Silvery-white over Swansea

I saw my first UFO in Swansea Bay, an inlet of the Bristol Channel, in January 2003. I was about 17 years old at the time and my father was driving me and my younger brother home from town along the Mumbles Road, Swansea. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the exact time of the sighting, but it was probably the early afternoon. It was definitely still very light outside.

While we were stopped at a red light, my eyes turned to the relatively cloudless sky and I saw what at first glance I took to be an aeroplane. I quickly realised, by the strange way the object was moving, that it could not have been. As well as being very curious, I remember getting a bit scared at this point because I really did not know what I was looking at.

The object was moving up and down diagonally from right to left over and over again in the sky. It was a shining white line or rod, almost silver in parts, and appeared to have small round lights spaced out equally in a horizontal line along the centre of its body. I got the impression that the lights were moving around the object.

After registering that what I was looking at was very odd, I pointed the strange moving object out to my father and younger brother. For some reason it took them both a little while to find the object in the sky. After watching and discussing this unusual object among ourselves for a couple of minuets, the traffic light turned green again and we began to move off. As we were moving away, I continued to watch the object for another minuet or so until, most strangely of all, the object suddenly disappeared in a silver flash.

A few weeks later, on February 1, 2003 (the same day as the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster), me and my younger brother had a second daylight sighting - very different to the first. This was of a yellow and orange fireball and was probably just a conventional meteor.

Whatever these two sightings were, they definitely had a very real and lasting effect on me and were chiefly responsible for my general interest in UFOs turning supernova. Back then I think I only had two or three books on UFOs but now I have a bookcase full, so these sightings definitely fuelled the flames of my interest in a big way.