Posted: March 2, 2010

Location of Sighting: Peterborough, Cambs Woodston
Date of Sighting: 24 feb 2010
Time: 2130

Witness Statement: At approx 2130hrs on the 24/02/10, my wife and I were stood in the utility room at the back of our house which looks towards Peterborough city centre and is approx 2 mins from the main town bridge. My wife pointed out something that look liked a larger orange ball in the sky at clearly some altitude, as both of us are ex police we assumed it to be the police helicopter which is a regular visitor around this area.

However our attention was caught for the following reasons, firstly the light was far too bright and the wrong type of light (that sounds weird but if you have seen the police spotlight on the chopper as many times as we have you would understand it just wasn't the right density, colour or shape) secondly the noise, there wasn't any and thirdly the height was wrong, this object was at a high altitude and its flight was too smooth to be the helicopter. The object also changed its flight path quite sharply in comparison to any aircraft I know, (although I'm not an expert). We watched the object heading west for at least a minute if not slightly longer before the light went completely out and the object appeared to shoot straight up.

I am not into any of this kind of thing normally, however as stated above this did not make sense to us, due to our experience with the police helicopter we are certain it was not that in the sky. And although it was cloudy on the night it was patchy cloud and we could both visually follow the object without too much difficulty and when the light disappeared the light was in a very clear patch of sky.

I tried to use a pair of binoculars to focus on the object but found this difficult to do, as it was dark and the binos are more for bird watching than looking at high altitude objects. I could not make out any shape due to the intensity of the light. We stayed in our garden for quite some time after this event and kept checking, but we never saw a re-occurrence of this phenomenon.

To be honest I would not have done anything about this normally, but having read your reports on here, what we saw does seem to resemble quite closely what others have seen in the same area, within a similar time frame.