Birmingham UFO Group Case Report
Author: Dave Hodrien
Release Date: 09/02/2012
Last Updated: 09/12/2024
UFO witness Mr J. Sturch got in touch with me in January 2012 to discuss a number of incidents, including a white coloured sphere sighting which he had the previous year. Details of this sighting can be found below. He also discussed a childhood sighting of an unusual being, and an orange orb sighting his brother from Coventry experienced. These have been written up as separate reports, the links to which can be found near the end of this one.
Sighting Details
On 20th August 2011, Mr Sturch was out mowing the back garden of his house in Shard End, Birmingham. It was around mid-day and the weather was clear and sunny. He heard the sound of a jet on take-off passing overhead. This was a common occurrence as he lives below the flight path of Birmingham international airport.
It was flying quite low, so he looked up to see how large it was. As he looked up at the jet, Mr Sturch noticed that there was also a white spherical object in the distance to the West. He watched this for about a minute, and realised that it was moving diagonally across his field of vision, and appeared to be under control.
He ran inside the house to get some binoculars so he could get a closer look at the object. When he went back outside he saw that the object was further across the sky and heading towards some clouds. Through the binoculars it looked like a perfect white reflective sphere with a greyish metallic structure underneath it. This appeared to be two attachments that came down at a sharp angle and met in the middle. The overall structure gave the appearance of an ice cream cone.
It appeared to be quite large in size. As far as he was aware it was completely silent. He could see that the object was moving in a different direction to the clouds so certainly appeared to be under power. The clouds were moving towards him to the East, where as the object was moving in a North Easterly direction. After a couple of minutes the object was lost from sight behind the bank of clouds.
Soon after the incident, Mr Sturch decided to post the sighting on the UK UFO Sightings website to see if anyone else had also seen the UFO.
Sighting Analysis
The object seen in this incident is quite interesting due to its unusual shape. White spheres are often seen but they rarely have metallic protrusions hanging down underneath them. For such an object I would usually put forward the possibility of some kind of balloon or inflatable.
However Mr Sturch is quite certain that the object was under control and was not an inflatable or hot air balloon. The fact it was moving in a different direction to the wind would tend to support this theory, though there is always the possibility of multiple air currents at different altitudes. The fact that the object moved on a straight course and did not perform any unusual manoeuvres means that we cannot fully rule out the possibility that it was a drifting inflatable. However some of the evidence does suggest otherwise.
If it was not a balloon, what else could it have been? It certainly did not appear to be a conventional aircraft of any kind. Could it have been a military drone? Perhaps, but these too tend to have visible means of propulsion such as rotor blades. Could this have been a genuine unusual craft, and if so was it human built or otherwise? These are questions that are unlikely to be answered, so it remains an interesting case.
Click here to view the report on Mr Sturch's childhood being encounter, or here to view details of his brother's orange orb sighting.
Copyright Dave Hodrien 2024
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