PETER DAY

Opening

Just after 9am on Thursday 11 January 1973, building surveyor Peter Day left his home at Moreton, a mile south of Thame in Oxfordshire, and drove the A418 towards Aylesbury. He saw an orange light low over the fields, took the cine camera he kept in his glove compartment, and filmed it for about 23 seconds near Cuddington, just over the county line in Buckinghamshire.

The film ends with the light on one frame and gone on the next. That same morning, about 40 minutes later and 24 miles to the north-east, a burning American F-111 came down near North Crawley. Most of the argument since has been about whether those two facts belong together.

Timeline

08:56, 11 January 1973According to the accident record, F-111E 68-0024 of the USAF 20th Tactical Fighter Wing suffers an engine fire shortly after taking off from RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire. The crew circle while trying to get back to base.

About 09:05Day sees the light while driving towards Aylesbury and films it near Cuddington. Children at the primary school in nearby Chilton and a teacher later say they saw an object at about the same time.

09:47The F-111 crew, Major Bob Kroos and Captain Roger Beck, abandon the aircraft in its escape capsule. The jet crashes near Hurst End Farm, North Crawley, and the capsule lands in an allotment on the village high street. Both men survive.

Days afterDay tells the Thame Gazette, which reports that police have already explained the sighting as fuel dumped from a military jet in trouble. Day says he watched the light for several minutes and that fuel could hardly burn that long.

1973 onwardsKodak is reported to have examined the film and passed it as genuine. Day's attempts to interest the Ministry of Defence and the military in the footage get nowhere.

LaterJenny Randles writes up the case for the British UFO Research Association and argues against the jet explanation.

Key figures

Peter Day is the cameraman and the main witness. His description of the end of the sighting is the case's best-known line: the object moved neither up, down nor sideways, it was simply not there any more.

The Chilton schoolchildren and their teacher are the independent witnesses. None of their names or statements is public in any source I could check.

Major Bob Kroos and Captain Roger Beck flew the F-111 that became the standard explanation. Nothing in the public record has them commenting on the sighting.

Jenny Randles is the investigator who did the most to keep the case open, chiefly by arguing that the timings did not fit a burning jet.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: one roll of cine film of about 23 seconds, a reported Kodak examination that found no tampering, a Thame Gazette report carrying the police explanation, a BUFORA write-up by Randles, and the USAF accident record for F-111E 68-0024. The film gauge is not stated in the sources I could check, and the Kodak report itself has not been published.

Two details are still in dispute. Some retellings have Day filming from the moving car, while the most detailed local account has him pulling into a lay-by first. Earlier summaries, including the previous version of this report, also placed the sighting near Aylesbury as a still photograph, and one catalogue entry put it in Warwickshire. The record points to cine film, shot on the A418 between Thame and Aylesbury.

Things you might not know

• The camera lived in the glove box. Day kept a movie camera in his car as a matter of habit, which is why a commuter had footage at all.
• It vanishes between two frames. The light is present on one frame and absent on the next, with no visible movement in any direction.
• The hedge stays sharp. In the final frame, the foreground hedge is in focus while the trees under the vanished light look blurred. Nobody has published a tested explanation for it.
• The jet was already burning. The accident record puts the F-111's engine fire at 08:56, about nine minutes before Day filmed.
• The crew landed in an allotment. The F-111's escape capsule came down on the high street allotments at North Crawley.
• Kodak judged the film, not the light. A clean bill from a film lab means the footage was not doctored. It says nothing about what was in front of the lens.

Competing explanations

The burning F-111 or its dumped fuel. This is the police explanation of the day. Its strongest form is the timing: the accident record has the jet on fire from 08:56 and in the air until 09:47, circling as the crew tried to return to Upper Heyford. That covers the minutes Day was filming.

An unidentified object. Randles argued that a jet seen burning at 9:05 could not have stayed airborne until 9:46, and Day said fuel would not burn for the minutes he watched. The sudden disappearance between frames is the detail this reading leans on, since a jet does not usually leave the sky between one frame and the next.

Ball lightning or another atmospheric light. It has been suggested in local write-ups, but nobody has matched it to the weather that morning.

Later life of the case

The case drifted into British UFO roundups as a short capsule entry, often garbled. It gained a local following through Thame-area history writing, which restored the cine film, the A418 route and the F-111 to the story.

Finding

The film is real and was not tampered with, and an F-111 really was burning in the skies over Buckinghamshire that morning. The strongest reading is that Day filmed the stricken jet or the fuel it was dumping, because the accident timings that were once used against that explanation now appear to support it. That is a best explanation, not a closed one: no one has matched the jet's track to Day's position on the A418, and the vanishing between frames has never been tested.

What still will not resolve: the F-111's flight path between 08:56 and 09:47, the Kodak report itself, and the names and statements of the Chilton witnesses.