March 2007 to December 2008 - West Midlands Police - Various UFO Sightings

Birmingham UFO Group Case Report

Author: Dave Hodrien

Release Date: 25/01/2009

For reasons of anonymity pseudonyms have been used

Introduction

When UFOs are reported by people with good credentials it lends a lot of weight to their statements. Many would put police officers into this category. Due to the nature of their job, they are often adept at describing things they are seeing. There is also less chance of misidentification taking place, as they will often need to report to others about what they have witnessed.

On 20th November 2008 I was privileged to meet up with two police officers from Birmingham who have had numerous sightings since early 2007, including a mass of incidents since mid-October. Some of these sightings have been photographed/videoed and some have other witnesses also present. Most took place while the officers were out on night duty. I met Martin and Sandra at a location in Tamworth to discuss what they have witnessed in depth. This report will cover each of these sightings separately.

March 2007 Rome Sighting

While most of the incidents took place in the Birmingham area, the first significant sighting that the couple had together took place on the 31st March 2007 while they were on holiday in Rome. It was a clear sunny day with some light cloud cover. At 6.30pm the witnesses were out walking the streets of Rome after a day of sightseeing. They were around the area of the coliseum, and were crossing a small open grassy area between the rows of buildings. Dusk had just started to set in but it was still quite bright in the sky. As they walked, Sandra looked into the distance over the buildings. She could see a light grey oval shaped “cloud” in the sky. It was moving slowly to the left along with the other clouds, but stood out as it looked slightly darker and more rounded. It looked about 30000 ft up, the same sort of height as an aeroplane would fly. It was hard to judge how far away it was from them but it appeared to be at least a couple of miles away. Due to the distance, the witnesses estimate that it must have been much larger than a plane. Sandra watched it for several seconds. Suddenly it changed direction and started to move back to the right, in direct contradiction to the other clouds! She realised at this point that whatever she was looking at was not a cloud but something else entirely. As she watched, the object changed shape to resemble a tornado. It appeared to be spinning and was waving left and right in the sky. By this point she had stopped and was staring at it, this is where Martin’s attention was drawn to it. Less than a minute later it changed its shape again and became almost spherical. It also became a bit darker (as if becoming more solid) and became stationary in the sky. Sandra decided at this point to get her mobile phone out and start videoing the object. Sadly the footage didn’t pick up the object too well due to its distance. While watching the object, it began to fade in and out. The witnesses couldn’t tell whether this was due to it moving further and closer or if it was becoming more and less solid in nature. It did this for about 30 seconds, then without warning split into two separate smaller circular shaped objects. These began to move around each other, darting about the sky in curved patterns. Martin noted at this point that the objects certainly seemed controlled in some way. 30-40 seconds later the objects moved together and formed one object again! After this it once more split into two and then became whole a second time, then it started to fade away from their sight until it had vanished. Other people in the area at the time didn’t seem to have noticed the object at all; however the witnesses speculate that maybe somewhere else in the city others may have seen it from different angles.

Afterwards, the witnesses talked about what they had seen a lot and were fascinated by it. It was the first UFO that Martin had seen in his life, so he was excited to discuss it with Sandra and his family. To this day they have no explanation as to what it could have been. Due to its appearance, there is the possibility that it was some sort of atmospheric phenomenon. However the movements and shape changing that the object performed seem far too unusual for this explanation. Whatever it was, it managed to both stop still in the air and go against the wind direction. And the darting manoeuvres that the smaller spherical shaped objects performed seemed far from natural. The fact that it formed numerous different shapes makes it improbable that it was some sort of floating object such as a balloon. It looked almost as if it was trying to communicate in some way. The witnesses have never seen anything like it since, and it remains a mystery.

Witness drawing showing different shapes that the object formed:

June 2007 Tamworth Sighting

This incident took place on a hot clear summer’s day. It was about 1.00pm in the afternoon and the witnesses were off duty and out driving in their own car. They were in Tamworth town centre and just approaching Tamworth snow dome. There are two islands close to the snow dome, and it is between these that the sighting took place. As they went round the first island, Sandra suddenly noticed two objects in the sky off to their left out of the passenger seat window. There were two metallic grey cigar shaped objects, one positioned above and to the right of the other. They were smooth and had no visible markings on them. They were quite low in the sky and seemed to be quite large; the witnesses felt they were about the size of a standard airliner. The objects were stationary in the sky and about ½-1 mile away from them. Initially Martin couldn’t see them as he was driving. They continued up the road towards the second island, and as they approached Martin also got a look at the objects. They then also spotted a 3rd object which looked the same off to their right. It was the same height in the sky as the others. They began to head round the 2nd island and suddenly the objects had all completely vanished. The witnesses didn’t see them disappear, they just looked and couldn’t see them any more. From start to finish the whole sighting only lasted around 10 seconds. Nobody else appeared to have seen the objects, but it’s possible other drivers could have seen them without stopping just as Martin and Sandra did.

This sighting is once again very interesting and hard to explain. The appearance of the objects obviously rules out most explanations. But could the three objects have been some sort of balloons that were released into the sky? Maybe they were drifting so slowly that they appeared stationary to the witnesses. However if this were the case, how did they all vanish at the same time? Surely as it was a clear day they would have been visible until they drifted into the distance or to the ground. Also the objects seemed much too large to be balloons. The objects were clearly present in the sky and not an optical illusion of some kind, as both witnesses saw them from different viewing positions and at various points along the road. It is quite probable that there were other witnesses to these objects but so far none have come forward.

Witness drawing showing the first two objects seen:

Sighting location map: