Have any alien encounters included clothes descriptions?

QUESTION: Have there been any accounts of alien encounters that included descriptions of what clothes the aliens wore?

There have been a number of alleged alien encounters in which witnesses described the clothing, or attire, of the beings they met.

Perhaps the most famous to date was that of civil rights activists Betty and Barney Hill, who claimed to have been abducted in rural New Hampshire in September 1961.

In their first description of the alien, Barney described figures ‘of human form dressed in shiny black uniforms and black caps with peaks or bills on them. The uniforms were like glossy leather’.

The case became famous because the couple underwent post-abduction hypnosis by Dr Benjamin Simon, an expert in therapeutic hypnosis who had used it extensively to treat military personnel during World War II.

Under hypnosis, the couple ­evidently completely believed in their story, though Simon attributed it to acute anxiety. Interestingly, during hypnosis Barney changed his description, correcting that only the leader wore black leather, while the crew wore ‘light-coloured shirts, similar to blue denim, and no caps’.

Four years earlier, a Brazilian farmer called Antonio Villas-Boas had finished his day’s work when an ‘egg-shaped’ UFO approached him. Figures emerged from the craft, all wearing ‘a very tight-fitting siren-suit, made of soft, thick, unevenly striped grey material. This garment reached right up to their necks…’

In 1975, a forestry worker named Travis Walton was abducted from Arizona. He recalled that ‘two men and a woman were standing around the table. They were all wearing ­velvety blue uniforms’.

Closer to home, in August 1983, 77-year-old Albert Burtoo was quietly fishing on the Basingstoke Canal when a UFO landed. Two ‘strange-looking beings’ escorted him to their spaceship. ‘They were about four feet high, dressed in pale green coveralls from head to foot,’ Burtoo recalled. ‘And they had ­helmets of the same colour with a visor that was blacked out.’

These descriptions perhaps reflect the science fiction influences and cultural expectations of the time when the encounters were reported.

J. B. Cunningham, Liverpool

QUESTION: Where does the phrase ‘tub-thumping’ come from?

Nonconformists — those who, after the Act of Uniformity of 1559, did not conform to the established Church of England — were in the habit of making speeches from a tub or a barrel, as opposed to a pulpit.

They were known as ‘tub preachers’ from the 1640s, and finally tub-thumpers from the 1660s, the latter presumably for thumping their tubs for emphasis.

The earliest reference comes from an anti-Presbyterian tract called The History Of The Wicked Plots And Conspiracies Of Our Pretended Saints… by Henry Foulis (1662). He wrote ‘by the power which the Tub-thumping boute-feus [firebrands] had over the people’s inclinations, and judgements, many had not onely a bad opinion of the King, but thought very well of the Parliament’. Foulis also used the terms ‘Tub-pratlers’ and ‘Tub-tatler’.

Janet Coe, Gainsborough, Lincs

QUESTION: Did Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton ever make a record together?

While the two guitarists played together, they never recorded together. The closest they came was on Stephen Stills’s eponymous 1970 solo album. Eric Clapton provided the outro guitar solo for Go Back Home, while Jimi Hendrix added ­guitar to Old Times, Good Times.

Clapton and Hendrix first met and played together at Regent Street Polytechnic, London, in 1966.

Clapton was playing with Cream when Hendrix’s manager Chas Chandler introduced them: ‘He [Hendrix] asked if he could play a couple of numbers. I said, ‘of course’ but I had a funny feeling about him.’ Hendrix then blew everyone away with a manic version of Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor.

The two men became friends, with Hendrix joining Clapton on stage a number of times, including a famous jam session at the Scene Club in New York with Jeff Beck in 1968.

Clapton was devastated by Hendrix’s death. In fact, Clapton had originally planned to meet ­Hendrix the night of his death on September 18, 1970: ‘The night that he died I was supposed to meet him at the Lyceum to see Sly Stone play, and I brought with me a left-handed Stratocaster. I just found it, I think I bought it at Orange Music. I’d never seen one before and I was gonna give it to him.’

Ryan Greenwood, Nottingham