Date: May 2, 2010
Time: Approx: 11:00 p.m.
Hi Brian, regarding your orange objects seen over Heathrow on 27 June 2010. Strangely, a month before this date, at about 11:00 p.m. on 2 May 2010 I saw three very bright orange lights in the sky. These were initially in line east - west.
I saw these from Devizes Wiltshire which is a little to the west of Heathrow from a pilot's point of view. After 2 minutes they suddenly started moving in differing directions across the sky. Like your sighting I used a small telescope to try to see some structure from the one that moved nearest my location, but it looked like a really bright star or planet.
No flicker and none of them were moving with the wind which was wnw 8mph. I know that because I had been paragliding that evening.
I put the sighting on a UFO sighting site and someone in West London excitedly reported he had seen orange objects moving across the sky toward the west (i.e. toward Heathrow Airport).
I am an ex-pilot (not professional) and sky watcher of decades but I can say I have never seen anything like what I saw that night. Nor can I work out what they were. My feeling was that they were very high in our atmosphere but there was no cloud to help discern their altitude. They could have been 2000 feet or 200,000 feet high.
When these orange 'Venuses' were stationary and my thought was military flares because we live near Salisbury Plain mod danger area and see these lots. But when they started to move in different directions I realized they were nothing 'normal' up in the starry sky.
Although I have seen some things in the sky over the years that I cannot identify as 'normal' sky phenomena or human vehicles, these orange objects have had a most profound effect on me. When I watched them move apart across the sky I knew I was seeing something really strange. But other people seem to find it easy to dismiss what I have seen as normal.
They say it must have been something natural or human. I know pretty much everything that is up 'there' and I ask them to give me an explanation. They cannot but remain sure they have a prosaic explanation. But truly, what I saw was profoundly unusual.
Another Heathrow event that happened a couple of years back has also made me feel we are seeing phenomena that we should be trying to scientifically understand. Because these things are in the sky on a regular basis challenging our view of what reality is. I was en-route on the motorway to somewhere else and I stopped in at Heathrow to try out a new camera. (I used to live nearer the airport and have a affection for the place.)
Moving aircraft on short finals give great testing conditions for cameras. I took a number of photos of jets crossing the hedge of 27R on a sharp, sunny day. We could see everything in the sky very clearly, in fact we noticed how many aircraft were going east-west at mid and high altitudes over the airport on N9 airway. We could see easy jet orange 737s at 20,000 feet descending into Bristol, it was that clear.
But we didn't see the UFO that I noticed on one of the photos a day later. I had taken a photo of a Fokker 100 jetliner and high up, in the background is an object shaped like a dark grey cigar with a semi pointed end. I thought it might be a bin-bag balloon but the temperatures were too low for such a sun-heated black bin bag balloon to work.
What is odd is that the sun was in the south or south-west and this object is sideways to the sun. The sun should have high lighted its side up but this isn't how it looks. It looks grey and slightly faint as though it is not completely there. I found another object with these strange semi-real lighting characteristics in a paragliding photograph. Both objects, while shaped differently, look very far away which would make them huge but would explain the lack of clarity. I could email you the photos if it interested you.
Hope this is of interest.
If you have seen anything like this in the same area please be kind enough to contact Brian Vike at:
sighting@telus.net with the details of your sighting.
All personal information is kept confidential.
Sightings.com website: http://www.sightings.com/
