The little dog laugh'd to see such Craft

I keep spending all my lunch money in the Oxfam near where I work. Last week: 26 copies of the Flying Saucer Review for only £5.99. They date from 1958 to 1963 and they're such a weird little slice of history. The reports of sightings and other articles ("Mars and Venus Inhabited? Famous Russian scientist admits possibility") are impossibly earnest and endearingly quaint. I have to keep reminding myself that they were all published years before the moon landings. I've just read a rather desolate article from 1961 about a Swiss amateur radio enthusiast picking up a transmission that seems to be the dying words of a stranded cosmonaut. You can't get much more Cold War than that.

For the record I don't really believe in flying saucers, not ones piloted by aliens anyway. I think I used to up until about the age of fifteen or sixteen, but I remember reading a comment by Patrick Moore saying that in all his years of stargazing he'd never once spotted a UFO. Mad old badger though he is I found this more persuasive than any reported sightings.