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2007 Alderney UFO sighting

The island of Alderney, above which the reported sighting took place.
Date	23 April 2007
Time	Approximately 14:09 (UTC+0)
Duration	Approximately 0:09:00
Location	Over Alderney, Channel Islands
Coordinates	49°42′N 02°22′W / 49.700°N 2.367°W / 49.700; -2.367
Type	UFO sighting
First reporter	Ray Bowyer
Participants	Ray Bowyer (pilot) Paul Kelly (air traffic controller) John and Kate Russell (passengers) Patrick Patterson (Blue Islands pilot)

The 2007 Alderney UFO sighting was the sighting of an unidentified flying object over the island of Alderney, in the English Channel, on 23 April 2007. Ray Bowyer, a pilot flying south towards Alderney, reported the sighting to Paul Kelly, an air traffic controller on the island of Jersey, around 14:09, at which point Kelly told him that a second pilot had reported a similar observation.

In Bowyer's report to the British Civil Aviation Authority he said he saw two bright, stationary objects; he subsequently gave various conflicting assessments of their size, ranging from that of a large aircraft to that of a city. Two passengers on Bowyer's aircraft said that they saw unusual coloured lights at the same time. The Civil Aviation Authority made no further investigation into the incident.

The incident has been widely cited by believers in ufology, though Bowyer distanced himself from the suggestion that he had claimed to see an alien vessel. The sighting was mentioned in stories published by the BBC, The Daily Telegraph, The New Yorker and The Times.

Reported sighting

On 23 April 2007, Ray Bowyer, a fifty-year-old pilot with eighteen years flying experience for the Guernsey-based airline Aurigny, was flying a Britten-Norman Trislander from the British port of Southampton towards Alderney, a small island near Guernsey in the Channel Islands, off the French coast. His aircraft was flying at 4,000 feet (1,200 m), approximately 30 miles (48 km) from Alderney. In the British government's publication of Bowyer's report, the time of the reported sighting was given as 14:09, though The New Yorker reported it as 14:06 following a 2021 interview with Bowyer.

Bowyer reported seeing "a cigar-shaped brilliant white light" in the sky. He stated that he initially suspected that it might be reflected light from greenhouses on the nearby island of Guernsey, but subsequently judged it to be stationary, approximately the size of a Boeing 737 and at an altitude of around 2,000 feet (610 m) at a distance of 10 miles (16 km) from his own aircraft. According to Bowyer's report, he approached the light, reassessing its distance as closer to 40 miles (64 km) and its size as "as much as a mile wide". In 2021, Bowyer said that the phenomenon was "the size of five or six battleships", and that it had been "a very sharply defined, solid, bright yellow-gold object with a couple of black bands on the side that were kind of shimmering". A BBC article published in July 2007, two months after the incident, quoted Bowyer as describing the object as "like a CD on its edge".

Bowyer said that he approached the light and looked at it through his binoculars, and later remarked that he had been "able to look at this fantastic light without discomfort". He reported seeing a second object shortly after the first, which he said had moved in formation with the first set of lights. The Evening Standard, a British newspaper, quoted Bowyer as describing this object as "exactly the same … further away", being closer to the island of Guernsey. He stated that it was "clearly visual" for approximately nine minutes.

According to Bowyer, the passengers on his aircraft had noticed the light, one of whom had tapped him on the shoulder to ask about it; Bowyer handed the passenger his binoculars to observe the apparent object. Another passenger, named Kate Russell, would later say that she and her husband John had seen the objects, which she described as "sunlight-coloured". John Russell, meanwhile, reported seeing "an orange light … like an elongated oval".

Other witness accounts

According to Bowyer's account, he had radioed an air traffic controller between the two sightings, and was informed by the controller that another pilot, flying to nearby Jersey from the Isle of Man, had seen a similar phenomenon.

The British academic and folklorist David Clarke published a partial transcript of the recorded conversation between Bowyer and Paul Kelly, who had been the duty air traffic controller on the island of Jersey, in 2013. In the transcript, Kelly responds in the negative when Bowyer asks if he can pick up any radar contacts ahead of Bowyer's aircraft, only finding what he calls "a very faint primary contact", which he considered to be meteorological in origin. On receiving Bowyer's report of his second sighting, Kelly asked other pilots in the area if they had seen anything unusual. Patrick Patterson, a pilot from the Channel Islands airline Blue Islands, responded that he could see a similar phenomenon to that reported by Bowyer, in the same approximate position. When interviewed by The Register, a British online newspaper, in 2007, Kelly said that Patterson had had been passing the island of Sark when he reported "an object behind him to his left". Kelly reported that "the description was very similar to Captain Bowyer's" and that the pilot had given its altitude as 1,950 feet (590 m), approximately the same as Bowyer had. Clarke, meanwhile, reported that Patterson had told him that he had probably seen an atmospheric phenomenon.

Approximately three weeks after the reported sighting, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) released information connected with the report, including a statement from a second pilot. The report of the sighting published by the MoD reads:

First object was bright orange/yellow. There was a gap in light or darker area. Second object was identical.

Bowyer's report

After landing in Alderney, Bowyer made an official report to the Civil Aviation Authority, labelling the incident as a "near-miss"; his report appeared in Pilot magazine in June 2007. Bowyer added a sketch of what he had seen to this report, in which he described the objects as approximately the size of a "reasonably large town." Bowyer subsequently flew the return leg of his flight to Southampton, but did not see the apparent objects again. By 25 April 2007, the Ministry of Defence had stated that it would not investigate the reported sighting. Approximately a week after the reported sighting, the MoD stated the incident had taken place in French airspace and so was outside its responsibility.

Bowyer later reported to the BBC that he was "pretty shook-up" by what he saw, describing the incident as "pretty scary". According to The Times, Bowyer's report is "regarded as one of the most impressive and perplexing testimonies to have found its way into MoD archives". In 2008, the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported on the incident in connection with what it called a "huge rise" in reported UFO sightings in the United Kingdom.

Proposed explanations

Bowyer rejected the suggestion that he had claimed to see an alien vessel, only remarking that he had "never seen anything like it before in all years of flying." When interviewed by the BBC, he accepted the suggestion that he had seen earthquake lights, a scientifically-debated phenomenon where flashes of light appear over areas of seismic activity, connected to the earthquake in south-eastern England that took place on 28 April. Michael Maunder, a meteorologist based at Guernsey airport, suggested that Bowyer may have seen sun dogs: an optical phenomenon caused by the refraction of light through ice crystals in the atmosphere.

Modern studies of reported UFO encounters generally approach them as what the folklorist William Dewan has called "a modern dynamic legend". In particular, the content of these sighting and the meaning ascribed by them to those who experience them is understood as an intersection of direct experience, individual psychology and the cultural background of the observer.

Footnotes

Explanatory notes

1. This article adopts the Encyclopaedia Britannica definition of unidentified flying object as "any aerial object or optical phenomenon not readily identifiable to the observer."

References

1. Shostak 2023.
2. ^ Cleland 2008.
3. ^ Evening Standard 2007.
4. ^ Campbell 2021.
5. ^ Haines 2007.
6. ^ United Kingdom Government 2007.
7. ^ Lewis-Kraus 2021.
8. ^ Rohrer 2007.
9. ^ Clarke 2013, p. 167.
10. ^ BBC News 2007.
11. Derr et al. 2011, p. 165.
12. Maunder 2007.
13. Dewan 2006, p. 185.
14. Dewan 2006, pp. 188–189.

Bibliography

• BBC News (25 April 2007). "Pilot spots 'UFO' over Guernsey". Retrieved 13 May 2023.
• Campbell, Matthew (1 August 2021). "The truth is up there: how the Pentagon gave hope to Britain's UFO spotters". The Times. Archived from the original on 18 May 2023. Retrieved 13 May 2023.
• Clarke, David (2013). The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-life Sightings. London: Bloomsbury Publishing and the National Archives. ISBN 978-1905615506. Retrieved 19 May 2023.
• Cleland, Gary (7 February 2008). "Huge rise in British UFO sightings". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 23 May 2023. Retrieved 13 May 2023.
• Dewan, William J. (2006). "'A Saucerful of Secrets': An Interdisciplinary Analysis of UFO Experiences". The Journal of American Folklore. 119 (472): 184–202. JSTOR 4137923.
• Lewis-Kraus, Gideon (30 April 2021). "How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 11 May 2023. Retrieved 13 May 2023.
• Derr, John S.; St-Laurent, France; Freund, Fridemann T.; Thériault, Robert (2011). "Earthquake Lights". In Gupta, Harsh K. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics. Vol. 1. Dordrecht: Springer. p. 165. ISBN 978-90-481-8701-0.
• Haines, Lester (27 April 2007). "UK airline pilots spot giant UFO". The Register. Retrieved 13 May 2023.
• Maunder, Michael (September 2007). "UFOs over Alderney" (PDF). Sagittarius. St Peter Port, Guernsey: La Société Guernesiaise.
• "'Mile-wide UFO' spotted by British airline pilot". The Evening Standard. 22 June 2007. Retrieved 13 May 2023.
• Rohrer, Finlo (4 July 2007). "Saucers in the sky". BBC News. Retrieved 15 May 2023.
• Shostak, Seth (21 April 2023). "Unidentified Flying Object". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 24 May 2023.
• United Kingdom Government (6 July 2007). "UFO Reports 2007" (PDF). Retrieved 13 May 2023.

Further reading

• Baure, Jean-Francois; Clarke, David; Fuller, Paul; Shough, Martin (23 April 2007). Report on Aerial Phenomena Observed near the Channel Islands, UK (PDF) (Report).
• Bowyer, Ray (2010). "Gigantic UFOs Over the English Channel". UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. p. 73-81.
• Clarke, David (2015). How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. London: Quarto Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-78131-304-6.
• Lillington, Tim (September 2007). "Alderney UFO – a Meteorological View" (PDF). Sagittarius. St Peter Port, Guernsey: La Société Guernesiaise.

49°42′N 02°22′W / 49.700°N 2.367°W / 49.700; -2.367

• 2007 in Guernsey
• Alderney
• Accidents and incidents involving the Britten-Norman Islander
• Alleged UFO-related aviation incidents
• Aviation accidents and incidents in 2007
• April 2007 events in Europe