Lost "Miniature UFO" From Yorkshire Moors Shows Up In London Museum
February 22, 2018 6:00 AM ‐ UFOs
This article is more than six years old.
In 1957 a "miniature pilot flying saucer" crashed on the Silpho Moor near Scarborough, its remains went missing soon after. But, after decades hidden in a museum archive, the downed alien craft has been found.
Photo: © Michael Graham
Like pretty much every famous UFO case that ever occurred in the UK, the Silpho UFO of North Yorkshire is said to be the British Roswell.
The story does share some similarities with the famous American flying saucer case. The object, found on Silpho Moor near Scarborough in 1957, was also claimed to be a downed alien spacecraft. And just like the Roswell craft, it was said to have been inscribed with hieroglyphics.
What made the Yorkshire UFO unique was that it was only 40cm in diameter and weighed just 10kg. It was described as "a miniature pilot flying saucer" by Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, who examined the metal disc after it was discovered by a local man out driving on Reasty Hill Top one night.
Then 42-year-old, Frank Dickenson, claimed that his car stalled while driving two friends across the moor. In the darkness they saw a glowing object in the sky that fell to the ground. Frank climbed from the car to investigate the mysterious object and found the metal disc crashed on a ridge.
Upon finding the object, he headed back to the car to get his friends, passing a young couple out walking along the way. When Frank and his friends arrived back at the scene, the object had gone.
Frank didn't give up, he placed a classified ad in a local paper in the hopes of tracking the crashed disc down. And it worked, a few days later Frank became the proud owner of an alien spaceship, after handing over just £10 for the alien artefact.
With the crash taking places just weeks after the Sputnik launch, Frank thought the hieroglyphs which marked the disc looked like Russian lettering, and after cutting the object open he found more. Inside the miniature UFO was a book made of 17 sheets of thin copper, bound using a coil of copper wire.
Each of the metallic pages was covered in hieroglyphics, which were translated by a local business owner, Phillip Longbottom, who concluded that the symbols represented a 2,000 word message from an alien called Ullo. The stark message was a warning about our use of nuclear weapons, telling humanity we must "improve or disappear."
In 1963, parts of the object were handed over to the Natural History Museum in London for examination, including a fragment of fused metal and plastic from the outer shell of the craft. As well as some of the copper pages from the book that was discovered inside.
Gordon Claringbull from the museum concluded that the alien fragments were probably an elaborate hoax, as there was no evidence that the object had come from space. The metals are commonly found on Earth and there was no sign of the high temperatures it would have been exposed to when entering Earth's atmosphere.
Other tested carried out by the University of Manchester did reveal that the fragments were made of unusually high purity copper. But skeptics maintain that this was a hoax and that the disc was made from a domestic hot water cylinder.
Soon after it was examined, the miniature wreckage vanished and hadn't been seen in sixty years, until it was recently discovered by UFO expert David Clarke just around the corner from the National History Museum, in the archives of the Science Museum.
After giving a talk at the museum, Dr. Clarke said he was tapped on the shoulder by one of the museum's staff who asked him if he was aware that "bits of a flying saucer" had been kept in a cigarette tin in the museum group store for decades.
"It was obvious these were the remains of the missing Silpho Saucer," said Dr. Clarke, "it's incredible to hear that pieces of this mystery object have been sitting in a museum archive for more than half a century."
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