The Zetans of 1966

[natecull]

An expansion of a comment I just posted on the Reddit UFOs forum ( https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/ ... i/m5un5d9/ ), because it's a thing I've known for several decades now, and have never seen commented on before.

The phrase "Zetas/Zetans" for little aliens with probing and memory-wiping ways has become widespread in UFO and popular culture since the 1990s. The word "Zeta", as everyone now well knows, originates in a conjecture by Marjorie Fish first published in 1974, that the star system Zeta Reticuli might be the home planet of the UFO occupants reportedly encountered by Barney and Betty Hill in 1961 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_an ... l_incident ) The Hill's story was first widely published in 1966 as John G Fuller's "The Interrupted Journey".

But the universe sometimes has strange little "burps" and things apparently happen out of order. Eight years out of order in this case....

Did you know that there was a British comic from 1966 -- the same year that "The Interrupted Journey" was published, but eight years before Terence Dickinson published "The Zeta Reticuli Incident" in 1974 -- which named its flying saucer aliens "Zetans", because they operated from a "Satellite Zeta"?

The strip was "UFO Agent" from the famous British Eagle comic (much more famous for being the home of Dan Dare). Eagle was actually positioning UFO Agent as Dan Dare's replacement, and it became the cover strip for a few months in 1967.

See: https://eagle-times.blogspot.com/2021/0 ... story.html

There's a direct UFO connection with the Fleetway Books publishing combine which produced Eagle (and Look and Learn, its educational counterpart) in the 1960s, because their social circle overlapped with Waveney Girvan's highly influential "Flying Saucer Review" magazine ( see eg: https://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2017/09 ... azine.html ).

One specific person liking these two worlds of British UFOlogy and British boy's magazines in 1966 (and specifically, Flying Saucer Review and Eagle), would have been FSR editor Charles Bowen. Another, perhaps even closer link, was Eagle sub-editor and FSR assistant editor Dan Lloyd: https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2013/08/dan-lloyd.html

So it's not outside the realm of possibility that the phrase "Zeta", or some other hint about Zeta Reticuli, might have leaked into British/American UFOlogy from someplace other than Marjorie Fish, sending her thoughts in that direction... or perhaps Fish herself was thinking about Zeta Reticuli and talking about it well before she read The Interrupted Journey...

Or perhaps neither of those occurred, and "Zeta" popping up in British UFO-adjacent circles in connection with fictional aliens years before that Greek letter had any business being in the UFO zeitgeist, is just one of those weird cosmic red herrings which seem to orbit around the UFO subject. A little spark of wild precognition, perhaps...


Nate