Cynthia Appleton and the Gharnasvarn Visitors (the "Space Baby" Case)

In 1957 Cynthia Appleton was 27, a housewife and mother of two on Fentham Road in Aston, Birmingham. Her husband Ronald was a welder. Britain at the time knew the contactee stories of George Adamski, who said he had met a visitor from Venus in California in 1952.

On 16 November 1957, while doing housework, Cynthia lost about an hour of memory. It was later called a failed contact attempt.

On 18 November, by most accounts, the visitor came. A high-pitched whistle filled her sitting room. A rosy darkness settled outside the window. Then a tall, blond man stood near her fireplace, forming like a television picture, fuzzy at first, then clear. He was slender and pale, with shoulder-length hair and elongated eyes, and he wore a tight grey metallic suit with a kind of dome over his head. He spoke by telepathy. "Do not be afraid." He came, he said, from Gharnasvarn, taken to mean Venus.

He returned on 7 January 1958 with a companion, his superior. They spoke of atomic weapons, cancer treatment and time, which she was told did not exist. With a sweeping motion of his hands he produced what she likened to a television screen. In it was a saucer with a transparent dome, the "Master Craft". He had advice for Earth's rocket builders too. "Your scientists are pulling against the greatest force of gravity by going straight up," he said. Better to travel "with a sideways attitude".

In February 1958 he knocked at the front door in a black business suit and homburg hat, and left in a large black car. His hand was burned. He asked her to bathe it in boiling water. Afterwards she found a piece of skin at the bottom of the bowl.

In September 1958 came the prediction. She was pregnant with a boy, of the race of Gharnasvarn yet her husband's son. He would weigh 7 lb 3 oz, be named Matthew and become "a leader of men" at 14. On 10 May 1959 the Sunday People ran the headline "I'm going to have a baby from Venus". Around 2 June, Matthew was born. Blond. Just a little over 7 lb 3 oz.

No official body ever examined the case. Dr John Dale, a clinical psychologist and UFO researcher, visited several times and kept notes. Gavin Gibbons and the editor of Flying Saucer Review called in 1958. The Rev. G. E. Tiley, Vicar of Powick, backed her publicly. A scorch mark on a newspaper beneath where the entity had stood was taken by reporters and lost. The skin went to the University of Birmingham, then to Manchester University. The results were described as not human, animal, possibly porcine and inconclusive. No lab report was ever published.

Jenny Randles, working from Dale's notes, found that one symbol the visitor left matched a letter Adamski said came from his own Venusians. The tall blond messenger with an anti-nuclear message fits the contactee model of the day, and the black-suited visits put the case in Men in Black catalogues. The predicted collision of two asteroids never came. Matthew turned 14 in 1973 and appears not to have taken up the challenge. Yet no hoax was ever proven. Ronald, the vicar and Dale all believed she was sincere.

In 1960 the Empire News reported that "The Venus baby is so normal". By July 1960 the trail goes cold. Where Cynthia and Matthew went next is unknown.