The Seventies: Ufology’s Golden Age
NIGEL WATSON looks back at a heady decade filled with increasingly close encounters, active UFO groups, groundbreaking magazines and ufological acronyms galore...
To me, the 1970s was the Golden Age of ufology. It was a time when local, national and international groups held regular meetings and cases were reported and discussed in a growing number of magazines. We hammered out letters and articles on typewriters and used landline telephones. Abduction and high-strangeness reports were just about being accepted by ufologists, Roswell was still a footnote in history and Rendlesham was yet to come.
The Apollo Moon landing missions led to my interest in UFOs. I started by collecting newspaper clippings that mentioned anything related to space exploration, and at the local library I got any book available on the subject. On the same shelves were books about UFOs and I inevitably gravitated towards them. Some featured sober stories of ‘respectable’ people seeing strange things in the sky and the USAF investigations into the matter, written by the likes of Donald Keyhoe.
There were also plenty of contactee books by George Adamski and George Hunt Williamson, who said they’d actually met the space people and been taken on trips inside their saucers. Eileen Buckle’s 1967 book The Scoriton Mystery impressed me because it related to events in England. Later, I was disappointed to read Norman Oliver’s criticism of the case in his 1968 Sequel to Scoriton and his conclusion that it was a hoax.
At the time I was open to the idea that spaceships might be visiting us. Erich von Däniken’s
Chariots of the Gods seemed to confirm that they had been coming here for thousands of years. The Apollo missions had made it logical to think that if we could leave our ‘cradle’ then alien intelligences could have done so long ago. This type of reasoning was certainly used in Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey, which I saw in the early 1970s.
From one of the UFO books I got the address of Flying Saucer Review, and I started subscribing straight away. In its pages, the writings of John Keel indicated that the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) might be found wanting when applied to UFO reports. I started getting the
Merseyside UFO Bulletin (later
Magonia), which maintained a sceptical outlook towards the ETH and promoted other aspects of the ‘new ufology.’ Another big influence on me was Bob Rickard’s The News (now, of course, better known as Fortean Times). Since I had already begun cutting out ‘space’ stories in the newspapers it wasn’t a big leap to start sending clippings and articles to The News. In the meantime, I collected reports of UFO and paranormal events in my home town of Scunthorpe and the surrounding county of Lincolnshire. Using this
To raise funds, we even ran a few ‘UFO Discos’ in the main hall
material, I wrote a few short articles about UFO sightings in the area for the local newspapers. These put me in contact with a couple of other people interested in the subject. One day I met the organiser of the Grange Farm Hobbies Centre and he suggested setting up a UFO group. He put an announcement in the local press asking for people to come to an introductory meeting. I didn’t expect much of a turn-out, but was shocked and pleased to find a room full of people enthusiastic about starting a new organisation. After much deliberation we called ourselves the Scunthorpe UFO Research Society (SUFORS). For about two years or so we had weekly meetings at the Hobbies Centre. Here we would bring the latest UFO books and magazines and discuss the various theories to account for UFO reports. John Keel and his view that UFOs were some kind of inter-dimensional force that could come in and out of our time frame/dimension was much in favour.
One or two members were staunch supporters of George Adamski, but the rest of us were sceptical. We established a small library of books, but SUFORS was mainly a social group. To raise funds to pay for the hire of the room we even ran a few ‘UFO Discos’ in the main hall; they proved so popular that the Centre started running its own. After the initial enthusiasm the group settled down to a core of about 10 members. Over time, we began to meet socially – mainly in pubs – and it no longer seemed necessary to hold formal meetings.
Not long after forming, about six of us piled into a Bedford Workabus and spent a week visiting Warminster, Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and Glastonbury. We visited Cradle Hill and did a bit of skywatching, but only saw a few other UFO-seekers. Indeed, it would have been hard to tell that Warminster had been a hotbed of UFO activity. To relieve the boredom, we hid behind a bush when some American ufologists came up Cradle Hill one night. Using a metal detector, we blasted eerie electronic sounds into the air; the visitors were excited and delighted by this alien activity and probably went home thinking they had encountered the notorious “thing”.
On the same trip we met Molly Carey, who had taken hundreds of photos of Stonehenge showing what appeared to be various forms and figures chiselled into the rock; these were probably created by the effects of shadows and a dose of imagination – just like the structures later ‘seen’ in Mars space probe pictures.
Later in the 1970s I made two more visits to Frome and Warminster. The only sign of a UFO came one night we were driving to Frome. Along with two other cars, we stopped at the side of the road to watch a group of lights flying slowly towards us;
after several minutes we heard the sound of engines and saw that the object was an airship with lights attached to it. If it had not come closer we would have been convinced that we’d seen a saucer.
Another trip involved meeting the distinguished old Lincolnshire folklorist Ethel Rudkin. Many years earlier she had written a detailed account of Black Dog reports in Lincolnshire for the Folklore Society. Over a fine spread of tea and scones she said she had thought about sending up a kite before we arrived to make us think it was a UFO. She obviously had a good sense of humour and was intrigued to learn how the folklore of black dogs had a link with UFOs.
Through contact with David Rees and Jenny Randles, SUFORS joined their regional collective of UFO groups, which eventually became NUFON (the National UFO Network). We even ran their fourth conference at the Scunthorpe Film Theatre on 24 June 1978, where Gary Heseltine, who lived in Scunthorpe at that time, made an appearance. Tickets for a full day of talks cost an astonishing £1.50. In the Checkpoint science fiction fanzine (no. 90, July 1978) Darroll Pardoe wrote: “We went to the ‘4th Northern UFO Network Conference’ in Scunthorpe on the last Saturday in June: it was organised by a group of the ‘New’ ufologists: i.e., those who regard the phenomenon as subjective rather than objective. The audience was less than might be hoped (about 40), but the audience did include a number of vocal old-guard ufologists who provided a bit of verbal confrontation (including one amazing person who dragged in Ur of the Chaldees and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion)… In the morning we saw some movie film of UFOs, which wouldn’t have convinced anybody, but apparently is the best available, UFOs being notoriously shy of cine-cameras. And as a change from the serious stuff, the evening was devoted to a two-hour show of clips from SF films given by Philip Jenkinson, including a complete version of Melies’ 1903 trip to the moon film.”
By this time the SUFORS was virtually a spent force. Two of our most charismatic members had gone on a quest to India, but via a nasty traffic accident in Turkey, they ended up in Sheffield (don’t ask!) We did keep the group going by inviting guest speakers. Rex Dutta the publisher of Viewpoint Aquarius magazine visited us twice. He was well dressed and well spoken, and I think he drove an E-Type Jaguar. On one of these occasions he hypnotised a few people in the audience. He was a promoter of Adamski and other contactee cases and was into New Age topics.
During the 1970s I became more interested in collecting evidence. After interviewing several UFO witnesses, including my own grandmother, I realised that detailed descriptions of ‘things’ in the sky did not amount to much. What people actually saw was open to all types of physical or even psychological interpretation.
As NUFON and Jenny Randles’s UFO career progressed she was able to pass on to me what were then called “high strangeness” cases. Many of these were reported after the release of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was lucky enough to attend a preview screening of the film in London. It wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was a visually striking movie that brought to life the weird world of ufology, even if you’d never heard of Hynek orVallee.
My high strangeness investigations were supplied to UFOIN and published in ‘MUFOB’, and were eventually collected and expanded in my 1990 book Portraits of Alien Encounters. These close encounters contained as many ambiguities and as little solid evidence as previous sightings of lights in the sky. Shirley McIver, who was writing a thesis about ufology as part of her degree course in Behavioural Science, attended several of the interviews I conducted with UFO witnesses. Discussions with her and contact with MUFOB writers – particularly John Rimmer and the late Peter Rogerson – encouraged me to start studying with the Open University. In the 1980s I gained a degree in psychology after five years of part-time study.
In the 1970s I also started going through old newspaper files to collect historical UFO and fortean reports. This was mainly inspired by articles in FSR by Carl Grove, Jerome Clark, John Keel and Roger Sandell that discussed phantom airship and Spring-heeled Jack sightings in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Granville Oldroyd conducted intensive research into these areas and passed on most of his findings. This resulted in a series of articles and a catalogue of British 1913 airship reports in the 1980s and the eventual publication of my books The Scareship Mystery (2000) and UFOs of the First World War (2015).
Looking back, I think we were inclined to think that there was some form of paranormal and/or mental interface between us and the aliens. With the inspiration of Carl Jung in the 1950s and the writings of John Keel, it did seem likely that “they” could directly or indirectly influence our minds, culture and society.
For me, ufology was also important on a social and educational level. I gained a circle of friends in Scunthorpe that increasingly included people who were not directly interested in UFOs, and I regularly corresponded with ufologists and witnesses throughout Britain. One unknown consequence of my communications was revealed by Malcolm Jenson many years later: “Nigel Watson came into my life circa 1979 when I related to him my 1975 sighting. Years later he was responsible for introducing me, through common interests, to a lady who was to become my wife. 34 years later, still is! Avril and her mum had a close encounter of the first kind in 1969 at Washingborough, Lincs, and the object was picked up on radar and reported in the press. My wife has an alternative brain-wiring with her high-functioning autism/ Aspergers, and therefore is a stickler for the smallest detail. It could also be that this alternative brain-wiring is a key factor in the amazing amount of experiences she has had both before our union and during.”
As I noted earlier, the psychological aspects of ufology finally encouraged me to take a degree in the subject and made me even more sceptical of the ETH and UFO theories in general. In addition, I went off to study Film and Literature at the University of Warwick, which helped me look at how UFOs are represented in popular entertainment and how such cultural influences have had an impact on ‘real’ ufology.
Since then, ufology has changed for good and ill, but I still find it a fascinating subject that has taken me from Scunthorpe to the wildest frontiers of Magonia.