The Channel Islands Diamond and the Civilian Pilot

In the late afternoon of April 23, 2007, two commercial pilots flying separate routes near the Channel Islands found themselves looking at the same large, brightly lit aerial object in clear daylight conditions. Captain Ray Bowyer of the regional airline Aurigny Air Services was inbound from Southampton to Alderney in a Britten-Norman Trislander turboprop with three passengers aboard. Captain Patrick Patterson of Blue Islands was operating a Jetstream 31 inbound to Jersey from a regional connection. Both aircraft were on visual flight conditions in unrestricted airspace over the English Channel.

Bowyer, a former Royal Air Force pilot with more than thirteen thousand hours of flight time, was the first to make a clear sighting. Approaching Alderney at approximately 4,000 feet, he observed what he initially took to be the reflection of the sun off a greenhouse on the island. Within seconds it became clear to him that the object was airborne, was much larger than any greenhouse on Alderney, and was moving slowly across his field of view at a position roughly twenty miles to the south. He alerted Jersey Air Traffic Control, who requested confirmation. While Bowyer was relaying his observations, a second luminous object appeared to the right of the first, identical in apparent dimensions and brightness.

Captain Patterson, on the same air traffic frequency, reported observing the same objects from a position some miles to the north. Two passengers aboard Bowyer’s aircraft also confirmed the sighting. The duration of the encounter, from initial sighting to the final loss of visual contact, was approximately fifteen minutes.

The Radar Record

Jersey Air Traffic Control did record an unidentified primary return on radar in the approximate position of the sighting, although the trace was intermittent and did not produce a coherent track. The Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Centre of the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence subsequently reviewed the radar data and concluded that, while a primary return had indeed been recorded, it could not be associated with any known aircraft, balloon, or atmospheric reflection. The case was logged in the MoD’s UFO desk records before the desk itself was closed in December 2009 as part of broader Defence cuts.

Bowyer described the objects as flat, yellow in colour with darker bands at the leading and trailing edges, and approximately a mile to a mile and a half across. He estimated the height above ground level at between 2,000 and 4,000 feet. The objects appeared, he later told the BBC and the journalist Leslie Kean, to be hovering or moving very slowly against the prevailing westerly wind, in a manner inconsistent with conventional aircraft, weather balloons, or kites of any conceivable size.

The Investigations

The case was investigated independently by the British UFO Research Association, by the journalist Leslie Kean for her 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, and by Dr David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University, the UK National Archives consultant on the official Ministry of Defence UFO files. None of these investigations produced a definitive identification of the object, although several conventional possibilities were considered and rejected.

Among the explanations considered were a Fata Morgana mirage of the kind documented over similar bodies of water elsewhere, a high-altitude weather balloon, a formation of conventional aircraft seen at unusual angle, and an unannounced military exercise. The clear daylight conditions, the consistent reports from two separate professional witnesses on different aircraft, and the duration of the sighting argued against most of these. The radar return, although weak, argued against pure mirage. The MoD’s own conclusion, that no known aircraft was responsible, was made within the constraints of a department that was actively winding down its public engagement with UAP cases.

The Pilot’s Position

Captain Bowyer himself has been unusually clear in the years since the encounter about what he believes he and his fellow witnesses observed. He has not claimed knowledge of the origin of the objects. He has said, in interviews with the British and American press and in a notable appearance before a 2010 panel at the National Press Club in Washington DC, that what he observed was nothing he had seen in three decades of flying, that it was not a conventional aircraft, and that he believes the case deserves a more serious investigation than it has received.

His position has been broadly supported by Captain Patterson and by the two passengers aboard the Trislander who confirmed the sighting at the time. None of the witnesses has subsequently retracted any portion of the original account.

For comparable multi-pilot encounters in European airspace from the same broad period, see our entries on the Belgian Triangle wave of 1989-1990 and the Alitalia MD-80 encounter over Kent in 1991.

A Resolved File

The Channel Islands case was among the last entries to be made on the Ministry of Defence UFO desk’s active register before the desk itself was closed. The files were transferred to the National Archives at Kew in 2010 and 2011 and have been publicly available since. The radar logs from Jersey, the witness statements from both crews, and the MoD’s own internal correspondence on the case are all in the public domain.

What remains, more than a decade after the encounter, is the testimony of two professional pilots in clear daylight conditions, supported by independent passenger witnesses and by an unidentified radar return, describing two large bright objects that did not behave like any known aircraft. For students of the modern UAP record, the case stands among the better-documented daytime encounters of the post-Cold War era.

Sources

• Bowyer, Ray. The First Officer’s Account, in Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Harmony, 2010.
• Ministry of Defence (UK). Defence Intelligence Staff records on the Channel Islands UAP encounter, April 2007, The National Archives, Kew.
• Clarke, David. The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-Life Sightings. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.
• BBC News, BBC Radio 4 You and Yours, broadcast coverage, June 2007.