Kim Wilde's Garden UFO Sighting, Hertfordshire

Kim Wilde is a pop singer and TV gardener who lives in a converted 16th-century barn in Hertfordshire. Fields lie at the bottom of the garden. Friday, 26 June 2009. Wilde had spent the evening at A&E with her little boy. Back home, she sat in the garden with her husband, actor Hal Fowler, and a friend.

Late in the evening, Wilde noticed "a very bright light coming up from the south east" and some helicopters. The first thought was a police chase. Then "the helicopters went over our roof, disappeared, and it all fell quiet."

"I looked up in the sky and saw this huge bright light behind a cloud," Wilde said. "Brighter than the moon, but similar to the light from the moon." It was "silent and huge". The three of them walked down the grass to look for a source. There was none.

The light stayed where it was for a minute or two. Then it moved. "All of a sudden it moved, very quickly, from about 11:00 to 1:00. Then it just did that, back and forth, for several minutes."

Each jump happened "silently and within a split second". A smaller light began to follow the larger one through the same swings. Whenever it moved, Wilde said, "something shifted in the air". And still no sound. "Absolutely silent."

Fowler reportedly ran inside to find something to film it. Wilde chose to keep watching. After a few minutes, the light was gone.

Wilde felt no fear. It was "a benevolent feeling", with a sense that "it was watching us". In a German interview, the light became "bigger than any airplane. Simply gigantic!"

The next week, the Welwyn Hatfield Times reported another witness who had photographed a sphere in the sky. That account matched Wilde's. On 30 June 2009 the paper quoted a witness named Andy, out in a back garden in Howlands, Welwyn Garden City, with a dog at about 10.45pm. Two strange objects. "They were above the clouds, swinging left to right." And: "There was no noise whatsoever." Whether Andy took the photograph is not confirmed, and the picture itself has never been located. Wilde later said other people locally saw something that night too.

In 2018, TV Overmind questioned the account, pointing to the lack of a photograph by Wilde and to her glass of wine. A Slovenian headline said everyone thought the wine was to blame. The retellings shift in small ways: the light moved to 1 o'clock in one interview and 2 o'clock in others. In one version the helicopters had left, while in another they were around the light. The Ministry of Defence still ran its UFO desk in 2009, and its published log records a 10.45pm Welwyn Garden City report only as "A UFO".

The night changed Wilde's career. Here Come the Aliens was released on 16 March 2018, its title inspired by the sighting. Its opening track, "1969", links the Moon landing to the idea that aliens might come because of humanity's failings. A tour followed, including Birmingham Town Hall, and on Loose Women Wilde said: "I believe aliens are here already, and have been for a long time." In 2023, Wilde said former US Navy pilot Ryan Graves's congressional testimony echoed what she saw and that it "definitely wasn't the moon".