Within Hertfordshire UFOs
How Did Old Sky Stories Become UFO Lore?
Older Hertfordshire stories show how medieval sky wonders and remembered orange lights become part of local UFO folklore.
On this page
- St Albans medieval sky wonders
- Hemel Hempstead memories
- Folklore, caution and reinterpretation
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Introduction
Older UFO lore between St Albans and Hemel Hempstead is not a chain of proven alien encounters. It is better understood as a local memory process: medieval chroniclers recorded sky wonders as portents, later readers reclassified some of those wonders as “UFO” material, and modern residents added remembered orange balls, green lights and puzzling formations to the same folklore stream. St Albans matters because its abbey produced one of medieval England’s great traditions of recording marvels; Hemel Hempstead matters because local reminiscence and Ministry of Defence logs show how ordinary sightings became community stories in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The strongest evidence is documentary rather than physical: chronicles, local memory pages, and MoD sighting lists. The main caution is that “unidentified” does not mean extraordinary, and many such reports fit meteors, satellites, lanterns, aircraft, atmospheric effects or simple uncertainty. The National Archives+3University of Reading+3Herts Memories [reading.ac.uk]reading.ac.ukUniversity of ReadingUniversity of Reading
St Albans Medieval Sky Wonders
St Albans gives this local theme unusual depth because the medieval abbey was a major centre of historical writing. St Albans Museums describes its chronicling tradition as exceptionally long-lived, naming Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris, William Rishanger, Thomas Walsingham and John of Wheathampstead among its celebrated historians. St Albans Cathedral’s archive material likewise notes that the abbey was particularly known for historical writing and that Matthew Paris’s chronicles remain important primary sources for medieval England. [St Albans Museums]stalbansmuseums.org.ukOpen source on stalbansmuseums.org.uk.
The key figure for UFO folklore is Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century monk of St Albans Abbey. Sarah L. Hamilton’s study of the Chronica Maiora stresses that Paris recorded not only politics and church affairs but also “strange and sometimes inexplicable phenomena” in the tradition of medieval mirabilia, or wonders. These included eclipses, comets, reddish celestial appearances, meteor-like events, visions and unusual clouds. That does not make Paris a UFO witness in the modern sense. It makes him a careful medieval recorder of events that later readers could detach from their original religious, natural-philosophical and chronicle setting. [University of Reading]reading.ac.ukUniversity of Reading
One example shows the problem clearly. Hamilton notes that Paris described a comet in 1240 and two incidents of meteorite activity that he did not recognise as such, including one shaped like a torch or large-headed fish trailing sparks and smoke across the sky. Her footnotes add that one moving sky object “could be classified as a UFO” in the literal sense, but is “indicative of a meteorite”; a later shower of star-like sparks is also judged unlikely to be anything other than a meteorite shower. [University of Reading]reading.ac.ukUniversity of Reading
That distinction is essential for a public UFO history of Hertfordshire. A medieval sky report can be “unidentified” to its observer without being evidence of a craft, visitation or technology. Paris and his community worked with the categories available to them: divine warning, marvel, natural sign, comet, dragon, meteor, vision or cloud. Modern UFO language is a much later overlay; the Oxford English Dictionary places the earliest known use of “UFO” in the 1950s, long after the medieval St Albans material was written. [Oxford English Dictionary]oed.comufo n1ufo n1
The most useful way to read the St Albans material, then, is not as a hidden medieval flying-saucer file but as an early example of how sky anomalies are preserved. The abbey’s record-keeping gave unusual events a durable written form. Centuries later, UFO writers and internet compilers could lift short descriptions of lights, torches, mock suns or sky-borne forms out of that context and place them into a modern mystery framework. The “lore” is created as much by reinterpretation as by the original sighting.
Hemel Hempstead Memories
Hemel Hempstead contributes a different kind of evidence: remembered local experience rather than medieval manuscript culture. A Herts Memories page by Alan French describes a 1956 sighting after school near Bennetts End Secondary Modern School, now part of Longdean. French recalls walking down the driveway towards Hill Common with a friend and seeing a “strange glowing orange ball” in the sky, apparently hovering near the Great Elms Road area. He also recalls, a year or two later, seeing a distant green light on several nights while walking his dog in Belswains Lane. [Herts Memories]hertsmemories.org.ukOpen source on hertsmemories.org.uk.
The value of this account is not that it proves an exotic object. Its value is that it shows how a sighting survives in local memory: by place, school route, companion, colour, direction and later reflection. French himself offers a cautious reading. He suggests the later green light may have been connected with early satellite activity, while leaving the orange ball unresolved. He also states the basic distinction between a UFO and an IFO, meaning an identified flying object, and notes that many UFOs lose their mystery when explained. [Herts Memories]hertsmemories.org.ukOpen source on hertsmemories.org.uk.
That tone makes the Hemel material more useful than a sensational retelling would be. The witness is not simply escalating the story. He is remembering, comparing, doubting and trying to place the event in a wider sky-watching culture. This is exactly how local UFO folklore often forms: a witness keeps the strangeness of the moment while accepting that the explanation may be ordinary.
The same Herts Memories page also preserves a 2009 Hemel Hempstead Movie Makers episode. After a meeting at the Carey Baptist Church Hall, French says he saw lights in an oblong formation, whitish or silvery with some red, flickering and moving in a way that did not seem like an aeroplane or helicopter. Another member reportedly saw something after being called over, but the cameras had already been packed away and most members missed it. The story is vivid partly because of that irony: a film-making group had no usable footage at the critical moment. [Our Dacorum]ourdacorum.org.ukufo hemel hempsteadufo hemel hempstead
As evidence, however, it remains weak. It has named local circumstances and a self-aware witness, but no clear image, no triangulation, no instrument data and only partial corroboration. As folklore, it is stronger: it has a location, a club setting, a missed-camera motif and a modestly humorous teller who does not force the story into certainty.
Orange Lights and the MoD Pattern
Hemel Hempstead also appears in official UFO report lists from the Ministry of Defence era. The 2006 UK UFO report list includes a 5 March 2006 Hemel Hempstead entry describing a disc seen flying above two aircraft. The same 2006 national list is full of brief orange-light reports from around the UK, which is important context for judging any single local entry. [GOV.UK]assets.publishing.service.gov.ukOpen source on service.gov.uk.
The 2007 MoD list includes a Hemel Hempstead report from 6 August 2007: three bright orange lights in the sky. Nearby Hertfordshire entries in the same list include Boreham Wood, where a UFO was said to hover and then shoot off, and Hitchin, where three orange lights were reported travelling in line formation. These entries are useful as a pattern, but not as case files. They are short summaries, usually without full witness interviews, weather checks, astronomical reconstruction or aviation analysis. [GOV.UK]assets.publishing.service.gov.ukufo report 2007ufo report 2007
By 2008 and 2009, Britain was in a wider orange-light reporting wave. The National Archives notes that most UFO records describe shapes, lights and flashes that can often be explained. Its final-tranche material says many sighting accounts involving formations of orange lights moving slowly across the sky resembled Chinese lanterns, even though witnesses did not always recognise them at the time. [The National Archives]nationalarchives.gov.ukOpen source on nationalarchives.gov.uk.
That matters for the St Albans-to-Hemel corridor because local memories of orange balls and official reports of orange lights can look more coherent than they really are. A 1956 orange ball, a 2007 set of orange lights and a 2009 oblong formation are not automatically one phenomenon. They may simply share a human description: bright, warm-coloured, silent, difficult to judge for distance, and memorable enough to retell.
Folklore, Caution and Reinterpretation
The mechanism behind this local lore has three stages. First, someone sees something odd in the sky and describes it with the language available to them. In medieval St Albans that might mean a torch, dragon, comet, mock sun, vision or portent. In modern Hemel Hempstead it becomes an orange ball, green light, disc or oblong formation. Second, the report is preserved: in a chronicle, a local memory site, a club anecdote or a government list. Third, later readers reinterpret it through the dominant mystery language of their own time. [University of Reading+2Herts Memories]reading.ac.ukUniversity of ReadingUniversity of Reading
This is why older sky stories are attractive to UFO writers. They seem to promise continuity: people saw strange things long before aircraft, satellites, drones or science fiction. But continuity of reporting is not the same as continuity of cause. Medieval observers saw meteors, comets, aurorae, halo effects and unusual clouds without modern terminology. Twentieth-century observers saw aircraft, balloons, satellites, re-entering debris and lanterns alongside genuinely puzzling lights. The shared experience is uncertainty, not necessarily a shared object.
A useful caution comes from the “flaming sky torch” story associated with Matthew Paris. Sceptical writer Jason Colavito has criticised modern UFO retellings of the 1239 account, arguing that Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck’s version in Wonders in the Sky mishandled the source and even treated “Matthew Paris” as if it indicated France rather than the St Albans chronicler. Whether one accepts every part of that critique or not, it highlights a real problem: once older texts are extracted from their manuscript and historical context, errors can travel faster than corrections. [JASON COLAVITO]jasoncolavito.comOpen source on jasoncolavito.com.
For Hertfordshire’s UFO history, the best reading is therefore balanced. St Albans offers a genuine medieval archive culture of sky wonders and marvels. Hemel Hempstead offers remembered and logged modern sightings, including orange lights that fit a wider UK pattern. Neither body of evidence proves extraordinary craft. Together, however, they show how a county’s UFO folklore is built: from observation, memory, record-keeping, retelling, sceptical correction and the repeated human habit of looking up and trying to name what the sky has not made obvious.
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Passport to Magonia: from Folklore to Flying Saucers
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Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750
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The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
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Endnotes
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