The Bexleyheath Saucer: King Harold's Way and Bedonwell Primary School, 1955

Sunday, 17 July 1955. Bexleyheath was still part of Kent then. Today it sits in the London Borough of Bexley, in south-east London. The day was very hot and cloudless.

Margaret Fry, a young local woman, was walking to the doctor's surgery in King Harold's Way. Not far off, on a building site at Streamway, 15-year-old labourer Rodney Maynard was at work with Ron Deadman, Tony Savin, Vic Clarke and Tommy Staggs. During the lunch break, word reached the crew "that something was happening over in King Harold's Way, so they walked up to look."

Maynard remembered that "this thing had landed in the roadway." It "took up the whole width of the road and overlapped onto the pavements." Yet it was "not on the ground." It stood on "about eight massive suckers."

The craft was "black, sleek and streamlined with a surface like polished metal." It "had what looked like windows, but the glass was concave and moulded together." Its centre held still. The outer rim spun slowly, with "white lights flashing, like a camera flash." It hummed. About thirty people gathered to stare, among them around a dozen children who had been playing in the street. When they edged closer, "it began to spin faster."

Fry saw it too, and so did Fry's GP, Dr Thukarta. To Fry it was "saucer shaped," with three spheres set into its underside. One of them came away and "came to rest on the ground" at the junction of Ashbourne Road and Whitfield Road. Its colour defied words: "blue, silver, grey, pewter in texture, yet none of those colours." Later, Fry drew it. The drawing was "the exact impression I had of that extraordinary craft, just 18ft above my head on that blazing hot day in July 1955."

The object "lifted slowly off the ground" and hovered above the watchers' heads. It "tilted slightly." Then it "moved slowly until it was over Bedonwell Primary School, where it stayed for about a minute." Then it "shot up into the sky and disappeared."

"It was very fine and beautiful," Maynard said. "It certainly wasn't a prank." Maynard kept quiet for decades all the same, because "people would think you were barmy."

In 1965 Fry began a "one-woman investigation" and later wrote Who Are They?, a book about the many witnesses across North Kent that July. Fry went on to become a known UFO investigator in North Wales. In 2002 a newspaper appeal brought witnesses back together. In 2007 Linda Piper of the News Shopper told Maynard's story. John Hanson and Dawn Holloway, in Haunted Skies, called the case "probably one of the best documented accounts" of a British landing.

The paper trail is thinner than that praise suggests. No 1955 newspaper report, photograph or Air Ministry file has surfaced, and the case is absent from Loren Gross's chronology of that summer. Most of the testimony was gathered 47 to 52 years after the event. A Sunday also sits a little awkwardly with a building-site lunch break and a visit to the surgery. Some retellings add stalled car engines, or say the craft itself landed at the Ashbourne Road junction, details other accounts do not support. Still, no hoax allegation or specific conventional explanation has turned up. Londonist later called Bexleyheath "a verifiable UFO hotspot," with encounters in 1952, 1955 and 2004.