Case file · Sighting
The Byland Abbey 'flying saucer'
A Latin text said to describe monks of Byland Abbey seeing 'a flat, round, shining silvery object' fly over them in 1290 is often quoted as a medieval UFO report.
1290 CE · 54.20, -1.16 · status: hoax
The account
The passage first appeared in a letter to The Times in the 1950s and spread through UFO books for decades.
The sceptical view
It was a schoolboy prank: two teenagers wrote the 'medieval' Latin themselves. No manuscript of the passage exists.