The Seventies: Ufology’s Golden Age
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 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 and his conclusion that it was a hoax.
