The Amazing Godwin
by David F. Godwin

(September 2008)--I am old enough to remember when flying saucers were fun.

Hundreds, thousands of people were seeing mysterious things in the sky. Not just lights, but metallic discs, cigars, and flying machines. Every now and then, there would be a close contact, as with the Florida Scoutmaster I read about in Boys Life. But even more fascinating were the intimate contacts with the pilots and crew of these extraterrestrial spacecraft: the kindly Venusians who took George Adamski on a tour of the solar system, or the less kindly nightmarish monsters with acid tentacles who stopped cars on lonely roads in West Virgina.

I liked the Venusians better. The eight-foot-tall slithering horrors were too frightening.

I read several books by Donald E. Keyhoe, which convinced me that Flying Saucers Are Real and that the government is Covering-Up. Not much has changed in that regard. I read Adamski’s first book and its companion piece by Desmond Leslie. I read Gerald Heard’s bizarre theory that the aliens must be insects—bees, in all probability—in order to withstand the accelerations  and sudden directional changes exhibited by their spacecraft.

I didn’t read the skeptical material by Donald Menzel and other close-minded “enemies of truth.” I didn’t want to hear it.

I was enthralled. In any remote area, I would sit on the ground and wait, hoping a saucer would land and take me for a ride to a better and more fascinating world.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, that never happened—that I can remember.

Decades passed, UFOs ceased to be newsworthy, and then it quit being fun.

It had its beginning with the eight-foot octopoid monsters, but now it was worse than brief encounters and being badly scared.

Instead of taking people on nice pleasure excursions, the ETs were suddenly abducting people—by the thousands, evidently—and performing hideous experiments on them that left them scarred for life, physically and mentally. What made the aliens turn mean?

Some of them were reptiles who could disguise themselves as human. Others were giant praying mantises. Ick. What happened to the nice Venusians?

And then the legends of underground bases where repulsive ETs were allowed to perform Nazi medical experiment on human beings in return for snippets of alien technology. You know, like the cell phone or iPod. We let them mutilate cattle and gave them the Tesla death ray in return for the secrets of the Pentium microprocessor.

It isn’t much fun anymore. Things have gotten so bad that I’m anxiously waiting for those nice Venusians to give me a ride out of here!

David F. Godwin is the Managing Editor of FATE and author of numerous articles, columns, books, and other materials.