On the evening of October 9, 2010, I stepped outside the house of a friend I was visiting in Glan Conwy, Wales. It was quite dark, there was a solid ceiling of clouds not high but not low either. I noticed a reddish-orange light in the sky heading in my general direction from the west. It was slow moving, much like the speed of a slow moving helicopter, my first thought is that it was and the bright light was its search beacon. I didn’t think too much of it until it came closer, but I continued to watch it.
It was flying in a straight and level path well below the cloud cover and soon began a wide-arced turn which is when I started to realize it was something abnormal. The bright light never dimmed as a search beacon should have if it had been turned away. I dashed into the house, grabbed my camera and snapped off a shot. Unfortunately, the shutter remained open for 1/10 of a second causing a blurred shot. It was too dark to see the adjustments on my camera so I didn’t take any more shots. The object had grown closer as it made its turn to the north, appearing much like a very bright military flare at this point. There was no smoke coming from it, the sky was clear enough that I would easily have seen any. It made no sound, no red and white lights hazzard lights were flashing from either side and the intensity of the light made it impossible to see any details of the object. I doubt it could have been more than 10 to 20 feet in height and width. Its speed never varied, its trajectory seemed to be controlled as it never climbed, dipped or wavered to either side. There is no way anyone could convince me that this was a Chinese lantern…far too bright to be that. I estimate the closest it got to me was within 1/4 mile, its altitude being only 1000 to 1500 feet at most.
I continued to observe the object for a full four to five minutes before it dissappeared over the hilltops to the northwest, heading in the direction of the nearest RAF base. The light grew only slightly dimmer as the object grew more distant. While the object was recorded on my camera the duration of the shutter opening showed movement of the camera and gave the recorded image the appearance of a fireball with a tail (a tail that the object I saw did not possess). I more adhered to the object being something military in nature due to both my lack of explanation of it and its course in the direction of the RAF base. That is until my friend called me from the UK on December 31, 2010 to tell me she had seen two objects near her house (that same house) which matched my description to a tee. That’s when I started searching and saw there seems to be many sightings identical in nature from many parts of the world.
