The Alex Birch Flying Saucer Photograph, Mosborough

Mosborough was a Derbyshire village then, five miles from Sheffield City Centre. Today it is part of Sheffield. In March 1962 three boys were in a field near the British Oak pub. Alex Birch, usually given as 14, though one account says 13. David Brownlow, about 12. Stuart Dixon, about 16. Birch had a Box Brownie 127, about a year old.

A grey Sunday morning. The account later published in the Derbyshire Times described what the boys saw: "Five in all, hanging in the air, with dazzling white blobs emerging from their dark saucer shaped fuselages."

There was time for one picture. "I got my camera up and took a shot of them. A second or so later they disappeared at terrific speed towards Sheffield." One exposure. Then an empty sky.

The Derbyshire Times ran the story on 22 June 1962. Other Yorkshire papers followed, then the national press. On 1 September the Sheffield Telegraph carried an article by Waveney Girvan. The next day the photograph was on the front page of the News of the World. On 22 September Birch addressed the inaugural BUFORA meeting in Kensington, before more than 200 people. BUFORA analyst Alan Watts called the objects "fairly normal Adamski-type saucers."

That September the Yorkshire Post paid for a visit to the Air Ministry in Whitehall. Flt Lt R.H. White and Flt Lt Anthony Bardsley interviewed Birch and examined his camera. Birch later recalled long corridors, a room with some men and a doctor, and questions that went on until he got muddled. They kept the negative and the camera overnight. They told him "they were not flying saucers but Russians."

The public explanation was "ice particles in the atmosphere." Clarke later wrote that it "satisfied no one." In private, Bardsley was doubtful. His memo of 24 September 1962 noted that "it is a relatively simple task to reproduce an identical photograph to the one we were shown" and that the exposures on the two strips of negatives "do not exactly fit the boy's story." A print went into Project Blue Book, marked "Insufficient data for evaluation." In 1997 the photo was reproduced in an article by CIA historian Gerald Haines. The Air Ministry files had been released in 1993 under the 30-year rule.

6 October 1972. Birch, now 24, told the Daily Express the photo was a fake. On television, he showed the pane of glass. Brownlow said "the whole thing was a joke which snowballed." In 1998 he was blunter: "It was a hoax. Alex has always run with it more than we have. It was painted on glass." They had been messing around in Alex's dad's greenhouse, he said, all into Quatermass and War of the Worlds at the time.

That same year, Birch withdrew his confession. "I decided to claim that it was a fake in hope that it would all go away and the pressure would be taken off me." Stuart Dixon also withdrew his original statement, after meeting his old friend for the first time since 1962. In 1999 he said: "I find it far better and simpler to let people think what they want about that photo. I don't care anymore."

David Clarke and Andy Roberts told the story in Magonia in 2001, setting it beside the Cottingley Fairies. A hoax by children that grew beyond their control. Clarke has met Birch and believes he sincerely holds the belief now. In 2004 Birch photographed another "saucer" over Retford, which researchers took for lens flare. In 2022, at 74, he released a film, Beyond Perception, claiming meetings with Prince Philip and Lord Mountbatten and a transatlantic phone call with President Kennedy. Nothing in the documents supports those claims. The photograph endures. So does the argument.