To earth from heaven

When I was a child, the highlight of the summer holidays was when my cousin Simon came to stay. We shared a common obsession: aliens. Day after fruitless day, we would scan the skies, looking for UFOs. At night, long after we were supposed to have gone to sleep, we would get out our torches and pore over books on extraterrestrial life.

These ranged from the sternly scientific — tomes on astronomy or space flight — to paperbacks with altogether more lurid copy. One in particular, filled with vivid images of flying saucers and Area 51, was a focus of our almost superstitious fascination. This was because it contained a picture that —to my deep embarrassment now — we had mutually decided was the scariest we had ever seen. The ‘Kentucky Glowing Man’ was a goblin-like creature that had supposedly attacked a farm one night in the 1950s. The illustration of this incident — complete with phosphorescent alien — gave us both such a delicious frisson of terror that we only had to look at it to scream and hide under our duvets. ‘Kentucky Glowing Man’ came to serve us as shorthand for everything that made the concept of extraterrestrial life so compelling and delicious.

But with age came disillusionment. One summer, when I mentioned the Kentucky Glowing Man to Simon, he shook his head sagely. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘would an alien have crossed the immensities of interstellar space just to frighten two farmers?’ And with that simple question, the scales fell from my eyes. It was like being told that Father Christmas did not exist. My belief in the reality of extraterrestrial life, hitherto such an article of faith, shrivelled and died.