Birmingham UFO Group Report
Author: Dave Hodrien
Release Date: 11/03/2020
In February 2020 I was invited to give a lecture at New Horizons group in St Annes. During the evening I met a lady named Kathryn who mentioned she had experienced a sighting back in the 1960s. I ran out of time to discuss things further but soon afterwards got back in touch to discuss the incident in depth.
Sighting Details
The sighting happened some point between late 1968 and early 1969. At the time Kathryn was in the army and stationed at the Royal Engineers Army Camp at Barton Stacey. On the night of the incident, she had been out from camp for the evening (Kathryn confirmed that she had not had any alcohol). She was walking back to the camp on her own some point between midnight and 1am.
She was walking North along the edge of A34 and just approaching the Bullington Cross roundabout where the A34 and A303 meet. It was a calm, dry and pleasant night. Due to the time of night there was very little traffic on the road.
Kathryn began to hear a low undulating droning sound coming from her right from behind a row of poplar trees on the far side of the road. She stopped walking and stared to the East towards the sound. She then saw what the sound was coming from. As she watched, a line of roughly six white lights appeared. They were about 200 feet off the ground and travelling in her direction at around 10 mph. There appeared to ba about 10 feet between each light.
Kathryn watched as the lights passed over the top of the trees, across the road and right overhead. She could not see anything linking them together but they kept precisely the same distance apart from one another. Kathryn got the distinct impression that the lights were attached to a single larger object, however it was impossible to see this as it was dark. She continued to watch for a number of minutes as the lights glided away parallel to the A303 to the West at a constant speed.
Unfortunately she did not have a camera with her at the time. After the lights had moved out of sight she continued walking back to the army camp. She did not tell anyone about what she had witnessed.
Sighting Analysis
Kathryn’s sighting is fascinating and hard to explain away as something mundane. The row of lights could not have been a formation of helicopters. The witness was in the armed forces and was familiar with how helicopters both appear and sound at a distance. There were no other navigation lights visible, and at 200 feet up it would have easily been possible to see these. The sound coming from the lights was also completely unfamiliar to the witness. They were moving too slowly to have been a formation of other aircraft.
Lit inflatables are out of the question. Firstly this sighting happened decades before LED balloons existed. They were the wrong colour for Chinese lanterns and also balloons or lanterns would certainly have drifted a bit rather than maintained a constant position from one another for the duration of the sighting. They would also not have been making any sound at all.
It is unfortunate that Kathryn could not see the main body of the object, even just a shape blocking out the night sky. Because of this we have no way of verifying whether it really was a single object or whether it was a formation of smaller lit objects which were keeping an accurate distance from one another. Either way it is likely that this was something out of the ordinary, and I would like to thank Kathryn for coming forward with this information.
Copyright Dave Hodrien 2020
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