The Cleethorpes Glass Sphere

September 1956. England's skies had already given the RAF a strange summer. The Lakenheath and Bentwaters radar and visual incident had happened the month before. Then, eight days before this story, people around Cleethorpes thought they heard flying saucers. A mystery explosion rocked homes in the district. On Saturday 22 September, the seaside town on the Humber estuary looked up.

About 3 pm. High over Cleethorpes promenade, a mystery sphere glittered in the blue sky. It did not drift away. It stayed. "It looked like a glass globe with something white inside," one eyewitness told the Empire News. The paper said thousands of people across Lincolnshire saw it.

The crowds on the seafront were not alone. About 14 miles to the south, at RAF Manby, a Meteorological Office spokesman trained a telescope on the object. "I don't know what it is," he said. "It certainly is not a balloon from here." According to the Sunday Times, the object was sighted both visually and by radar. It was at 54,000 ft and remained apparently stationary for about an hour. Meteorologists reported a diameter of 30 ft.

Two fighter aircraft were sent up to investigate. When they arrived at the point where the object had been seen, they found nothing. Nor could it any longer be seen from the ground. The Sunday Times did not say that anyone watched it go. A later version, cited from the Louth Standard of 29 September 1956, is more dramatic. RAF planes approached the object and it flew off.

With each retelling, the sphere got bigger. The Grimsby Telegraph, h2g2 and Wikipedia describe it as about 80 ft across, far larger than the 30 ft given in 1956. The case found its way into Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, a Reader's Digest book of 1973 credited to Russell Ash. No photographs or film of the object are known. No Air Ministry file on the case has been found. The eyewitnesses, the radar operators and the fighter crews all remain unnamed.

Some online summaries have also borrowed details from another case, the West Freugh incident of April 1957 in Scotland. Among them is a weather balloon from RAF Aldergrove. That explanation belongs to West Freugh, not to Cleethorpes.

The Manby spokesman ruled out a balloon launched from his own station. He did not rule out one launched from somewhere else. Patrick Gross, who archived the Empire News clipping, added his own question to the transcript: "[A balloon from elsewhere or a meteor?]" A high-altitude balloon would fit much of the 1956 account: a glittering globe, something white inside, an empty sky when the fighters arrived.

The Sunday Times, though, added that the object held its place despite a wind of more than 40 mph at that height, which is harder to square. Two days earlier, an object over Hastings had been judged "probably a meteorological balloon" by H. F. Finch of the Royal Observatory, Herstmonceux.

The Aetherius Society claims the sighting as a fulfilled prophecy. At Caxton Hall, London, on 25 August 1956, its founder had named "September 17th to 22nd" as "days of flying saucer activities over all areas." Cleethorpes saw its sphere on the last of those days. Whatever it was, a glass globe hung over the promenade for an hour. Then it was gone.