Emley Moor TV mast police sighting, West Yorkshire

The Emley Moor transmitting station rises above the hills near Huddersfield, in Kirklees, West Yorkshire. Its concrete tower stands 1,047 feet tall and has carried television signals since 1971. On a dark November morning in 1986, it became the backdrop for something else.

Sunday, 2 November 1986. At about 4.20am, an officer of West Yorkshire Police received a report of a possible sighting from control. He was asked to "confirm or deny".

He confirmed. According to the police report later quoted by the Huddersfield Examiner, he "observed the UFO" for approximately three minutes. It was "cylindrical in shape", "approx 150-200ft in length", and lay "two or three miles away towards Emley Moor mast". There was "one white light at either end, which were not flashing". The object had "no particular colour". It was "not bright". It was "making no noise". It was "totally static", yet it "appeared to be hovering".

He was not the only one watching. Six or eight police officers, from five different vantage points, reported the same thing. Nine people witnessed it in all. "They all report this 200ft cylindrical object motionless next to Emley Moor tower," the paper wrote. The PRUFOS police database names the places: Holme Moss, Pole Moor and Kirkburton. It describes "a huge UFO estimated at some 200 feet in length" seen in the vicinity of the mast "and over Holmfirth".

Chief Inspector Brian Smelt of West Yorkshire Police confirmed that six officers had reported seeing the UFO. The force logged it as a possible UFO sighting. Checks with airports proved negative. No official conclusion was ever recorded. No photographs, film, radar data or physical traces are known.

The case has a loose thread. The Huddersfield Examiner, in later retrospective articles, places it on 2 November 1986. The PRUFOS database, compiled by Gary Heseltine, files a closely matching six-officer report under 1987, on a Sunday, citing the Huddersfield Examiner of that year. One summary of that version describes something "similar to that of an airship" with five or six white lights. It may be the same night recorded twice. It may be a second event entirely. Only the original newspaper pages can settle it.

No published source offers a mundane explanation. An advertising airship comes to mind, given a silent cylinder with a light at each end. But a flight at that hour on a November morning would be unusual, and the airport checks found nothing to account for it. The question has never been tested against the original police report.

Emley Moor would return to the files. In June 2004, five objects in formation were photographed over the area, which researcher Patrick Gross concluded were Dutch F-16s on a NATO exercise. The region has its share of police cases too, from Todmorden in 1980 to Ilkley Moor in 1987 and Howden Moor in 1997. Yet the 1986 report stands on its own. Six or more officers. Five vantage points. One silent shape beside the tower, holding perfectly still before dawn.