Buck Nelson and the "Things": The Ozark Spaceman's Three Discs and Trip to Mars, the Moon and Venus

William E. "Buck" Nelson farmed in the hills north of Mountain View, in Howell County, Missouri. He lived miles from the nearest neighbor.

July 30, 1954. 4:00 p.m. Nelson was listening to his radio when it began, in his words, "to go crazy wild." His dog set up a barking. Outside, his pony began "to raise all kinds of cane." Then: "As I went out the kitchen door right over it were three huge disks." Each, he later wrote, was "fifty feet across and eight feet high." He called them the "Things". He went back for his camera and photographed them three times. Only one frame came out.

He had brought a flashlight too. He waved it at the objects as a signal for them to land. Instead, he wrote, they fired a ray "much brighter and hotter than the sun" that knocked him behind a barrel. Nelson said the ray cured his lumbago and 15 years of neuritis, improved his eyesight and left him able to read without glasses.

The craft came back. They circled low over his house and spoke through a "public address system", asking if he was friendly and asking permission to land near his spring. Then they landed. Three visitors came, with a huge dog named Bo said to weigh 385 lb. They were friendly human spacemen from Venus. Bucky, a 19-year-old distant cousin of Nelson's from Colorado, served as interpreter. Bob Solomon, the pilot, was 200 years old "but youthful in appearance." Their message: "We are here to see which way this world will use Atomic power; for peace or war."

April 24, 1955. Nelson put on clean overalls and went aboard. Once airborne, he said, the spacemen let him play with the controls. He flew the ship "upside down and every which way." On Venus he saw hover-cars with no wheels. On Mars, people living in rock homes. On the Moon, large hangars for servicing spacecraft. On each world he left a US flag.

Project Blue Book kept a copy of his photograph, filed by mistake under Mountain View, Montana. The caption was blunt: "Air force did not buy the story." The evaluation hinted at a double exposure, or objects tossed before the camera. In 1958 the FBI opened a file after the Rev. Bill Britton wrote to J. Edgar Hoover that Nelson was "using the FBI to authenticate his story." Nelson said agents had questioned him in Washington, D.C. "The guvment was disappointed in my story," he said, disappointed "because I couldn't tell 'em any more than what they already knew."

In 1956 the letters and mailings of James L. Hill of Seymour launched Nelson's fame, and Quill Press printed his booklet, My Trip to Mars, the Moon and Venus. In June 1958 he held his first Spacecraft Convention. About 300 of the expected 10,000 people came to hear the contactee Wayne S. Aho. Nelson sold booklets, postcards and envelopes of black hair he said came from Bo, while visitors saw burn spots he called landing marks.

His later writings turned to segregation, and his house burned in 1969. Even the date of his death is disputed. Yet Mountain View remembers him. Cosmic Coffee opened in his honour, and a town festival was planned for the 2024 eclipse. As sociologist Thomas Kersen put it, "he made a remote spot in rural Missouri part of the counterculture world for a time."