UFO Sighting in London, England on 1995-02-15 00:00:00 – Rapidly descending high-altitude light becomes dull orange oval, describes random arc flight patterns before ascending and shooting off at immense speed.

The following exert is an eye witness statement. Please read into it what you will. This has been reported to mufon who I am sure are investigating:

hi, i really just want to log, for archive purposes, a ufo sighting i had about 25 years ago. i’ve sent the report to a few organisations over the years but never got anything back. i mailed nick pope recently who said he thought it was worthwhile logging it with you guys. so just for historical record, here it is:

i cannot remember the exact date, it was around 1995. i was up late reading an astronomy book in the kitchen at about 2 o’clock in the morning, and i had been popping outside every 10 minutes or so and looking up at the sky, trying to learn the names of the constellations. ( i am no astronomer, i worked in it at the time.) now you know how you often look up at night and you see one of those very high, fast-moving dots that are obviously satellites; from my experience if you spend a while stargazing you’re almost guaranteed to see one. anyway on this night i also caught sight of one of these ‘satellites.’ however, now imagine the same dot *suddenly* get bigger and faster *simultaneously,* giving the appearance of something that had descended very rapidly, which i thought was odd. i initially thought that i had been following a satellite that had somehow crossed paths (albeit at hugely different heights) with a commercial airliner. then i waited a few seconds and to my astonishment it descended again, now moving faster; a brighter, larger dot of light, of the kind of size and speed you would associate with a low-flying light aircraft, but i confirm it had no flashing lights. finally, the object suddenly ‘descended’ again into a large, dull, fuzzy orange disc/oval; absolutely featureless. now the key here is the object then started to perform ‘arc’ manoeuvres in the sky. to best describe this, imagine someone shining an orange-coloured torch light against a wall, and flicking it back and forth with the wrist in an arc, giving the impression of something moving at an unimpressive speed but with immediate acceleration. i watched it for about 5 minutes, desperately trying to think what it could be. there were no orange streetlights, and there was no cloud cover at all onto which a projector could have been aimed. after this 5 minutes it went behind the ‘horizon’ which was actually just a medium-sized industrial complex (nothing special, it was called vandervell engineering and they made engine bearings at the time, my dad worked there.) anyway, i went back in, very puzzled, and carried on reading the book. i kept checking outside from time to time. finally, after about half an hour, i went outside and the object reappeared from behind the backdrop of factories, still describing arcs in the sky. it then stopped, and proceeded to ascend smoothly, this time to the kind of ‘height’ and luminosity that you might ascribe to a mid-level commercial aircraft, changing colour from a dull orange to more of a white dot. finally, the bright dot accelerated unbelievably quickly and flew across the sky at precisely the kind of ultra-high speed you would normally associate with a shooting star. this was a clear sky, no clouds, very little light pollution, about 2:30 in the morning in maidenhead, berkshire, about 30 miles west of london, facing approximately east, about 25 years ago.

i was really quite spooked by the incident, but i forgot about it, as you do, and it wasn’t until a year or so later that i read a newspaper article about historic ufo sightings that it all came back to me. this was a ‘feature’ story in – i believe, either the daily mail or the mail on sunday, and it was one of those big 4-page feature type stories they run from time to time. anyway, it was a big feature about historical ufo sightings and one really caught my eye – it described a ufo encounter witnessed by the pilots of a squadron of us airplanes in the 1960’s i think, and one pilot’s description of the object and its flight characteristics was *precisely* the same thing that i had witnessed – he described it as having descended rapidly, performed random arcs, before shooting off again at incredible speed. i’ve always meant to revisit this article, but i’m afraid i’m pretty clueless when it comes to making historical searches in newspapers, maybe at some point in the future the british library will finally get all historical newspapers onto their database and i can do a search, as i’m convinced the only explanation is extraterrestrial.

so, for what its worth, that’s my record of the sighting. maybe it will come in use at some point when cross-referencing sighting types or what have you.
anyway, all the best.
nick.

p.S. for the record, the reason i’m writing this now is that tonight i’ve been idly watching hangar 1 ufo mufon files on the tv. i’ve reported this sighting before as said, but mainly to some low-key british ufo associations but never heard anything back, so i thought why not log it with you guys. disappointingly i’ve never seen anything like it since. i was lucky enough a few years back to see a fireball, ie a meteor skipping off the the atmosphere or a maybe a bit of space junk burning up which was quite spectacular, but nothing like this.

have a great day.
nick.