The Flying Purple People Eater

In 1957, I was a third grader in Dallas when a rash of UFO sightings around Levelland, Texas made headlines in Big D and around the world. While not yet old enough to hang on every word the newspapers had to say about what happened, I clearly remember hearing about that South Plains incident and other reports of mysterious aerial lights or objects during the mid-to-late 1950s.

I  also recall seeing a newspaper photograph of a contraption some hoaxer built in an attempt to fool the public into thinking that an alien spacecraft had landed near Grapevine. While some people attributed the things they saw in the sky to government secrets or intelligent life from another world, others got their kicks doctoring photographs or creating “evidence” of space visitors.

        In the spring of 1957, as I finished second grade at the demonstration school at the Texas State College for Women in Denton (now Texas Women’s University), I became a victim of a UFO prank myself. When my mother brought me home from school one day, the college student who occupied the other side of our duplex came over to tell me he’d picked up something on his shortwave radio that might interest me.

        Sipping a cold Grapette soda, I went next door with Mother and stood in the looked-old-to-me student’s living room as he fiddled with knobs and switches on one of an array of gray metal boxes filled with tubes and coils. Our neighbor reminded me of a somewhat younger version of the brainy character on television’s “Watch Mr. Wizard,” the NBC series that ran from 1951 to 1965. 

        “Listen to what I picked up on my shortwave the other night,” he said.

        The guy flipped a switch, and a reel-to-reel tape recorder started rolling.

        At this late date, I won’t try to recreate what I what I heard on the tape, but it sounded like the last words of a spaceship commander about to crash. The alien pilot—who just happened to speak English with a Texas accent—shouted “Mayday-Mayday-Mayday,” noted his position, and reported his craft was hurling out of control toward Planet Earth. Then, in midsentence, his voice cut off, his spaceship obviously having crashed and exploded. Who knows? The craft might have gone down near Denton.

        Only nine, I believed every word of what I had heard—at least until Joe College and my mother started laughing and I realized I’d been hornswoggled. Even so, I still wanted to believe I’d heard a radio transmission from a flying saucer. In that era, with talk of atomic-powered spaceships, space stations and colonization of the moon and Mars by the 1970s, anything seemed possible.

        That incident amounted to my only UFO experience, but during the 1950s flying saucers were as much a part of American popular culture as poodle skirts and hula-hoops. No matter their origin—outer space or our collective imagination—UFOs spun into the mass media’s solar system of newspapers, magazines, books, radio, television, and film.

The 1956 movie “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” held me on the edge of my seat, and Sheb Wooley’s Top 40 song “The Purple People Eater” became one of my favorite sing-along tunes. I used paper plates taped together to create my own fleet of flying saucers and fully expected that by the time I grew up I’d be able to travel to space as casually as my mother drove to class every day.

        Eighteen years old going on 19, I decided to perpetrate my own UFO hoax. A cub reporter on West Texas newspaper, I turned in a short, anonymous article supposedly based on a telephone call from a woman who’d insisted that I couldn’t use her name. According to my piece, the night before—just outside of town—she’d seen a mysterious round, low-flying object that alternately pulsated orange and white.

        I never expected the piece would appear in the next morning’s newspaper, but it did. I also never expected what happened next. Not long after I got to work the following afternoon, I answered the main newsroom phone. One the line was a woman (definitely not anyone I knew) who said she just wanted the newspaper to know that she’d also seen the flying orange and white flashing object.

        Fortunately for what turned out to be a 20-year newspaper career, I waited until well after I’d left that newspaper before I told anyone about the prank that could’ve gotten me fired on the spot.

Now a gray-headed Social Security recipient, and not being an astronaut or multi-millionaire, I’m pretty sure I’ll never venture beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Well, unless I’m kidnapped by a UFO crew as a specimen for scientific examination.

On the upside, I can still recite the chorus line from “The Purple People Eater”:

It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater
(One-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater)
A one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater
Sure looks strange to me…