The following bit on Buck Nelson was co-written with my cosmic cohort, Greg Bishop, host of Radio Misterioso.

Buck Nelson will forever be known as the guy who sold Venusian dog hair, but is probably best known for the famous photo in which he is holding up a sign for one of his spacecraft conventions with the “S” written backwards.

On July 30^th, 1954, sixty-five-year old Buck witnessed “a huge disc-like object” hovering over his farm in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas that beamed down a light “much brighter and hotter than the sun.” Buck later claimed that this beam cured him of chronic lumbago.   1

The following year, Buck was treated to a second otherworldly visitation when a saucer landed in his barnyard carrying a crew of three amiable spacemen that included “Bob Solomon” (a strange name for a Venusian), an earthling traveling with him named “Little Bucky” and a third unnamed “old man” who was a trainee pilot brought along to learn how to steer the saucer. All three space-guys sauntered out of their saucer naked as jaybirds, carrying their uniforms on their shoulders to show they were normally proportioned human men so as not to alarm old Buck—though of course who knows if Buck would have found them any less alarming if they’d been wearing their normal spacesuits. Accompanying the space voyagers was a 385-pound space dog called “Big Bo” who stood on his hind legs and shook Buck’s hand just like he was a regular human feller.

Little Bucky, as the story goes, was a nineteen-year-old Earth-boy, who in 1940 was visited by a Venusian spaceship that landed on his family’s property in Colorado with an offer to take them all on a trip to Venus and back. However, little four-year-old Bucky was the only one in his clan to take the Venusians up on their offer, which apparently his parents were ok with.

As for Bob Solomon, he was a two-hundred-year-old Venusian who didn’t look much older than Bucky, which says a lot about the fine living one can find on Venus. Buck soon learned from the spacemen that atomic bombs would be the death of us all and that we needed to wise up and put the skids on any further atomic bomb testing or reap the dire results!

When the saucer men departed, they left behind Big Bo to hang with Buck for an extended stay and, being the good host he was, Buck would dutifully brush his interplanetary space dog and while doing so was able to collect a considerable amount of Big Bo’s hide, which he later sold in little packets at the 4^th annual Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention. (Some observers at the event noted that the packets of hair looked like they may have come from a plastic doll.) 2

On April 24^th, 1955, Buck was treated to a saucer flight to Mars where he enjoyed lunch, then next stop was the moon where he was treated to a right nice dinner, followed by a much-deserved nap. In between planet-hopping and much-deserved napping, Bob Solomon bestowed upon Buck a Venusian version of the Ten Commandments entitled the “Twelve Laws of God.” Not to be outdone, Little Bucky gave a demonstration of a “Book Machine” which was about the size of a television set and when a book was slid into this book machine contraption it would read the pages out loud, play music and project pictures!   3

Strangely (or not so strangely) Nelson noted that the space brothers also practiced segregation along racial lines, at least on Mars. Buck was told that “there are other races and colors of people there, but I was taken where the people were most like the ones I was used to.”  ⁴

Buck wrote about his madcap adventures with these cosmic klansmen in My Trip To Mars, The Moon, and Venus. Before his trip, Nelson recalled that he “left milk out for my cat, which I call ‘Krazy,’ and Trixie, my horse, could get feed out on the range. Ted, my dog, went on this trip with me.”  5

According to Buck, the people of Venus had “no roads, [due to their use of hovering vehicles] no police force, no jails, no government buildings, and no wars.” The ruler he visited wore overalls just like the denim ones favored by Nelson, but they “didn’t have all the buckles and hooks which ours do and they were made of a different material.”6

A man named Hank Fulk claimed that Nelson:
“…got to meet President Eisenhower on an arranged trip to DC. The President’s doctors learned how to do open heart surgery from Buck Nelson. They were able to save Eisenhower’s life when he had his first heart attack. This was information given to Buck by the “visitors.” Many in Washington DC wanted Buck killed, but the General was a Friend that stood by Old Buck. He was as “HOT” as Area 51.

“BO the dog was analyzed, photographed, and x-rayed by students from The University of Missouri, School of Veterinary Medicine in 1953. The Results showed his hair to be unlike standard dog hair, internal organs were also some different. He was said to look much like a giant Sheep Dog.” 7

The trail on Buck Nelson goes cold sometime in the 1970s, but there are rumors that he spent his last years with relatives in California. The present whereabouts of Big Bo are unknown.

For more fruity flying saucers stories just like this, you really need to check out A is for Adamski: The Golden Age of the UFO Contactees available now where finer books are sold on the internet.

1 Flammonde, Paris, 1971. The Age of Flying Saucers (pp.87-88.) New York: Hawthorn.

2 Nebel, Long John, 1961. The Way Out World (p. 36.) Prentice-Hall, Inc.

3 Clark, Jerome, 2000. Extraordinary Encounters (p. 51) ABC-CLIO Publishers.

⁴ Nelson, Buck. 1956. My Trip To Mars, The Moon, and Venus. Quill Press Company. (p. 8).

⁵ ibid p. 10.

⁶ ibid p. 4.

7 http://gratisenergi.se/hank.htm