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| This artist's illustration is a good approximation of the delta-configuration of lights seen in the Leicestershire sky on the evening of October 23rd 1978 |
Although the event is now almost four decades in the past, this recollection is based on a journal piece I wrote during the 1990s.
In October 1978 I'd just started high school and lived in a village called Measham, on the fringe of the counties of Leicestershire and Staffordshire. Our house had a good-sized back garden and our neighbours, a couple called Jayne and Stuart, had two large dogs that were normally quite well behaved. One was a German Shepherd called Elsa, the other was called Jason.
The evening of October 23 was unusually warm, which meant a lot of people were outdoors. I was in the rear garden when a bright light caught my eye. It was in the night sky to the southeast, roughly where the town of Hinckley lay about 15 miles distant. At almost the same moment Stuart, who was sitting out in his garden, asked what was the unusually bright light in the sky.
Being relatively familiar with the night sky, and the appearance of Venus and Mars at dawn and dusk, I mentioned that it was probably Venus as it was quite bright, and said I'd fetch an old telescope - a slightly dented old mariner's eyepiece that was bulky and made of brass, but was still serviceable.
Looking through the telescope the object did not appear like Venus. Initially it had me thinking that maybe it was a hot air balloon lit from beneath by bright lights. Stuart tried the telescope and was no surer than I. By now his wife Jayne was in the garden and also remarked on the bright light.
Whatever it was, it seemed to be stationary over the Hinckley area. We continued to observe the light as it stayed stationary for what was at least 10 minutes, but could have been twice as long. Then it began to move again, towards our village. It followed a roughly diagonal path from southeast to northwest. As it moved closer the light increased in brightness and it began to appear as more than a single point of light.
With the benefit of the telescope I quickly made out at least three separate lights. But as it got closer there was no need to use the telescope, even with the naked eye it was clear the lights were aligned in a delta configuration; one at the front and two slightly off centre behind.
The object made no sound and moved smoothly and relatively slowly.
What added to the feeling that something wasn't right about these lights in the sky was the reaction of Jayne and Stuart's dogs, they were in the garden and started to bark loudly for no reason and became generally agitated, something which the couple found odd.
As the object got closer the brightness of the lights seemed to dim, but the delta formation remained. Even with the telescope trained on it, it was impossible to make out any structure beyond the three lights. The object glided almost directly overhead in total silence and continued on its way northwesterly in the direction of Castle Donington.
For the remainder of the evening I felt a strange uneasiness. The following morning on the school bus from Measham to Ibstock, many of the schoolkids were talking about seeing the strange lights in the sky.
That evening there was an article in the Leicester Mercury newspaper about a flood of calls to the police and other organisations from people in the Hinckley, Measham, and Ashby-de-la-Zouch area who wanted to know what the lights were.
The following day, in a second report, the same newspaper said that the number of callers had increased to more than 100 as more people reported seeing the same unusual lights in the sky. There was no explanation from the authorities, and traffic control at the East Midlands Airport, near Castle Donington, said they had no flights recorded at the time the lights were sighted.
To the best of my knowledge this widely reported UFO has never been explained. It occurred in 1978, the year the movies Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind arrived in UK cinemas, bringing a heightened awareness of space and the unknown; but even that trivia does not explain why so many people, across a wide geographical region, reported seeing the same delta-shaped, silent formation of lights. Nor does it explain why our neighbours' dogs became so agitated as the object came closer.
The Leicestershire UFO Research Society, in its contemporaneous report and subsequent follow-up interviews in the years immediately following the sighting, said: "we ... conclude our report by agreeing with the majority of the witnesses by stating that the October 23rd 1978 aerial object was indeed something out of the ordinary, and that it (or indeed they), cannot definitely be identified without, we believe, perhaps greater access to military flight records etc".
For further reading, the LUFO report: A true UFO? - The case of the silent Vulcan
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