The Alderney UFO Sighting: Captain Ray Bowyer and the Two Yellow Cigars

Captain Ray Bowyer was 50. He had flown since 1984, including the Southampton to Alderney route for 8½ years. On Monday, 23 April 2007, he flew Aurigny 544, an Aurigny Air Services Trislander, at 4,000 feet on autopilot. Overcast lay at about 8,000 feet. A thin haze layer lay below at about 2,000 feet.

At about 1406Z, around 3pm local, he noticed a bright light near the horizon, almost directly ahead. He first thought sunlight reflected from large vinery glasshouses on Guernsey. Through binoculars he saw a "thin cigar suspended horizontally", sparkling yellow, with "very sharply defined" edges and pointed ends. It seemed "self-luminous rather than reflective." Near one end sat a narrow band of "dark graphite grey".

Then a second shape. "I saw a second identical object further to the west. It was exactly the same but looked smaller because it was further away." At 1409:32Z he radioed Jersey air traffic control. "I had to think of the safety of the passengers first." Two passengers, John and Kate Russell, described "an orange light … like an elongated oval."

About 20 miles south of Alderney, Blue Islands Captain Patrick Patterson passed Sark at 3,500 feet. He saw an object below him, at about 1,950 feet. "No apparent motion." On Sark, two visitors came back from a walk asking what the two bright yellow objects in the sky were.

The objects always appeared stationary. As the Trislander flew on, they seemed to line up vertically. At about 1418Z the aircraft descended into the haze. Both were lost.

Jersey controller Paul Kelly found "a single blob" about 8 miles west of Alderney near the Casquets. He called the echo "unstable or ragged" and "probably not a solid target". Radar engineers were "99% certain" that two slow tracks were ships on shipping lanes.

Bowyer filed an Air Safety Report with the Civil Aviation Authority. The Ministry of Defence said it would not investigate. It found "no threat to national UK defence". The case later surfaced in MoD files released through The National Archives.

Jean-François Baure, David Clarke, Paul Fuller and Martin Shough led an independent study. They triangulated the first object about 2 nautical miles south of the Casquets lighthouse, averaging about 510 metres. They were "unable to explain the UAP sightings satisfactorily" without discounting features of the reports or "doing violence to at least some conventional meteorological optics." Their paper appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2008.

Local astronomer Michael Maunder proposed sun dogs. The study disagreed: "Two lights near the horizon, almost directly below the sun and just a few degrees apart, are not sundogs." It rated sunlight on Guernsey greenhouse glass, scattered by the haze, and earthquake lights linked to the Kent earthquake of 28 April 2007 as somewhat plausible. On Metabunk, forum members later suggested a sunlit cross-Channel ferry. "I'm certainly not saying it was something of another world. All I'm saying is that I have never seen anything like it in all my years of flying."

Bowyer told the BBC the object was "like a CD on its edge" and called the experience "pretty scary". By 2021 it had become "the size of five or six battleships". He appeared on CNN and Britain's Closest Encounters. In November 2007 the case reached a National Press Club panel organised by Leslie Kean and James Fox. For David Clarke, it "remains one of the more intriguing puzzles in the MoD's X-files".