Reviving the cold case of the 2009 Bethnal Green UFO spotting
When UFOs were spotted hovering over an East End bookie in the early days of Google Street View, they raised timeless questions about the great unknown.
Have you ever seen an unidentified flying object (UFO)? In 2009, eagle-eyed Google Street View users spotted a strange apparition in the cloudy skies above Bethnal Green Road.
Nine mystery discs appeared to be hovering above a bookmaker’s shop, with the moment frozen in time as the Google Street View camera passed through the neighbourhood the year before. Screenshots show bystanders pointing up into the sky, seemingly discussing the UFOs.
Those pictured in the images have their faces blurred as is standard for Google Street View and have never spoken to the press. We don’t know who they are, or what they saw that day. Today, the bookie has become an Oxfam on Bethnal Green Road, down the street from E. Pellici’s.
The event made national news and then faded into the tail-end of the 2000s, surviving total online anonymity today through a Telegraph article and a few niche blog posts by conspiracy theorists.
In the UK, UFO sightings have been reported as far back as the Middle Ages, in many shapes and forms. A classified three-year study between 1997 and 2000 by the Ministry of Defense called Project Condign investigated over 10,000 such modern sightings in the UK. It concluded that none of them could be attributed to extra-terrestrial life.
Nevertheless, when a Freedom of Information request released Project Condign to the public for the first time in 2006, the public was intrigued that the topic had been investigated in so much depth.
This sparked new conspiracies about UFOs in the UK and gave extraterrestrial visitors a special spot in the public imagination in the 2000s – a possible explanation for why the Bethnal Green sighting caused such a stir.
In 2007 Google Street View launched, and by 2008 their cars had descended on London, mapping our streets in a way they’d never before been mapped. Internet users across the globe scoured the endless trove of images in the new tool for strange and interesting moments. The question hovers, unanswered – was it a glitch, or something more?
Today, Google Street View’s novelty has worn off. It’s hard to imagine the Bethnal Green UFO sighting making headlines like in 2009. Instead, new rapidly evolving technologies like AI inspire the imagination and headlines like ‘Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient,’ ‘She Is in Love With ChatGPT’ and ‘We asked ChatGPT if AI is a threat to humanity and we’re more scared than before’ have taken the stage.
As our experiences with AI chatbots slowly become normalised, some of these headlines already seem dated. Extraordinary questions can become mundane when we’ve asked them enough.
Did fragments of light in Google Street View trick us in 2009, just like fragments of voices in AI trick us today? Or were there UFOs that day in Bethnal Green?
If you witnessed the 2008 Bethnal Green UFOs, contact us here.
If you liked this read Saxophonist Lora Logic made a name with punk band X-Ray Spex, then vanished from music for 40 years—now, she’s back.
