In 1967, aviation students in England tricked authorities with six “flying saucers” that convinced police that the objects had extraterrestrial origins.
They had large metal domes, emitted a strange and ominous humming sound and appeared one morning in a straight line in the south of England. For a few hours, the public, the police and the army really believed that they had grounded extraterrestrial spaceships – until it was revealed that it was a student ploy. But how was the hoax so successful?
The apparently extraterrestrial ships caused a major police and military reactionwitnessed by Ray Seager, who was with other children playing outside when one of the six discs was found on the Isle of Sheppey on September 4, 1967.
“We all came running and there he was,” he said. “There were no two ways about it. It was there.
“It was the old flying saucer shape. It was a big silver dome with something around the outside. Yes, it was a flying saucer“.
While the children were excited, he remembers there was also real fear when the police arrived.
“They started walking up the hill and as they got closer they started gesturing to us, all the boys, to move away. AND they were scaredI think, as much as we do.”
Newspapers reported how records were watched, listened to and weighed at police stations and an RAF base throughout the day.
The Sheppey disk was removed by an RAF helicopter, while satellite experts were called to a “landing” site in Berkshire following reports that the object had been found there. was beeping and whistling and filled with a mysterious liquid.
From the moment apprentices at Farnborough’s Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) came up with the idea for the hoax, there was a determination that it must be convincing, said engineer Chris Southall.
They were all interested in science fiction and set out to create a drawing that was not recognizable as human.
The discs could not have any recognition characteristicssuch as portholes or antennas, nor anything that could be seen in terrestrial inventions, such as an airplane or a boat.
First, they made the metal-coated fiberglass discs, forming plaster molds to construct them in two halves, and then joined them together with electronic sound equipment inside.
“When the discs were turned upside down, a switch came on and a battery would be connected,” said Southall.
“We were putting it on secret, in the middle of the night, in the early hours of the morning, and we didn’t want them to make any noise until then. Only when we left, we turned them around and the noise started – and then we quickly ran away.”
The discs were also filled with a flour and water mixture which fermented inside and turned into smelly sludge.
“We wanted to do something that felt really alien,” he said.
They were placed at six locations in a straight line from east to west – Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey, Bromley in south London, Ascot, the village of Welford near Newbury in Berkshire, Chippenham in Wiltshire and Clevedon in Somerset.
Engineer Rog Palmer, who was also on the committee, organized teams of two or three apprentices to take the discs to each location and briefed each group on how to carry out the task, including what to say if they were stopped by the police – which they had stayed out late at a party.
And when the records were discovered, the pranksters were back at their hostel – where 500 apprentices lived – bleary-eyed at breakfast, after staying up all night but in great spirits.
They had managed to plant the “spaceships” without being detected, but were they prepared for the extraordinary success of your departure?
Southall, now 72 and an environmental activist who runs an eco-house in Clacton, Essex, remembers it was It was Sputnik and space exploration – and says that the aim of the hoax was to be taken seriously.
“We thought the government should have some kind of plan if aliens land,” he said.
“So we gave them the opportunity to try out whatever plan they had – but they didn’t have any.”
Remember the surprise of the apprentices when the police and the army blew up a disc and dropped another.
David Clarke, a media law expert at Sheffield Hallam University and consultant and curator of the National Archives’ UFO project, believes the response to the hoax has been imperfect.
“One of the discs, when they punctured it, because it was filled with some kind of compacted papier-mâché, it exploded and flooded the police officers with this material.
“If it was some kind of radiation hazard, how would they have handled it? It would have been a disaster zone.
“And what did they do? Simply they washed it through the pipes.”
Clarke and Southall agree that, by 1967, the public imagination was already gripped by UFO fever – at the time, the Ministry of Defense was receiving almost daily reports of sightings.
But despite this climate, the apprentices did not expect the huge media reactionwhich included international coverage and double-page spreads.
“It was more than we expected,” Southall said.
The events of that day remain somewhat hazy, but he remembers going to a television studio at night, after the hoax was exposed.
By the time the papers went to press, journalists had been informed of the departure, but that didn’t stop them from reporting it as an extraterrestrial invasion, Southall said.
Press clippings from the time reveal that official sources “tended to be grumpy” when asked about the hoax.
But police confirmed no action would be taken against the pranksters, with a Bromley officer saying: “We’re taking it like gentlemen“.
Southall admits that putting the police and army in such an uncomfortable situation today would have completely different consequences.
“These were hippie days“, he said. “We were RAE apprentices and people had a kinder attitude towards us because of who we were, and back then it was different.”
Now, he says, the discs would be treated as explosive devices and detonated – and the perpetrators of the hoaxes could end up in jail.
“That’s one of the interesting things when we look back 50 years later.
“The times we live in now are much tougher and I don’t think we could do it now. We would end up in trouble.”
