What happened
One of the most widely repeated 'medieval UFO' reports. In 1953 a letter to The Times of London claimed that a Latin manuscript recently found at Ampleforth Abbey described a silver disc over the Cistercian monks of Byland in 1290. The monks had confiscated Brother Wilfred's sheep and were about to eat them on the feast of SS. Simon and Jude when Brother John rushed in to report a portent outside. Everyone ran out and saw a large, round, silvery thing like a disc flying slowly over them, causing great terror. The abbot promptly declared Wilfred an adulterer. George Adamski and Desmond Leslie reprinted the 'translation' in Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953). Jacques Vallee called it a classic case in 1965, and at least six books had repeated it by 1968. Some versions were embellished with invented dialogue.
The official explanation
The story was a schoolboy prank. The first doubts were recorded by Gavin Gibbons, who translated Paul Thomas's Flying Saucers Through the Ages (1965). Gibbons wrote that two Oxford undergraduates admitted to him in 1956 that they had forged the document as a joke. Samuel Rosenberg of the University of Colorado UFO study then checked it for the 1968 Condon Report. His London contact John Haggarty asked Ampleforth College and cabled back that the 'document' was a prank by two sixth-form boys in a letter to The Times. The Latin is also poor, and Ampleforth's monastery was founded far too late to hold such a record.
The anomalous case
There is no genuine anomalous case. The 1290 'sighting' rests entirely on a 1953 letter that its writers admitted making up, and no medieval manuscript has ever been produced. The only argument ever offered for it was its age, and that age was invented. The case is kept in the archive because it is still widely repeated, and because Rosenberg used it to show how flying-saucer authors copied 'ancient' cases from one another without checking original sources. Byland Abbey itself is real and was founded in the 12th century, which helped the fabrication seem plausible.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Condon Report, Sec. 5 Ch. 1, part 6: The 'Byland Abbey Sighting' report, files.ncas.org
Sources
- Final Report of the Scientific Study of UFOs, Sec. 5 Ch. 1: UFOs in History (Samuel Rosenberg) University of Colorado / NCAS
- Byland Abbey (UFOs) Mysterious Britain & Ireland
- Byland Abbey Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.