Tuesday 9 July 2013

Flying Saucers Have Landed

Pole Hill, a section of Epping Forest in Chingford, was a regular haunt for me and my pals in 1972 and '73. The reason? Uninterrupted views across two massive reservoirs, long-rumoured locally to be a centre of heavy UFO activity - the Area 51 of North East London if you will. With our imaginations fuelled by too much Star Trek and Erich von Däniken, we would head off on a Saturday morning and spend hours sitting on the grass, cameras in hand, gazing out through our binoculars, waiting for....something, anything to happen. Funnily enough, we never did see any little green men, but I'm pleased to note that all these years later, the rumours of their existence in the area persist.

The soundtrack to our Pole Hill excursions and to our fevered discussions about every new titbit of UFO-related gossip, was 'Flying Saucers Have Landed', a groovy single by Paul St. John, released in 1972, but even then sounding more late 60's than early 70's.


4 comments:

C said...

Ooooh!

I've met so many people over the years who have very believable tales of odd sightings that I can't help but keep an open mind. I was terribly excited myself a couple of years ago one night when I spotted a line of around a dozen orange lights, regularly spaced, high in the sky, moving quite swiftly across my local town. Oh, the adrenaline rush! I didn't know whether to call the police, email the local paper, find a UFO hotline or what. Only the next day did I realise it must have been Chinese Lanterns :-(

Old Pa's Corner said...

I love the thought of flying saucers and aliens....but find it all a bit scary....think of us discovering America, New Zealand for the first time and the way we treated the natives...maybe they will treat us in the same way....I would like to think not!!

The Swede said...

My friends and I would speculate and hypothesise for hours on end about UFO's and alien invasion, then, quite suddenly, we stopped. Perhaps we discovered girls, I can't remember! In more recent years I have occasionally glanced at the odd UFO related thing on YouTube, but unfortunately they invariably seem to feature fairly eccentric or less than believable people and so don't always come across as a serious proposition. I'm open minded though.

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