How British College Students Convinced Authorities That Flying Saucers Were Invading the U.K.

Paul Brown, Narratively

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Neil Batey, a shaggy-haired, 15-year-old paperboy, was on his way to deliver newspapers when he spotted a strange object. It was early on a warm and still Monday morning, September 4, 1967. He had walked across a cricket field from his family’s home in Clevedon, a seaside town in Somerset, in southwest England, on his way to the newsstand to pick up his deliveries. He saw it as he came over Dial Hill, the town’s highest point. “Just off the footpath, in the long grass,” Batey says, “was a large silver flying saucer.”

It was a shiny disk, a little over four feet in diameter, with a dome shape on top, and it was emitting a strange mechanical beep. “If I’m perfectly honest, I didn’t know what it was,” Batey says. “But it was definitely flying saucer-shaped.” He hurried down to the newsstand and told the intrigued owner, Robert Seeley, what he had found. The pair sped in Seeley’s Humber convertible up to the hill, where Batey showed him the object. “He said, ‘Oh, my god!’” Batey recalls. “And we both drove back to the paper shop, and he phoned the police.”

That same morning, some 30 miles east, at Elm Tree Farm near the country market town of Chippenham, Wiltshire, Mary Puntis (then Mary Jennings) was woken by shouting. A 23-year-old teacher, Puntis was staying with her parents at their farm on the last day of her school’s summer break. “I worked on the farm during the holidays to help out,” Puntis says. “Dad had told me I could have a day off to get ready for school the next day. So I was in bed having a bit of a lie-in. And then Dad came shouting up the stairs: ‘Mary, get up! Get up, quick! Bring your camera! There’s a flying saucer in the field!’”

Puntis went downstairs and found her father, Dick Jennings, speaking on the phone with the police. “I think you better get up here,” he was saying. “There’s something in the field. I don’t know what it is. It looks like a flying saucer.”

“Oh yes, Mr. Jennings?” Puntis recalls the police dispatcher replying sarcastically. “Are there any little green men?”

“Well, I haven’t seen any, but you better get up here,” Dick said. Then he drove back to the field in his tractor.

“And I thought, ‘I better go, I suppose,’” Puntis says. So she and her younger brother, Martin, got in her Mini car and followed the tractor up a hedgerow lane to the field.

“Halfway up the field, fairly close to the hedge, I could see this silver disk,” Puntis says. She told Martin to wait in the car and trudged in rubber boots through the furrowed field to the object. Unbeknownst to Puntis, it was identical to the one Batey had just found. It was about the same width as Puntis’ Mini and had a perfectly smooth metallic sheen with no visible joins or openings. “The only way you could describe it was that it looked like a flying saucer,” she says. “We were just befuddled.”

Chippenham is about 20 miles away from Warminster, the site of Great Britain’s biggest mass UFO sighting. Over a prolonged period in 1965, around 200 witnesses saw unusual objects in the sky and heard strange sounds. Fiery and glowing lights and booming and droning noises were accompanied by mysterious occurrences, including power failures and birds falling from the sky. The phenomenon became known as the “Warminster Thing.” Experts and officials were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation, and the area became regarded as Britain’s epicenter for UFO sightings. Had the “Thing” returned?

Two police officers arrived and ordered Puntis and her father to move away from the object. Puntis describes the officers as nervous and cautious. “They wouldn’t go in the field to begin with,” she says. “They peered at it over the hedge.” Then a reporter from the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald arrived, followed by a uniformed flight officer from the nearby Royal Air Force (RAF) Colerne base.

Puntis handed the Gazette reporter her camera to take photographs. She says the RAF officer, David Pepper, “got quite brave” and approached the object. With the reluctant police officers, he lifted the heavy disk onto its side and was startled when it began to beep. Pepper told a reporter that he had never seen anything like it. “Eventually,” Puntis says, “the RAF decided they were going to take it away and blow it up.”

By this time, the police and the Gazette had received reports suggesting that more of these “flying saucers” had been found across southern England. “I was talking to the Gazette man on the edge of the field,” Puntis says, “and it wasn’t too long before we realized that something big was happening.”

The objects found in Clevedon and Chippenham were two of six identical silver disks found on the same morning at equidistant locations along a plumb-straight line that bisected southern England.

A map of the locations where the six disks were found Illustration by Julie Benbassat

Thirty miles east of Chippenham, in the village of Welford, Berkshire, postal worker Eva Rood found one of the saucers while on her delivery round. Baffled police took it to their station, where officials from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense were called in to investigate, and United States Air Force military police from the local air base arrived to take photos. (The U.S. Air Force has maintained a presence in the U.K. since World War II.)

A fourth saucer was found another 30 miles east, at Winkfield, also in Berkshire, near NASA’s only U.K.-based satellite tracking station. One of the station’s engineers, Roger Kenyon, threw pennies at the silver disk to check that it wouldn’t explode. Then he turned it over to the police, who decided that the most appropriate response was to place it in their “lost and found” office. “Well, where else do you put something that comes under the heading of ‘Found’?” a police officer at the scene told the Daily Mirror.

Thirty miles east of Winkfield, at Sundridge Park Golf Club in the London borough of Bromley, caddy Harry Huxley found saucer number five. Police bundled the saucer into a van and transported it to their station, where the officers became so annoyed by the constant beeping that they dumped it outside while they waited for Ministry of Defense officials to arrive.

The sixth saucer wasn’t found until around lunchtime. This one was another 30 miles away, on vacant land in Rushenden, a village on the Isle of Sheppey, off Kent on England’s east coast—about 150 miles away from the first site at Clevedon. Police cordoned off the area, and the fire brigade scanned the object with a radiation survey meter.

Stretched across England’s green fields and rolling hills, the six silver saucers appeared alien and otherworldly—but what were they? Were they from outer space? Were they from the Soviet Union? Were they aircraft or pieces of aircraft? Fallen satellites or unexploded bombs?

At Rushenden, a large crowd was gathering, and children were delighted by the arrival of an RAF helicopter that the Ministry of Defense had scrambled from the nearby base at Manston. Creating something of a slapstick spectacle, the RAF crew attempted to lift the unidentified object into the helicopter, but it was too heavy, so they dropped it. When it hit the ground, the saucer split open, spraying the crew with a putrid, gloopy liquid.

Back in Clevedon, the police had taken the first saucer, the one Batey had found, away on a roof rack. Batey had changed into his smartest shirt and tie and gone to the police station, where he was photographed with the saucer for newspapers and filmed with it for Pathé News. Two engineers arrived from local precision-tool manufacturer Willcocks to assist the police in identifying the object and figuring out what was inside. Adopting the kind of bumbling carelessness that characterized the overall response to the supposed invasion, they set upon the disk with a hacksaw and then attacked it with a chisel. Eventually, they managed to make a small hole—and also unleashed a foul stench.

“A smell as bad as bad eggs came out,” engineer Reg Willard told the Birmingham Post. Inside was the same off-white substance that had sprayed the RAF crew. “I know this sounds silly,” Willard added, “[but] I have read these science fiction stories and wondered if this was an alien attempt to establish life on this planet.” Despite concerns, Willard’s colleague was photographed dipping his fingers into the saucer to taste the substance. A sample was sent to scientists for more detailed analysis.

In Chippenham, officials took the saucer found by the Jennings family to a garbage dump. There, experts from a British Army bomb disposal unit attached specially prepared explosives and blew it apart—with little regard for the well-being of any potential alien occupants. Out poured the foul-smelling gloop, described by the Western Daily Press as a “pig-swill-like mixture.” When police and Army personnel inspected the guts of the wreckage, they found a secret compartment.

The engineers back at Clevedon, with their hacksaws and chisels, had also discovered the compartment, which contained a wired-together contraption consisting of a loudspeaker, a transistor with a mercury switch and an Exide brand battery. It now seemed unlikely that these UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. As Willard told the Nottingham Guardian Journal, “They are made in Britain—not Mars.” The flying saucer invasion that had flustered and baffled police, military and government officials across Britain was a remarkable hoax.

Earlier that morning, around 2 a.m., a group of young men operating in six teams of two or three had fanned out across the breadth of southern England. Each team had a vehicle filled with camping gear. If anyone asked, they planned to say they were setting out to spend the night under the stars. But hidden beneath their gear, each of the six teams had a large silver disk. Under the cover of darkness, they separately placed these disks in six very specific locations. Then, they retreated from the scene and waited for their respective flying saucers to be discovered.

The young men were student engineers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a Ministry of Defense college and research base in Farnborough, Hampshire, right in the heart of southern England. And they were planning to pull off an extraordinary prank—the greatest UFO hoax the world had ever seen.

The hoax’s mastermind was Chris Southall, a 22-year-old with a chinstrap beard and half-frame glasses who was just coming to the end of his five-year apprenticeship. “We had to do quite a lot of work in advance to find good sites,” Southall recalls nearly 60 years later. “We looked on maps and went out looking for sites where we wouldn’t be spotted at night, but where people would find them in the morning.” A glance at the chosen locations on a map reveals they were selected with remarkable precision.

The idea was that the saucers would be planted at equidistant sites approximately 30 miles apart across southern England, in a straight line just above the 51st parallel, at a latitude of 51.3 degrees north of the equator. This specific formula represented a ley line, a mystical pathway that supposedly connects ancient sites across the earth with an invisible energy trail. Some UFO researchers have posited that ley lines could be navigational markers created by prehistoric civilizations to guide visiting alien spacecraft.

Southall was the only member of the group who believed in UFOs, and he reckoned that if aliens did invade, they would carve up the earth with landing spots based on these lines. He saw this as a fun way to test the authorities’ response to an actual invasion. The fact that several of the locations happened to be near secretive Air Force bases, a NASA tracking station and recent UFO “hot spots” only enhanced the caper.

“On the night of ‘laying the eggs,’ as we called it, we drove across the country and put them in the spots we’d figured out,” Southall says. The plan worked (almost) perfectly. The saucers were all quickly found and reported to the authorities—except for the sixth saucer, the one Southall had planted himself at Rushenden. Because no one found that disk organically, Southall decided to take matters into his own hands. He phoned the police, telling them he was a schoolboy who’d been out walking his dog when he came across something he thought might be a bomb. Pretty soon, the scene was crawling with police and encircled by a helicopter, and an RAF crew was sprayed with the putrid goopy liquid.

An illustration of Chris Southall — Illustration by Julie Benbassat

Southall and the others returned to their dorm at the Royal Aircraft Establishment. “And then we just had to wait with bated breath to see what kind of publicity it got,” he recalls.

The aim was to promote the students’ Rag Week, an annual British tradition in which university students carry out stunts and pranks to “raise and give” (hence “Rag”) money for charity. At the time, costumed parades, sponsored challenges and eye-catching antics (such as attempting to build the world’s biggest sandcastle) were common, with participants shaking collection tins and buckets for donations around their towns. However, Southall and his friends had previous experience with creating much more ambitious and far-reaching stunts.

Two years earlier, in 1965, the young men had dropped a replica of NASA’s Gemini space capsule, complete with parachute, into the River Thames in central London, generating national headlines and official consternation. (“Mystery Capsule Found on Thames Bank,” read one headline. “It could be a hoax,” a police spokesperson told the Daily Mirror, “but we can’t take any chances.”) And in 1966, Southall had designed and built a 7.5-foot-tall mechanical robot named Rodnee, which had embarked on a 30-mile charity walk from Farnborough to the capital. (“Rodnee the Robot Marches on London,” splashed the Daily Mirror, although a later headline revealed a setback: “Rodnee’s Engine Fails at Crucial Moment.”)

The UFO stunt was even more audacious. Work began eight months before its execution, in January 1967, in a workshop at the back of the students’ dorm. Southall made a plaster model of a flying saucer and used that to create a mold. Then he used the mold to make 12 fiberglass halves and stuck those together to make six saucers. These were coated with a specially formulated aluminum gel to give them an unearthly polished shine. The saucers cost around £30 to make (equivalent to around £465 or $600 in 2024), paid for out of the college’s Rag Week budget.

The disks’ innards were filled with almost 60 pounds of goopy gunk—actually a simple flour and water paste. “When you let it go off, it turns into this rancid jelly,” Southall says. (This is also where the putrid smell arises, either from the mixture being left out for too long or because the flour itself has gone bad.) “The idea was that if they cracked it open, they might think it was a dead alien or something.” Southall and his friends also built the electronics that made the beeping sound designed to help people find the saucers. “It was powered by just a tiny little battery,” he says. “That’s all you needed.”

Farmer Dick Jennings looks at the object he found in a field near Chippenham on September 4, 1967. Photo by Tibbles / Daily Mirror / Mirrorpix via Getty Images

It didn’t take long for the saucers to land in the media. Evening newspapers and local television bulletins reported the emerging story. Speaking about the saucer that Batey had found in Clevedon, police sergeant John Durston told the Bristol Evening Post, “The object does look just as one imagines a spaceship should look. I have contacted my headquarters, and they are getting in touch with all sorts of people.” He added, “It looks just like a flying saucer,” but cautioned, “There’s always the possibility that someone silly might have put something on Dial Hill to cause a panic.”

On Monday evening, around 12 hours after the first saucer was found, a reporter linked the flying saucers to previous Rag Week stunts and called the Royal Aircraft Establishment to ask if those same students were behind the UFO hoax. “We owned up,” Southall says. They had hoped the mystery would last a little longer. But the hoax became the story. “So we got a second day of publicity. And lots of international publicity.”

The headline in the local Western Daily Press was “The Big Flying Saucer Hoax.” The Daily Mirror ran a front-page story and center spread featuring photos of Batey and Southall under the headline “How the Saucers Hoax Got off The Ground.” “The Great Invasion From Outer Space was unmasked last night for what it was,” the national newspaper reported, “an amazing hoax by a group of bright young men … a leg pull that started a search for little green men.” Across the Atlantic, the New York Times’ headline was “Aviation Students Hoax Britain With Flotilla of ‘Flying Saucers.’” Half the world away from southern England, Australia’s Canberra Times simply said, “Student Hoax Fools Britain.”

Southall and his colleagues were jubilant. They fielded phone calls from reporters, met with photographers and traveled to television stations. “We did it to publicize our Rag Week,” Southall told reporters at the time. “We aim to raise £2,000 for local charities, and this was the best way of drawing attention to it. We also thought we would give the police an exercise in dealing with alien spacecraft, because it could happen one day. We didn’t mean to cause chaos—in fact, we were rather surprised that it caused all this fuss.”

The fuss had involved—and embarrassed—the police, the military, the Ministry of Defense and the Royal Aircraft Establishment, as well as numerous officials, engineers and experts. While the students’ previous stunts had generated a lot of local interest, this one had spread around the globe and entwined the highest levels of authority. As Southall’s colleague David Harrison told the Reading Evening Post, “We haven’t received a reprimand from any officialdom yet, but we are half expecting that we will get a bit of a telling off.”

There was one response the group hadn’t anticipated. During the press calls, several reporters asked the same surprising question: What did the hoaxers know about a seventh flying saucer that had been found on the same day on a major thoroughfare in central London, less than a mile from both the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace? This mysterious “seventh saucer” looked a little bit like the other six, and police were investigating where it had come from. Southall did not know anything about it and answered honestly: “It was nothing to do with us.”

“It was every bit as intriguing as the old TV science fiction thriller ‘The Quatermass Experiment,’ which told of weird, egg-shaped objects full of gas whining down to earth as the spearhead of an invasion from outer space,” wrote the Newcastle Journal following the UFO hoax. “Judging by the coverage in national newspapers,” the Runcorn Weekly News reported, “it was the most successful space stunt of recent times.”

UFO researchers were impressed, too. Richard Beet, secretary of the Surrey Investigation Group on Aerial Phenomena, told the Farnborough Chronicle that it was “a very clever hoax,” adding that he wanted to acquire one of the saucers for an exhibition. The newspaper reported that “an American television company has rung up the Rag committee asking to buy one of the ‘spaceships’ to build a show around it.” Still, as Harrison had feared, the Chronicle also said that “officialdom” had taken a “dim view” of the stunt, and police were considering pressing criminal charges.

A Somerset Police spokesperson handling the Clevedon case refused to comment to the press about suggestions that the students could be prosecuted but said “those responsible” would likely be interviewed. Wasting police time was a criminal offense, and newspapers reported that the students might also be charged with littering in the countryside and “causing a public mischief.” The investigation of the six saucers had entangled five separate police forces across southern England, including London’s Metropolitan Police, based at Scotland Yard. Perhaps more importantly, the hoax had caused consternation and red faces in the government offices of the Ministry of Defense.

“If we’d done it now, we’d have been in jail,” Southall says. He held an emergency meeting with his colleagues at their dorm to discuss the possibility of prosecution. “We were nervous about it,” he recalls, “but it was all so exciting. And, of course, we’d been up all night, and then we were trekking off to television studios and things like that. We were so zonked out that it was hard to get too worried about it, and we were just going with the flow.”

In Clevedon, Batey’s saucer was held by police as evidence. “We’re not giving them back their saucer,” said Durston, “not for the moment, anyway.” But Durston said he would be very surprised if the Somerset Police pressed charges.

Chief Inspector Frank Dummett of the Wiltshire Police, responsible for investigating the Chippenham saucer, seemed to take the prank with good grace. “It was obviously a very elaborate hoax,” he said, “exceedingly well organized and must have cost a good deal of money to carry out.” In Bromley, a Kent Police spokesman said, “We are taking it like gentlemen,” and there was “no question of prosecution.” But in Welford and Winkfield, the Berkshire Police force was less forgiving, saying it was still considering action against the hoaxers.

As for the Royal Aircraft Establishment, the prestigious institution at the center of the caper decided that the students would not face punishment. The institution’s chief engineer, F.H. Beer, said, “I want to say publicly that I thought it was a very fine effort. In spite of the fact that there have been some people who don’t approve, I personally do.”

It was the seemingly incompetent response to the hoax that caused the most embarrassment. Another UFO research group, the National Investigation Committee for Aerial Phenomena, wrote to the Ministry of Defense, criticizing a “complete lack of cooperation” among the departments involved in the official response and offering its own services in the future. “One hesitates to think of what might have happened had one or more flying objects actually landed,” the letter said.

Declassified files show that the Ministry of Defense regarded the incident as an “(obviously very successful) practical joke.” But the documents also suggest that officials feared the response to the high-profile hoax might reveal secret details about investigations into actual UFOs and potential plans for dealing with a real alien invasion.

A letter held at the U.K.’s National Archives shows that the Ministry of Defense wrote to an RAF intelligence officer involved in the Bromley saucer investigation, advising him not to comment to the media about any of the equipment he had used in examining the objects, nor about any of his previous or subsequent “‘UFO’ work.” According to another letter, the officer from Bromley (whose name is redacted) was “responsible for investigating all UFO sightings in U.K. airspace,” suggesting he was a 1960s British version of FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder from “The X-Files.” A restricted staff memo indicates how seriously the U.K. took the incident by stating that the officer should be reminded of his obligations under the Official Secrets Act, U.K. legislation that protects sensitive information, including information related to national security. To the U.K. authorities, this was more than just a joke.

In the end, despite—or perhaps because of—the Ministry of Defense’s involvement (and the potential embarrassment of national security secrets being revealed if the case were prolonged), Southall and the other students were not prosecuted and faced no further action. They had, after all, pulled off the stunt for a good cause. Several of the hoaxers also participated in a more traditional Rag Week event—a sponsored walk in “flower power” costumes. Southall, “minus his flying saucers,” according to the Farnborough Chronicle, walked 41 miles. The UFO hoax’s publicity generated extra donations and helped the Rag committee reach its charity fundraising target of £2,000 (equivalent to around £31,000, or nearly $40,000, in 2024).

A newspaper article about the hoax *Farnborough Chronicle* / Courtesy of Paul Brown

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Although the flying saucer invasion had been exposed as a hoax, some refused to believe the explanation. In Bromley, a witness named Cynthia Tooth, described in the Newcastle Journal as the wife of an advertising executive, claimed she had seen the saucer found on the golf course fall from the sky in the middle of the night and described “a steady bright light, surmounted by a flashing light.”

There were other strange sightings on the day of the hoax, too. In Lower Spanton, near where Puntis and her father found the Chippenham saucer, villagers and schoolchildren reported seeing a silver “flying bubble” in the sky. “It was very large and very high and glinted and shone in the sun,” local Michael Smith told the Western Daily Press. “I never saw anything like it before.”

In Bicester, north of where the U.S. Air Force photographed the Welford saucer, a group of motorists stopped their vehicles on a country lane to watch a silver, cigar-shaped object floating in the sky in broad daylight. “I’ve never believed in this sort of thing before,” witness Raymond Richardson told the Reading Evening Post. “But this made me go cold all over.” It’s impossible to know what they saw, but each of these witnesses believed they’d seen something out of the ordinary, most of which could not be traced back to the students’ hoax.

And then there was the so-called seventh saucer, found on the same day as the six fake ones, on a traffic island at Kingsway, central London, outside the Rediffusion television studios—in a building that had previously been the administrative headquarters of the RAF. The silver-gray saucer, about three feet across with two protruding antennae, was found by Jack Grant of Wandsworth, who said he didn’t dare touch it. It was taken away in a van by police and seemingly disappeared—with no record of what happened to it. “Probably another hoax,” wrote the Daily Mirror. “But then, you never can tell.”

Official records show that 362 “unexplained aerial sightings” were reported to the U.K. Ministry of Defense in 1967, up from 95 in the previous year.

Batey and Puntis, now ages 72 and 80 respectively, recall their UFO encounters with—mostly—good humor. Batey’s media appearances led to teasing at school. “I got the piss taken out of me mercilessly by younger kids,” he says. More positively, Batey was contacted by a long-lost cousin in Australia who spotted his photo in a newspaper. He bears no resentment toward the hoaxers. “It was just a bit of fun,” he says. “I was an avid science fiction fan, anyway. It was quite impressive. I would probably have done it if I’d been a bit older. I would have taken part gleefully.”

“We thought it was absolutely brilliant,” Puntis says. “Really, really clever. Because they had plotted these six places across the country, and they had gone to an awful lot of trouble to identify sites that were exactly the same distances apart. And one happened to be our field. It was wonderful. It’s been a talking point for, well, 57 years. And people are still talking about it.” Puntis now lives in a house she built in that same field.

As for the great UFO hoax’s mastermind, today Southall is an environmental activist who builds eco-friendly geodesic domes rather than flying saucers. “We grow our own food and provide our own heat from wood and solar, and all that kind of stuff,” he says. He got into self-sufficiency right after finishing his engineering apprenticeship. “I lived off-grid on the Isle of Man for 9 years, and after that, I lived in a commune for 20 years, so I’ve had all sorts of adventures through my life.”

Southall is still amused when he thinks of the blundering official response to the saucers. “It’s a bit shocking, isn’t it, really?” he reflects. “Because they could have been real, they could have had strange, slimy creatures inside or whatever. They didn’t know when they cracked them open that this slimy stuff was paste. At the time, I was well into science fiction, so I would have liked to have thought they’d take it a little bit more seriously, at least initially.”

As for the witness who saw one of the fake saucers fall from the sky and the mysterious seventh saucer that he had no involvement with, Southall can give no explanation other than offering a well-accepted truism: “It’s a funny old world out there, I tell you.”

Paul Brown writes about history, true crime and sports. He also pens a newsletter called Singular Discoveries about unusual true stories from forgotten corners of the past.

Jesse Sposato is Narratively’s executive editor. She also writes about social issues, feminism, health, friendship and culture for a variety of outlets. She is currently working on a collection of essays about coming of age in the suburbs.

Julie Benbassat is an award-winning illustrator, painter and animator.