Six and a half minutes.Then the tape disappeared.

On Thursday 5 October 2000, 44-year-old Sharon Rowlands was at home in Slaley, Bonsall, with her husband Hayden when an eerie noise drew her attention outside. Contemporary reporting placed the start of the sighting at about 9:15pm. She had only been given the camcorder days earlier. Rowlands took it outside and filmed toward the woods and fields around the village, estimating the object at roughly two miles away.

Her description was unusually specific. She compared the form to a giant disc with a section missing from the bottom and later called it a segmented disc with a dark centre. She said the object appeared to carry red, yellow, orange and blue lights, to pulse, expand and contract, and at one point to come close enough that she feared it might land in the field. She also described it as looking extraordinarily large through the lens — roughly the size of a detached house in her later recollection.

Rowlands repeatedly stressed that she had not approached the night as a committed UFO believer. Her public position was closer to: she had doubted the subject, then filmed something she could not explain. That matters because it is part of how the case was understood at the time — an ordinary household with a new consumer camcorder suddenly holding an unusually long piece of UFO footage.

The resulting recording was reported as approximately six and a half minutes long. Contemporary descriptions say the object moved across the image, showed red, yellow, orange and blue light, changed appearance and eventually disappeared in a red flash. The publicly circulated excerpts are much less generous: dark sky, a bright defocused form, heavy zoom and only fragments of the sequence that made the original tape famous.

That gap — between the reported full tape and the footage most people can actually inspect — is the central evidential problem of the case.

The Derby Evening Telegraph reported in May 2001 that California producer Robert Kiviat's company had acquired the tape for more than £20,000 and was considering it for a programme provisionally titled Could It Be True?. Kiviat was quoted praising the footage, ranking it among the strongest UFO films he had encountered and discussing comparison with imagery from NASA's STS-75 tether mission.

But a specialist archive carried a significant correction only days later: according to Santiago Yturria, Kiviat denied that the reported £20,000 transaction had taken place and said an intermediary in Britain had been acting on his behalf. That contradiction is now part of the evidence genealogy. The famous “£20,000 Hollywood sale” must not be presented as settled fact.

The NASA connection needs equally tight wording. Contemporary coverage reported visual similarity to STS-75 imagery and said optical physicist Bruce Maccabee might examine the tape. No published Maccabee analysis of the Rowlands master has been recovered in this research pass. “NASA imagery was compared with it,” “a NASA-associated expert might examine it,” and “NASA authenticated the UFO” are three very different propositions.

That media journey matters because it explains why Bonsall acquired a reputation far beyond Derbyshire. The tape became valuable not only as evidence but as television content — exactly when custody, copy generation and editorial processing became harder to reconstruct.