What Are The Mysterious Ghostly UFOs Spotted Over Yorkshire and Leeds?

It seems something strange is happening in the skies over the north of England. Forget grey, rainy days - people in Yorkshire are looking up and seeing some truly weird stuff. A whole bunch of new photographs have popped up showing mysterious lights and objects that have left people scratching their heads. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or could it be something a bit more... out there? Let's have a proper look at what's been going on.

A Spoon in the sky over Leeds

In Headingley, Leeds, a local photographer named Jesse Gallagher has been busy snapping away with his iPhone. But he wasn't taking pictures of his mates or his dinner. Between August 2021 and November 2023, he captured a collection of really odd images in the night sky. These weren't your classic flying saucers. The pictures show a whole crew of spooky, ghostly shapes and sizes, quite different from the traditional depictions of UFOs you see in films. Some of these objects are just plain bizarre. One of them, glowing with a silvery-blue light, genuinely looks like a giant spoon hanging in the darkness. Another object is a deep blue sphere, or orb, that seems to be glowing faintly.

The photographer took all these snaps around midnight, when the darkness made the strange, glowing light from the objects easier to see. He even made some videos. Mr Gallagher said, 'When zooming in, the orbs are either white or multi-coloured and can be seen pulsating. One recording has the moon as a backdrop which provides some interesting perspective. I have seen other videos of similar objects around the world.' It's these pulsating orbs that make the sightings feel so mysterious. What could these ghostly lights be?

Could it just be a trick of the light?

Of course, not everyone is convinced this is an alien invasion. UFO researcher Philip Mantle had a look at the photographs and offered a more down-to-earth explanation. He thinks the images show 'some kind of 'distant light source that is out of focus'. Basically, when a camera, especially a cellphone camera, tries to focus on a small, bright light far away, it can get a bit confused. 'The out of focus image makes the light look very different from what the naked eye would see,' he explained. 'They could well be simple lens flares as seen in the photo of the moon.' Lens flares are those little spots or streaks of light that appear in photos when you point your camera at something bright, like the sun or a streetlamp. So, could these strange shapes just be a camera glitch? It's one of the main alternate theories.

However, one of the images is harder to explain away. It shows a textured grey object that looks solid, with what might be a hole in the middle. It looks a bit like a piece of machinery or maybe a broken bit of spacecraft. But if it was a chunk of old satellite or rocket, physics says it should have fallen back to Earth. So the mystery continues.

More mysterious sightings in Yorkshire

It isn't just in Leeds that people are seeing things. Not long ago, another Yorkshire resident, John Tunnah, spotted something weird near Skipton. He was taking pictures of the hills when he captured a classic saucer-shaped object. What's odd is that he took about a dozen photographs, but the strange shape only appeared in one of them. The object looks exactly like the flying saucers from old sci-fi films, with a round, flattened shape. It's a complete departure from traditional depictions of modern UFOs, which are often reported as triangles or spheres.

Nick Pope, who used to work for the Ministry of Defence looking into UFOs, also had a few ideas. He suggested that when something shows up in a photo but wasn't seen at the time, it could be a simple explanation. 'When photos show an anomaly that wasn't seen at the time, I suspect either a glitch with the camera, or a fast-moving object like a bird or an insect, close to the lens,' he said. It's possible the object was just a bug flying past at the exact moment the picture was taken. But the clear, saucer-shaped image makes that hard for some people to believe.

UFO or UAP? What's in a name?

All this talk of UFOs can get a bit confusing. The term has been around since after World War II and often makes people think of little green men and an alien spaceship of extraterrestrial origin. Because it's so linked with conspiracy theories, officials try to avoid it. In America, the government's defence department, the Pentagon, now uses a different term: UAP. This stands for 'unidentified aerial phenomenon'. It sounds a bit more serious and covers anything in the sky that can't be immediately identified, whether it's a weird weather event, a secret drone, or something else entirely. While the term UAP is becoming more common, most people still know these mysterious sightings as UFOs.

It's not just Yorkshire, it's happening in Los Angeles too

This whole aerial phenomenon isn't limited to one place. On August 28, all the way over in Los Angeles, two people saw something incredible from their balcony. For about 25 minutes, they watched a huge, black, V-shaped craft covered in lights move slowly across the city sky. They managed to get clear videos and pictures with a cellphone camera, even zooming in to see nine bright white lights along the craft's hull. The object flew south until it disappeared from view around 11:38 pm. This wasn't just a quick flash of light; it was a long, sustained sighting.

Mark Christopher Lee, a UFO researcher, looked at the footage. He doesn't think it was an alien spaceship. He offered some alternate theories, but what the object was remains a puzzle. Whether it's strange pulsating orbs in Leeds, a classic saucer-shaped craft in Skipton, or a V-shaped machine over Los Angeles, one thing is clear: people are capturing some incredible and mysterious things in the sky. And while experts have their theories, from lens flares to secret tech, nobody knows for sure what they are. The sightings continue, and so does the debate.