IT was a night of great relief at the City Ground as Nottingham Forest sneaked the victory which assured their safety in the old First Division – but nothing could have prepared the crowd for the still unexplained sight which many of us saw as we started to make our way home.

Because Manchester City were due to face Leicester City in the FA Cup Final the next day, Forest's game had been switched to a Friday night on Trentside.

Some 26,629 fans were at the game to watch the Reds beat third-placed Everton 1-0 thanks to a goal from Dave Hilley.

Watching the game from the press box – but merely there in a spectating capacity – meant that a colleague and I left with the majority of the crowd on the final whistle.

I think that the fondly-remembered Tavern inside Trent Bridge Cricket Ground (long before the Larwood and Voce) – under the kindly stewardship of John Gough – was our destination. It usually was.

As we walked across the main City Ground car park and were jostling for position as we approached the main gates, a strange low-flying "craft" streaked across the sky immediately in front of us, speeding from behind what was then the Bridgford Hotel and disappearing across West Bridgford.

It was going so fast that it was a case of "did I just see what I thought I saw?" Fortunately we were heading for the Tavern, not away from it, and my colleague was able to confirm that indeed he had seen the UFO as well.

Remember that in 1969 we had only a small percentage of the general communications facilities available in 2010, so it was only in the Guardian Journal and Evening Post and News the next day – April 26, 1969 – that we saw the headlines which screamed "Fireball From Outer Space Hunted by Police".

Hundreds saw it flash over Notts. The mystery object came down near Roewen in the Conway Valley, North Wales, after thousands throughout Britain had reported seeing something with a fiery tail flashing through the sky. In Notts, hundreds contacted the Notts Combined Police headquarters at Nottingham and Epperstone Manor after seeing the object zooming overhead.

"We have never had as many calls of this nature before," admitted a police spokesman. "At Watnall, the switchboard was jammed for 40 minutes while staff took descriptions from people all over the Nottinghamshire area who had seen the object."

It was described by an East Bridgford man as "a bright green object with a tapering tip," while in Newark it appeared as "a greenish yellow colour and was like a huge firework in the sky with a long tail". The verdict from a Kirkby-in-Ashfield observer was "cigar-shaped, green in colour with a red tip".

It never was explained.

A few years later on a Sunday evening, I was closing the curtains when somewhere in the vicinity of Nottingham city centre it caught my eye that four star-like shapes were forming the corners of a perfect square.

Suddenly, the bottom left star started to go up in a straight line to join the one immediately above it. It couldn't have been a plane and it was highly unlikely to be a helicopter – although that was a vague possibility.

I stood in the darkness and carried on watching as the star moved in turn to the other corners of the square before stopping briefly and then speeding away into the night sky at such a velocity that it was gone in a flash.

To my disappointment, unlike the incident on April 25, 1969, I can't remember any media coverage the next day. It had been such a deliberate exercise in "docking" with each of the three other stars that it was fascinating to watch – while the speed it disappeared at was amazing.

It would be great to hear whether anybody else remembers either of these two instances – and, more to the point, any solutions.