Youth Will Have Its Day
Adult hoaxers often anticipate monetary reward, or the perquisites of fame.
Younger hoaxers, want notoriety, too, but their ability to put one over on adults brings special fun. In 1967, fourteen-year-old Ronnie Hill of Oriental, North Carolina, had a clever idea. On July 21, he snapped a blurry photograph of a figure clad in a spacesuit and with one arm raised in friendly greeting—or perhaps aggressively, as a dark, bell-mouthed object appears to be gripped in the upraised hand. The presumed space traveler has an unusually large, spade- shaped head and painfully thin arms and legs. Behind the figure, apparently at some distance and level with the figure’s head and shoulders, is a smoothly spherical shape that Ronnie Hill identified as a spaceship.
The photograph’s lower half is comprised of foliage, or perhaps blades of grass; the spaceman stands at the middle of the frame, just above center. Because of the snapshot’s fuzziness and visual perspective, scale is at issue. Perhaps the figure is a person in costume, or maybe the visitor is only inches high. In a 1967 letter to Dell Publishing’s Flying Saucers UFO Reports magazine, Hill described the spaceman as standing three to three-and-a-half feet high. When the boy snapped the photo, the mysterious visitor was about fifteen feet away. The boy added that the craft measured about nine feet in diameter.
Editors at Dell passed the letter and snapshot on to UFOlogist John Keel. Keel shortly located experts willing to vouch for the image’s authenticity (though this seems small evidence for an alien visitor, even assuming the figure and sphere were real). Some sympathetic examiners saw a resemblance between Hill’s spaceman and the spade-headed Flatwoods Monster sighted in West Virginia in 1952 (see chapter ten). Keel wrote about Ronnie Hill’s encounter in the January- February 1969 issue of Flying Saucer Review. Although Keel later had doubts about the photograph, he was unable to devote sufficient time to a full investigation before his death in 2009.
Around 2011, Fotocat, a credible UFO/IFO investigatory project operated by Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, engaged photo expert Andres Duarte to examine the Ronnie Hill image. Duarte mathematically plotted sightlines, angle of sunlight, height-to-distance ratio, and other elements. He concluded that were the photograph real, the sphere would be considerably more elevated. Further, the sphere would dominate nearly half of the frame’s area, instead of the small area captured by Hill.
Young Ronnie eventually admitted his prank. The creature was a small doll wrapped in tinfoil, and the spacecraft was an egg. Regardless, Hill’s spaceman has survived in UFO lore, inspiring renderings by artists and mention as a “legitimate” sighting in The Black Book of Flying Saucers, a 1970 book by Henry Durrant (a pseudonym for Didier Serres).
Ronnie Hill, who smartly copyrighted his photo while still a boy, perpetrated a hoax that has engaged people’s imaginations for half a century.