Mr and Mrs Webster live to the north of the city in a suburb known as Mile Cross. NUFOS committee members Mark Savill, Alex Clark and myself were present at the interview. According to the Websters, the video recording was made through their living room window which has good views to the south-east—this was easily confirmed as being the case. While the various press reports state that the sighting was made at approximately 20:15 GMT on Friday, November 3^rd, cross-examination and the astute recognition of a piece of background TV dialogue on the video as belonging to ‘Eastenders’ (!), puts the event one day earlier and sometime between 19:30 and 20:00 GMT—with further analysis of this particular episode of the ‘soap’, it may be possible to derive a precise time for the event.

The brief sequence opens with a view to the south-south-east where the object appears as a moderately bright point source close to the horizon that emerges from behind a mature tree in the garden. The sky was clear since the object moves in a virtually straight line in an easterly direction while gaining in altitude until it passes beneath the Moon. At this juncture a fainter point source becomes visible close to the Moon’s disc which, on my later analysis, confirms the date and time since the point source is the planet Saturn which lay some 5 degrees (the field of view of a pair of 10x50 binoculars) to the lower left of the 80% illuminated waxing gibbous Moon on the night in question.

It is at this point that the UFO (which must have been about magnitude -2 to -3 compared to Saturn) rapidly expands into the disc portrayed in the press reports—an evenly illuminated yellow/white circle with two black, semi-circular indentations or ‘notches’ cut out of the circumference on opposing sides of the disc, each about one sixth of the disc’s diameter in depth. At this point the image appears to dance and waver and, in step frame, a group of three dark motes or obstructions cross the disc, giving rise to the reports of ‘rotation’ or spinning.

I immediately suspected that the disc effect was merely a result of zooming the image of a bright point source while defocusing, and that the ‘notches’ were merely the result of an iris artefact within the camcorder. The motes, which are black and irregular in shape, were either marks on the living room window pane or dust on the glass plate covering the CCD chip in the camera. By Mrs Webster’s own admission, Glen often pulled focus when he was zooming into a subject and I was able to reproduce precisely the effect of the ‘axehead’ or ‘Batman’ symbol on a distant streetlight through the same lounge window that acted as a good approximation to a point source. In fairness to Glen Webster, the zoom facility of his camcorder does seem to pull focus at high amplifications, so he was unaware that the effects captured on the video originated within the camera itself.

The dancing, zigzagging motions of the source were therefore entirely a result of the difficulties associated with holding a camera still at high zooms, and not due to the object itself. The disc then contracts back to a point source as the zoom is reduced and the sequence ends with the UFO, as bright as before, moving to the east of the Moon at approximately the same altitude (34 degrees at 19:45 GMT on November 2^nd) on what I presume was the original trajectory. I estimated from the angular size of the Moon and the length of the track that the source was travelling at about one degree per second and the object was in view for almost a minute before Mr Webster attempted to go outside. By the time he had done so it had disappeared.