Pieces of missing ‘flying saucer’ discovered in tin box
MISSING pieces from a miniature “flying saucer” that was hailed as the British Roswell have been found in a tin box in London’s Science Museum.
The lump of metal discovered on Silpho Moor near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, in 1957 was so strange that it was dubbed the Silpho UFO.
The disc, 16in wide and weighing 22lb, was inscribed with hieroglyphics, similar to the wreckage of the so-called spacecraft found at Roswell, New Mexico, in June 1947.
When the object was cut open, a book made of 17 thin copper sheets was found inside, with each sheet covered in more hieroglyphs.
Phillip Longbottom, a local café owner, claimed the hieroglyphs translated into a 2,000-word message sent by an alien called Ullo, who warned: “You will improve or disappear.”
The remains were sent to the Natural History Museum where experts concluded it was probably a hoax as there was no evidence the metal had nonearth origins.
Even so, Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding continued to believe that the object was extraterrestrial and said he had personally examined it in 1959.
Yet it was unclear what happened to the object after that, with UFO believers claiming it had been destroyed.
It has now emerged that it was sent to the Science Museum in 1963 and left in the archives. It was only discovered after Dr David Clarke, of Sheffield Hallam University, recently gave a talk on the release of the Ministry of Defence’s UFO files at the museum.
He said: “One of the museum staff tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was aware that ‘bits of a flying saucer’ had been kept in a tin in the museum store for decades. I was absolutely amazed when later we opened the tin box. It was obvious these were the remains of the missing Silpho Saucer.”