Birmingham UFO Group Case Report
Author: Dave Hodrien
Release Date: 20/01/2022
Late evening on 5th January 2022 Shaun Watson got in touch with BUFOG via our online sighting report form to report a sighting of two glowing UFOs which had just happened. I soon contacted him via Facebook messenger to go over things in more depth.
Sighting Details
At 8.20pm Shaun stepped out into his back garden of his house on May Lane, Yardley Wood, to grab something from his shed. It was a clear and dry evening with only light cloud in the sky. As he walked down the garden he happened to glace to the South East East over the fence.
Through the branches of some nearby trees he noticed two brightly glowing white lights positioned some distance horizontally away from one another. The lights were so bright that they emitted rays from their centre in different directions, most likely caused by atmospheric distortion. They seemed to be at quite low altitude at only about 10 degrees elevation.
Shaun immediately noticed that the two lights were slowly moving towards one another. There were no other coloured lights visible and seemingly no sound coming from them, so he did not think they were distant aircraft. At first he assumed that they were attached to either end of a crane which was slowly rotating. He had not noticed a crane in the location before but this seemed like a logical explanation for what he was seeing.
However as the lights reached each other they seemed to briefly merge together and stop for a few seconds. They continued on their paths, but after a moment the light which had came from the left (the North North East) stopped moving, while the other continued to the left. At this point Shaun realised they were separate from one another and not two fixed lights attached to a single large object. The other light which was still moving continued to the left until it was lost from sight behind the houses.
At this point Shaun realised they may be something more unusual so he quickly ran back into the house to get his smartphone. Heading back outside he was pleased to find that the other orb of light was still present, so he started to film it. For almost a minute the light seemed to be stationary. Then suddenly it made a short and fast manoeuvre to the left before halting again. After watching for another minute the light started to travel upwards at a slow speed. At this point he lost sight of it on his smartphone camera and stopped filming.
Shaun waited a short amount of time hoping the light would return. However it did not and in the end he headed back insde.
Video Analysis
Unfortunately by the time Shaun started to film, one of the two orbs had already left the area. Below is the 1 minute 57 second long video Shaun managed to capture of the remaining white orb:
Here is a still of the light taken at 14 seconds into the footage after Shaun has zoomed in on it a little:
At 56 seconds into the footage the orb suddenly shifts position a short way to the left. This is quite hard to make out due to camera shake at the same moment. The below picture indicates this manoeuvre:
At 59 seconds the orb then travels a short distance back to the right, returning to roughly its original position:
After hovering motionless again for a period of time, at 1 minute 36 seconds the object is lost from sight. Shaun moves the camera around in an attempt to locate it again. 10 seconds later the object re-appears and has now obviously moved a little to the right, which can be seen by the positioning of the tree branches:
Shaun thinks that towards the end of the sighting the object started to ascend slowly upwards before being lost from sight. However this is not really observable in the footage.
Sighting Analysis
The glowing orbs seen by the witness clearly seemed to be two separate aerial objects, which can be determined by the reported movement of the first orb and recorded manoeuvres of the remaining one. I would agree that they are unlikely to be distant aircraft. No other navigation lights were observed and the fact that the recorded orb remains largely stationary means it cannot have been an aeroplane.
Flight Radar 24 confirms that there were no tracked aircraft in the vicinity at the time:
360 Radar confirms that the area does not lie within an airway:
It also confirms that it does however lie within controlled airspace, which reduces the possibility of it being an untracked helicopter:
The relative lack of movement of the orb on camera suggests it is not a drifting lit object like a white coloured LED balloon, or an object in orbit such as the ISS or a satellite. It was a clear night so it could not have been ball lightning, and earth lights are both extremely rare and do not tend to appear over urban areas.
However I feel there is a good chance that the orb on camera (and probably the previous one too) was a distant drone. These have the capability of hovering motionless and also making sudden darting manoeuvres exactly like those seen in the footage. At a distance if the drones had multiple lights on these would have merged into single orbs of light, and it would not have been possible to hear the buzzing sound of the rotor blades. While this cannot be confirmed without doubt unless the owner gets in touch this does seem like the most likely explanation.
Shaun has previously had another sighting of a triangle of lights. Click here to go to the separate report on this incident.
Copyright Dave Hodrien 2022
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