Three lights maintaining triangular formation – Wolverhampton, UK – 23 Aug 2026, 22:01 BST

[Bomorse]

Three lights maintaining triangular formation – Wolverhampton, UK – 23 Aug 2026, 22:01 BST

I'm posting this in the hope that somebody can identify these lights from the footage and the time/location information.

Date: 23 August 2026
Time: Approximately 22:01 BST (21:01 UTC)
Location: Wolverhampton, West Midlands, UK
Coordinates: 52.595371, -2.197843
Viewing direction: Approximately west
Direction of travel: Right to left when facing west, therefore approximately north to south
Number of witnesses: Two

My mother first noticed three lights while letting the dog outside. She started recording almost immediately after noticing them, so the beginning of the attached video is approximately when the sighting began.

I came outside shortly afterwards and also observed the lights directly with my own eyes.

There appeared to be three separate points of light arranged in a triangular formation. They moved slowly and smoothly across the western sky from right to left (approximately north to south).

What particularly caught our attention was that the three lights appeared to maintain their positions relative to one another as they moved. I couldn't see any visible structure connecting the lights, so I don't know whether this was three separate objects travelling together or simply appeared that way from our viewpoint.

There were no obvious red/green navigation lights or an obvious aircraft-style flashing pattern. We also didn't observe any sudden acceleration or unusual manoeuvres — just relatively slow, steady movement while apparently retaining the triangular arrangement.

The attached footage was recorded by my mother. Unfortunately, the copy transferred to me appears to have been compressed/transcoded by the messaging service, so useful original camera metadata such as GPS and recording timestamp is no longer present. The date, time and location above have therefore been obtained separately from the original recording and where we were standing.

I have not enhanced the attached version for this post. I also have a 4K-upscaled/edit of the footage, but I'm providing the unenhanced transferred copy because I don't want processing to introduce artefacts that could affect identification.

I'm not claiming these were a single triangular object or anything anomalous. I'm primarily interested in determining whether they can be matched to satellites, aircraft, drones, lanterns or another identifiable source given the exact time, coordinates and direction of travel.

Any identification or analysis would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Samuel

 

[flarkey]

They look just like Chinese lanterns, and that can be hard to prove because they don't transmit their location like planes do.

 

[Eburacum]

What particularly caught our attention was that the three lights appeared to maintain their positions relative to one another as they moved.

However, it is easy to demonstrate that these lights do not, in fact, maintain the same formation over time as they pass across the sky. Here are images taken from different times in your clip, and it is easy to see that they do change their position with respect to one another.

These are three separate objects, floating along at what appears to be wind speed, and are almost certainly Chinese lanterns. I've seen this apparent 'formation flying' many times- it is an illusion, and occurs because any three lights in the sky always form a triangle of some kind - even if they fall into a straight line, that is just a very acute-angled triangle, or a triangle seen edge-on.

 

[purpleivan]

Agreed that this looks like 3 Chinese lanterns. Over the course of the video, the lowest of the 3 can be seen to drift from a position slightly ahead of the one above it, to a long way behind it, so it doesn't look like a triangular object, instead, 3 separate ones.

Edit: just beaten to making that point by @Eburacum