What happened
On the afternoon of 23 April 2007, Aurigny Air Services captain Ray Bowyer, a pilot with 18 years' experience, was flying a Trislander from Southampton to Alderney at about 4,000 feet when he saw a brilliant yellow light ahead. At first he took it for sunlight glinting off Guernsey's greenhouses, but it stayed put. Through binoculars he described a sharply defined, cigar- or disc-shaped object with a dark band, and then a second identical one further west. He watched them for about nine minutes and told Jersey air traffic control; passengers also saw the lights. The controller, Paul Kelly, said nothing showed on radar but that a Blue Islands pilot flying past Sark had reported a similar object in the same spot. Bowyer filed a report with the Civil Aviation Authority. He first estimated the object as the size of a Boeing 737 about 10 miles off, later revising it to perhaps a mile wide and 40 miles away. The MoD declined to investigate, saying it had occurred in French airspace.
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The official explanation
Several natural explanations have been proposed. Local astronomer Michael Maunder suggested sun dogs, noting the lights were roughly 22 degrees from the Sun and the weather suited ice-crystal halos. Bowyer himself accepted in a BBC interview that he might have seen earthquake lights, linked to a quake in south-east England five days later. Others suggested a mirage or atmospheric reflection. The Jersey controller considered a faint radar return to be weather-related.
The anomalous case
Two professional pilots in separate aircraft, seeing from opposite sides, placed an object in the same location and at about the same altitude. The Blue Islands pilot reported it independently, and passengers on Bowyer's plane saw it too. Bowyer watched for about nine minutes, used binoculars, and described a solid, sharply defined object that he could look at without discomfort, which argues against a glare effect. He filed a formal near-miss report, and The Times called his account one of the most impressive testimonies in the MoD's files. The controller explained that a stationary object could be filtered out by radar, so the empty screen does not rule it out. Bowyer has said he never claimed it was alien, only that he had never seen anything like it. No explanation has been confirmed.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- 2007 Alderney UFO sighting Wikipedia
- Pilots spot mystery object over Channel Islands The Register
Witness reports elsewhere
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