Mysterious Object Seen Flying Out of Lightning Clouds in North Gloucestershire
A report posted on the GloucestershireLive website on 11th September 2023 reported that the previous evening people had seen lightning flashes within a bank of cloud to the north of Gloucestershire. The cloud was also seen in parts of the west Midlands, Wales, and the south west. Several people had filmed the phenomenon and sent them into the website. One of the clips, by Mark Ravey, who filmed the event from Longlevens, seems to show an object fly out of the cloud and cross the sky from left to right. Another photo, taken by someone who wished to be credited as Ravenwolf, apparently shows the same object as a solid line of black silhouetted against the lightning behind it. Ravenwolf remarked that the object must have been solid as the lightning did not make it look transparent as the clouds.
The videos and photo are certainly dramatic. The lightning flashes within the cloud itself, called intra-cloud lightning, resemble somewhat the cloud UFO which appears in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters, although it is usually lenticular clouds that generate UFO reports as they can resemble the stereotypical disc-shaped flying saucer.
The object is puzzling, especially after Congress in America held hearings in which members of the US armed forces testified that the US military really did have crashed alien spacecraft and the bodies of their crews. Such stories have been circulating for decades, and reached a peak in the ‘90s due bestsellers like Tim Wood’s Above Top Secret, Whitley Streiber’s story of alien abduction Communion and the TV series The X Files. This last had FBI agents Mulder and Scully tackling various paranormal crimes while fighting against a secret organisation, whose anonymous members were at the heart of a conspiracy involving UFO and attempts to breed human/alien hybrids.
The truth behind this UFO sighting, however, is probably far more mundane. In answer to the website’s query about what the object was, James Mays replied that he had seen it from Abbeymead and had watched an aircraft fly from left to right across the cloud, and back and forth towards it. He assumed it had been sent up by the Met Office to examine the cloud. This seems far more likely given the unusual nature of the storm and the fact that Britain has discontinued its use of sounding rockets to investigate the atmosphere. On the other hand, it could also have been a light plane, that had been caught up in cloud and whose pilot or passengers wanted a closer look at it. Either way, it is far more likely that the object was a terrestrial aircraft than an alien saucer.
Source, GloucestershireLive, 11/09/2023, ‘Lightning cloud mystery as object filmed flying out weather phenomenon’, by Phil Norris, at Lightning cloud mystery as object filmed flying out of weather phenomenon - Gloucestershire Live
Updated explanation Link - 12/09/2023 https://www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/news/gloucester-news/lightning-cloud-explained-new-footage-8744188