A Yorkshire resident said he photographed a saucer-shaped object flying low over the hills near Skipton in a single frame from a sequence of shots, a picture that has prompted questions from local observers and varied explanations from experts.
Photographer John Tunnah told the Daily Mail he took about 10 to 12 photographs from a roadside vantage point outside Shipton late one Saturday morning and later found the object in only one image. He said the camera was a recently purchased Pentax Optio SVi and described the object as resembling the classic round, elongated “flying saucer” shape shown in popular culture. The Pentagon declined to comment on the image when contacted by the Daily Mail.
Tunnah said he had noticed a “perfectly formed arch of cloud” beyond Silsden and stopped to take pictures. By the time he had the camera set up the arch had dispersed, he told the newspaper, but the later review of images revealed the isolated anomaly on the far left of one frame. He said friends who examined the picture judged the object to appear “real” and “solid” and to be travelling at speed from the horizon feature.
Observers and former officials offered multiple possible explanations. Nick Pope, who formerly worked on unidentified aerial phenomena for the UK Ministry of Defence, told the Daily Mail that when anomalies appear only on single photos he suspects either a camera glitch or a fast-moving object such as a bird or insect close to the lens. Tunnah himself suggested possibilities including a short-lived cloud, a fast-moving animal nearer the camera, or an unrecognised Skunk Works–type experimental aircraft.
Skunk Works is the unofficial name for Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs, credited with developing classified experimental aircraft. Neither Lockheed Martin nor the Pentagon provided confirmation that any known aircraft type matched the image.
The photograph fits some commonly reported shape descriptions for unidentified aerial phenomena. A Pentagon document published in 2023 summarised reported sightings from 1996 through 2023 and noted a variety of shapes — most often round or orb-like, but also rectangles, ovals, triangles, disks, cylinders and polygons. That document said about 16% of reports mentioned lights, sometimes attributed to reflective surfaces.
Interest in such images has increased as both military and civilian reporting of unexplained aerial events has grown. A crowdsourced platform, Enigma, reported more than 8,000 sightings across the United States between December 2022 and June 2025, including 422 reports specifically describing metallic orbs, many observed near military installations and between roughly 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.
The term "UFO" stands for "unidentified flying object" and does not imply an extraterrestrial origin; investigators and analysts typically treat individual reports as unexplained until further evidence can confirm a natural, man-made, sensor or processing cause. In the case of the Skipton-area photo, the anomaly remains formally unidentified in public reporting, and experts cited common photographic artefacts and nearby fast-moving objects as plausible non-extraterrestrial explanations.
Tunnah said he is not a believer in alien visitation but thinks whatever was captured deserves the label "UFO" in the literal sense. He provided the image to the Daily Mail and has shown it to friends; beyond that, there has been no confirmed independent analysis published to establish the object's nature.