The Dudley Dorito: Black Triangle Over the West Midlands

Late November 2007. Numerous people across the West Midlands conurbation reported a silent, triangular object in the evening sky. Dozens of readers contacted the Express & Star, with sightings in Tipton, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Hagley and Quarry Bank. The press gave the object a name that would outlast every theory about it. The Dudley Dorito.

Wednesday, 28 November 2007. About 19:00. Over Halesowen, a witness watched the object head towards Stourbridge. The local group UFORM passed their statement to the press. It looked like a "huge Dorito and had distinctive red lights on its underside, which moved position while the craft was flying." At the same time, an observer on the Lickey Hills followed it over Birmingham through binoculars.

They were not alone. In Dudley, Wednesbury and Bushbury, people described "a large triangle with three lights at each corner and was silent." In Quinton, the founder of a local UFO group filmed an "enormous" triangle with three visible red lights.

8 January 2008. About 21:00. From their grandmother's house near Dudley Castle, two girls, aged seven and nine, saw a triangle. They drew it. One drawing had three lights. The other had four. Later, The Sun published a photo reportedly taken in the castle grounds by a 57-year-old reader. Gary Heseltine, a police officer and editor of UFO Data Magazine, weighed in: "It's a very intriguing photograph taken purely by chance. If it's genuine it could be one of the most convincing pieces of evidence collected about aliens from the UK ever."

The reports kept coming. In 2009, builders at West Midland Safari Park saw a UFO "floating above them". On Bonfire Night 2010, David Allen watched a triangle over Sutton Coldfield "four or five times bigger than an aeroplane".

That November in Tipton, Munesh Mistry and his friend Neil Martin, both 21, first took the lights for "three birds flying in unison". Then they saw a silent triangle made up of what appeared to be three lights. It would "fly across the sky at a mind-boggling speed".

14 January 2008. 16:10. A sonic boom was heard over Shropshire. It was attributed to an RAF Eurofighter Typhoon malfunction and a "30,000 ft plunge". The Express & Star noted that the aircraft resembled the witness descriptions. RAF Shawbury and the Ministry of Defence denied involvement.

The Ministry of Defence recorded reports, but as a spokesperson put it, "unless a security threat is suspected the Ministry does not investigate further." Press coverage later reached for Project Condign, an earlier Defence Intelligence Staff study. It suggested black triangles may be "a supernormal atmospheric plasma phenomenon akin to Ball Lightning". Not every clip held up. A 2012 video from woodland near York, billed as the Dorito, drew an amateur analysis pointing to chroma-key compositing errors.

17 December 2023. David Banner, 38, was walking home from a bus stop in Ettingshall Park, Wolverhampton. Something above him was "flickering and darting". He filmed it. It made him think of the Dudley Dorito.

21 November 2025. 19:17. Above Thorns Road in Brierley Hill, a man named James thought at first he was seeing Starlink satellites. He pulled over. It was "a huge black rectangle, with lights on each of the corners". A flight-tracking app showed no aircraft in the area. Then "it silently flew towards the Merry Hill Shopping Centre and out of view." Former West Midlands police detective John Hanson and Dawn Holloway have covered the case in their Haunted Skies books. Eighteen years on, the Black Country is still looking up.