Silpho Moor, England: Man finds inscribed metal disc after glowing object falls
On the night of November 21, 1957, Frank Dickenson and two friends saw a glowing object fall near Silpho, North Yorkshire; Dickenson found an 18-inch metallic disc with inscriptions that was later analyzed in a laboratory and described by a local newspaper editor as a hoax.
Background
At night on November 21, 1957, Frank Dickenson and two friends were driving up Reasty Hill near Silpho, North Yorkshire, England, when their car stalled and they saw a glowing object that appeared to fall onto a ridge above Broxa Forest. Dickenson found in the bracken a metallic saucer shaped like a 'large flattish spinning top,' 18 inches across and weighing 33 pounds; when the three men returned, it was gone, and Dickenson recovered it for £10 after placing an advertisement in a Scarborough newspaper. Photos by UFO researcher John Dale showed a script on its copper base; inside were ash, fused glass, a copper cylinder and a booklet of 17 copper foil sheets, whose 2,000-word text Scarborough café proprietor Philip Longbottom claimed came from an alien named Ulo. A University of Manchester metallurgist found the casing to be mostly lead and the copper foil unusually pure. In 2017 David Clarke found five specimens in the Science Museum in London, which Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith had judged terrestrial; Scarborough Evening News editor Mick Jefferson said in 2003 that the paper had exposed the object as a hoax made from a domestic hot-water cylinder, though the hoaxers never surfaced. The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.