Stephen Sowerby

The two larger cylindrical objects appeared somewhat in the manner of say a large aircraft passing through a patch of moist air. Giving a short fat condensation trail. Well there were no aircrafts there large enough, that we could see, to have caused anything like this and no other aircraft in the sky at that time, in the direction we were looking. These things were, it's difficult to estimate their length, I mean, size of a battle-ship has been quoted at me, but it's very difficult to get visual reference in the sky. Say the length of the GPO tower? Or something like that. And about a quarter as wide as they were long, appeared cylindrical.

Interviewer: How far were you away from these objects, when you first saw them?

Sowerby: I would say somewhere around about 20 to 30 miles.

Interviewer: And high were you at the time?

Sowerby: Around about 30,000 feet.

Interviewer: And for how long a period did you actually have them in your view?

Sowerby: Well from the time when we were first asked to look at them by ground control until the time we actually landed at Farrow (sp?), which must have been at least quarter of an hour probably twenty minutes.

Interviewer: What do you think they were?

Sowerby: I don't know. I don't have any idea. I mean there have been explanations as to the shining lights [as] reflections off the sun from the underside of an aircraft, but most pilots have seen that sort of thing and it was far, far brighter than that. It certainly wasn't a star or a planet, we've all seen phenomena like that and it was something that we've never seen before.

On our flight back, we passed the same area of sky, at about 2 hours later, this was at 11 PM. It was dark. It was a perfectly clear night. We had the aircraft weather radar on and we picked up some very definite returns, very solid returns, (not) there were no clouds in the sky, so it couldn't have been a cloud return. And we picked this up at about 20 miles first. And as we flew along our track we closed with these objects and we eventually passed them at about 7 miles and yet we could see absolutely nothing. We had very strong returns on the radar from a distance of 7 miles, which is quite close in flying terms, and we couldn't see anything.^[2][3][1]