The Bonsall UFO Video: Sharon Rowlands and the Pink Disc Over Middleton Wood

Bonsall is a small village near Matlock, in the Derbyshire Dales. Sharon Rowlands, 44, lived with her husband Hayden in Slaley, a hamlet beside it. Days earlier she had been given a camcorder as a gift.

Thursday, 5 October 2000. 9:15 pm. Something hung over Middleton Wood, on the other side of the valley. At first it looked like a disc seen edge on. Motionless. When she began filming, it tilted into a horizontal position and came closer.

It was a large luminous pink object, hovering and rotating over a nearby field. Yellow, orange and blue lights surrounded a dark centre. Red lights on its underside seemed to rotate. Others pulsated. "It resembled a giant disc with a bite taken out of the bottom," she said. "It was huge and through the lens it looked like it was going to hit me."

It moved to the right. Pulses of light came from its left side. It flashed, turned over and showed scarlet lights. Then it disappeared in a red flash.

The recording ran about six minutes, six and a half by one account. It went into a bank vault. At one point the object appears to be made of concentric circles, and the image is slightly out of focus as she tries to zoom in. A Met Office officer confirmed there were no freak weather conditions that night. No Ministry of Defence or police investigation has come to light.

The story broke at the end of May 2001, in the Derby Evening Telegraph, The Sun, the Daily Star and on BBC News. Kiviat Productions of California had reportedly paid more than £20,000 for the footage, for a TV series called Could It Be True? Robert Kiviat was quoted calling it "one of the top five pieces of video footage of UFOs ever taken." NASA reportedly asked to see the tape because it resembled an image from the STS-75 shuttle mission, credited to astronaut Claude Nicollier. What NASA made of it has never been confirmed. Omar Fowler of the Phenomenon Research Association called it "one of the most important sightings of recent years."

On 11 June 2001 the story turned. Santiago Yturria, who had supplied Mexican UFO footage to Kiviat, phoned the producer. According to Yturria, Kiviat called it "a big mistake." No money had changed hands. He had not even seen the footage. An agent in the UK had been acting for him, and the deal folded once the newspapers got involved. The correction was never widely reported.

One UFO researcher who saw the full tape called it "not sensational." They put the object at about 50 feet and the footage at about £20. Others describe an out-of-focus ball of light, its rings similar to a photographic orb. A distant point of light on a camcorder at full zoom can look like a coloured disc with a dark centre. No analyst has named a specific source, and no one has accused Rowlands of a hoax. She said: "I was a complete disbeliever but this has made me think twice."

Bonsall had logged 19 sightings in the four months before the video. It became known as Derbyshire's UFO hotspot. Villagers reported a ball of fire, two big, bright lights and a pink glow shaped like a shoe box. The Barley Mow pub ran UFO watches, and its first UFO trail walk, on 1 April 2004, was featured on Countryfile. In February 2023 Rowlands told her story again, to Paul Hawkins of GB News.