Sussex Police Helicopter Cylinder Footage over Brighton

Brighton, East Sussex. The night of 11 August 2000. A Sussex Police helicopter was in the air over the town. On board were Sgt John Tickner, a police sergeant, and Sean Mitchell, a paramedic on the crew.

One later account, published by The Phaser in 2016, says the crew were investigating suspicious air traffic reports that night. It gives the date as 3 August 2000. No other source repeats either detail.

The helicopter was flying 1,000 feet above Brighton. Then the crew saw an object begin to approach them from the left. It was shaped like a compact cylinder. It did not look like any conventional aircraft they had ever seen.

They had a special police camera with night-vision capabilities. They filmed the object as it approached, then swept past. They decided to give chase and set off after it, filming it all the while. At one point they switched to a thermal-imaging view.

For three minutes they pursued it. Then they lost track of it.

The officers did not take it very seriously. They joked among themselves about "little green men". They did not report the sighting at the time, possibly fearing a loss of credibility with their superiors. The footage stayed private for about two years.

In 2002 a documentary was being made about the normal work of the police helicopter. Tickner was approaching retirement. The pilots laughingly showed the footage to the documentary makers, who immediately realised its significance. On 3 September 2002, The Argus in Brighton ran the story under the headline "Police helicopter chases UFO". The video was shown on television and made available on the internet, and The Phaser says BBC News covered it.

Two readings emerged: an alien craft or a lighted balloon. Some suggested a Chinese lantern, which floats like a balloon but has a candle burning in the centre. The Worcester UFO & Paranormal Group, whose account underpins most retellings, writes that the matter has not been settled definitively. It adds that the weight of opinion now favours the balloon and rejects the idea that it was something paranormal.

The group never says whose opinion that is. No named analyst has published a frame-by-frame study or a check of the winds over Brighton that night. No Ministry of Defence report on the sighting has been identified, and no statement from Sussex Police has come to light.

The footage lives on in documentary segments such as Shiver's "The Truth Behind Brighton's UFO Sighting" and Paranormal Files' "Brighton's UFOs: The Odd Sighting Spotted By A Policeman", and in fan uploads online. It also has a later parallel. On 7 June 2008, a police helicopter crew near Cardiff reported a "saucer-shaped" UFO and chased it to the North Devon coast. Two British police crews, eight years apart, each followed something through the night sky.