This is the light switch cover in my office. My daughter (Twilight Ninja Girl) got it for her birthday but I have the only dual-throw light switch on our lot. (I say on our lot because my office is a separate building from the house — I’ll blog about it in the future.) So I ended up with the cover.

As you can see it’s got glitter and glue and this thing pasted on it with flying saucers and this motto. Looking at the bottom edge I saw this:

And I realized slowly that this was a paperback cover. (There are people out there who are going “You idiot, hadn’t you ever heard of Donald Keyhoe?”)

A little Googling and I found that indeed, it was a book and that Mr. Keyhoe was not only a noted and famous UFOist, he was a genre writer with stories in the pulps including four appearances in Weird Tales.

On UFO’s he published:

• The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950)
• Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953)
• Flying Saucer Conspiracy (1955)
• Flying Saucers: Top Secret (1960)
• Aliens From Space (1973)

He cofounded the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in 1956 but was kicked out by the board eleven years later for authoritarian behavior and financial incompetence. He believed at that time that, instead of the Air Force, it was now the CIA who was covering up evidence of Alien Visitation.

It really gives me hope.

I mean, if my career as an SF author goes down the tubes, I’ve got other avenues. Hell, it worked for Whitley Streiber, didn’t it? I could manage a little financial incompetence.

And I’m not likely to forget–all I have to do is turn on the light.

Full text of The Flying Saucers Are Real is in the public domain and available here.