UFO Reports from the UK 

UFOs over Northumberland

[ Updated: 18/05/2008 ]

8 April 2004 - Sunderland, Tyne & Wear

In April 2004 a witness - "RK" (pseudonym) - contacted APRA, having observed, and videoed what he and his wife considered to be a UFO, from their home in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear on 8 April.

RK sounded very excited and puzzled on the phone, describing watching this bright light that kept expanding and contracting - naturally this sounded suspiciously like the classic camcorder 'auto focus' false UFO when the cameraman zooms the lens to its extremes and the auto focus constantly ranges between near focus and infinity focus.

However, RK was convinced he and his wife could see this 'pulsating' with the naked eye, and not just through the camera lens/viewfinder. RK kindly provided a VHS copy of the footage for analysis.

On viewing the footage, my initial thoughts over a simple false auto focus effect were confirmed. For some reason, RK failed to note that on occasions when he had a short focal length, and had streetlights and house lights in frame, these too displayed the same 'pulsation' as the auto focus desperately hunts for an object to lock onto. There is no difference between known lights and the 'UFO'.

Having checked RK's address, it is believed the view from his bedroom window faces Northwest (RK himself is unsure). On viewing the footage it isn't too difficult to see that the two witnesses were looking in the direction of a setting Venus, and the light's position above the horizon would confirm that it was Venus.

On the basis of the report, and analysis of the footage, we are 95% certain the UFO was Venus, and the recorded effect was the simple/classic auto focus artefact. However, this cannot explain the naked eye perception of this pulsation, unless the eye was deceived into seeing what the camera was falsely recording, but from the witnesses comments, their attention was taken by their naked-eye observation first. Also, given that Venus was brilliantly visible in the Western and North-western sky for weeks and months, why did the witnesses not see it and perceive it as unusual before that night?

31st October, 2001 - North Durham Coast

From Kenneth:

“At around 5.45 pm, I was getting out of my car in front of my house which faces the North Sea, 200 or 300 yards from the beach - it was a clear night with a full moon. As I was locking the car I noticed a large aircraft coming in over the sea flying approximately North West. On the right side of the aircraft, very near to it there were two reddish coloured lights appearing to be flying alongside it. I then shouted for my fifteen year old son to come and watch, he told me that the lights looked like 2 triangles - his eyesight is better than mine. While we watched, the objects seemed to be moving at the same speed as the aircraft, but the distance between them was varying. We watched for about 3 minutes, when the aircraft arrived over the coastline it carried on in a NW direction and the two red objects headed west, almost overhead. I first thought that it was a couple of smaller aeroplanes escorting the larger one but at times they were so close they would have collided. The red lights were not flashing and even when they changed direction and our view changed they looked exactly the same, there appeared to be nothing else to them apart from the light, we could hear no noise.

I have lived here on the Durham coast for over 12 years and am used to seeing lots of strange lights over the sea which always turn out to be aeroplanes or helicopters or even laser lights from Sunderland football ground, but I have never seen anything like the two objects I saw last night.

I reported this to Newcastle Airport security hoping that they could contact the crew of the aircraft and find out if they were aware of the objects alongside them, but they didn't really know what to do with my information.”

Again, and somewhat frustratingly, the witness didn’t get back to us with information that would have made investigating this case realistically possible. We don’t know his precise location, but he must be somewhere near Sunderland, and that fact that he thought that Newcastle airport was more obvious to him than the one at Teesside may be significant. My own feelings are that Kenneth is somewhere in the Whitburn or South Bents area on the Northumberland coast.

What must be remembered in this case is that there are two designated peacetime ‘air to air’ refuelling (AAR) zones off that part of the coastline – numbered as ‘5’ and ‘8’, and the witnesses description of “...On the right side of the aircraft, very near to it there were two reddish coloured lights appearing to be flying alongside it…” – this is very suggestive of two aircraft formating with a tanker aircraft. It should also be remembered that at the time of current international crisis that many unusual aircraft may be using these AAR’s – however, it must be said that conventional aircraft should have been more ‘obvious’, given the apparent close proximity at which they flew over. Without more details this will have to remain ‘unsolvable’.

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