The Leicester Road Flying Saucer, Dinnington, 1965

Dinnington sits between Rotherham and Worksop, in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire. Autumn 1965 was a busy season for flying saucer reports around the world. In the week before 29 October, one of them arrived over a single street.

It began with the children. A little girl ran into the house on Leicester Road and told Mrs Carl Kalas, 35, that there was a flying saucer outside. "I told her not to be silly, but when she took me outside a short time afterward I saw it for myself."

What Mrs Kalas saw was "a large round object with red flashing lights underneath it." It travelled from one side of the sky to the other. By the account of Mrs Kalas, it must have stayed in the area for hours. The exact figure is lost. In the only surviving transcription of the report, the number cannot be read.

On the same road, at 61 Leicester Road, ten-year-old Brenda Perry came in with the same news. Mrs Vera Perry, 41, passed on the description. Red and green flashing lights, underneath the object.

Frank Bird was 16, a trainee wire drawer, out with a group of friends when the children in the street started shouting. "When I went to see what was wrong, I saw the object moving spirally through the sky. It was larger than a helicopter and it wasn't a plane. There were red lights flashing as it went."

One of the friends added a detail nobody else reported. Windows, in the side of it. The object stayed around for a long time. Then, in the words of Frank Bird, it "eventually disappeared in the clouds over Maltby."

The Worksop Guardian carried the story on Friday, 29 October 1965, under the headlines "Mum, Come Quick! There's A Flying Saucer!" and "MYSTERY OF THE FLASHING LIGHTS." The residents of Leicester Road, the paper said, were "still talking" about it. A local police spokesman said there had been no reports of such phenomena. The article closed on a wry note. "Men from Mars haven't landed yet, but, until they do, the mystery of two flashing lights remains unsolved."

No investigator is known to have looked into the case. Red and green flashing lights are the colours of aircraft navigation lights, and the region had active RAF airfields in 1965, among them RAF Finningley near Doncaster. The witnesses rejected that idea outright. A bright star or planet low on the horizon could linger for hours, though it would not cross the sky. Another possibility is that the children's cry of "flying saucer" shaped what the adults saw. Without a firm date, time or weather record, none of these can be tested.

The case survives through one clipping, preserved in the online press archive of Patrick Gross. The Ministry of Defence UFO file for 1965 and 1966, AIR 2/17982 at The National Archives, has not yet been searched for a Dinnington report. A month earlier, in Derby, Barry Swan and Keith Rowland had described a round-based object with "green-lighted windows around the circumference." For now, Leicester Road keeps its own small mystery. A round shape. Flashing lights over the rooftops. And a long wait before the clouds over Maltby closed around it.