UFOs — answering a call from the cosmos

‘For nearly eight decades, the curiously compelling acronym ‘UFO’ — as an idea at work in the world soul — has shaped human belief and imagination in complicated ways.’ Keith Thompson

The first books I read about UFOs as a teenager were Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), co-written by occultist George Adamski and musician and film-maker Desmond Leslie, and Flying Saucer from Mars (1954) written by the eccentric astronomer Patrick Moore under the assumed name of Cedric Allingham.

Of course, both books turned out to be hoaxes. In the emerging UFO controversy, Adamski, with faked photos of his ‘lampshade’ spacecraft, was investigated and outed almost immediately, yet went on to publish the follow-ups Inside the Space Ships (1955) and Flying Saucers Farewell (1961).

Adamski claimed to have met a Venusian in the California desert after a craft landed, and Moore/Allingham similarly claimed to have encountered a Martian on the Scottish coast. It was Flying Saucers Have Landed that inspired Moore to write Flying Saucer from Mars but, surprisingly, the latter book — including a fuzzy photo of Moore himself disguised as the Martian — was not substantiated as a hoax until the mid-1980s. Moore, who died in 2012, aged 89, never admitted the con.