The Wardle Flying Saucer ("The Thing")

Wardle sits high on the Pennine Moors, a village near Rochdale that was then part of Lancashire. In 1957 it lay in the constituency of Tony Leavey, a Conservative MP known for raising flying saucers over Lancashire.

Friday, 15 February 1957. About 10 p.m. Gwynneth Fitton, aged 19, was on an unlit lane beside her parents' cottage. A bright light caught her eye.

It was moving between two hills. Then it moved towards her. The object was circular with a dome. Suspended below it was a light that switched from white to red at intervals.

"The Thing" stopped dead at rooftop height. Gwynneth ran to alert her mother. Dorothy Fitton saw it and cried out: "Good God, They're here!" Both women watched it hover silently. One catalogue says it descended and ascended repeatedly before it disappeared swiftly across the moors.

When the Rochdale Observer asked "Was Wardle Visited by a Flying Saucer?", others came forward. One catalogue counts about 15 more witnesses. That same night, Mrs M. Ashcroft at Birch Hill Hospital saw something like a ball of fire rise from a hillside and become a white disc with alternate red and green lights beneath. Three other patients saw it too.

Then Neil Robinson, a 35-year-old mechanic and radio ham at a laundry in Rochdale, went to the police. He said he had filled "two five-penny balloons" with hydrogen, lit them with a pen-torch bulb, and released them on four occasions. It was "just an experiment in tracing air currents." Boys later found a silver cylinder, rods, wire mesh and a parachute on the moors. The cylinder appeared to come from an Air Ministry weather balloon.

20 March 1957. Leavey asked about "an abnormal, brightly illuminated airborne object." C. I. Orr-Ewing replied that it "did not emanate from outer space, but from a laundry in Rochdale." Leavey said the witnesses were "most unlikely" to accept that. Orr-Ewing assured the House: "We have not been launching any flying saucers."

In April an Air Ministry intelligence officer from DDI (Tech) came to Wardle. He interviewed five witnesses and Robinson, checked the prevailing wind, and asked people to keep his visit quiet. In May the minister told Leavey the objects were "in all likelihood" Robinson's balloons. He admitted Mrs Fitton "does not share this opinion." The case was filed as "private experiments (Wardle incident)."

The Rochdale Observer was not satisfied. Robinson could not explain how he made the hydrogen. A similar balloon, fully inflated, was at most 12 inches across. The cylinder was perfectly dry and unmarked despite snow, which fed rumours it had been planted. Relatives later spoke. Ivan Corlett called it "a hoax … out of pure devilment."

Years later Alan Fitzsimmons claimed two men in dark suits and bowler hats read the Official Secrets Act to the newspaper's staff. It became Wardle's own Men in Black story, though former colleagues had no recollection of any visit. Researcher David Clarke revisited the case in Fortean Times in 2005. Like the Silpho Moor saucer of the same year, it left hardware behind. Clarke's sources still disagree about what flew over Wardle.