Autumn 2005 – Wednesbury, Birmingham – Lit Disc UFO Sighting, Missing Time
Updated: May 24
Birmingham UFO Group Case Report
Author: Dave Hodrien
Release Date: 23/05/2023
Last Updated: 24/05/2023
In early May 2023 a lady named Laura Wakelam got in touch via Facebook Messenger to ask whether I had previously investigated cases from around Wednesbury. I asked her why she was interested and she informed me that she had experienced a UFO in the area back in 2005 when she was 15 years old. I arranged an extensive phone call with her to go over what took place.
Sighting Details
Laura thinks the incident happened around October 2005. She is unsure of the exact month, but says that it was getting dark early in the evening so she feels it happened in late autumn of that year.
Back then she used to live on Moor Street, Wednesbury with her parents and two younger brothers. She believes it took place around 7.30pm. She had gone up to her bedroom, leaving her parents and brothers downstairs, possibly searching for her mobile phone.
She had a high sleeper bed in her room which was up against the front wall of the house with the window partially blocked. However there was no desk under the bed, so if she wished she could duck down under the bed to look out of the window, which had a net curtain on it.
She noticed a white light coming from outside, so decided to crouch under the bed, lift the net curtain and take a look. It was a clear and dry night outside. Due to the time of year it was fully dark, but the road was lit by a number of street lights. She cannot recall whether she could see the stars or whether there was cloud cover. It was very quiet with no passing vehicles or pedestrians.
Just off to her left, and visible over the neighbouring house roofs she could see the silhouette of an aerial object. It appeared to look like a domed-disc shape and roughly 40 feet across. It was tipped up at an angle of about 35 degrees, with the left side higher than the right. It seemed to be positioned just to the right of one of the back gardens of the opposite houses, and at a very low altitude, perhaps only 60 feet up.
Coming from the left side of the object was a thin white beam of bright light, which was shining down into the garden to its left. This beam looked thinner and more sharply defined than the beam from a helicopter’s search light. The beam was sweeping around in circles like it was looking for something. However the object itself remained un-naturally still in the air. There appeared to be no sound coming from it at all.
Laura was quite frightened by the odd appearance of the object, it’s stillness in the air and the beam coming from it. She stared at it for about 2 minutes, too scared to call out for her parents or brothers to come and see. Back in 2005 she had an early camera phone, however she did not have it on her at the time or knew where it was, and she was transfixed on watching the object.
Suddenly the beam went off and the object vanished without trace. Then a few seconds later it reappeared directly over the roof of four houses along the road to the left, now in a horizontal position.
It immediately started to flash a sequence of multi-coloured lights. These lights appeared around the central rim of the object one at a time, and it was these which drew Laura’s attention to its new position. At this point she was convinced that she was looking at something highly unusual and this was definitely not a patrol helicopter.
The sequence took a number of seconds to proceed right round the craft in an anti-clockwise direction. There were two rotations of the lights before they ceased flashing.
After this the object moved forward until it was positioned over the road. It then slowly began to tip up on its axis until it was positioned vertically! This took about 10 seconds. At this point of the sighting Laura should logically have been able to see it clearly, lit up by the street lights. But she only has vague recollections of its appearance. She feels that the memories of this may have been blocked from her mind.
Once it was vertical the sequence of flashing lights once again occurred. It then came back down the road and moved back over to where it had initially been situated. Once again the beam came on a short while and did another circular sweep of the garden.
It then came forward again, arcing round the front of the houses as it moved back up the road, until it was positioned over the far side of the crossroads with Kilvert Road. It remained there a short while, then moved away to the North East out of sight.
Laura felt traumatized by what she had just witnessed. She sat there at the window thinking that she should go downstairs and tell her mother about what had occurred. She crouched down under the bed, but as she crossed her room she realised that the details of the incident were becoming hazy in her mind, and the feeling of trauma was subsiding. By the time she was downstairs it had gone completely.
The details of what happened only came back to her ten years later when she decided to watch a UFO documentary about Bob Lazar, the man who claimed to have worked on back engineered craft at Area 51. At a certain point in the documentary Bob spoke about witnessing one of the craft tipping up vertically in the sky. Upon hearing this, Laura had a vivid flashback of what she had seen when she was 15. The details of the craft tipping up in the documentary had seemingly jogged her mind and caused the memories of the incident to return!
Sighting Analysis
This is a fascinating event and one which has numerous unusual and interesting aspects to it. It is quite rare that witnesses report seeing beams of light coming down from UFOs. But what exactly could it have been? The object could not have been an aeroplane due to the fact it was hovering motionless at numerous points within the sighting for an extended period of time, seemingly at very low altitude, and shining a light down onto the ground.
The obvious mundane explanation which needs to be considered is that the object was a police helicopter checking the local vicinity for one reason or another. Unfortunately due to the fact it happened many years ago it will not be possible to get the police to confirm this one way or the other.
Helicopters can of course send search lights down to the ground and can hover quite still in the air when required. Here is an example photo of one doing precisely this:
However there are numerous aspects which do not fit with this explanation. Firstly the shape of the object was not right for a helicopter. True it was quite dark, and initially it might have just looked like a dark indiscriminate shape, but later in the sighting Laura was able to see its shape more clearly, as she has drawn.
At no point in the sighting did the object display any standard navigation lights (and it was of course seen from different angles throughout the sighting). Helicopters normally have white, red and green navigation lights on them, as indicated below:
Logically at least some of these would have been visible to the witness. In the previous night photograph of the helicopter the red tail strobe and lower of the two white strobes are clear to see.
Laura says the stillness of the object in the sky appeared un-natural. Even a helicopter hovering in the same spot will tend to drift a little bit, but when this object came to a halt there appeared to be no drift at all. Also it is very likely that at that distance from her house Laura would have been able to hear the rotor blades if it was a patrol helicopter. Yet it appeared to be completely silent.
The vertical tilting it performed and the row of flashing multi-coloured lights which were seen numerous times again both point away from this being a helicopter, or any other normal type of aircraft.
360 Radar confirms that the area does not fall within any airways:
It also confirms that it does lie within controlled airspace:
These reduce the likelihood of it being an untracked private aircraft.
If it wasn’t an aircraft what else could it have been? It seemed much too large to be some kind of radio controlled model, and the sighting took place many years before drones were commercially available. The beam of light, controlled manoeuvres it performed and flashing sequence of lights also rule out some kind of large inflatable.
There is also the fact that Laura completely forgot the incident took place almost immediately after it happened. Even though she was clearly shocked by the sighting, it is very unlikely that her mind would have blanked out the experience to the point that she could not remember it at all. I feel that this aspect of the incident is extremely important and points away from it being something mundane.
When asked about this aspect of the experience, Laura stated the following:
"I remember getting by the bed and I was going to go and tell my mum then I couldn't remember what it was, but I could feel that it was bad. Then as I got by the stairs that feeling went. Then when I was downstairs I didn't even know any of it. I just know that it traumatised me because every time I try to think about it, it does my head in. And when I first remembered it, it put me in shock. I still don't remember some things because I know I stared at it when it was upright just can't remember what the bottom of it looked like. But I know I stared at it"
It seems likely that this was a genuine sighting of a domed-disc shaped advanced craft, possibly of ET origin. I have investigated many cases of UFOs of this shape before, and there are countless more on record. I have even dealt with cases where precisely the same lighting has been reported, with a rotating line of multi-coloured lights around the central rim. There are known cases where these craft have been seen to tip up vertical in the air, just as Laura reported. There are also cases on record where UFOs have been seen to send down beams of light as if scanning the ground, including the infamous Rendlesham Forest Incident.
The blanking out of the incident from Laura’s mind is also a regular aspect of UFO encounters, often associated with direct contact. Usually only partial missing time occurs, but I have looked into numerous incidents where the memories of the experience have been completely removed, and it is only through a later “trigger” that they have returned. This trigger can sometimes be seeing/hearing details of a similar incident, which is precisely what happened in this instance.
There does not appear to have been any direct contact or interaction with the experience. When the memories did return to Laura, she only recalled seeing it and then heading back downstairs after it had left the vicinity. It is of course possible that there was, but the memories of this have not yet returned. However if this did indeed happen, I feel there would be more of an indication of this such as a bright light or confirmation of missed time from her family.
If it was an advanced craft, we can only speculate as to what it was doing in the area, or why it was shining beams of light down into the one specific garden. Due to its apparent size, the beams of light and sequence of flashing colourful lights, it is also possible that there were other witnesses to this incident who have yet to come forward. If you have any information relating to this sighting please get in touch.
Copyright Dave Hodrien 2023