Silpho Moor Saucer (1957)

The recovery

In late November 1957, a group of men near Silpho Moor, outside Scarborough, reported seeing a red glow descend into the heather. Going back to search, they found a metal object about 45 cm across, shaped like a flattened spinning top, with a white dome and a copper base etched with symbols. One finder compared the lettering to Russian script. Clarke names Scarborough businessman Frank Dickenson, then 42, as the central figure; he placed a newspaper advertisement for the object’s return and eventually paid £10 in a night-time exchange with the man who had taken it. Grantham gives a different cast of finders, and the names and the object’s weight (about 15 kg in one account, “three or four stone” in another) differ between the two.

The story reached print in the Yorkshire Post on 9 December 1957, which ran a photograph of the object. Grantham notes that pages 2 and 3 are missing from every library copy of that issue.

Opening the object

The finders cut the object open. Clarke reports that it then fell apart, leaving ash, fused glass and a booklet of 17 thin copper sheets wound with hollow copper tubing, with lettering on the pages. Scarborough solicitor Anthony Parker examined it at Dickenson’s home in Scalby. He advised handing it to the Air Ministry and said he did not believe it was a flying saucer. Scarborough café owner Philip Longbottom later claimed the pages held a 2,000-word message from an alien named “Ullo”. No document supports that claim, and it is best treated as local folklore.

Professor Bernard Lovell of Jodrell Bank suggested the object may simply have fallen from a passing aircraft. The object’s whereabouts after it was cut open are unknown in most accounts.

Laboratory tests and the 2018 rediscovery

Samples went to London. Clarke reports that the Science Museum passed them in 1963 to Gordon Claringbull of the Natural History Museum, a meteorite and explosives specialist, who found “nothing unusual” and said he would wager the metal was made on Earth. Separate work at Manchester University reportedly found lead in the shell and unusually pure copper. A metallurgist concluded there was no sign the material had been exposed to high temperatures, which argued against a space origin. UFO researcher Jenny Randles, who read the Manchester report, called it probably the most costly and well-organised hoax in Britain.

In 2018 the author David Clarke was shown remains at the Science Museum’s store, where they had been kept for decades in a tin cigarette box. The fragments included fused metal and plastic from the outer shell, copper tubing, and foil from the booklet. Clarke calls it “obvious” that they were from the missing Silpho saucer, but he does not state a firm conclusion about what the object was. He reports the sceptical view that it was built from a domestic hot-water cylinder, a view consistent with the 1963 findings.

Assessment

The case is contested. The object was destroyed before any independent analysis could test it, the surviving remains were examined only once, decades later, and the 1963 results point toward a terrestrial origin. The “PF228” explanation, a claim that the object was a secret government surveillance device disguised as a UFO, rests on an anonymous email that has never been verified. A short list of further reading is available in the Skeptic archive, and the 2018 Yorkshire Post coverage is the main contemporary account of the rediscovery.

The case matters less for what the object was than for how it shows the British press handling a physical “saucer” claim in 1957: a local story that grew into national interest, with the artifact dismantled before anyone could test it properly. It is a useful example of how a recovered object can end up with less evidential weight than its retelling suggests.