The Elusive Mr. Allingham
Flying Saucer from Mars is a 1954 book by a Briton named Cedric Allingham.
In it, Allingham claimed to have witnessed a saucer landing at Lossiemouth, Scotland, and spoken with a humanoid alien that left the craft. A local fisherman named James Duncan also witnessed the landing and signed an affidavit to that effect; the document is reproduced in the book.
The Allingham-Duncan account caught the attention of Scots and others, but both men were elusive when reporters and researchers attempted to contact them for additional information. Duncan seemed to have vanished altogether, and Allingham made only one personal appearance in support of his book (for the pleasure of a UFO club in Tunbridge Wells). Still, supporters of George Adamski and other contactees initially hailed Flying Saucer from Mars.
By the 1980s, skeptics concluded that Allingham was British astronomer Patrick Moore, and they were right—partially. Moore did indeed write the book, but the man in the Flying Saucer from Mars author photograph (a reedy, mustachioed fellow posing with a twelve-inch telescope) was Peter Davies, a friend of Moore who passed himself off as Allingham at that Tunbridge Wells appearance. Davies’s most significant contribution was his rewrite of Moore’s original manuscript, so that the book would have the distinct “voice” Moore desired.
Because of a hugely successful 1979 BBC television program called The Sky at Night, Moore (later Sir Patrick) became Britain’s equivalent of Carl Sagan—a respected scientist who found popular recognition on television. Moore had interviewed American contactee George Adamski for the BBC’s Panorama in 1956, following publication of Adamski and Desmond Leslie’s Flying Saucers Have Landed, and was not overly impressed—except by the ease with which anyone could manufacture a saucer story. Thus was born Flying Saucer from Mars.
Moore’s good-natured hoax began to unravel when some of his friends and acquaintances confirmed that the telescope in the author photograph of Davies belonged to Moore.
Patrick Moore died in 2012, at eighty-nine. To the end of his life, he maintained that he was not Cedric Allingham, and soberly threatened to sue anyone who said he was. Moore’s autobiography makes no mention of the book or Allingham.
British folklorist David Clarke concluded a 2012 piece about Moore with the great astronomer’s own thoughts about UFOs: “There is nothing I would like better than to meet a Martian, a Venusian, a Saturnian or even a Sirian and my immediate instinct would be to invite him to join me in a Sky at Night programme.”