The world is fair and square when it comes to celebrations. Nothing seems to escape the calendar. Almost every date has become some day. There are the popular ones, of course, those that have been bestowed with grandeur, like International Women’s Day and World Environment Day. Endowed with magnificent stages distributing glorious awards, these are the days that luck and fame favoured. Then there are those that quietly exist, unknown to most of us, quietly ensuring that every imaginable aspect of life on Planet Earth gets its moment in the sun. World Lazy Day, No Elevators Day, World Idli Day….there is nothing that has been missed out when it comes to acknowledgements.
So then, today must be some day, you may ask. Yes, indeed — it’s World UFO Day! July 2 marks the incident that gave birth to perhaps the world’s most famous alien conspiracy theory, when the US government announced that the debris found by a rancher in Roswell was a flying disc.
The statement was swiftly retracted, but by then the UFO legend had already taken flight. For outer space enthusiasts, the day is celebrated with star-gazing sessions and science fiction movie watching events, aimed at encouraging the spirit of scientific inquiry.
Extraterrestrial life has always fascinated humans and art history is proof enough. Most prehistoric cave paintings appear to include strange disc-shaped objects and mysterious figures that are clearly non-human. 10,000 year old rock paintings discovered in Chhattisgarh reveal spaceship-like drawings that even feature three tripod-like stands, and huge armless figures with antennae. Similar cave paintings have been found all over the world and while most of them have armless figures with hollow eyes, some of them seem to be in bulky suits and astronaut helmets.
Renaissance paintings from the 15th century onwards also have a lot of reference to flying discs in the sky. Although art historians consider them to be divine clouds or angels, modern interpretations have wondered if they portray alien forms. Either the heavens were unusually busy back then, or artists have always enjoyed leaving future generations with puzzles to argue over.
In contemporary times, there have also been artists who have built entire careers around their conviction that UFOs are real. Eighty-two-year-old artist David Huggins calls himself an alien abductee and has based his art entirely on his experiences with these beings. His first encounter was at age 8, and over time, he claims he was chosen to father alien-human children.
All his paintings depict the aliens he says he has met over the years. Romanian artist Ionel Talpazan has produced innumerable drawings of UFOs, after he supposedly had a UFO sighting. In 1963, at the age of 7, he claims to have been encircled by a strange blue light in a field, which he later concluded to be an alien ship. Ever since, until his death, all he seemed able to paint were UFOs.
Whether those cave paintings depicted visiting aliens or simply the limitless imagination of our ancestors may never be known. But they remind us that long before science sought answers, art was already asking questions and continues to keep our curiosity alive!