The Rod Dickinson Somerset Footage

Rod Dickinson was driving in Somerset when he began filming, and kept filming for about twelve minutes in daylight. The object is placed roughly two hundred yards to the left of an aerial mast at around five hundred feet, and at one point in the sequence it is described as presenting as a black circle directly overhead.

What is on the record

One telling on one channel, Dickinson as the sole claimant, and no documents. The grade is a single account.

A Ministry of Defence file was formerly attached to this case and carried it to the archive's document-corroborated tier. It was read in full during this review, and it documents a cluster of sightings from 20 February 2005, seven years after this footage, with Somerset appearing only as one county among the eight that reported that day. Dickinson's name appears nowhere in it. The document has been removed.

The analysis is the substance here. The footage was examined by Bill George of Industrial Light and Magic, whose finding as recorded is that the object was physically present in front of the camera when filmed. The reasoning is specific and testable in principle: camera shake transferring to the object, the way the lens focus behaves on it, and birds passing in front of it during the sequence. Those are exactly the tests that separate something in the world from something added afterwards.

What that analysis does not do is identify the object, and the archive holds neither the footage nor the report of the examination.

Why it sits where it does

L0, a single account, after the removal of a document about a different year's sightings. The substance of the file is unchanged by the correction: twelve minutes of daylight footage and a named effects supervisor's opinion that the object was physically present is more material than most single accounts carry, but the footage is not in our holdings and one voice remains one voice. What Rod Dickinson filmed is not resolved here.