'Hovered Above the Hotel for 20 Minutes': Ex-RAF Witness Films Suspected Alien Triangular UFOs in Bali

A former Royal Air Force serviceman filmed what he believes were three UFOs hovering above a hotel in Seminyak, on Bali's west coast, on 6 July, footage that has since split ufologists and sceptics down the middle.

The witness, who asked not to be named, told Metro he watched the triangular shapes glow yellow, red and green against a clear sky for around 20 minutes.

For context, the sighting began at 6.40pm, when the man and his partner spotted the objects roughly 600ft above their apartment. 'We saw three triangular shaped objects in the sky,' he told Metro.

'One was flashing red, pink and blue green lights and the other was showing three steady green lights. The third was quite faint. They were not making any noise and were stationary.'

The pair briefly went inside to get ready for the evening. When they stepped back out, the objects had vanished. 'Quite weird really,' the witness said, which is about as understated as a close encounter gets.

UFO Sighting Divides Opinion Among Investigators

Gary Heseltine, editor of UFO Truth Magazine, was sent the footage by a former colleague and told Metro his first instinct was drones. He changed his mind after studying the clip more closely. 'There are several things that suggest to me that they might be anomalous, or a UAP,' he said, using the current term for unidentified anomalous phenomena.

Heseltine pointed to the objects' silence, their unusual paired shapes and the fact they held position above the hotel for a full 20 minutes. He also noted the formation did not resemble typical drone patterns, and that a hotel in Seminyak was an 'unusual' location for such a sighting.

He compared the footage to the mysterious drone swarms that appeared over New Jersey and other East Coast states in 2024, concluding the Bali sighting was, in his words, 'curious and for me unidentified.'

Not everyone is convinced. Ufologist and filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee called the video 'impressive' but said he doubted it showed extraterrestrial visitors. He suggested the lights could belong to Balinese kites, known locally as layang-layang, fitted with LED lights, a tradition tied to the island's kite flying season, when locals fly the kites to ask Hindu gods for a good harvest.

'For a brief few seconds my ancient alien head on was thinking ancient Vimāna coming back,' Lee told Metro, referencing the flying craft described in Hindu texts. 'But logic kicks in, especially with those lights, I guess at night you also can't see the strings.'

Science writer and UFO sceptic Mick West was characteristically blunt. 'They look like LED kites,' he said. It's the kind of verdict that tends to end debates rather than start them, though this one seems set to run a while yet.

Why Grainy UFO Footage Keeps Fuelling the Debate

There's a familiar problem here too. UFO footage has a habit of arriving blurry, distant and hard to verify, and this clip is no exception. Kate Burns, VP EMEA at video authentication firm identifAI, told Metro that parts of the footage appear to have been edited.

'The challenge with such videos, however, is that the lower the resolution they are, the harder it is to provide an entirely confident score,' she said.

Public appetite for these stories shows no sign of fading. A 2021 YouGov poll found roughly half of Britons believe aliens exist, and nearly one in ten claim to have seen a UFO themselves.

Nearly 100 sightings of orbs, triangles and metallic discs across UK skies have been logged with UFO Identified this year alone, though no official body records such reports.

Nick Pope, who investigated UFO reports for the Ministry of Defence in the 1990s, told Metro before his death in April that most callers to the department's 'UFO desk' genuinely believed what they'd seen.

'In the end, we found about 80% or so of these sightings were misidentifications, 15% had insufficient data and 5% were unknown,' he said. 'That 5% doesn't mean extraterrestrial, but as I always remind people, neither did we rule that out.'

Whether Bali's flashing triangles turn out to be kites, drones or something odder, nobody involved seems in a rush to say for certain.