The Woman Who Made UFO News

The Washington, D.C. area was a hotbed of UFO activity in the early 1950s, for news, events, and as a locale for researchers. The flying saucers reports in July 1952 over the nation’s Capital made UFOs a matter of national security and front-page news. The flying saucer fever led to clubs springing up all over, including Washington.

A major figure in the D.C. area saucer scene was Clara L. John, but her role in UFO history has been largely forgotten, making  her one of ufology’s “Hidden Figures.” STTF set out to find out more about Clara and her work.

Clara Louise Colcord, age 19.
The Evening Star, Oct. 8, 1907 

Clara Louise Colcord was born on June 12, 1888, in Scranton, Iowa. In the early 1900s, her family lived in Maryland near Washington, D.C, and her father was the editor of religious publications for the Seventh-day Adventists. At the age of 19, Clara married Ray Albert Leslie, and in the following years, they moved to Michigan. Census records show they didn’t have any children, and she gave her occupation as “none.” Unofficially, Clara Louise Leslie was a writer for general interest articles in magazines and newspapers. Two examples: In “Why Do We Love Mary Pickford?,” for Motion Picture, May 1918,  Clara hyperbolically wrote, “Mary Pickford is a fairy! She is not of this world.” Her essay, “An Evolutionary Eyeful,” in Photoplay Journal, Feb. 1919, was on the virtues of movies as a medium for entertainment and education.

After her husband Ray died on July 25, 1924, Clara moved back to the Washington area. She researched and wrote about the invention of the microphone, and who deserved credit for it, as seen in The Radio Home, June/July 1926 “The Man Who Made the Mike: A Brief History of Emile Berliner, the Man Who is Responsible for the Microphone.”

Time magazine, May 21, 1928

We could find no documentation of Clara’s interest in the occult before 1927, but afterwards, most of what she wrote was on supernatural topics. In the Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), Jan. 10, 1929, Clara’s letter defended against criticism of Spiritualism. She felt the “materialistic world” was at its limit, and the spiritual realm was the new frontier.

Reason Quarterly no. 2, 1927, “Analyzing Prayer and Telepathy”

Evening Star, Jan. 10, 1929

Clara was in her early 40s when she married Dr. Walton Colcord John (1881-1942) on December 24, 1930, a professor who worked for the United States Bureau of Education. Shortly afterwards Clara published an article about a strange guest her husband had hosted. “Science Studies Pow-Wowing,” was Clara’s article about Jacob Zellers, who claimed to have killed five people with witchcraft. Zellers spoke to an audience at the Graduate School of American University at Washington. D.C., “all advanced students and educators working under Dr. Walton Colcord John.” It was published in Every Week Magazine, reprinted in newspapers such as the Lubbock Morning Avalanche, Jan 23, 1931.

They lived at 4811 Illinois Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. and she continued to write professionally under her old name, Clara Louise Leslie, as in this piece, “Live Ghosts in a Senator’s House” Feb. 7, 1931, in The Evening Independent.

Clara’s letter to the Washington Post, on June 2, 1938, suggesting the planned national memorial for Thomas Jefferson be created as “a planetarium instead of a pile of stone.” Her remarks about the universe and its “orderly energy” may have been a hint of how she’d later feel about flying saucers.

She returned to the topic of ghosts in True Mystic Science, Jan/Feb 1939, for “When the Camera Catches Ghosts.”

Walton Colcord John became ill and was treated at the Washington Sanitarium. He died at the age of 61 on June 18, 1942. There’s not much to document Clara’s life during this time, but her father had died in 1935, she’d lost two of her brothers by 1937, then her mother in May of 1950. Clara was 62 then, and her only surviving family was her youngest brother, Glenn. But Clara was not alone, she had a wide circle of friends and frequently hosted discussions and lectures in her home. 

If the Flying Saucers are True… 

Like many interested in spiritualism and the occult, when flying saucers made the news, Clara became interested in the mystery – and the hope that they were the craft of friendly otherworldly visitors. The first public documentation of her involvement with UFO topic was in the Times Herald (Washington, D.C.), May 18, 1952, where Clara wrote a letter to the editor: 

“If the flying saucers are ‘true,’ it will be the biggest news since Adam. The evidence now seems to be piling up in that direction. One thing beclouds the issue - peoples’ fears of such things - born out of science fiction which in turn is based on war-filled earth history. A moment’s observation shows this fear to be unwarranted. Sightings have been going on for years and not once have these ‘visitors’ done us any harm. Another self-evident thing, whatever or whoever they are, their knowledge of astronautics and propulsion is far ahead of ours. Newspapers easily have the power to remove this tendency to mass fear which, in turn will remove the attitude of ridicule on the part of many (a defense mechanism) so that from here on the subject can be faced open mindedly. I have even heard some of your readers propose a weekly ‘clearing house’ for worthy observations and opinions. This should make interesting reading, to say the least.

Clara Louise John

Speaking of interesting reading… Clara must have read and loved Frank Scully’s 1950 bestseller, Behind the Flying Saucers. A portion of the book discussed Meade Layne and his Borderland Sciences Research Associates, who believed flying saucers were “ether craft come to us from the ’other side,' who’d come with the “intention to prevent destruction of the omniverse by makers of hydrogen bombs.” Clara began corresponding far and wide with others with similar views. As she became more involved, saucers were one of the many unusual topics discussed in meetings she held in her home. T. Townsend Brown was a regular, and his daughter Linda Brown recalled “a childhood memory of a farm in Maryland, the home of a 67-year-old widow, Mrs. Walton Colcord John… [who] indulged an abiding interest in the unusual and esoteric, subjects that today might be considered ‘New Age.’ … Clara hosted some like-minded friends… For one such gathering... Townsend Brown brought his daughter, who mostly remembers that Mrs. John ‘had white ponies in a nearby field.’” (The Man Who Mastered Gravity 2023 by Paul Schatzkin, 2023)

In late 1952 Clara made contact with flying saucer lecturer George Adamski.

Fate July 1951

According to Loren Gross in his UFOs: A History, 1952: November–December, even prior to Adamski’s claim of meeting an alien, he had “established a number of epistolary friendships with persons across the country, perhaps the most notable being Mrs. Clara [Louise] John…” and that, “correspondence between Mrs. John and Adamski was extensive before and after November 20, 1952 and that it was no accident Mrs. John was working on the ‘professor's’ crude notes in preparation for a book on the ‘desert contact."

According to Frank Edwards (in Flying Saucers - Here and Now!, 1967), Clara first approached him with the manuscript. “I declined to have anything to do with the mess and she left my office in a bit of a huff.”

A publisher in the UK was far more receptive and packaged Adamski’s tale with a previously completed Theosophical manuscript by Desmond Leslie. Their book was published in the Fall of 1953, the international bestseller, The Flying Saucers have Landed. Clara’s involvement in the book was not public knowledge, and she wanted to keep it that way.

 

The Little Listening Post

By early 1954 Clara decided to draw on her connections and sources and produce a newsletter. In it, she did not use her name, early editions were signed as “C.L.J.” Gray Barker’s The Saucerian, Sept. 1954 described her publication. 

“THE LITTLE LISTENING POST, published by Mrs. Walton Colcord John… is a two-or-three-page mimeographed bulletin reporting a remarkable volume of saucerdoings and occult phenomena. The bulletin is informative and will keep the reader briefed on the goings-on in those fields. The project is supported by good-will donations, and we' re sure a quarter will bring at least some sample copies your way.”

The Little Listening Post 1954-1965 Collection
at Archives for the Unexplained (AFU)

LLP reached a small but devoted audience of devoted flying saucer fans, and provided news on saucer sightings, clubs, conventions, literature, ESP, ghosts, spirit radio, and other associated paranormal topics. Her sources? Often anonymous, they included mainstream reporters and broadcasters, UFO witnesses, Contactees, government insiders, and psychic channelers. The tone was often fervent and hyperbolic with big saucer news perennially coming soon, typed lots of things in ALL CAPS and underlined for emphasis!!! 

In Clara’s Feb. 1954 article, “Need for Unity between Science and the Occult,” she talked about how UFOs might be an indication that “our familiar old three dimensional world is in some sense bursting its shell… Patience will be needed… And enough humility to lay aside old vaunted traditions…”  

In LLP Dec/Jan 1954-55, Clara showed her devotion to George Adamski and quoted from his recent letter to her. She believed as he did that, “for the first time in this civilization we are becoming alerted to the reality of other inhabited planets and growing into a greater consciousness and understanding of the vast universe…”

Clara received many saucerian guests at LLP, and in early 1955, Morris K. Jessup (1900-1959) paid a visit. She taped the only known recording of either of them, a discussion of saucers and his forthcoming book, The Case for the UFO. From Wendy Connors’ Faded Disc archives: Morris Ketchum Jessup's only Known Recorded Interview by Clara John of the Little Listening Post at Washington, DC. in 1955. 21:42.

Clara said that ufology had become “practically your life’s work now.” Jessup replied, “I’m not doing anything else…” and she said, “Well the subject owns us it’s so, so much bigger than we are, I don’t blame you.” Jessup said, “That is certainly the truth, and this subject takes hold of you, and you practically become a slave to it. It’s a little hard to explain, but once you get into it, you recognize the length and the breadth and the depth of it, to a point where it is not only amazing, but perhaps a falling as well.”

Later, promoting Jessup's book in LLP, she wrote; “Saucer Fans, here is a weapon to use in convincing the Skeptics.” It became famous for something different, however. Gray Barker was one of many paranormal researchers Clara kept in touch with. Writing in his 1963 book, The Strange Case of Dr. M. K. Jessup, Barker tells how he got a call from Clara: 

“I first learned of the annotated copy [of The Case for the UFO] when… over the telephone, Mrs. John told me of a strange rumor going around, to the effect that somebody had sent a marked-up copy to Washington and that the government had gone to the expense of mimeographing the entire book, so that all the underlinings and notations could be added to the original text. This was being sent around rather widely, she told me, through military channels. She… seemed to connect it with an alleged Naval experiment wherein a ship had completely disappeared from sight. I couldn't make too much out of all this until later I had also heard about the strange Allende Letters, which told of such an experiment in a most horrifying way.”

That was the infancy of the legend that became known as “the Philadelphia Experiment.” Over the years, LLP endorsed just about every claim, from Frank Scully’s crashed saucer story, to the schemes and yarns of Otis T. Carr and Reinhold O.Schmitt. Spiritualist Enid Brady, who channeled aliens, called Clara, to tell her about her work. She published an announcement about it in the LLP Dec 55/Jan 56 issue, saying Enid “gave much intimate ‘contact info’” from Venus, and also had formed the Daytona Beach (Florida) Flying Saucer Research Club.  

From the Saucer Group to NICAP

Clara decided to turn her own gatherings into the Flying Saucer Discussion Group.

Classified ad, possibly for Clara’s group. Evening Star, March 04, 1956

Clara John’s notes from the group’s fourth meeting on July 20, 1956, stated:

"Today there are great thousands of little research groups all over the world, as well as people working singly on this thing. The time has come to coordinate their activities into a pattern that will prepare humanity for this startling new event in human existence.”

The idea went over, and soon T. Townsend Brown came up with a prospectus for what was soon named the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP).

By 1957, UFO author Donald Keyhoe took charge of the organization. Curtis Peebles in Watch the Skies! (1995), “Given the anticontactee stance NICAP took under Kehoe, the involvement of Clara L John in the group's founding is, to say the least ironic.”

Although she was supportive of NICAP, Clara was not an active part of it. When Donald Keyhoe stepped in as director, he purged the group of any connections with the Contactees. Nevertheless, Clara continued to report on Don Keyhoe and NICAP’s crusade and urged readers to support it. 

 

Controversies and Exposures

It went largely ignored for years, but Flying Saucers Have Landed included George Adamski’s recognition of a key contributor: 

“With grateful thanks I acknowledge the sincere co-operation and untiring efforts of those who have helped me make this book possible. And without the editing and helpful encouragement of C.L.J. this book in its present form and at this time would have been impossible.”

Lonzo Dove was skeptical of Adamski and quoted correspondence that revealed Clara’s role in his book, and he also found material that suggested Adamski had hoaxed UFO photographs to just for the book. Uranus Dec. 1956, Vol 03 No 3, “Adamski - The Last Nail?” quotes her Jan. 23, 1953, letter to Dove, where Clara said while working on the manuscript: "Things are all mixed up, publicity not handled right, pathetic and his [Adamski] story is too prosaic, not put together right. Please don't mention my name in any of this."

Leave it Jim Moseley. Clara was “outed” by name in his Saucer News Feb-March 1957.

The scandal continued in Lonzo Dove’s “Open Letter to George Adamski’s ‘C.L.J.’ in Saucer News April/May 1957. Working from Dove’s evidence, Adamski Critic David Wightman, implicated Clara in "The Adamski Photographs, Where And How?" in  Flying Saucer Review. 6:3 May-June 1960.

Clara did not seem to respond publicly, but maybe this was her indirect response from LLP Aug-Oct. 1958:

“Within the ranks war continues between those who accept the contact stories and those who don't. Dif[ferences] of opinion O.K. but in a subject as big.as this one it is SMART to keep openminded. Also POLITE. YOU ARE DEALING WITH A MYSTERY. A SITUATION FOR WHICH THERE IS NO PRECEDENT! “Judge not!" IT IS A SERIOUS THING TO BRAND ANOTHER AS CROOKED, or A FAKE.”

Clara was branded as a fake to the FBI. Page 21 of the FBI file on Otis T. Carr contains a letter from sent to them by Dan B. Haber, and he enclosed an ad 1958 from a 1958 LLP announcing the publication of Margaret Storm’s (Contactee biography of Nikola Tesla) Return of the Dove. Haber’s handwritten notation on it stated: “This page was written by Clara Johns… [who] wrote George Adamski’s first book, ‘Flying Saucers have Landed!’ She seems to be the center of much fiction that is branded as fact.”  

If the FBI had come after Carla, she would have thought it was part of the government’s saucer silencing policy, a crime against the Cosmos! In LLP Jan-March 1959, she said that for their saucer cover-up, someday the Air Force would face a reckoning!

 

The 1960s and the Final Issue

Clara was eternally cheerful and optimistic about what tomorrow’s promise for the saucer scene. In LLP Mar./Apr./May 1963:

*SAUCER FRONT: U.S.A.F. trying doggedly to sink the Saucers, but public won't be hoodwinked! NICAP official tells LLP that interest in UFO's is now at an all-time high; a great expectancy is felt across the land----"people are waiting for SOMETHING!"….. O'er the ramparts we watch, the Saucers still zoom….”

However, after ten years, the Contactee era was on its way out. While the notion had been popular, it just wasn’t taken seriously by many for very long.

Nevertheless, Clara continued to zealously believe, and sometimes to preach, as in LLP Jan/Feb 1964:

“In our skies are VISITORS… today, most of the world is blind to the glorious ‘GOSPEL’ - - the ‘Good News’ - - being WRITTEN OUT BEFORE THEIR EYES by swift, shining, unearthly ‘messengers’ world-over in our skies.”

The Little Listening Post continued publication until 1965. The May/June/July issue announced the death of George Adamski, and the following Aug./Sept./Oct. issue was its last. On January 29, 1968, Clara died at the age of 79. She was buried next to Walton in Glenwood Cemetery, Washington, D.C.  

Flying Saucers International, March 1968.

Clara John was a pioneering woman in the UFO field, a well-connected advocate who published an influential periodical, and helped create one of the most respected saucer organizations of all time. Her work forged the UFO topic into what it is today, and she deserves to be remembered for that. 

. . .

Ray Bradbury and George Adamski: Worlds Apart

In 1952, an imaginative author ran into a flying saucer lecturer at a science fiction convention. In a different time and place, perhaps they could have been the best of friends. here's what happened instead.

The Man for Mars

Ray Bradbury grew up reading about spacemen like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, loving fantasy and science fiction. In 1937 at the age of 17 he met Forrest J. Ackerman, joined a club and became involved in fandom writing for (and publishing) fanzines until making his first professional sale in 1941. By the late 1940s, he was a family man and an established author. A snapshot of Bradbury’s career highlights from Current Biography Yearbook, 1953:

“He has had 170 short stories published and twenty-three radio dramas and five television plays produced…with imaginative themes which combine advanced technology with subtle fantasy and have what has become known as ‘the Bradbury twist.’ His stories were first published in science fiction and fantasy magazines… [then the mainstream] Collier's, Saturday Evening Post and the New Yorker. … His most recent work, The Golden Apples of the Sun, is the fourth of his published books, the others being Dark Carnival (1947), The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951). … He has also done much writing for the moving pictures… Of Bradbury's prolific output Punch (August 1952) has written: ‘"It is hard to speak with restraint of these extraordinary tales which raise Ray Bradbury to a secure place among the imaginative writers of today.’"

 

A Friendship with a Flying Saucer Author

In the summer of 1950, Ray Douglas Bradbury (1920-2012) was thirty years old. That was when he met Gerald Heard (1889-1971), a science fiction author twice his age, who was interested in the paranormal, UFOs, and many other unconventional subjects. In the 2011 book, Becoming Ray Bradbury, Jonathan R. Eller described how they became good friends:

“In spite of Heard’s growing eccentricities… he offered Bradbury more than his passion for Eastern philosophies. Bradbury was not drawn to Heard’s beliefs, but he was drawn to his [talent, intellect, and personality].”

From the slightly re-titled US edition.

Heard’s book The Riddle of the Flying Saucers: Is Another World Watching? was published in the UK later that year.  In 1951, Heard was a founding member of the group Civilian Saucer Investigation of Los Angeles (CSI), the first UFO organization with a board of scientific and aeronautical experts. Riddle also lectured on saucers and revised his book for the 1953 Bantam paperback edition, adding two new chapters on recent sightings. This all goes to show that Bradbury had a trusted friend who was knowledgeable on the UFO topic, but Ray had no desire to be any part of it.

However, in the Imagination April 1951 science fiction magazine, Bradbury’s "In This Sign..." appeared, a UFO story of sorts about anomalous aerial spheres of blue light, later revealed to be sentient beings. The story was later retitled "The Fire Balloons." For a closer look at this from a historical UFO perspective, see: Ray Bradbury's Orbs from Mars at Blue Blurry Lines. 

 

The Man for Venus

In 1952, two rising stars crossed paths, a young science fiction author and an aging flying saucer lecturer. Although they had much in common, the two were sharply divided about their opinions on the reality of alien visitors. It happened at the fifth annual West Coast Science Fantasy Conference, which was held June 28-29, 1952, at the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego.

Ad from Science Fiction Advertiser, July 1952

"Sou-Westercon" was a major convention sponsored by the San Diego Science-Fantasy Society. Their guest of honor was author Ray Bradbury. It was considered a curiosity or quirk, but Bradbury chose not to drive a car or fly on an airplane. That’s why he travelled from his home in Venice, California, to the San Diego convention by train.

Anthony More’s report on the convention in Shangri-LA (newsletter of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society) #32, Fall 1952, said Sou-Westercon was, “the largest fan group ever assembled, and included the largest professional collection ever brought together at one time at a fan affair.” He noted that Ray Bradbury was supposed to give the opening remarks, but didn’t arrive on time (possibly his train was delayed). The convention started without him, the first of their schedule problems.

The 4-page program for Sou-Westercon was chiefly their directory of the events, but there was also a page featuring an ad for the booklet “Ray Bradbury Review.” Another unconnected ad below it was for “Cosmag S-F Digest,” which included an illustration of two flying saucers zipping through space.

Most of the speakers covered topics related to science fiction, but one talk was a bit different. The lecture for Saturday at 1:30 pm was “a discussion of The Flying Saucers” given by “Dr. Adamski.” 

FATE Magazine, July, 1951.

That was George Adamski (1891-1965), before his greatest claim to fame and bestselling book. (See: The Professor's Message from Space.) At that time, Adamski was an obscure figure, lecturing on flying saucer and selling the photographs he claimed to have taken of them. The convention report wryly mentioned Adamski’s presentation in passing:

“The ubiquitous flying saucer then wheeled into view, and a scattering of fans listened to a ‘Dr.' Adamski, who competes from the foot of the hill with Palomar Observatory, tell about that unusual form of iron known as carbon.”

It’s not documented how long it lasted or exactly what he talked about, but the lecture was scheduled to last 30 minutes. In other appearances around the same time, Adamski spoke about saucers as coming from our neighboring inhabited planets and displayed (and sold) his photos. Adamski sometimes talked two hours longer than planned, so he’d likely have run past his half-hour given the chance.

Ray Bradbury arrived from the train station while Adamski was lecturing, and on the way into the hotel he encountered some people who’d walked out on the talk. (We’ll hear his recollection of that later.) We don’t know how much of the lecture Bradbury saw or if he spoke to Adamski, but he was left with an unfavorable impression. After the convention, both Adamski and Bradbury both went on to greater successes, and both were the subject of much media coverage. As far as we know, they never crossed paths again.

 

It Came from Outer Space

Universal-International hired Ray Bradbury to come up with the story for a 1953 science fiction movie to be filmed in 3-D. One of their working titles was “The Atomic Monster,” but Bradbury resisted the idea of writing about monstrous flying saucer invaders from outer space. 

The 1953 United Press interview promoting It Came from Outer Space mentioned that the author was opposed to riding in a plane, then discussed his taste in films.

“Bradbury also is anti those science fiction movies in which the visitors in the flying saucers are usually villains. He approves of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ which featured a robot who was a hero. But in ‘The Thing,’ he complained, the man from another world started out believable but wound up as a monster.” Giving away the plot, in his film, an alien who landed here would just seek “to get away safely before somebody got panicky and killed him.”

Instead of space invaders, Bradbury’s aliens were not hostile, just visually repugnant to humans.. Their motive was only to repair their damaged ship and resume their voyage. Still, the studio sold the movie as being about a spaceship that “carried terrifying beings from outer space [who] planned to conquer the world…”

Trailer: It Came from Outer Space

Meanwhile, George Adamski had also been busy. It's possible that when the skeptical audience bailed on his 1952 convention lecture, he decided that talk and photographs were not enough. On November 20, 1952, Adamski claimed to have encountered a flying saucer and spoke to a man from Venus, and it was backed by photos, physical evidence, and multiple witnesses. The fantastic story gained traction in the press, and became the subject of a best-selling 1953 book, Flying Saucers Have Landed (coauthored with Desmond Leslie).

The Los Angeles Daily News, Oct. 19, 1953, carried two side by side ads featuring authors Bradbury and Adamski.

The 1960s

The UFO controversy had a resurgence in the 1960s, but Bradbury seems to have avoided taking part in public conversation on the topic. Bradbury wrote an article for his friend Forrest J. Ackerman in the Warren magazine Spacemen # 8, June 1964, discussing his favorite science fiction films, among them: “The Day the Earth Stood Still strikes me as a fine attempt to speak to mankind today about its problems on Earth.” Bradbury didn’t mind flying saucers as fiction, he was more concerned with a good story.

In 1967, the paperback collection, Man Faces Extra-Terrestrial Life In Contact edited by Noel Keyes listed Bradbury’s name first and reprinted his 1951, story, "The Fire Balloons."

Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1963. Contact, 1967.

George Adamski went on to write two more books about his series of interplanetary adventures. Despite being exposed as a fraud, he still had devoted followers when he died in 1965 at the age of 74.

1970s: Close Encounters

Bradbury was quoted in “’Saucer Cults’ Reread Bible in Light of UFOs” by Russell Chandler in the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 8, 1974:

“Religion and science are always circling each other,” he said. “It's like flesh and skin. There is a continuum between the two… The deep gap between them is just talk. But Bradbury, who believes “humanoid creatures like us” could exist on other planets, added that both science and religion “deal in ignorances,” and that theory is, in fact, faith. “We need to hang loose on this,’ he concluded. ‘There is always the danger of a new quack religion forming, but we need to allow this to proliferate in a free society.”

The 1976 reprint of Ralph and Judy Blum’s 1974 Bantam paperback book, “Beyond Earth: Man’s Contact with UFOs,” carried a cover blurb from Ray Bradbury stating: “We have needed a new, comprehensive UFO survey for many years now. … This is that book.”

Bradbury didn’t care for flying saucers, but he was deeply moved by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. His loving review, “Opening the Beautiful Door of True Immortality,” was published in The Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1977 (Reprinted in the UK magazine Starburst, March 1978). He had nothing to say about the UFO lore in the film, just focused on what he felt was the true message:

“The great truth it teaches is that human beings, no matter what their shape, size, color, or far star-country of origin, are on their way to Becoming, Deciding to Be, deciding to travel in order to stay, deciding to live rather than dooming themselves to graveyard pits on separate worlds.”

Interviewed for the Jan. 12, Merv Griffin show, Bradbury talked about his love of Close Encounters: “I've seen it twice and cried both times…it's a very emotional experience, a very beautiful one...it's probably the most important film of the last 20 years.”

When Bradbury was a guest on the Tonight Show on March 1, 1978, host Johnny Carson asked him about UFOs and alien contact:

“The fascination lately of course with... Star Wars, Close Encounters… where people become involved again in reported flying saucers, what's your personal observation?"

Bradbury evaded the question, saying, “I'm very open. I think we you have to keep your mind totally open…” He later hinted at his true position by saying we had begun exploring space and “that we're going to be the Martians from here on in...” Carson persisted, “Do you feel personally that we are being observed? A lot of people believe that… if that's so, why don’t [aliens] contact us?” Bradbury mentioned the possible bacterial or cultural concerns, then gave his real answer. 

“I don't really think they're that close to us at this point, but I think that we'll make the contact… We can't travel fast enough right now… it will be possible, let's say 200 years from now, to make it to Alpha Centauri at almost the speed of light.”

1980s: A Saucer from a Martian Hoaxer

To promote the 1983 movie adaptation of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a version was produced for radio. It was narrated by Orson Welles, notorious for The War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938. Bradbury was unhappy with the script changes, but rewarded afterwards with a nice memento when Welles, “handed Bradbury the reading script with a hand-drawn flying saucer inscribed, ‘For Ray from his admiring friend, Orson.’” From Bradbury Beyond Apollo by Jonathan R. Eller, 2020

 

The Turn of the Century

The debate about aliens and UFOs got a boost in 1996 when scientists reported possible evidence of cellular life in an ancient meteorite thought to originate on Mars. The Los Angeles Times, Aug. 8, 1996, article stated there was a prominent non-believer:

“It’s ridiculous,” said author Ray Bradbury, whose Martian Chronicles painted a far more vibrant picture of Martian life. “They don’t have any proof. They’re not even sure [the rock] came from Mars. It’s a theory.” Bradbury compared the announcement to claims about UFOs and mysterious crop circles. He doesn’t believe it for a minute. “It’s stupid,” he said.

Ray Bradbury suffered a stroke in 1999 that left him with many physical problems. While his memory was dimmed by age and illness, he was still sharp and continued to work. During his final years, Bradbury spoke about UFOS and aliens several more times. Jim Cherry interviewed Bradbury for Arizona Republic August 31, 2000 (reprinted in Conversations with Ray Bradbury, Steven L. Aggelis, editor, 2004).

Cherry: “What do you think of alien visitors and UFOs?”

Bradbury: “No such, no way. It's ridiculous; there's absolutely no proof anywhere, at any time.”

Ray Bradbury wrote the foreword for the 2001 book, The Complete War of the Worlds: Mars' Invasion of Earth from H.G. Wells to Orson Welles. Entitled, “H.G. Wells, Master of Paranoia,” and it included a passage to the UFO topic:

“Wells and Welles prepared us for the delusional madness of the past fifty years. In fact, the entire history of the United States and the last half of the twentieth century is exemplified beautifully in Well's work. Starting with the so-called arrival of flying saucers in the 1950s, we've had a continuation of a mild panic at being invaded by creatures from some other part of the universe. It started with that alien professor who sold hot dogs with saucers of Invaders at the foot of Mt. Palomar. It then ravened up the years with half-baked sightings to end in Roswell and while true believers who claimed they never met a bug-eyed monster they didn't love.

Dr. Hynek disagreed, and he was the expert on flying saucers hitting the fan, having started the Center for UFO Studies. People said yes to his truths but snuck off the next day to Bide-a-Wee Martian Shoals in California, Arizona, and New Mexico.

The myths proliferated, all the way from the friendly beasts that invaded Meteor Crater in my It Came from Outer Space to the incredible mothership landing in firework illuminations in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. God reaching down to judge Adam's upstretched hand.

So the invasions will never cease. Or, not until we landfall Mars, build towns, and become friendly invaders to the universe. We will arrive in peace, and hopefully go with God.”

Ray Bradbury only mentioned Roswell in passing, but he recognized the story as something that had been manufactured by UFO mythmakers. In 2003, Bradbury had a heated exchange with Paul Davids, the producer of the 1994 Roswell TV movie. Bradbury was “an arch skeptic,” according to Davids, who said the disagreement happened at a Hollywood luncheon: 

“When he heard that I had made Roswell he started yelling at me! He started attacking me! Saying ‘what are you doing making a piece of fiction like that and trying to pass it off as something that’s true?’”

The last documented comments by Ray Bradbury on UFOs take us full circle. In 2009, Jeff Krulik filmed an interview of Bradbury, whom he found “still gracious and full of life and big ideas.” Almost as an afterthought, Krulik asked him, “Do you believe in UFOs?” In a hyperbolic reply, Bradbury said that George Adamski “invented” UFOs, blaming him for the popularity of the belief in them as alien spaceships. Bradbury described arriving at the 1952 Sou-Westercon:

“I went down [by] train to go to the science fiction convention in San Diego… in the U.S. Grant Hotel… people were rushing out… ‘We're leaving… [a] man that has a hot dog stand at the base of Mount Palomar, he's talking about some flying saucers… He's a nut, stupid nut.’ So I found out that... it was a complete lie that he made up… and people believed him. I talked on various radio shows and TV shows and told people not to listen… they asked me about that, I said, ‘Go talk to that hot dog salesman, it's a complete lie.’”

Ray Bradbury died on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91. The Los Angeles Times obituary for Bradbury quoted his view on his writing:

“I’m not a science fiction writer. I’ve written only one book of science fiction [Fahrenheit 451]. All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can’t happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.”

Bradbury viewed flying saucers from outer space not as science fiction, but as fantasy.

. . .

 

This article is an offshoot of a project that began years ago, “Science Fiction vs. Flying Saucers,” examining the opposition of many of the field’s authors to beliefs about UFOs. If you’re interested in seeing more on this topic, please let us know in an email or comment.

 

CE3K Trivia: George Adamski’s Revenge?

Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind presented a story based on a potpourri of events, concepts, and legends from UFO lore. Spielberg had scared moviegoers with Jaws, and all the advertising for CE3K was dark and menacing, telling us to “Watch the Skies,” and that “We are not Alone.” For most of the movie, the mystery of the UFOs is treated as menacing, but in the final act, the Mothership lands we learn that these ancient and technologically advanced aliens were peaceful and benevolent. Except in appearance, just like George Adamski’s space brothers.