Mr. Broom was in the process of renovating the cottage he bought eight months ago when the bizarre discovery was made:

It was stuffed in the corner of the loft with other old newspapers. Before me, an old spinster lived in the house. I don't think anybody had been up there for years. I haven't got three heads and I'm not the sort of eccentric lunatic to think it's an alien but it's a funny thing to find in your loft.

Describing it as merely "a funny thing to find in your loft" is, in fairness, a hilariously restrained way of putting it.

The article continues:

The delicate 30cm (12 inch) figure of a baby alien is stored in a pungent liquid and has a US serial number painted on its four-toed foot. Possibly sculpted from a clay-like substance and painted grey, the model closely resembles the aliens depicted in a hoax film of an autopsy of the infamous "Roswell incident".

Curiously, the alien was discovered stored in an old toffee jar wrapped in a copy of the Daily Mirror dating from October 1947. In July of that year, officials at the American air base of Roswell reported and then denied finding the remains of a flying saucer. The Roswell incident sparked a popular fascination with UFOs and led the US air force to collect data on sightings

1947 is, of course, not only famous (among ufologists) for the 'Roswell Incident', but it was also the year of Kenneth Arnold's seminal sighting of 'Flying Saucers' near Mount Rainier, Washington. The fact that the paper is dated thus seems a tad too convenient, as anyone with even a passing interest in the area would immediately register the date's significance.

In addition, though the 'grey alien' has now become by far the most iconic and easily recognised representation of extraterrestrials, 'greys' don't seem to have featured in UFO lore untill at least the mid-1960s:

Martin Kottmeyer claims that the origin of the contemporary appearance of Greys comes from the mask of the Bifrost alien (designed by Wah Ming Chang) from the "Bellero Shield" episode of the 1960s sci-fi TV-series "The Outer Limits". Not long after the episode's debut on February 10, 1964, according to the contactee reports, Greys seemed to suddenly acquire most of their characteristic features.¹

After that, the combined forces of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Whitley Streiber, and (of course) The X-Files, conspired (ho ho) to ensure that greys enjoy their current cultural dominance.

The fact that Mr. Broom's house is a mere "45 miles from two large US air bases at RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall", and that, "Many US servicemen and women live and work in the region", may be interpreted as significant by some…but it's still hard to know what to make of the discovery.

If the object does indeed date back to 1947, then it demonstrates (at the very least) that the 'grey alien' image was doing the rounds long before it gained widespread recognition. Of course, if it's a more recent hoax then it suggests that the hoaxer may have been unaware that greys are of a more contemporary vintage, and that they simply settled on 1947 as an evocative date. Either that or they were fully aware that a 1947 grey would appear anachronistic and cleverly anticipated that this 'double bluff' would, in fact, make the object seem more credible!

Anyway, the Guardian managed to get a terse "It's a hoax" out of "a spokeswoman for the US air force", a statement which, of course, will serve only to convince the more 'paranoid' UFO-fans out there that there's far more to this than meets the eye….

1. Wikipedia – "Greys" [back]

Scanning the shelves, I quickly passed over categories like "Novels I've been meaning to read for years" and "Popular Science books whose content failed to match their jazzy covers", before my eye (I only have one) finally came to rest on a mini section of aging paperbacks that speak of my interest in the…em…'esoteric'…

From the sober (and po-faced) UFO's: A Scientific Debate (eds. Carl Sagan & Thornton Page), to the alarmingly entitled Somebody else is on the Moon (George Leonard), and on to the hubris and confidence of Philip J. Klass's UFOs Explained, the dusty edges of the titles not only reflect my negligent housework, but also highlight a phenomenon that (now) seems decidedly dated…and rapidly disappearing over the horizon of the zeitgeist.

If Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting of 'Flying Saucers', coupled with the 'Roswell Incident' (both 1947), managed to set the modern obsession with UFOs in motion, then the turn of the millennium seems to have (almost) succeeded in bringing the phenomenon to a grinding halt. Or so it would appear…

I have no clear idea what publishing/sales figures are for UFO-themed literature, but my intuitive zeitgeist radar would hazard a guess that the 1990s (a period when conspiracist thinking, of all hues, reached a kind of zenith) was the most fruitful of decades for work of this sort. Much of the material published was, of course, of the lurid, bargain-basement, variety…with little ambition other than riding the X-Files cash cow in search of a quick buck.

The popularity of such literature may have been interpreted by some (Carl Sagan et al.) as reflecting a worrying slip toward 'paranoia' and 'unreason', but it can also be (convincingly) argued that readers in the 90s engaged with this material in a manner more playful (and knowing) than earnest and committed/convinced. After (at least) 50 years of exposure to UFO/Alien-themed cultural artefacts, it's hardly surprising that 'readers' had become (reasonably) savvy and literate consumers of the 'genre'.

A look back at some of the 70s publications on my shelves, however, reveals a more pragmatic (and in some ways charmingly 'old-fashioned') engagement with the subject. The Sagan edited volume (for example) is actually a collection of papers delivered to a symposium on UFOs sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (and published by W. W. Norton, by arrangement with Cornell University). The possibility of such an august gathering of serious scientists coming together for such a purpose would seem extremely improbable today.

The reasons for possible changes in attitude to the phenomenon are no doubt complex, but it seems to me that following the genesis of 'Ufology' in the 50s, and the development of (and serious engagement with) it in the 60s & 70s, the 90s could be seen to represent a period of over-satiation and 'blow out'. Without wanting to appear excessively 'decade-ist', it's not hard to speculate how a flooded book market, and an increasingly absurdist, dumbed-down (Sky/Fox) TV engagement might have led to a 90s implosion, followed by a 00s vacuum. Whatever the real reasons, the net result is a cultural phenomenon that appears (and that's a key word) to have gone into hibernation.

Of course, it should be clear to most readers – especially in today's news climate – that just because the ol' mainstream media (such as it is) no longer pays much heed to a particular phenomenon/situation, it doesn't necessarily follow that that which it ignores has ceased to be relevant or significant. Though the current fixation with 'terror' may seem to have pushed our extraterrestrial friends onto (and off of) the back pages, there's no reason to assume that 'ufology' is not still being engaged with by passionate devotees. The 00s may have seen Greys (and their ilk) supplanted by far more human bogeymen, but the great wheel of cultural trends may spin back in an extraterrestrial direction before too long.

If nothing else, such a renaissance will give me a few more titles to gather dust on my bookshelves…