The Leicestershire UFO Research Society (LUFORS) later wrote up the evening as one of the largest public responses to a local aerial sighting in its records. Its report says 67 separate incidents were documented between 6pm and about 12.45am, with 55 of them falling in the half hour from 6.30pm. The area covered was around 425 square miles, from Nuneaton to Whitwick and across to Burton on Trent and Kibworth, with the biggest clusters in Hinckley, Nuneaton and Leicester.
Witnesses described a dark triangular craft, around twice the size of a jumbo jet, with three very bright white-yellow lights, flying low at roughly 2,000 feet and able to hover before moving off fast. The society says over 200 people were known to have seen it and 62 left statements. One driver on Ashby Road, Hinckley, described a delta-shaped mass of bright lights that vanished faster than the eye could follow. Another, between Littlethorpe and Cosby, thought at first it was an aircraft landing at East Midlands Airport but saw no wing or tail lights and heard nothing. A family at Bosworth Park, Market Bosworth, watched three hovering lights for about ten minutes without any sound.
The report also says a Burbage witness filmed it on 8mm colour film in the grounds of Hastings High School, where his family were caretakers, and that the footage of just over 30 seconds shows the object approaching head-on at low level. East Midlands Airport air traffic control is said to have been baffled, with the crew of an inbound Maltese flight also reporting it while nothing showed on radar. The Avro Vulcan bombers then based at nearby Bitteswell were the first suggestion, but experts told the investigators a Vulcan would have been heard indoors with the windows shut. An experimental stealth aircraft was floated later, though the society itself notes that the RAF would normally have told the airport about any test flights.
This is the society's own account, gathered by volunteers and then published by them, and the investigators admit that newspaper coverage the next day may have shaped some later descriptions. The film and the original statements have not been seen for this entry. It is a well documented local mass sighting rather than a proven anomaly, and it remains unexplained in the sources found.
Comments