The art of alien encounters

JENNY RANDLES looks back at half a century of attempts to render the UFO experience in images

Between 1975 and 2019 (with a bit of a gap for other commitments) I edited a magazine called Northern UFO News ( NUN). Only around 200 copies went out each month, mostly free to UFO groups around the world to share data. It was a very far cry from Fortean Times: handmade and intended merely as a link between local groups who had formed an alliance, it was a way of updating independent teams in multiple cities coordinated by that Northern UFO Network. We shared research and pooled resources in a time when there was no Internet to help. There were many such groups then, as the space age inspired us to gaze skyward and wonder.

I ‘retired’ NUN just before the pandemic on reaching issue 200 (though issue 201 may appear one day), but I wanted to explain its modest aims as, by chance, it charts decades of UFO history. Looking back on this labour of love one thing strikes me – the relationship between UFOs and art that the magazine embodied by inviting readers to create covers. While several regulars did this, a few got submitted by witnesses, and I came to appreciate their efforts. These people had seen the impossible and struggled to persuade others it was real. Most had no visual evidence, as mobile phone cameras were pure science fiction back then, so they resorted to the next best thing: sketching what they saw, often crudely but from the heart. Indeed, UFO report forms still encourage witnesses to draw what they saw. These reluctant witnesses were desperate to depict what changed their life in a flash. Yet, looking back, these images revealed another relationship.

Of course, UFO art did not start with the arrival of flying saucers. Oddities have appeared in the sky for as long as humans have gazed upward. Once terrifying visions are now understood as meteors or weather events, but long ago they were often interpreted as religious signs; these days, we may also ascribe them to more alien deities. All of these are simply human responses to the unfamiliar and our need to explain the unknown. From images on cave walls by prehistoric humans showing animals encountered while hunting for food to visions of signs and wonders in mediæval skies, the intent is much like that behind the modernday witness sketches made by stunned humans: to visualise the impossible, because while these people know what they saw, proving it to a disbelieving society requires evidence. We try to recreate the unimaginable because others were not there to see it; an illustration strives to vindicate the awe and wonder, and perhaps to persuade ourselves that we really did see something marvellous.

With this in mind, I looked at those 200 issues of NUN to see how ufology was depicted in its pages. One of my favourite illustrations came from regular contributor John Watson at a time when talking scarecrow Worzel Gummidge was a regular on TV. In 1981, John used the exchangeable heads concept from the stories to depict the different ones a ufologist might ‘wear’ depending on how they approached the subject. A cobweb in the ‘decent new case’ shelf 40 years on still seems apt.

UFO imagery itself morphs with the ages, from a lovely Johnny Waudby ink cover of Ken Arnold seeing the first ‘saucers’ over the Cascade Mountains through many by my co-investigator Roy Sandbach showing how aliens were visualised. However, I was intrigued by witness imagery, and one case in particular grabbed my attention.

Sometimes a witness was unable to draw what they had seen in anything but crude form so one of our artists did it for them, a bit like a crime scene reconstruction. The result when Bill Callaghan did this with one small story was to visualise what the stunned witness had never been able to do.

The witness who contacted me (I’ll call him David) in this long-forgotten case was 20 when the events took place in the summer of 1967, a year when UFOs were vying with hippies for pop-cultural domination. This man’s life was changed in a moment as he was returning from a night shift at a factory in a northern town. As David told us, it was a lovely warm morning in the ‘Summer of Love’. He left work at 6am and walked home in the pre-dawn light. He noticed three lights in the sky that he assumed were a plane,

though he was baffled by the lack of noise in the very quiet surroundings. Then he noticed that the sky itself look odd: there were no stars directly above his head.

Several things now hit home at once. It was as if the world had stopped breathing and was in freeze frame. David was experiencing the ‘Oz Factor’ (a term I had not even coined at that time, but one that witnesses had reported throughout UFO history). Over his head he could now make out a dark circular shape obliterating space from his view along with all ambient noise. “It was so low I could have hit it with a stone,” he told us. But, of course, he did not do so given the ‘magic spell’ that witnesses are under. Within seconds he found himself inexplicably running forward trying to get nearer, calling into the empty sky: “Welcome to our world!”

Needless to say, he quickly realised how odd his behaviour was, but he was caught in the amazement of the moment. Unperturbed, the object drifted away silently toward the horizon, looking like a “great silver pan – stained and pitted.” A moment in time had changed his perception of the Universe. David reached home, got into bed – quietly, as his wife and baby were asleep – and as he did so felt all the sounds of the night fade again. This time, he was unable to move and a strange voice was telling him: “You have a great secret.” Understandably scared, he fought to free himself, feeling his heart pounding as normal dawn sounds returned alongside a sulphurous smell. He was too afraid to fall into a deep sleep, yet much of the next 12 hours vanished from his memory. Then normal life returned. For the next 20 years David told almost nobody about what had happened; who would understand? He wanted answers, but sadly we had none to give. The story inspired that cover from Bill Callaghan, which at least sought to visualise this moment that changed David’s universe.

UFO research is littered with half-told tales, mirrored in artwork, that never get resolved. It would be nice all these years on to update this story. Yet, sadly, as far as I know, there is no sequel – although I quietly hope that David retained his curiosity. Maybe, more than half a century on, he has more to tell. Perhaps he is a reader of a more widely-read magazine – this one – and might get in touch... If so, that cover drawing might yet work its magic.