Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. Ian Fleming wrote that. While it hardly seems responsible to suggest that three sightings of the same "UFO" is equivalent to "enemy action" (don't attack UFOs, literally nothing good could ever come from that), it's a good quote and there's a truth in there. Three separate sightings of the same weird thing in sky over the course of one week suggests that, despite the impossibility of identifying that weird thing, something's puttering around up there. In early January, in the city of Hull, East Yorkshire, England, multiple witnesses reported seeing a glowing UFO on separate occasions and at different times of the day.
First, on January 6th, Hull Live reported that a woman and her aunt had seen a strange glowing red light hovering low in the sky while walking down the street at approximately 5:40 PM. The woman snapped a picture of the UFO and described the sighting:
"It didn't seem to be moving and it just seemed really weird as it definitely wasn't a laser, a helicopter or another light that was supposed to be there - it was just stationary in the sky and we thought it could have been a UFO.
As soon as we saw it, we took a picture of it on the phone, and when we were walking back from the shop, the red ball was still there - it was really freaky and shook us up a bit as it made us think that something else is out there."
"Something else is out there" might be the most vague phrase ever used by anybody, but OK. The woman said that when she got home she showed the picture to her partner, who then went to the location of the sighting to try and get a video, but the UFO had disappeared.
On its own, that sighting would be pretty meaningless. It's a red light in the sky in a populated area. There's a thousand different explanations for that. Yet, on January 9th, Hull Live reported that another woman had come forward with a sighting. A 31-year-old woman says that at roughly 1:30 AM on New Years day, she was in bed and falling asleep when she heard a loud bang. She jumped up, thinking that it might be an intruder and looked outside. According to the woman:
"I thought it may have been someone booting in my gate to get my children’s bikes, so I peeked out through the blinds only to be met with a massive red orb in the sky opposite my street hovering above the local field.
My heart skipped a beat and I shut my blinds and dived back in bed because I was too nervous to look back out."
On January 11, a third sighting was reported. This sighting occurred on Thursday, January 4th. A family was walking to a shopping center at approximately 4:45 PM when they saw a "scary, multicolored UFO" appear in the sky for a brief second. According to the unnamed witness, the object was circular and had lights of various colors and disappeared in the blink f an eye. However, 15 minutes later, the "UFO" showed up again, and the family was able to take a picture (you can see the picture here). According to the witness:
"We saw it again when we got to top of Midmere off Dorchester Road. It was flashing red, blue, green, yellow, all sorts of colours and when we blinked it disappeared into thin air.
It was circular in shape and we thought it was a plane at first but it was moving too quickly and it wasn’t shaped like one. It was flickering all different colours, normally a plane is one or two different colours when you see it. It was quite scary to see."
This is actually pretty accurate.
So are these sightings related? The first two sightings aren't reported as being anything other than a glowing red orb, while the third apparently upped its lighting budget. Of course, the third sighting also happened while it was still sort of light out. Do aliens use different headlights depending on the time of day? The picture of the third UFO definitely looks like it could be some sort of craft, but it could also be a drone. Drones are small and quick. Because of their size, they can present the illusion that they're further away and faster than they actually are. At the same time, they make a pretty distinctive sound, and one that we're all kind of used to at this point, so it's hard to say.
It will be worth keeping an eye on Hull to see if any other UFOs show up, or if anyone crashes a drone.
Sequoyah is a writer, music producer, and poor man's renaissance man based in Providence, Rhode Island. He spends his time researching weird history and thinking about the place where cosmic horror overlaps with disco. You can follow him on Twitter: @shkennedy33.