ATV Today film crew UFO sighting at Radford, Enstone

Autumn 1971. North Oxfordshire was in the grip of a UFO flap. Around Banbury, the reports had been mounting since August. BBC Two's Man Alive would later say the area had seen "nearly 1,000 UFO sightings since last August".

ATV Today, the news programme of Associated TeleVision, the ITV contractor for the Midlands, was already following the story. On 11 October 1971, reporter Peter Plant interviewed local people around Banbury, some of them in a pub. A UFO investigator showed drawings made by witnesses. One man passed on a claim that a local lorry driver had seen "an eight foot space man" who left in a disc-shaped craft.

Fifteen days later. Tuesday, 26 October 1971. An ATV film unit was on location at Radford, a small hamlet on the River Glyme in the parish of Enstone, about six miles east of Chipping Norton. They were in a field owned by farmer Tom Parsons. It was just before noon. Broad daylight.

Then the crew saw a UFO. This time the witnesses were a television crew, and their camera was rolling. Reporter Lionel Hampden, cameraman Noel Smart and production assistant Chris Fewlass each gave an account of what happened. And they captured it on film.

The report went out on ATV Today the same day. It ran 3 minutes and 22 seconds on 16 mm colour sound film. Hampden described the sighting. Smart and Fewlass gave their own accounts. Then the footage they had captured was shown.

That film survives in the Media Archive for Central England, known as MACE. Its catalogue entry is the only written description of the event. The crew's own words, the shape of the object, how it moved and how long it stayed, all of that lives only in the film itself. No transcript has been published.

No official investigation of the Enstone sighting has been found. The wider flap did draw attention. A public debate was held at Banbury town hall, where Air Commodore Anthony Davis spoke for the Ministry of Defence. The ministry reportedly said it was ready to investigate the Banbury sightings, and a British UFO society looked into them too. Ministry of Defence files released in 2003 include notes Davis prepared after the Man Alive appearance. Nothing yet ties any of those papers to the film crew at Radford.

No one has offered an explanation for the sighting, and no hoax has ever been alleged. The open questions are simple. What exactly did the crew see, and what does their footage show? Until the film is transcribed, the case rests on a catalogue entry and a handful of stills.

For decades the report sat quietly in the archive. In May 2025 the UFO Intel Substack brought it back, reproducing the MACE description alongside images from the broadcast. It remains a rare thing in British ufology. A sighting made by a news team, filmed by that news team, and put on air the very same day.