On 23 April 2007,[1] Ray Bowyer, a fifty-year-old pilot with eighteen years flying experience reported seeing "a cigar-shaped brilliant white light" in the sky.

[3] Then he decided it was a stationary object, approximately the size of a Boeing 737, at an altitude of around 2,000 feet (610 m) and at a distance of 10 miles (16 km).

[2] In 2021, Bowyer said it was "the size of five or six battleships", and that it had been "a very sharply defined, solid, bright yellow-gold object with a couple of black bands on the side that were kind of shimmering".

[7]In 2013, the British academic and folklorist David Clarke published a partial transcript of the recorded conversation between Bowyer and an air traffic controller on the island of Jersey.

[6][2] After landing in Alderney, Bowyer made an official report to the Civil Aviation Authority, labelling the incident as a "near-miss".

[8] Approximately a week after the reported sighting, the MoD stated the incident had taken place in French airspace and so was outside its responsibility.

[5]Later, in Pilot magazine, Bowyer added a sketch of what he had seen to this report, in which he described the objects as approximately the size of a "reasonably large town.

[7] A local astronomer, Michael Maunder, attributed Bowyer's report to sun dogs, an optical phenomenon caused by the refraction of light through ice crystals in the atmosphere.