Satellite / Rocket Re-entry Misidentification (UK waves).
documentedexplanationRendlesham Forest (RAF Bentwaters/Woodbridge)
Prosaic driver of many UK UFO waves: re-entering satellites and spent rocket stages (e.g. Soviet Zond and Cosmos hardware) produce slow, bright, fragmenting fireballs widely misreported as UFOs. Examples include the 1966-67 wave (~400 MOD reports), Birmingham 1975 sightings tied to Zond 4 / Kosmos 460, and a March 1993 triangular-UFO wave attributed to a Russian booster re-entry plus a police helicopter.
Documented as an official assessment: the MOD/DIS concluded in 1967 that the vast majority of reports were satellites, space debris, rocket launches or natural phenomena. UK intelligence also exploited UFO reports as a way to track where Soviet space junk would fall during the Cold War.