The Stanton Drew Saucer

Stanton Drew sits in the Chew Valley, north of the Mendip Hills, about 8 miles south of Bristol. Just outside the village, in open fields, stand the Stanton Drew stone circles. An avenue runs northeast toward the River Chew. The Cove stands in the garden of the local pub. Across the river lies Hautville's Quoit.

The stones carry an old legend. A wedding party danced past midnight into Sunday. A stranger in black, the Devil, played for them. At dawn the dancers were turned to stone.

The summer of 1950 was already a restless one for British skies. On 1 June, a Meteor pilot near Tangmere reported a saucer, and RAF Wartling radar reportedly confirmed it. That case led to the creation of the Flying Saucer Working Party.

The early hours of 26 August 1950. A 20-year-old woman was walking back to her home in Stanton Drew from a party, and decided to take a shortcut through a field near the stone circles. Then she heard a buzzing sound. She turned to her left. Over the next field, a bright saucer-shaped object was hovering.

A door on the craft began to open. She screamed. She started to run. She did not stop until she got home.

She was alone. No one else is known to have seen the object. There are no photographs, no radar returns and no physical traces. No beings appeared in the doorway, because she was gone before anything could. The account never says what the craft did after she fled.

Her name has never been published. The story survives in one paragraph of Wikipedia's list of UFO sightings in the United Kingdom, and since November 2020 it has carried a citation needed tag. No press report, government file or first hand testimony has been found. No source links it to the Air Ministry or to the Flying Saucer Working Party. It does not appear in the index of Loren Gross's UFOs: A History for August to December 1950.

None has been offered. No hoax allegation exists, and no critical analysis has ever been published. Any serious study would need the original report, to check the weather, the phase of the moon, and whether aircraft or farm machinery were active nearby that night.

The original may lie in a Somerset newspaper from late summer 1950, perhaps the Western Daily Press or a Bristol evening paper. Until it surfaces, the case rests on a single unnamed voice.

A young woman leaves a party in the small hours. She crosses the fields where legend says other revellers were turned to stone. And there, she meets something she cannot explain. No source draws that parallel. The stones simply stand where they always have.