The Bakewell Black Triangle

The early 1990s were the years of the black triangle. The Belgian UFO wave had made large, dark, triangular craft with bright lights the defining shape of the decade. In March 1993 a triangle was reported across western England during the Cosford incident. Six months later, it was Derbyshire's turn.

Bakewell is a small town in the Derbyshire Dales, inside the Peak District National Park. Not far away, in Derby, Omar Fowler ran the Phenomenon Research Association, a local UFO group. Search excerpts describe him as a former Fleet Air Arm man who moved to Derbyshire in 1990 and founded the PRA there.

Sunday, 26 September 1993. The sources disagree on the hour. One listing gives 21:30. Excerpts of the PRA's own booklet reportedly place the start of the activity at 7:45 pm.

What residents described was a huge black craft. A bright white light burned on each corner of its triangular shape. Numerous smaller lights ran along its edges. Fowler wrote that many residents of this small town watched it "slowly and silently flying over their town."

It was low. It was slow. Fowler put its speed at only 30 mph, adding: "A witness driving his vehicle at 40 mph overtook it!" Over Bakewell the triangle performed several slow manoeuvres. Then it returned to its original course and flew slowly out of sight.

No count of witnesses was ever published, but excerpts of the PRA booklet, which have not been checked against the full text, reportedly name some of them. Mr Andrews was driving his van toward Bakewell when he saw several bright lights moving low and slowly ahead of him. A woman walking near Alport with her six-year-old daughter saw a brightly lit object and left the area. Mrs Pailing of Bakewell reported red, green and white lights, and another witness said the lights looked like a fairground. The booklet also reportedly mentions activity around Matlock that same evening.

The only known inquiry was Fowler's. The PRA reportedly interviewed one of the main witnesses on video within 45 minutes of the event. No copy of that tape has been found online. Fowler later wrote up the case in The Flying Triangle Mystery, a 24-page booklet published by the PRA in Derby in 1996.

There are no photographs or film of the object. No radar data. No physical traces. No police report, newspaper story or Ministry of Defence file has been found for Bakewell in September 1993.

No explanation specific to Bakewell has ever been published, and no hoax has been alleged. The wider debate over black triangles offers several. The MoD's Project Condign study argued that most if not all such sightings could be explained by buoyant plasmas, and at least some by meteors. It suggested that a dark gap between glowing objects in loose formation can look like a triangle, though the report was not peer reviewed. For other waves, aircraft in formation, ultralights, blimps and flares, classified aircraft and drones have all been proposed.

Bakewell would appear in the record again during the Dales UFO flap of 2000 and 2001, but those reports belong to a different story. The 1993 triangle lives on mainly in Fowler's pages. A quiet Sunday evening. A town looking up. A huge dark shape moving so slowly that a car could pass it.