What happened
On the evening of March 30 and in the early hours of March 31, 1993, dozens of reports of bright lights and triangular objects reached the police and the military from western England and Wales. At about 1:15 a.m., a military police patrol at RAF Cosford reported bright lights passing over the base at high speed. Shortly afterward, a meteorological officer at nearby RAF Shawbury, alerted by colleagues, saw a huge triangular object gliding at an altitude of about 60 meters, emitting a low hum and sweeping the ground with a narrow beam of light. According to his account, the object at first moved very slowly and then flew off at tremendous speed. The case was investigated by Nick Pope, who worked in the section of the British Ministry of Defence that handled UFO reports.
Witnesses
The military police patrol at RAF Cosford, the meteorological officer at RAF Shawbury, and dozens of civilians from several counties in western England.
Explanations and hypotheses
In a memo to his superiors, Nick Pope wrote that an unidentified object undetected by radar had been operating in British airspace, but his superiors were skeptical. Researcher David Clarke and other skeptics showed that most of the sightings of bright lights coincided with the reentry of a Russian rocket stage that had launched a satellite that evening. The Shawbury account of a low-flying triangle remains the most difficult element to explain.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.