No one does a UFO hoax like the Yanks, but we gave it a try

When it comes to show-stoppers, even the greatest of Anglophiles must be forced to admit that Americans sometimes have the upper hand. Where they had Elvis, we had Tommy Steele; where they have the Las Vegas strip, we have the Blackpool Tower; and where they had the Roswell incident – in which an unidentified flying object crashed in the New Mexico desert and became the foundation stone for a million conspiracy theories – we have the very famous Silpho Moor UFO.

How surprising that you’ve never heard of it – this, Britain’s very own Roswell! Let me fill you in. One evening in 1957, three chaps were out for a drive across the Yorkshire Moors and saw a glowing object fall to earth. One of the three, Frank Dickenson, went to find it but when he returned with his friends it had vanished. Enterprisingly, he put an advertisement in the local paper offering £10 to anyone who could find it. Even more enterprisingly, a man appeared with an object which looked rather like a child’s spinning top and collected the reward.

Frank and his pals forced it open and found it was made from 17 copper sheets inscribed with “hieroglyphics”. One of the three, Philip Longbottom, local café owner and the Howard Carter of the North Riding, claimed the scratchings were a message from an alien called Ullo and included the admonition: “You will improve or disappear”. Fine. America gets googly-eyed grey men, abductions, weird examinations and time slips, and we get a grumpy ticking off from a housemaster. The future’s “aaaht” there, lad, and it wants you to pull your socks up.

Or perhaps it isn’t. After a brief and glamorous period on display in a fish and chip shop, the UFO was sent to the Natural History Museum, where research revealed it comprised ash, glass, copper and possibly bits of old hot water cylinder (waste not, want not). In short, a hoax. So, we can all relax about the selfimprovement, though Mr Dickenson’s heirs might want their £10 back.

All this might have been forgotten if the random pieces of metal hadn’t been recently discovered in an old cigarette tin in the Science Museum, with a slightly sniffy note on Victoria and Albert Museum stationery: “Alleged UFO bits”.

Not for us, the drama of the military press conference, the official denial, the secret air base; just a knick-knack lost in a dusty, cavernous archive.

To be fair to the three pals, they weren’t alone in their credulity. At the time, Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, in a spectacular display of “Because I Say So”, claimed the pieces of old hot water heater were definitely extraterrestrial. Lord Dowding was also a member of the Fairy Investigation Society, and believed that fairies “are essential for the growth of plants and the welfare of the vegetable kingdom”. But then, a great many people during the last century – upright, solid, sensible people, seemingly not prone to whimsy – genuinely believed in the Cottingly Fairies, literal cardboard cut-outs photographed by young cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in 1917.

It is true that while we may love a hoax, we love a mystery more. We have an overwhelming desire to believe in something “other”, something “out there,” and in the absence of gritty alien autopsy photographs à la Roswell, a bit of scratched hot water heater will do. After all, we’re nothing if not thrifty.