The Silpho Moor Flying Saucer, Scarborough 1957

Late November or early December 1957. Sputnik had been launched two months earlier. Three Scarborough men left the Mill Inn at Harwood Dale and drove home up Reasty Bank, near the village of Silpho. They included Frank Dickenson, a 42-year-old businessman, and Fred Taylor, a tailor. The third is named as Charles Thomas or Frank Hutton, and one of those names is said to be fictitious.

It was night. Climbing Reasty Hill, they saw a glowing object in the sky. It appeared to fall to the ground on a ridge above Broxa Forest. The car stalled. Paul Grantham's 1997 account remembers a strange red glow, descending to earth just out of sight over the top of the moor.

In the version told by David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University, Dickenson climbed a steep bank. In Grantham's, it was Taylor. He found a metallic saucer lying in the bracken. Walking back along a footpath to alert his friends, he passed a young couple heading toward the scene. When the three men returned, the object was gone.

It came back for a price. Solicitor Anthony Parker suggested a reward advert in the Scarborough Evening News. Dickenson later handed over £10 in a night-time exchange for the object, hidden in a sack. It was shaped like a large flattish spinning top, about 18 inches across, with a white upper dome and a copper base inscribed with "hieroglyphics".

Cut open in Scarborough, it held a 17-page booklet of thin copper sheets. There were also traces of ash, fused glass and a white powder. Café owner Philip Longbottom spent about 100 hours on the script. He produced a text of about 2,000 words from "Ullo", warning of atomic war. "You will improve or disappear."

There was no official government investigation. Scientists examined it instead. Manchester University metallurgists found lead in the shell and unusually pure copper. They found no evidence of high-temperature exposure, and concluded it could not have come from space. Jenny Randles, who read their report, called it "the most costly and well organised hoax that has ever taken place in Britain."

Not everyone agreed. In 1959 Lord Dowding, the Battle of Britain RAF commander, said he had "actually held and examined" it. He called it "a miniature pilot flying saucer". Professor Bernard Lovell of Jodrell Bank thought it may have fallen from a passing aircraft. In 1963 Gordon Claringbull of the Natural History Museum found "nothing unusual" and was "prepared to wager anything that the pieces of metal were made on Earth."

The saucer itself was lost. Its fragments were not. In 2018 Clarke gave a talk at the Science Museum on The National Archives UFO files. Afterwards, staff showed him a cigarette tin labelled "alleged UFO bits". Inside were fused metal and plastic from the outer shell, hollow copper tubing and tiny pieces of foil from the booklet. "I was absolutely amazed," he said.

The press called it the British Roswell. Sceptics said it was made from a domestic hot water cylinder in a back-street garage and planted on the moor. At the time, some feared it was Sputnik debris or wartime ordnance. No maker has ever been named. "Mystery remains," Clarke said, "as to who was responsible and why they went to such elaborate lengths."