‘Shapeshifting’ UFOs Stump a Man in Essex

Video: “3 UFOs turn into 2 Over Bowers Gifford, England May 20, 2026”, uploaded by UFO Sightings Daily, 27 May 2026, 02:48 PDT (10:48 BST), 1 min 23 s. Witness footage. Embedded, not rehosted.

St Margaret’s Church, Bowers Gifford, by day, 2018. Photo: Sludge G, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Generic place image, not the objects.

What happened

On the evening of 20 May 2026, a man outside his home in Bowers Gifford, a village between Basildon and Benfleet in south Essex, saw dark objects crossing the sky. He filmed them on his phone for 1 minute 23 seconds and submitted a report to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), report 197930.

On 27 May the blog and YouTube channel UFO Sightings Daily posted the clip under the title “3 UFOs turn into 2” and reproduced the witness’s NUFORC account. Coast to Coast AM picked the story up on 1 June under the headline “‘Shapeshifting’ UFOs Stump British Man”.

The witness is a private person. Neither NUFORC nor the outlets name him, and neither do we.

Timeline

• 2009: The UK Ministry of Defence closes its UFO reporting desk. Since then, British witnesses have often filed with US-based NUFORC instead.
• 2013: The UK National Archives completes its release of declassified MoD UFO files.
• 2024: The US Department of Defense’s AARO publishes a paper on how forced perspective and parallax mislead observers about size, distance and speed.
• 20 May 2026, evening: The sighting. At Bowers Gifford the sun set at about 20:51 BST.
• 27 May 2026, 02:48 PDT: UFO Sightings Daily uploads the 83-second clip to YouTube. Its blog post, quoting the NUFORC account, is time-stamped 04:11 the same morning (blog time).
• 1 June 2026: Coast to Coast AM shares the story.
• 4 November 2026: This rewrite re-checks the sources.

What believers claim

UFO Sightings Daily’s Scott C. Waring argued that the clip was genuine because the witness reported a haze around the objects: “That 100% confirms that this was a real UFO.” He suggested the haze comes from onboard propulsion. The video’s title frames the event as three craft merging into two.

Coast to Coast AM’s write-up stresses the mystery. It says the witness first thought it was an airplane but changed his mind when the object “seemed to be changing shape.”

What the research found

1. The witness explains the “shapeshifting” himself. The full NUFORC account, as reproduced by UFO Sightings Daily, goes on: “It was then apparent that was 2 or 3 independent objects moving around each other that was causing the object to look like it was changing shape.” No single object changed shape. Several objects moved around each other, and their combined outline changed.