My Lost UFO Sighting: Why I’m Coming Forward Now
In April 2020, during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Germany, I found myself with plenty of time on my hands. I decided to sort through old 35mm negatives that I had stored away in a drawer in our basement. The drawer had acted as a storage box for years.
While scanning the film strips, I stumbled upon negatives from England, where I had lived in 1995. Among those negatives were two frames of particular interest.
Frames 7 and 8 of the Ilford XP2 film revealed an Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP). I was unprepared to find these images, having completely forgotten about this UFO sighting for 25 years. The only others who knew about it were my friend and her father, both of whom were with me during the sighting.
I had taken two exposures of the object while driving straight at 70 mph on the motorway.
I recall being quite disappointed when the film was developed in 1995; the images were small and blurry, failing to capture the clarity of what I had seen with my own eyes that night.
After that, I completely forgot about the sighting.
In 2020, I was genuinely excited to rediscover the film. I purchased a digital microscope to examine the negatives in greater detail.
I scanned the negatives and submitted a report to BUFORA, the British UFO Research Organization, given that the sighting occurred in the UK. BUFORA suggested that what I had seen was an advertising blimp parked near the M6 motorway.
An advertising blimp? What I witnessed was a white object with no advertising on it. The whiteness wasn’t due to overexposure, nor did it bear any markings. You would need to have been sitting with me in the Land Rover back in 1995 to understand that.
Additionally, the object appeared to decrease in size by 25% as we approached it—an unusual characteristic for a stationary advertising blimp. For the blimp to appear smaller, it would have had to travel faster than 70 mph, yet a blimp’s top speed is only 55 mph.
I took out a ruler and measured angles and distances from the two photos. The straight lane divider on the motorway made it possible for me to actually triangulate distance, speed and size of the object.
The triangulation gave me an even higher speed for the object:
But who knows? Maybe I made a calculation error and someone can give me a better speed, distance and size estimate.
UFO Alert!
That leaves me with the question: what did I see?
This is the reason I am stepping forward now. I would like to propose an idea for definitively answering the question, “Are we alone?”:
The Contact Project
The goal of the ‘Contact Project’ is to discover whether or not humanity is equipped to respond to extraterrestrial contact.
The project can grow by discussion and criticism and is adaptable. It would be nice to engage radio amateurs to try and make contact. But it’s not a requirement. A search partner can be anyone who cares.