It was a baking summer's day in July 1967. A bright blue haze hung over the Welsh hills and the glaucous-blue tidal waters washed sleepily against the hulls of the swaying shrimp boats moored in the Caldy Channel. On the golf links overlooking the breezy Dee Estuary, moneyed golfers trod the springy turf as they whiled away their well-deserved hours of leisure while their housewives cooked dinners in the elegant white houses studding the top of Caldy Hill.

All about was green, wooded and peaceful on this glorious Saturday afternoon; it was a scene straight from the lid of a chocolate box Richard Cadbury would have commissioned from Constable - a John Betjeman poem personified.

Onto Caldy Hill came Paul and Gabriel, two bearded men in their 20s who looked like unwashed vagrants, speaking in the dialect of Meridional French, and they passed unnumbered dwellings bearing typical English rustic names such as Meadow Croft, Woodlea, Little Paddocks and Beechwood. A lady walking her poodle picked up the pampered pooch and hurried home when she set eyes on the ragged foreign-speaking strangers.

Paul was studying a magnetic compass and Gabriel was reading a map featuring a copy of the strange coded message found on a lead tablet beneath one of a handful of secret French pyramids.Most historians do not acknowledge the pyramids of France, and their origins and purpose are as baffling as the ones in Egypt. The Cairn of Barnenez, constructed at Brittany around 4,800 BC still stands today, as does the 32-feet tall Pyramide de Couhard, which stands in Autun in the Saône-et-Loire department of France.

Gabriel was reading the strange symbols transcribed on a piece of parchment from the lead tablet found within this enigmatic and unexplained pyramid.

Gabriel, a gifted polymath who had recently graduated from the Sorbonne, had deciphered the meaning of the symbols and the information was unequivocal - the Holy Grail was located in a large slab of lichen-covered rock at the foot of Caldy Hill, facing Thurstaston Common. When a certain magical incantation was recited, the long-sought magical vessel would appear in a concave recess in the rock. Paul and Gabriel had been searching for the Grail for three years, and had read every manuscript and book about the alleged Last Supper cup in every library in Troyes in France, the British Library in London, and the vast library at Dublin's Trinity College.

What the two men had deduced was that the Holy Grail was holy from a time long before the birth of Christ, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity.

The Grail was in fact an artefact that had survived a worldwide catastrophe millions of years ago - when a previous civilization, much more advanced than ours had become corrupt and destroyed itself. Both Paul and Gabriel were staunch believers in an early Secret Wisdom that had been lost through some war or catastrophe in the remote past and they viewed Stonehenge and the thousands of megaliths - those gaunt standing stones with their eerie alignments dotted across hundreds of miles in the British Isles and France - as the vestiges of some forgotten ancient empire.

The Grail-seekers arrived at Caldy Hill and surveyed the sandstone outcrop with its elliptical carved recess. The incantation had to be performed at night, so the two young Frenchmen camped nearby. At midnight, Gabriel stood before the concavity and began the ritual recitation. A strange light appeared over the giant stone, and the two men got the impression this was some luminous sentry. That night, a UFO was reported over Caldy, and no doubt it was this hovering light.

Minutes after midnight, an orange glow appeared in the niche of the stone, and a vessel resembling a translucent chalice appeared, hovering a few inches away from the wall of the rock. Paul and Gabriel gasped when they set eyes on the object. It had a powerful calming effect on them, and it floated away from the stone.Gabriel had on woollen gloves, as he was afraid to touch the highly mysterious object with his bare hands.