The Brierley Hill "Massive Craft" Sighting (Barbara and Brett Forrest)

Late 1987. Across the United Kingdom, people were reporting strange things in the sky. The author Timothy Good later described a wave with hundreds of witnesses, one he said the national media "largely ignored or dismissed". Its best known case came on 1 December, at Ilkley Moor. Weeks earlier, it reached Brierley Hill, near Dudley in the West Midlands, where the chimney of the Royal Brierley glassworks still rose over the town.

Thursday, November 19, 1987. About 7pm. Brett Forrest, 27, was walking along Moor Street, coming back from a shopping errand for his mother, Barbara. Then he noticed them. Flashing lights, above the chimney of the Royal Brierley glassworks.

"Suddenly more lights started to appear and flew around the first two," he later recalled. "They all formed into a diamond-like formation." Brett froze. "At this point I stopped dead and was just transfixed."

The lights began to dim. And as they did, he saw a huge triangular object. It started making its way towards him. "It was coming at me," he said, "albeit in a 'step-like' manner."

Barbara Forrest saw it too. She later wrote to Timothy Good. "Whatever anyone will say, both my son and I will never forget the 19th November, 1987," she began. "The craft came so very low, to enable us to have a very close look. It was massive, wonderful, and frightening." Later accounts describe the object seen at close quarters, hovering over houses.

There is a small puzzle in the record. In the newspaper telling, Brett is alone on the street. In Barbara's letter, mother and son watch together. Both can be true. He may have fetched her, or she may have watched from the house. No surviving account explains it.

No official inquiry into the sighting has come to light. There are no photographs, no film and no radar data. No physical traces were reported. The available accounts do not say how long the object stayed, or how it left. A secondhand summary credits Good with further details: a drone-like buzzing sound, a groove-like structure on the underside coloured black, silver and bronze, and a size compared to an aircraft carrier. None of these could be checked against a primary account.

No one has claimed the sighting was a hoax. No conventional explanation for it appears in print. The case rests on two named witnesses and their own words, and it has never been explained.

Good chose Barbara Forrest's letter to open the Editor's Foreword of The UFO Report, published in 1989, letting it stand for the whole wave of 1987 and 1988. In 2007 BBC Black Country returned to the story in a feature titled "UFO over Brierley Hill". The Express & Star carried Brett Forrest's own account under the headline "The day the first flying saucer was seen".

The area never quite let go of triangles. Years later, the Express & Star used the nickname "Dudley Dorito" for local triangle reports, a separate phenomenon decades on. And shortly after Brierley Hill, the Belgian wave of 1989 and 1990 would make the black triangle famous around the world.