2.08.2006

Tastes Like Chicken

Alien in the Attic

from Sploid

An English man found something disturbingly gruesome while remodeling a cottage he bought in Norfolk.

Hidden away in the attic and wrapped in yellowed newspapers from 1947 was a baby "alien" in an old candy jar.

Floating in a thick, disgusting liquid, the foot-long monster fetus has apparently been in the attic for nearly 60 years.

Barry Broom, 54, bought the cottage eight months ago and had just gotten around to working on the attic loft. The previous owner was an "old spinster," Broom said.

As for the creature in the jar - which was wrapped in Daily Mirror papers from October 1947 - Broom doesn't believe it's an actual pickled space monster.

"I haven't got three heads and I'm not the sort of eccentric lunatic to think it's an alien," he told the Guardian this week.

"But it's a funny thing to find in your loft."

The strange numbers on the alien's left foot turned out to be an American-style serial number that looks particularly military in nature.

Broom believes it might be some kind of model used by the U.S. Air Force. There are two large American air bases nearby, and many thousands of U.S. military have lived in Norfolk from WWII to today.

Without seeing the curiosity from Broom's attic, the USAF denied having anything to do with the alien fetus. "It's a hoax," said an Air Force spokeswoman. She did not explain what about a figurine in a jar might be a hoax.

Curiously, the style of alien figure was not known to the public in 1947.

The news of a flying-saucer crash near Roswell, New Mexico, did briefly appear in newspapers in the summer of that year.

But tales of "alien pilots" did not become part of the popular legend until the late 1970s, when UFO researchers returned to the long-forgotten Roswell story and interviewed dozens of surviving witnesses.

By this point, a specific space alien was familiar to many Americans. These short, slim and sexless drones had chilling black eyes set high in their insectoid heads. The widespread acceptance of this particular visitor was in large part the result of Steven Spielberg’s hit movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, released in 1977 during a hysterical wave of U.S. UFO sightings that would continue until 1981.

A series of books, articles and TV specials about Roswell followed throughout the 1980s, culminating in government-conspiracy E.T.-coverup phenomena such as the long-running X-Files in the 1990s.

Oddly enough, the spectacular landing of the mothership in Close Encounters is reportedly based on real footage filmed by Air Force personnel at a base in the southwestern United States. This rumored film of the spindly little gray aliens meeting Air Force officials was actually offered for a television documentary in 1972, but the offer was revoked when the Watergate scandal shook up the entire federal government.

Is Broom's foul discovery a 59-year-old example of the U.S. military's careful creation of the UFO phenomena, including the "aliens" that wouldn't be introduced to popular culture for decades?

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