UFO CASEBOOK
JENNY RANDLES RESURRECYS A COLD CASE AND WONDERS WHETHER A SOLUTION CAN BE FOUND.
SECURITY ALERT
Recently I received an unusual message from someone involved with a case that I’d helped investigate during the 1990s. He’d told his daughter about it, but could find no information on the case online, even on well-known UFO sites, so he asked if I could I help him prove that this lack of digital notoriety did not mean that the incident had never occurred.
This is a good opportunity to correct that omission and allows me to invite reader participation on a case that was never definitively explained. With a revival of The X Files coming soon, this is your chance to play Mulder and Scully: send your theories to FT and I will provide a free book to whoever gives the most helpful suggestions.
The story started on 8 March 1991 when a staff member from a large shopping centre on the outskirts of Warrington, Cheshire, contacted me. This was the Birchwood Mall, nestling in the intersection of the M6 and M62 motorways and adjacent to the Liverpool-Manchester railway line. A new town development built on a wartime armaments complex, it sprouted hundreds of new houses and bungalows in 1980 and the mall was constructed to serve them. This area had already seen another famous UFO case – the 1978 Risley entity sighting, in which severe electrical effects had devastating effects on the health of the witness (see FT305:29).
I had lived in the community for some years, which is why the mall contacted me to “look at a strange light form in the sky that we have on video from one of our CCTV cameras at the shopping centre”. Along with colleagues Peter Hough and Roy Sandbach I did just that.
Birchwood Mall operated a number of cameras from a control centre, screening various locations. At 1.23 am on 25 February 1991 one camera pointing eastwards across a small open area between buildings picked up a small floating object. The guard monitoring the cameras used remote control to track its movements, zooming in and panning out. There were no windows to look outside at the location and he never left his post during the seven minutes that the UFO was tracked.
This was a UFO in the truest sense – a bright ball of light just a few inches in diameter that moved in ‘controlled’ patterns around the area. The camera operator attempted to get close-up views, but it was never certain that the ‘shape’ that emerged was real, given the distortive effects of proximity to the camera. However, on these close-ups it resembled a soap bubble with a bright outer ring and more diffuse centre.
Most of the time the UFO remained close to ground level. It did climb a wall to near-rooftop height and passed in front of objects such as waste bins and a wall, but it never passed behind anything. It was moving independently of the camera and disappeared when above a tree between the shopping complex and the railway station. The whole thing was watched through the raw camera feed so we knew that this was not a video anomaly. The footage was retained for our analysis. The system had been in situ since the mall opened and some staff had worked there for years. None of them, viewing the tape in the following days, claimed to have seen anything like it before.
Despite visiting the location, talking to those involved and securing the footage for analysis there were problems. The system recorded at high speed, allowing days of coverage to be stored should footage be subsequently needed by police. Moreover, the recording took samples of images from each of the cameras in a continuous cycle, creating a final run that was confusing to view without specialist equipment. However, the mall owners were as keen as we were to try to solve this mystery and proved helpful.
At this point we thought that the proximity of Risley Moss nature reserve was possibly relevant – indeed, a fox brazenly strolls past the camera in later scenes – but as it turned out the case was harder to resolve than we’d hoped. Some kind of optical effect theory was considered, because in close-ups it was possible to see ‘through’ the ‘soap bubble’, meaning that the shape probably was an artefact. But the UFO itself seemed real, because in one sequence it can be viewed entering shot from the right hand edge of frame, gradually emerging just as a solid object would do. From the start we decided to invite scientists to assist us, notably a sceptical young doctor, now a professor at a British university but then a physicist at Salford University. He and several colleagues from other colleges who had some interest in paranormal anomalies met with our UFO investigation team at Manchester University to try to progress the case using specialist equipment and expertise. We were all genuinely puzzled by the footage, though we presumed there would be an answer within the realms of science. Various experiments were carried out to look at possible theories, such as getting children to blow soap bubbles that were illuminated by a flashlight as they drifted by. Cameras recorded this, but did not produce the ring structure seen in the footage, supporting the view that this shape was probably not an accurate image of what the object would look like close up. From here, the theory emerged that an insect might have become trapped inside the camera lens system and be moving about out of focus to produce the ‘bubble’ effect. However, we soon eliminated that option because the camera was opened up, cleaned and resealed every six months and any trapped insect could not have survived the months since the last such operation. Despite this, the scientists concluded that while there was no clear explanation, it was most likely connected with the optical set-up and “something causing aberrations very close to, or inside, the lens system of the camera”.
We also involved a meteorologist working at Swansea University to look at the other possibility – an identified aerial phenomenon (UAP) such as ball lightning. But events then took a surprise turn and made that idea far less likely. At 12.35 am on 26 April 1991 a completely different camera, pointing north and covering a more open area of the complex well away from the initial sighting, picked up a similar UFO. Being prepared by our investigation, the guard tracked it carefully and obtained minutes of footage as it moved along a road. This time it disappeared over the roof of the mall, again as a large bubble.
Happily, the guard conducted an experiment that we’d asked Mall staff to attempt if the UFO should return. The cameras had an Infrared spot beam to illuminate darkened areas when nefarious activity might be going on in a darkened corner. We suspected the soap bubble effect was being caused by this beam and asked the operator to switch it off whilst pointing at the UFO. They did so on the second sighting and the UFOs shape disappeared when the spot beam was extinguished but returned when put back on again. So, whilst there was obviously something visible out there, its bubble-like appearance was being stimulated by the illumination of the spot beam and it was really smaller and more diffuse.
We kept in contact with Birchwood Mall for three years and no guards reported the UFO again. However, about five years later, when I was on a live TV show, I mentioned the case in passing and later received a call from a man saying that he had worked at the centre before 1991 and had seen something similar. He supported our working theory (which I will reveal next month). Meanwhile, perhaps readers would like to try and figure this case out. This investigation exemplifies what UFO research should be about – treating a report as an anomaly that potentially can be resolved and trying to find that solution by all means possible. But is this case completely solved or are we overlooking another potential answer? Over to you...
Is this case solved, or are we overlooking an answer?