The Coniston Saucer Photograph (Stephen Darbishire)

Winter 1954. Fourteen months earlier, at Palomar, George Adamski had photographed what he called a "Venusian Scout Ship". His co-author on Flying Saucers Have Landed was Desmond Leslie. At Little Arrow, a farm near Torver below Coniston Old Man, lived 13-year-old Stephen Darbishire, a pupil at Ulverston Grammar School.

Monday, 15 February 1954. About 11 in the morning. Stephen was on the fellside with his cousin Adrian Meyer, aged eight, and the Kodak box camera his father had recently bought. Something glided towards them from the direction of Coniston. It descended behind high ground, then came back into view. It approached at tremendous speed, to within 400 yards. Then it stopped suddenly and hovered, noiselessly, in the sky.

Stephen described a "silvery milky colour". Portholes along the upper part. Something like a hatch on top. Three bumps underneath. He took two photographs. Then, he said, "just as I had finished the flying saucer (which I now thought it must be) shot off up into the clouds". The whole thing lasted about 30 seconds. Within half an hour, before the film was developed, he made a pencil sketch.

The Lancashire Evening Post broke the story on 18 February. The blurred craft looked almost exactly like Adamski's Scout Ship, and it was billed as the first flying-saucer photograph taken in Britain. Desmond Leslie arrived on 23 February and called it "the second of the Adamski type photographed in the world". The aeronautical engineer Leonard G. Cramp compared the two craft by orthographic projection. Proportionally identical, he said.

Then the Palace took an interest. Peter Horsley, equerry to Prince Philip, met Stephen and his father in March, and they were taken to Buckingham Palace. Horsley had the photographic firm Wallace Heaton examine the negatives. The photo, they concluded, "could have been faked but would have cost considerable money".

The attention would not let up. Stephen was accused of working with "Dark Powers" or government departments. So he said the photos were fakes. In a 1986 letter to Timothy Good he wrote: "in desperation I… said it was a fake". The negatives and all surviving prints were "stolen or borrowed and never returned".

In 1991, by then a professional artist, he confirmed every detail of his original story to Peter Hough and Dr Harry Hudson. He said he had never read Adamski's story beforehand, and that British intelligence people had interviewed him. None of this is documented. In 2001 he said: "it looked like a cloud to me".

In July 2001, David Clarke and Andy Roberts set out the case for a hoax in Magonia. Leslie had recorded Stephen saying he had seen Adamski's photo. A statement noting "Some grass is shown under the saucer" was supposedly written before the negatives were developed. About five days after the first sighting, Stephen reported a cigar-shaped "Mother Ship" matching Adamski's published image. And he admitted: "My cousin and I had been fooling around taking pictures".

The FOTOCAT catalogue lists it as a fake. Chris Parr called it "the ultimate schoolboy prank". Yet Douglas Denny, visiting Darbishire at Little Arrow, found him "totally committed to it being true and real".

Stephen met Adamski in London in 1959 and judged him "mad as a hatter". In 2024 Clarke returned to the story in "Close Encounters of the Royal Kind". A blurred saucer. A schoolboy at the Palace. And an account that has never quite settled.