Welcome to the flying circus
JENNY RANDLES greets a new identified flying object that still managed to fool the British press
At least 95 per cent of all UFO sightings are really IFOs – Identified Flying Objects – explicable in a variety of ways that we have become used to anticipating. The fun part is when a new option suddenly appears. It only happens every decade or so, though every IFO was once a novelty that had to go through a period of cultural awakening as society slowly came to terms with why it looked so odd.
Indeed, it is no coincidence that UFO sightings first became common in the wake of World War II, a conflict that saw rapid growth in aviation and rocket technology; once the war was over, our skies blossomed with strange looking aircraft and the public saw things they had never seen before. The secrecy engendered by the ensuing Cold War added to the mystery, exacerbating the idea that ‘the powers that be’ knew more than they did.
The process repeated as the UFO mystery escalated. In the 1960s, as telecommunications satellites went ‘up there’, we started to see them ‘down here’ for the first time, and a new wave of IFO misperceptions began. It was a decade or so before satellites became common enough that most people knew what they looked like. This rinse-and-repeat pattern is common in ufology – the 1970s and 80s saw it happen again with stealth aircraft, for example. They are up there, they are secret, we see them and assume they are UFOs – and it is not in the interests of the military or aviation industry to disagree, at least until such time as the technological or commercial edge is achieved and another IFO morphs from its alien form into what it always was. As the 21st century arrived, we saw the same thing happen again, when launching dangerous fire lanterns into the sky at New Year’s Eve and birthday parties caught on. I charted the development of this ‘new’ breed of IFO in this column a decade ago. By now, fire lanterns rarely trigger UFO cases and more often are reported to the police as a ‘fire hazard’.
However, here we are again: there’s a new kid on the block, the first to become a star on social media via the ‘post a YouTube video of what I just saw’ school of UFO reporting. I saw this in action last summer when videos were posted of a ‘startling’ UFO over southern England. They looked impressive and, for a time, the possibility existed that they were a genuine atmospheric phenomenon akin to ball lightning. But after several repeats and an emerging pattern of clues, I started looking for a more mundane explanation.
The case that drew my attention occurred in August 2017 near Cley Hill, Warminster, in Wiltshire. This is a town whose name reverberates through UFO history, so it was no surprise to find something odd in the sky generating interest. The video reported in the local press shows a spectacular spluttering ‘energy’ ball with a trail of sparks beneath it appearing to loop around in tight circles across the twilight skies. Some distance away, the camera operator was baffled. You can see why they thought this was a rare atmospheric phenomenon like ball lightning; if so, it would be the best-ever footage.
Digging into this case I discovered it was not unique. Sightings started in May 2017, around the bank holiday weekend near Frome, Somerset. Another man had shot and posted footage of this, revealing a fiery glow that moves and spirals upwards, then erupts into a trail of sparks in its wake. Once you start thinking about what this might be, as opposed to what the media wishes it to be, then answers soon emerge. So, in May 2018, when this new breed of UFO reappeared, accompanied by mass media exploitation and another tenuous UFO link, I was prepared.
On Friday 11 May, 19-year-old Lucas Budel, from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, posted on YouTube a 53-second clip he shot before sunset with the following brief account: “I initially thought I saw a meteorite falling and then it suddenly halted and went straight back up. I tried to record it but it disappeared into thin air. Then it came back a few minutes later and this is the footage I got. What was not visible in the footage was red sparks flying off it that looked like electricity.”
This looks a lot like the summer 2017 reports; if these had been resolved, as I believed they had, then this new case was surely on the ropes. Yet, surprisingly, after the video gained interest and was re-posted a few times with comments added (a few even suggesting my own answer) the tabloids discovered it. So, at the end of May (with no date of the sighting recorded) both the
Daily Mail and Daily Star added a new twist, ratcheting up the story. This was that the UFO had been seen near an RAF base where UFOs were once investigated. The base has no aircraft operating; in fact, the admin centre took over all paper records in 2009, just before the MOD shut down 50 years of UFO investigation, so they never really did much more than cross-check for foreign aircraft intruding into British airspace.
The cameraman described how he was sitting at his computer when the UFO appeared and on a second attempt was able to capture its “electrical cloud” before “whatever it was lost its power and started falling to the ground before the ‘engines’ started back up.” The media reports suggested ball lightning, military testing or extraterrestrial craft, although it was none of these things.
The key to this case – as I had found with the 2017 sightings – is that on the day in May when the film was actually shot, two miles south of the High Wycombe location, at Booker Airfield, there was an air show. As a spectacular twilight finale, a sophisticated small aircraft with pyrotechnics attached flew a daring display in tight loops whilst releasing its fireworks into the surrounding skies. These aerobatics create quite a show, and follow careful protocols involving clear summer weather at dusk for maximum safety and spectacle. It was confirmed as what is on the video by those present on this Friday at Booker and others who lived near the airfield and saw the flight from their gardens. It was not hard for me to track this case to source, although it was apparently beyond two British newspapers. Amusingly, they might have uncovered a real fortean coincidence. The airfield runway over which the ‘UFO’ performed is less than a mile across fields from the Lane End Conference centre. This just happens to be where in August 1983 a spectacular weekend UFO conference was staged by BUFORA, with a huge influence on UK UFO history. It was here that Brenda Butler, Dot Street and I first reported the existence of the Halt memo that proved the Rendlesham Forest case real; but this also put a stop to plans to release the MoD files that, 26 years later, ended up at the very airbase the Mail and Star had got so excited about. And it was at this conference that the News of the World first heard about Rendlesham, leading to their front-page story weeks later that reverberated around the world and is still recalled today.
What all this perhaps teaches us is that we should seek possible solutions rather than unsolved mysteries: fortean investigation works best that way. However, we are seeing here a soon-to-be-common new style of IFO, and I doubt this will be the last time the truth will disappear behind a real and metaphorical haze of pyrotechnics.