Kumburgaz is a beach suburb on the Sea of Marmara at the western edge of Istanbul, a strip of summer housing estates facing south across the water toward the shipping lanes. Between 2007 and 2009 a night watchman at one of those estates, Yalçın Yalman, filmed hours of video from the shore that he said showed structured craft hovering over the sea, and in a few close-up frames what looked like figures inside them. The footage was examined by Turkey’s national observatory, debated on national television and promoted around the world as some of the best UFO video ever taken. It is also, for skeptics, one of the clearest cases of a camcorder’s zoom turning ordinary lights at sea into something else.
What happened
Yalman, a retired driver in his late forties, worked nights at the Yeni Kent complex and began recording in 2007 with a consumer camcorder. His tapes reached the Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Center, a private group in Istanbul run by Haktan Akdoğan, which unveiled them at a press conference at the Dedeman Hotel on January 17, 2008. The clips show bright, elongated objects, sometimes with a darker center, moving slowly above the horizon at night, occasionally with the moon in the same frame. Later tapes from 2008 and May 2009 add the close-ups in which Akdoğan and his supporters see a domed craft with occupants. Residents of the estate and some fishermen said they too had seen lights over the water, and in 2009 a visiting American UFO researcher, Roger Leir, said he had watched Yalman film an object during a conference trip.
The investigation
Because the story was running on Turkish television, the Scientific and Technological Research Council, TÜBİTAK, asked its National Observatory to look at the first tapes. The report by the observatory’s director, Prof. Zeki Eker, dated January 31, 2008, said two things that have been quoted selectively ever since. It found no sign that the images were computer animation, a video effect or a studio model. It also found that the close-ups contained no reference objects in the same frame and that the ground showed no useful detail, so the footage gave no information about where the objects really were, how far away they were, how big they were or what they were. On that basis it placed them in the category of unidentified flying objects in the plain sense of the words. Akdoğan presented the report as official confirmation; the newspaper Yeni Şafak summarized it as “could be a UFO, but not aliens”.
By June 2009, at Sirius’s fourth international UFO congress in Istanbul, Akdoğan was saying that the May 2009 footage showing silhouettes inside the object had convinced even the most skeptical, and that the Turkish air force and intelligence service kept UFO desks. No Turkish official has ever confirmed the latter claim.
The explanations
The skeptical reading starts with geography. Yalman was filming from a beach, at night, out over a busy sea, with a camcorder zoomed to its limit. In 2010 the Brazilian skeptic Kentaro Mori, drawing on an analysis by a researcher named Duarte, argued from the camera’s bearing that the objects lay toward the Güzelce marina to the east and that the bright, slightly curved shapes were reflections in the side windows of yachts and small boats. When the footage was discussed on the Metabunk forum in 2018, its founder Mick West said the main object looked like a cruise ship seen end-on and compressed by the zoom, and that cruise ships regularly pass that coast; other contributors noted that the compilation mixes clips from different nights and years, that one much-shown light sits on top of the hills behind the bay, and that the observatory’s own report had flagged camera timestamps that switch between a.m. and p.m. in the same sequence.
Supporters have answered with calculations. Using the moon’s position in frames where it appears, they argue that the object sat too high above the horizon to be a ship, and they cite vessel-tracking records to say no cruise ship was in that part of the Marmara at the relevant hour. Skeptics reply that a cheap camcorder’s clock is rarely right, that the timing argument therefore proves little, and that an out-of-focus light source magnified a hundredfold can look like almost anything, occupants included. Nothing in the tapes has ever been matched to a specific vessel, and nothing has ever been matched to a specific craft.
Where it stands
Yalman left Kumburgaz in 2010 for Ayvalık on the Aegean coast, kept filming the sky, gave a long interview to an English-language UFO podcast in 2024, and died of a heart attack in September 2026 in a village near Ezine, still certain of what he had seen. The observatory report remains the only independent examination, and it says only that the tapes are real tapes of something that could not be identified from them. That is a long way from a craft, and it is the honest state of the case.