28th September 2016 – Handsworth – Glowing White Oval UFO Photograph

Chairman Dave
Sep 30
3 min read

Birmingham UFO Group Case Report

Author: Dave Hodrien

Release Year: 2016

Last Updated: 30/09/2026

In October 2016 Jamie got in touch with BUFOG via phone to discuss a photograph he’d taken the previous month, as well as an earlier sighting. This report covers the photo. His sighting of two black spheres has been written up separately (link towards the end of this report)

Photograph Details

On 28^th September 2016 Jamie was at his 2^nd floor flat on Browns Green, Handsworth. At 7:05pm he went out onto the balcony to take a few photographs of the sunset in the direction of West Albion Football Stadium to the South West West.

*Aerial map indicating Browns Green (A) and West Albion Football Club (B)*

He noticed nothing out of the ordinary at the time. However, the next day when he checked the photographs he noticed one of them appeared to have a brightly glowing oval/disc-shaped light or object on it:

Photograph Analysis

When analysing photographs, I often use an Exif Metadata Viewer to analyse image metadata, which can provide useful information and also help confirm whether or not the image has been tampered with on a computer image editing program. Unfortunately, the photograph Jamie sent me is not an original image off his camera so it has no metadata attached to it.

However, this does mean that it is not authentic. If Jamie had intentionally hoaxed the image I would have expected him to come up with a more interesting back story and claim to have seen it at the time with his naked eye, which he did not.

Below is a zoomed view of the object/light:

Zoomed view with edge find:

The photograph is intriguing, and I can understand why the witness may have interpreted it as a glowing oval or disc-shaped object. However, I feel that this is more than likely going to be lens flare. I have seen and analysed numerous similar photographs before.

Jamie did not see anything at the time, and only noticed the light the next day while checking his photographs. If it was a physical glowing/highly reflective object, then it would have had to have been moving extremely rapidly for him not to have noticed it. There would therefore have been motion blur, away from the direction of movement, though it is clear from the zoomed in image that the edges are sharply defined and no motion blur is visible. Obviously this does not rule out the idea of an object very briefly appearing then vanishing again, but this seems improbable.

Even though the sun is not present in the photograph itself, Jamie took the photo in a South West West direction, in the area of sky where the setting sun would have been present. I feel the most likely explanation is that this is a reflection of sunlight caught on this singular image. I have not seen the other images which Jamie claims to have taken, but perhaps they were taken at a slightly different angle meaning that the lens flare only occurred on this one image. Or perhaps a cloud was covering the sun when the other images were snapped.

As mentioned at the start of the report Jamie had a UFO sighting earlier in 2016. Click here to go to the separate report on this incident.

Comments