226 – Usborne book of UFOs

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow welcome entertainer, impressionist, and amateur astronomer Jon Culshaw to discuss 📚 UFOs 💵, part of the Usborne “World of the Unknown” series — a gorgeously illustrated children’s book first published in 1977 and recently reissued. Jon wrote the foreword for the new edition, having owned his original copy since the age of nine. Best known in the UK for the BBC topical impressions series Dead Ringers and his work with Big Finish Productions on the audio adventures of Doctor Who, Jon brings an infectious, wide-eyed enthusiasm for the subject that makes it easy to remember what it felt like to scan the skies as a kid and genuinely wonder.

This is a somewhat unusual episode of MonsterTalk: rather than interviewing the book’s original author (the elusive Theodore “Ted” Mather Wilding-White, who was tracked down but declined to participate in the reissue’s promotion), the hosts get something arguably more fun — a lifelong superfan who still has his dog-eared first-edition copy, and who punctuates the conversation with a revolving cast of Doctor Who voices.

🛸 The Book and Its Era

The World of the Unknown: UFOs was published in 1977 — a fascinating cultural moment Blake points out sits just before the Roswell story was resurrected in the early 1980s by researchers like Stanton Friedman. The book predates the darker, conspiratorial tone that would come to dominate UFO culture. Instead it strikes what all three agree is a tone of open scientific curiosity — covering the J. Allen Hynek close-encounter classification system, natural misidentification causes (ball lightning, Venus, searchlights, iridium flares), and speculative astrobiology, without coming down firmly on whether any of it is real. Jon credits the book’s non-patronising, inquisitive voice for the fact that it hasn’t dated.

Ted Wilding-White, the original author, also wrote 📚 Jane’s Pocketbook of Space Exploration 💵 and covered space as a journalist in the 1970s. Blake has attached PDFs of two of his period newspaper articles to the show notes for those curious about his writing.

🌌 Jon as Amateur Astronomer

Jon wrote a column called Exoplanet Excursions for Sky at Night magazine for six years, imagining the physical conditions of confirmed exoplanets — an idea he traces directly to a page in the Usborne book that speculated on what the Hopkinsville Goblins’ home planet might look like based on their described anatomy. He rhapsodises about observing the Galilean moons through binoculars and muses about future human visits to the TRAPPIST system and 55 Cancri e. He also notes — as many skeptics have observed — that amateur astronomers tend to report far fewer UFOs than the general public, because they’re very good at identifying what they’re actually looking at.

👽 Cases That Stuck

Several classic cases from the book come up in conversation:

– The Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter (1955): Jon’s long-time favourite. Blake mentions his own hands-on experiment firing a 20-gauge shotgun and .22 rifle through a window screen — finding the damage entirely consistent with what the witnesses reported, lending at least physical credibility to the account even if the cause remains disputed.
– An alleged 1972 alien encounter at a Renault car factory in Argentina, featuring tall, pale, seven-foot creatures with piercing eyes — which Jon describes as feeling like a scene from Doctor Who or Quatermass.
– The Betty and Barney Hill abduction case, with Jon focusing on Betty’s recalled star map and its purported connection to the Zeta Reticuli system. Blake recommends the podcast Strange Arrivals for a deep dive into the case.

📺 Out of This World (BBC, 1977)

Jon returns several times to a 1977 BBC documentary called Out of This World, presented by reporter Hugh Burnett, as a companion piece to the Usborne book. Two segments are available on YouTube and are linked in the original show notes:

– 📺 “Orange Light” — Joyce Bowles and Ted Pratt encounter a Nordic alien near Winchester
– 📺 Nordic Aliens — Jessie Rostenberg describes a craft hovering over her farmhouse in Staffordshire

Jon recounts both cases with evident delight, voicing the witnesses’ matter-of-fact Midlands sincerity as a quality he finds more compelling than any amount of dramatic embellishment. The documentary also features UFO investigator and ex-diplomat Gordon Crichton — a polyglot who spoke some ten languages and approached the subject with what Jon describes as the brisk authority of the Brigadier from Doctor Who.

🔬 Science, Wonder, and Pyramid Power

The book contains a surprising amount of hands-on activity for a UFO title — including instructions for building a miniature pyramid to test pyramid power on a rasher of bacon, and a build-your-own-UFO craft project. Blake announces his intention to try both and post the results. Jon approves. The conversation also touches on Carl Sagan‘s speculation (in his Cosmos series) about possible high-atmosphere life forms on giant planets like Jupiter, and the tentative 2020 claim of phosphine detection in the Venusian atmosphere as a potential — if disputed — biosignature.

🎭 Jon Culshaw and the Many Voices of the Doctor

Jon is perhaps best known to UK audiences from Dead Ringers and from playing the Brigadier and various incarnations of the Doctor for Big Finish Productions. Throughout the interview he slips in and out of Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee, and — in a moment of inspired digression — Worzel Gummidge. He mentions an upcoming stage production based on 📚 Notes from a Small Island 💵 by Bill Bryson, and shares a story about his friend Brian Blessed apparently describing a very large, bellowing, red-faced Yeti-like creature on a mountaineering expedition — which may or may not have been a description of Brian Blessed himself.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 UFOs 💵 (Usborne World of the Unknown) by Theodore Mather Wilding-White
– 📚 Jane’s Pocketbook of Space Exploration 💵 by Theodore Mather Wilding-White
– 📚 Notes from a Small Island 💵 by Bill Bryson

🔗 Related Links

– Jon Culshaw — Wikipedia
– Dead Ringers (BBC) — Wikipedia
– J. Allen Hynek and the Close Encounter Classification System
– Kelly–Hopkinsville Encounter (1955)
– Betty and Barney Hill Incident
– Zeta Reticuli
– Quatermass (BBC science-fiction series)
– Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World
– Phosphine on Venus — proposed biosignature
– Pyramid Power

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

We are joined by entertainer Jon Culshaw to talk about the influential children’s book UFOs, (affiliate link) part of the Usborne “World of the Unknown” series that was recently reissued.  Jon brings his love of the mysterious and his uncanny ability to do voice impressions as we talk about how UFOs were presented in the 1970s, the wonders of space, and – of course – Doctor Who.

Jon’s got a Wikipedia page! In addition to his work on Dead Ringers and BBC Radio adaptations of Doctor Who, Jon will soon be taking to the stage in an adaptation of Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island. 

BBC Out of this World (1977) segments mentioned are available on YouTube:

Orange Light 

Nordic Aliens 

Attached:
I’ve added a couple of articles by the original author of the UFO book, Theodore Mather Wilding-White, from his 1970s stint as a journalist covering Space.  Also, I attached a contemporary review of the book.