Sighting record / 1290
Byland Abbey, North Yorkshire. 1290. The sheep have been roasted for the feast of SS. Simon and Jude. Henry the Abbot is about to say grace. Then John, one of the brethren, comes in with news of a great portent outside. They all go out. Above them, "a large round silver thing like a disk" flies slowly overhead. It excites the greatest terror. That is the story as a Latin manuscript told it. For years it was a classic of flying saucer books. Then the trail led back to a letter in The Times in 1953. And to two sixth-form schoolboys.
Byland Abbey stands in the parish of Byland with Wass, inside the North York Moors National Park. Founded in January 1135, it joined the Cistercian order in 1147, settled at its present site in 1177 and was dissolved in 1537. On 9 February 1953, a letter in The Times of London gave it a new chapter. A manuscript, it said, had recently been found at Ampleforth Abbey, a Benedictine house nearby. It carried a Latin text and an English translation credited to "Mr. A. X. Chumley."