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Industry executives and bankers at the London Bullion Market Association annual meeting said the extent of the move into physical gold was unseen and driven by the very rich.

“There is an enormous pick-up in investment demand. I have never seen a market like this in my 33-year career,” said Jeremy Charles, chairman of the LBMA. “The gold refineries cannot produce enough bars.”

The move comes as fears grow among investors over the losses at investment vehicles previously considered almost risk-free, such as money funds.

Philip Clewes-Garner, associate director of precious metals at HSBC, added that investors were not flying into gold simply because they saw it as a haven amid Wall Street’s woes. “It is a flight into gold because it is a physical asset,” he said.

“Vault staff are also doing overtime,” another banker at the LBMA meeting said, adding that investors in some countries were paying premiums of up to $25 an ounce above the London spot price to secure scarce gold bars.

Spot gold prices in London on Tuesday traded at about $900 an ounce, more than 25 per cent above the level before Lehman Brothers’ collapse. Although some traders said the rush into physical gold could boost prices, others cautioned that prices were depressing jewellery demand, capping any price gain. Industry executives said gold refineries and government mints were working at full throttle to keep up with investor demand, but acknowledged they were suffering from shortages, particularly on coins.

Johan Botha, a spokesman for the Rand Refinery in South Africa, which manufactures the Krugerrand, the world’s most popular gold coin, said the plant was now running at full capacity seven days a week. “Even so, now and then we have shortages,” he said.

The Austrian mint, which manufactures the Vienna Philharmonic, a popular gold coin in Europe, said it had extended work to the weekends to accommodate soaring demand.

Dramatic eye-witness testimony was heard at a conference over the weekend which, delegates were told, provided “definitive” proof of recent UFO activity in the skies around north Dublin and Meath.

Footage, filmed on a camera phone at 10.35pm on August 3 near Dunboyne was also played and replayed to over 70 delegates who attended the fifth Irish International UFO conference in Carrick-on-Shannon.

The triangular shaped image, with lights at each point, which appeared to send a red laser-type light towards earth, drew gasps of amazement from the 70 or so delegates who attended the world premiere of the footage.

Unusual

A senior garda officer who was driving when he noticed the unusual light formation in the sky stopped to film it.

“There is no footage like this in the world. It is the most amazing and spectacular I have ever seen,” said Carl Nally, co-founder of UFO and Paranormal Research Ireland and joint author of ‘Conspiracy of Silence’.

Five days earlier, on July 29, an off-duty pilot who photographed lightning from Howth pier just after midnight later noticed what appeared to be a triangular-shaped object to the right of the lightning fork in the developed image.

And Fianna Fail Town Councillor in Trim, Jimmy Peppard, ran indoors for a camera on August 8 when he spotted a triangular-shaped object measuring “about a mile in diameter” in the sky, where it remained static for about half an hour.

“What we have here is sightings of three objects east, west and south-east of Dublin airport, each five days apart by reliable and trained observers and even since I have arrived here I have received another image from a pilot,” Mr Nally told the conference.

He later described the laser beam footage as the best footage on the planet and said it would be shown all over the world. “This is what the sceptics are crying out for. What all this footage has in common is that trained observers, honest people, took it. What better could you get than a senior garda, a politician and a pilot,” he said.

He added that he would not rule out speculation that increased UFO activity in the north Dublin and Meath areas was linked to the road construction works near Tara. “We cannot rule this out as a possibility. We are talking about a very ancient sacred place,” he said.

Ross Hemsworth, who presents a TV show on Sky which investigates the paranormal, said he would reserve judgment until he examined the footage more closely.

“There have been a lot of sightings in Ireland in a lot of strange places and the proximity to the digging of the motorway may have opened things up,” he said.

Delegates at the two-day event, organised by Betty Meyler, President of the UFO Society of Ireland, otherwise immersed themselves in talk of orbs, luminosity, crop circles, alien abductions and star children. And ex-oilfield executive Ian Crane warned of plans for a fake alien invasion to be staged at the 2012 Olympics in London by the terrorists behind 9/11 and other atrocities, in their quest for global control.

Frank McGarahan, 45, the chief operating officer of Barclays Wealth, in charge of assets worth £133 billion in 21 countries, was out with his brother and another male ahead of a family christening later that day in Norwich.

As they queued for a taxi at the Guildhall Hill rank at 3am Mr McGarahan spotted a man being attacked by a group of youths and is believed to have shouted at the gang to stop. Police say he did not physically intervene.

The shortage began two weeks ago in Atlanta, the region’s largest city, when oil refineries on the Gulf Coast were shut down by hurricanes Gustav and Ike earlier this month. Parts of north Georgia, western North Carolina and parts of Tennessee were also affected.

But by the time that bell sounded again on the New York Stock Exchange, seven and a half frantic hours later, $1.2 trillion had vanished from the U.S. stock market.

What had started 24 hours earlier, with a modest sell-off in stock markets in Asia, had turned into one of Wall Street’s darkest days. The Dow Jones industrial average tumbled 777.68 points, just shy of 7 percent, to 10,365.45, its lowest close in nearly three years. The decline also surpasses the record for the biggest decline during a trading day — 721.56 at one point on Sept. 17, 2001, when the market reopened after 9/11.

But in percentage terms, it was only the 17th-biggest decline for the Dow, far less severe than the 20-plus percent drops seen on Black Monday in 1987 and before the Great Depression.

A huge drop in oil prices was another sign of the economic chaos that investors fear. Light, sweet crude fell $10.52 to settle at $96.36 on the New York Mercantile Exchange as investors feared energy demand would continue to slide amid further economic weakness. And gold, where investors flock in search of a relatively secure investment, rose $23.20 to $911.70.

Across Wall Street, no one could quite believe what was happening on the floor — the floor of the House of Representatives, not the stock exchange.

As lawmakers began to vote on a $700 billion rescue for financial institutions, the trading desk at Voyageur Asset Management in Chicago went silent. Money managers gaped at a television screen carrying news that seemed unthinkable: The bill was not going to pass.

State and federal police forces want full-frontal images of vehicles, including the driver and front passenger, that are clear enough for identification purposes and usable as evidence in court.

“All vehicles passing through a fixed or mobile ANPR camera will have the data recorded and available for interrogation,” CrimTrac told the Queensland TravelSafe inquiry into the use of ANPR for road safety.

“Existing camera applications, such as Safe-T-Cam, red light and speed cameras could be upgraded where necessary to provide constant live streaming to a central database.

“National connectivity would be achieved through secure digital networks for fixed cameras. Law enforcement agencies would also use mobile units.”

David Vaile, executive director of the University of NSW’s Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre, warned that the ANPR “could become the next Access Card”.

“As a public surveillance system that could be linked to facial recognition, this has enough technology behind it to impinge on everybody’s daily life,” Mr Vaile said.

“CrimTrac has told us there will be 5000 cameras around the country, overwhelmingly in populated areas, taking some 70 million photos every day.

“There’ll be maybe 1000 cameras in downtown Sydney, close to that number in Melbourne, perhaps 100 or so in Brisbane.

“If you use the main roads, you’re likely to be snapped several times a day, and all those photos and any related data will be held by CrimTrac for up to five years.”

The sweeping move is intended to preserve financial stability, Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters at his Downing Street office.

“We will work night and day to make sure that Britain can come through fairly this downturn,” Brown said.

The move comes hours after Dutch-Belgian banking giant Fortis NV was partially nationalized with a 11.2 billion euros ($16.4 billion) rescue from the governments of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, after investor confidence in the bank disappeared last week. Germany’s second biggest commercial property lender, Hypo Real Estate Holding AG, said Monday it had secured a multibillion euro line of credit from several banks, as the financial turmoil in the United States spread further in Europe.

The government has also paid out 18 billion pounds ($33 billion) to facilitate the sale of Bradford & Bingley’s savings business, including its entire retail branch network, to Spain’s Banco Santander.

Santander, the second largest bank in Europe, said it will be paying 612 million pounds ($1.1 billion) for Bradford & Bingley’s 197 branches and 20 billion pounds of deposits.

Bradford & Bingley is the third major British bank to run into trouble since credit crunch began just over a year ago. Northern Rock PLC was nationalized in February, and HBOS PLC sold itself to Lloyds TSB Group PLC on Sept. 18, to stem a sharply falling share price.

Britain’s Treasury said that Bradford & Bingley’s management team would continue to administrate the lender’s mortgage book in the short term.