The 2012 Welsh "spinning UFO" may have been a sparking power line
An expert declared a 2012 nighttime video a genuine, spinning UFO. According to analysts on the Metabunk forum, however, it showed a sparking overhead power line damaged in a storm, which a 2025 letter from a power company also supported, but a podcaster still disputes the explanation.
At 3 a.m. on January 3, 2012, a fourteen-year-old boy was woken by a storm in Denbigh, North Wales, and heard a loud bang. According to a report by the local Denbighshire Free Press, he saw flashing white lights in the sky from his bedroom window and filmed them. The video spread on YouTube. A family member later recalled that they saw small explosions in the lights and watched them for about half an hour before they went out.
The Daily Star later published the footage under a headline saying an expert had declared it genuine. Jason Gleaves overlaid a daytime photo taken from the same window onto a single frame of the video and concluded that the lights were rotating around a central disc above the treeline, meaning it could be a flying, rotating object.
In March 2019, Mick West, administrator of the Metabunk forum, reanalyzed the shaky video. After image stabilization, the lights were not rotating but traveling in one direction at a fairly constant speed. By combining about fifty frames, he aligned the daytime photo more accurately, and according to this the lights were probably on or under the ridgeline, and the flickering may have been caused by trees obstructing them. He suggested they could have been the lights of vehicles moving along a path across a golf course, but he stressed that he had not solved the case and that no definitive conclusion should be drawn from a poor-quality video.
Storm and power line
In August 2025, the thread was revived after the person who filmed the footage, now an adult, talked about the case on a podcast. A forum member, flarkey, pointed out that a severe storm raged on the night of the recording, causing power outages in several parts of the United Kingdom. An overhead power line runs up the hill in the line of sight, toward the golf course's reservoir. He suggested that the line, damaged in the storm, was sparking.
He contacted the area's power company, SP Energy Networks, which replied on August 27, 2025. According to the letter, a report of a sparking overhead line came in that day from a field behind a property, in the vicinity of the golf course. Engineers repaired the low-voltage line in the afternoon and replaced two insulators and a fuse. The forum then renamed the thread "Likely sparking powerlines."
In November 2025, the podcast's creator began to dispute the explanation. In his view, the location seen in the footage is closer than the one the forum identified, a low-voltage fault repaired only by replacing parts does not explain the long-lasting light phenomenon, and the fault was reported hours later. Flarkey acknowledged that while the letter's description of the location matches, it does not name the exact location of the fault, so he asked the company for clarification. Closing the case now depends on exactly which section of line the January 3, 2012 fault ticket refers to.
The sober take
According to Metabunk analysts, the most likely explanation is the sparking of a low-voltage overhead power line damaged in a storm. According to the power company's letter, a report of a sparking line came in that night from the vicinity of the golf course, but the letter does not name the exact location of the fault, and a podcaster disputes the identification of the location.