by more than four per cent in September from 20.8 million to 19.9 million.

Large airports fared worst, with Heathrow down 3.6 per cent, Gatwick 6.8 and Manchester 6.7.

The figures suggest that the continuous growth in air travel since 1991 – encouraged by the popularity of low cost carriers – is coming to an end, along with cheap flights.

Any number of factors are driving leisure airline traffic down, not least the economic situation that’s beginning to affect family budgets. There are also environmental concerns and the well-publicised and off-putting problems with baggage handling and queues caused by extra security measures.

Companies are also re-evaluating business travel in light of the global downturn. According to Rebecca Ruiz of Forbes.com in New York, travel managers are considering everything from curtailing trips that aren’t revenue-generating to renegotiating contracts with hotels to include free Internet or gym access to asking employees of the same sex to share hotel rooms.

Environmental campaigners here in the UK say it all adds up to the government needing to look again at airport expansion, particularly a proposed new runway at Heathrow.

But the British Airports Authority says the outlook for aviation remains strong. “Historically, air traffic growth recovers from short-term shocks such as those currently being played out in the financial markets,” a spokesman said.

by Andy Moreton

Prince Charles has said the tourism industry will have to make efforts on a ‘heroic scale’ to minimise the impact of travel on the environment.

The Prince, who’s known for his forthright views on many aspects of the modern world from GM crops to architecture, sent a video message to the annual convention of the Association of British Travel Agents in Gran Canaria.

He said much was being done, but if care were not taken, the wonders of the world that inspired people to travel in the first place would be threatened.

He said he applauded the initiatives already taken by the travel and tourism industry. “There is, however, so much more that can be done and if we are to continue to enjoy the benefits of travel while at the same time safeguarding natural treasures, we must, I fear, redouble our efforts.”

Prince Charles was specifically concerned about the danger to the world’s remaining tropical rainforests, the decline of coral reefs - partly caused by pollution from hotels - and the damage to wetlands caused by the demand for water to supply tourist facilities.

“The travel sector, probably better than most industries, understands that there can be no secure long-term economic growth if the environment continues to be degraded, and that the only sustainable business strategy is to become low-carbon and resource-efficient,” said the Prince.

by Andy Moreton