The Ozarks Spaceman: Buck Nelson in 10 Facts
- Brandon Broughton
- 1 day ago
- 18 min read
On July 30, 1954, Buck Nelson stepped out of his Mountain View home and into a strange chapter of Ozarks history. Hovering overhead were three disc-shaped objects. Over the following year, this retired farmer befriended the spacemen in these discs, traveled with them throughout the inner solar system, and brought home lessons for humanity — or at least, that’s what he claimed.
Between his 1956 booklet My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus and his annual Spacecraft Conventions, Nelson secured a spot on the fringe of Ozarkian and ufologist history. It’s hard to recommend his booklet today. Nelson’s claims fall apart against even a basic understanding of astronomy and biology. At the same time, his depiction of outer space and extraterrestrials is too humdrum to entertain the average science fiction reader. The aliens wear overalls. They eat corn. One of the spacemen is from Colorado.
Instead, what makes Nelson and his writing intriguing is that his life remains genuinely mysterious. Even basic biographical facts are shrouded in mystery. We do not know for certain where Nelson was born or who his family was. More confounding is his internal world. What sort of man builds a life like this, and why?
In short: Who was Buck Nelson, and what did he want?
We may never know the answers, but what we do have is a collage of facts that create a strange portrait. Let’s dive into the unusual corners of Buck Nelson’s life and legacy. In doing so, we’ll clear up some mysteries, deepen others, and piece together the spaceman of the Ozarks.
Before We Get Started: What Was That About Going to Space?
If you’re already familiar with the story of Buck Nelson, feel free to skip this section. If you haven’t, brace yourself. Here’s an abbreviated retelling of Buck Nelson’s alleged interplanetary voyage, as told in his 1956 booklet, My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus:
Buck Nelson was listening to the radio in his Mountain View cabin on July 30, 1954, when they arrived. All at once, the radio went haywire, his dog — variously named Teddy, Paul, and Pup — began barking, and the pony outside panicked. Nelson stepped outside to see three discs hovering above his homestead. He ran inside and grabbed a camera and a flashlight. He signaled with his flashlight; they responded with a beam of their own: a searing ray of light that knocked him flat. When the ships had vanished and he got back to his feet, he found his chronic pain gone. Even his long-impaired vision was corrected. The beam, he claimed, had cured his ailments and restored his eyesight.
In March 1955, the vessels returned, and Nelson welcomed three spacefarers inside. There was Bob Solomon, 200 years old but youthful in appearance; a trainee pilot; and “Little Bucky,” a 19-year-old Earthling Nelson claimed was his relative. Also present was Bo, a 400-pound dog. In Nelson’s cabin, they talked about technology: the spacemen scoffed at his use of batteries but admired his radio. A month later, Nelson joined them on a tour of the inner solar system.
The party visited Mars, where Nelson saw canal systems from orbit, dined at a Martian ruler’s home, and noted that the famously red planet hosted a brightly multicored landscape. Then came the Moon, where Nelson visited settlements on both the “light side” and “dark side,” watched lunar children play with dogs, and dined repeatedly. It would seem that space travel works up an appetite.
Finally, they traveled to Venus, which Nelson described as a peaceful society with short work hours, hovercars, “book machines” resembling personal computers, and a fondness for corn. The Venusians wore overalls, they lived in stone houses, and their taxes were low. When Nelson was returned to Earth, three days had passed.
In the years that followed, Nelson became a minor celebrity through speaking engagements, his booklet, and his Mountain View “Spacecraft Conventions.” Today, many older Ozarkians recall the farmer who claimed to go to space with a smirk. With time, Nelson will likely join the constellation of Ozarks folklore alongside spooklights, painter scares, and howlers.
With our bearings set, let’s peer deeper into Nelson’s life.
1. Despite his well publicized story, many aspects of Buck Nelson’s life are still a mystery.
There is a lot about Buck Nelson’s past that is unknown. He was born April 9, 1895, but where is unclear. In his book he claimed to have been born near Denver, Colorado; on the 1940 census, he listed Iowa as his birthplace.
Even Nelson’s legal name is something of a mystery. “Nelson” is a common surname, and “Buck” is used as both a nickname and a given name. A chain of records from Buck’s time in southern California may hold the answer. On his 1942 Selective Service registration card for the “Old Man’s Draft,” he listed his address as 5075 Dewey Ave., Riverside, California. Checking the 1942 Riverside, California city directory for that address, yields not Buck Nelson, but William E. Nelson. Although Nelson sometimes hosted boarders, none of them appear to have been family, so this wasn’t a relative’s name. It’s possible that Nelson opted to use his full legal name on this occasion, but this remains a speculative finding.
2. Nelson’s identity as an Ozarks farmer was integral to his fame.
A large part of what made Buck Nelson interesting to skeptics and credible to believers was that he seemed to be just a simple Ozarks farmer.
Nelson leaned into his homespun image. He downgraded himself from being a 10th-grade graduate to a sixth-grade dropout and claimed he had “no experience as a writer or a lecturer” before embarking on a new career path of writing and lecturing.
In time, being an Ozarks farmer became an integral part of the myth of Buck Nelson. The Ozarks have long suggested simple authenticity, even to well-meaning outsiders and boosters. It’s the notion that the Ozarks’ imagined isolation has rendered its culture untouched by outside influence. Even Vance Randolph, the preeminent folklorist of the Ozarks, flattened the region to “an American survival of primitive society.” In the story of Buck Nelson, the notion of a hillman, uneducated in the ways of the world, becoming a cosmic emissary is undeniably compelling. It’s a shame none of it is true.
Although Nelson’s birthplace is unknown, he lived in Southern California for decades before relocating to Missouri in the 1940s. He wrote that he had “traveled in all of our 48 good old states” and worked as a ranch hand, sawyer, and auto park manager before settling in Missouri. His 1942 registration card listed him as employed at March Field, a major military airfield in Southern California, likely as a guard. He also worked as a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department, according to a 1966 interview with his right-hand man, James L. Hill, in the Southeast Missourian.
Despite the pervasiveness of Nelson’s image as a simple Mountain View farmer, in his own words he was a well-traveled man with a varied career. This isn’t information he tried to hide; it’s on the first page of his book. But the shorthand version of Buck Nelson’s story has become “the man from the Ozarks who said he went to space.”
3. During Nelson’s life, alien encounters became the subject of national fascination.
Buck Nelson was not a lone oddball spinning yarns about spacemen in the Ozarks, but rather a node in a network of contactees who vouched for one another’s stories, spoke at each other’s conventions, and collaboratively built what cultural history and theory professor Christopher Partridge has called a UFO religion.
It’s been said that Buck Nelson was an early “alien abductee.” This isn’t exactly true. Nelson did not claim to have been abducted; he went willingly on a sightseeing tour of the solar system. More broadly, Nelson’s story does not match the alien abduction template that emerged in the 1960s. After Barney and Betty Hill’s widely publicized account of being taken aboard a UFO and subjected to medical examination, that narrative came to dominate the shared image of extraterrestrial encounters.
Before there were abductees, there were contactees, according to Jerome Clark’s 2000 extraterrestrial encyclopedia Extraordinary Encounters. The typical contactee meets friendly, human-looking aliens (often called “space brothers”) who bring moral and religious messages alongside warnings about the future of humanity. Some contactees even tag along for treks through space. Similar stories date back to antiquity, but the contactee movement emerged in the late 1940s, after the alleged recovery of an extraterrestrial spacecraft in Roswell, New Mexico by Air Force personnel made flying saucers mainstream.
Although contactees were an international community, their nucleus was in Southern California, where prominent figures like George Adamski and George Van Tassel gave lectures and hosted conventions. Adamski is especially relevant — his 1953 book Flying Saucers Have Landed describes interplanetary travels, with many details echoed in Nelson’s account. Nelson even acknowledges Adamski’s support in his own book, writing, “George Adamski has done so much to help me, and he tells the world he believes my story,” he says, demonstrating his early ties to the contactee movement.
4. Nelson was part of the contactee scene before he “went to space.”
The broad strokes of Nelson’s story of space travel aren’t original. He garnishes his aliens with details that seem to grant his own lifestyle a sort of cosmic approval — he eats corn and wears overalls just like the ruler of Venus! — but on the whole, it rarely strays from the prototypical contactee narrative. Nelson’s story, like others, emerged through a kind of collaborative coauthorship, a common feature of story-swapping communities. Nelson didn’t become a contactee celebrity because of his book; his book was shaped by his participation in the contactee community.
The precise timeline of events is unclear, but in the introduction to his book, Nelson says he wrote to the Springfield newspapers after his initial sighting on July 30, 1954. In the foreword, Flying Saucer Club member Fanny Lowery defended Nelson against charges of fabrication. She argued that “the local papers and farm magazine which he took did not print anything about the Saucers, so he hadn’t the slightest idea what they were.” Incidentally, the Springfield newspapers, which Nelson read and wrote to, printed the term “flying saucer” over 800 times in the first half of the 1950s.
James L. Hill, a member of the contactee community from Seymour, read the report and sent copies of it to “Flying Saucer Clubs” around the country. The response was enthusiastic. As Nelson recalled, he was “investigated by several… and called to lecture to the public and tell my story on the stage at halls, churches and schools.” If true, this puts Nelson in touch with other contactees before his alleged space travels in spring 1955.
It is possible that Hill read the story after Nelson had already “gone to space.” However, Hill testified at a later Spacecraft Convention that Nelson’s appearance had changed after the 1954 sighting, according to Jerry Obermark’s June 28, 1966 article in the Southeast Missourian. Hill asserts that Nelson looked different following the encounter, his face having become pallid and his eyes looking “as if he had seen a vision.” His description implies he knew Nelson before the initial 1954 encounter, and saw him again soon after. Hill also adds details absent from Nelson’s original account of his space travels: the aliens have black beards, stood over 6 feet tall, and told Nelson cryptically upon their first meeting: “You have a mission and you will be told more as we want you to know.” Everything in Nelson’s account was shaped in conversation with other contactees and belongs to the collective body of contactee lore.
5. Nelson and his aliens were segregationists.
There’s a troubling passage in My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus. Describing Mars, Nelson wrote that “I was told that there are other races and colors of people there, but that I was taken where the people were most like the ones I was used to.”
The most charitable reading is that Nelson’s Mars had many “people,” some more Earthlike than others; however, the use of the term “races and colors” paired with Nelson’s midcentury Missouri context points to the presence of segregation on Nelson’s Mars. In his narrative, by making his angelic aliens segregationists, he depicts racial hierarchy as both the cosmic standard and as a divine ordination.
In March 1956, Nelson spoke to a Sunday school class in Washington, D.C., about his trip to space. An article in The Spokesman-Review about this lecture quotes Nelson as saying that there is “absolute segregation of all races and nationalities” on Venus. This talk was poorly received by the church, which stated that Nelson was invited to speak “in error” and that he received no payment for the lecture.
Buck Nelson didn’t just hold racist, segregationist views; he used his platform to promote them. By the early 1960s, Nelson was running a one-man printing press out of his home. In the May 1963 issue of Understanding, a contactee newsletter, an advertisement for several of Nelson’s publications can be found. There’s My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus, of course, as well as Household Hints and Tips, and then: “White Man Awaken.” The publication was advertised under “Pamphlets by Other Authors,” but Nelson did print and sell it. Several different pamphlets by that title have circulated, proselytizing either anti-black or antisemitic propaganda, though the author was never named.
6. The hype surrounding Nelson’s space travel was boosted by his Spacecraft Conventions.
Nelson is likely best remembered by locals for his Spacecraft Conventions, held annually from 1958 to 1966 at his Mountain View ranch. Attendance was substantial early on, with Mountain View motels filling up for the 1958 convention according to a May 8, 1958 article in the Springfield Leader & Press. The Leader & Press later reported that the 1959 Spacecraft Convention reportedly drew thousands of attendees and featured speakers from the international contactee community.
This wouldn’t last. As the Space Race ramped up and the general public’s awareness of astronomy grew, the claims of contactees lost credibility, and interest in the contactee movement waned. So, too, did Buck Nelson’s draw. The 1964 Spacecraft Convention saw only 50 attendees. Nelson and James L. Hill blamed the drop in flying saucer activity, and by extension attendance, on advances in ground-defense technology — apparently, the spacemen were radar-shy. By 1965, the Convention’s keynote speakers no longer hailed from across the Atlantic; they were Hill from Seymour and his brother from Texas, who didn’t even have a saucer story of his own.
The final Spacecraft Convention was held in 1966. Obermark from the Southeast Missourian noted that the 71-year-old Nelson said little. Instead, Hill took center stage, embellishing an already outlandish tale with even more confounding flourishes. To boost turnout, organizers brought in carnival rides and concessions, which sat largely unused throughout the Convention. According to Thomas Michael Kersen’s Where Misfits Fit, Nelson reportedly did not pay the operators of these attractions, but rather demanded a portion of their profits. Attendance numbers for the final convention are unknown, but it was described as “one of the most disappointing.”
Shortly after the 1966 Spacecraft Convention, Buck Nelson became ill. It is unclear what ailed him or if he ever fully recovered. In June 1967, Jerry Whited of the Mountain View Standard announced that there would be no convention that year. Such was the unceremonious end of Buck Nelson’s Spacecraft Conventions.
7. James L. Hill was Nelson’s biggest booster and possibly his coauthor.
Before he took center stage in the final Spacecraft Conferences, James L. Hill’s role in Nelson’s story was growing, and with it, his influence. According to Nelson’s book, Hill first became acquainted with Nelson’s story after reading the newspaper article about that initial 1954 saucer sighting. In this version, Hill is merely a messenger, sharing the story with contactees across the country and helping to launch Nelson’s speaking career.
In Hill’s telling from the final Spacecraft Conference in 1966, both he and Nelson were psychically compelled by the space brothers to leave California and settle in Missouri before Nelson’s first contact in 1954. Although it is not clear if the two men knew each other while in California. They did, however, know each other before Nelson’s 1954 saucer incident, per Hill’s comments in Obermark’s article. Whatever the true nature of Hill’s role, it’s clear that Nelson entered the contactee community through him.
Somewhere along the way, Hill declared himself the “space brothers’ contact man for Southwest Missouri.” In addition to relaying messages he claimed to receive telepathically from the space brothers, Hill offered his own contributions to the mythology in his tales of Lakson, a Saturnian who, coincidentally, was acquainted with Nelson’s Venusian friends.
Of particular interest to Hill was the existence of ancient atomic weapons, a theory he promoted in a 1957 letter to the editor in the Sunday News and Leader. It is notable that toward the end of My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus, the tone of the writing changes noticeably for a brief aside about an ancient calamity caused by atomic power that resulted in the sinking of Atlantis, the Biblical Flood, and the creation of the North American continent.
It can’t be said with certainty to what degree James L. Hill shaped Buck Nelson’s narrative. What is known is that Hill was there from the beginning. By the end, he was speaking not just for the spacemen, but for Nelson himself.
8. Nelson and Hill sought $1.525 billion in federal funding for secret alien projects.
Nelson was not running a flying saucer club, a homegrown publishing outfit, and an annual convention out of pure altruism. He was trying to make some money.
First, there were the publications. In 1963, My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus was priced at $1.25; “White Man Awaken” went for a dime. For a dollar, you could join Nelson’s Flying Saucer Club and exchange “U.F.O. information, pictures, [and] clippings” with fellow believers. In the 1961 reprint of My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus, Nelson even claims he was removed from his permanent total disability pension after sharing his space story. Allegedly cut off from his primary source of income, he asks his readers to send offerings. These were the more sensible ventures.
In the early 1960s, at the peak of their aspirations, Nelson and Hill embarked on an ambitious infrastructure plan, which Hill described in his 1966 conversation with the Southeast Missourian’s Jerry Obermark. Acting on instructions from the spacemen, they claimed to know how to supply water to any location in the United States without the use of pipes for the low price of $1.5 billion. They also asserted that they had been told how to construct an operational spacecraft at the cost of $25 million.
Hill drafted two bills, one for each project, and submitted them to United States Senator Edward V. Long of Missouri. In these bills, he explained that he could not divulge any information as to how this pipe-free water distribution system would work, nor provide schematics for the spaceship, due to a confidentiality agreement with the spacemen. All the federal government had to do was hand over the money to Nelson and Hill, who would handle the logistics under alien leadership.
The bills were not introduced in Congress.
9. Despite his warm reception in the contactee community, Nelson was perceived as an eccentric in his Mountain View community.
Nelson often attributed the strange happenings in his life to interference by the space brothers. In a blog post by retired Southeast Missourian journalist Ken Steinhoff, Steinhoff recalls attending the final Spacecraft Convention with colleagues Obermark and Denny O’Neil. Steinhoff recounts Nelson telling the story of “going out of town one weekend and coming back to find a tree that had been in his yard gone without a trace.” Nelson’s theory? “The space brothers must have levitated it right away without leaving so much as a leaf or piece of bark behind.” Standard Buck Nelson fare.
As it turns out, something did happen to that tree. After leaving the convention, Steinhoff discovered a leak in one of his LeSabre’s tires. At a Mountain View service station, the young attendant patching the flat asked what brought the journalists to town. When he learned that they were covering the Spacecraft Convention, the attendant replied, “That old Buck. We have a bundle of fun with him.” He went on to describe “the best prank” that he and his friends had played on Nelson: cutting down the tree in his front yard and hauling away every piece of it. “We didn’t leave a single scrap of sawdust behind.”
The attendant went on to mention another prank that he and his friends regularly played on Nelson. “Every once in a while,” he boasts, “we’ll go out there with a bunch of rockets and shoot them off over his house.”
Although seemingly innocent fun at a local eccentric’s expense, it’s possible that these pranks led to significant loss. Nelson’s final public message was in the form of a notice in the February 20, 1969 issue of the Springfield Leader and Press stating that he was “offering a reward for information in connection with a fire which destroyed his farm home,” a fire which “he believes… was set during his absence.” On the surface this looks like a paranoid projection from a conspiracy-minded man (most fires, after all, are accidents), but the confirmed activities of locals trespassing on his property and engaging in incendiary activities lends some credence to Nelson’s claim.
10. Like his Spacecraft Conventions, Nelson’s life goes out in a whisper.
The traditional version of the Buck Nelson story holds that after his Spacecraft Conventions dwindled in attendance and his home was burned to the ground, Nelson returned to California and disappeared, with no one knowing when or where he died. It’s a romantic notion, even for skeptics. You can almost see him wandering into the desert, only to be beamed up by Little Bucky and Bob Solomon.
In reality, Buck Nelson died in March 1972 while residing in Long Beach, California. This information is thanks to the Social Security Death Index, which includes the corroborating detail of Nelson’s birthday. His presence in the Social Security Death Index confirms he was receiving disability benefits until his death, contradicting his claims that the government had cut him off. It also indicates that someone, possibly a family member, hospital, or funeral home, notified the Social Security Administration to stop payments following his death. This bureaucratic footprint conclusively lays to rest any lingering mystery about the fate of Buck Nelson.
A cosmic biography lands with a thud.
It’s easy to see why the abridged version of the Buck Nelson story is better known than the messy reality. In a midcentury memory or a pamphlet in the rare book section, he can be a curiosity — “that farmer who held alien conventions.” However, beneath the surface, the portrait that emerges is confusing, frustrating, and even disturbing.
Part of preserving history and culture is interrogating the stories we tell, even if we end up with more questions than answers.
As much as Nelson wanted us to look to the stars, his story says far more about the people down here. It is an artifact of an America in motion: optimistic and paranoid, spiritual and opportunistic, yearning for unity while stressing the fractures. Maybe Nelson wasn’t always telling the truth, but he couldn’t help but reveal it.
Ultimately, Nelson’s message didn’t come from outer space. It came from right here.
Special acknowledgement:
This research was significantly aided by Kaitlyn McConnell’s “Buck Nelson traveled to Mars, Venus, the Moon – and into Ozarks history” (Ozarks Alive, 2022), which served as an invaluable primer and source bibliography for primary materials.
Resources:
Ancestry.com. U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2014. https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/search/collections/3693/
Original data: Social Security Administration. Social Security Death Index, Master File. Social Security Administration.
“AVAILABLE Books Written by Buck Nelson.” Understanding, May 1963. https://danielfry.com/daniels-writings/understanding-newsletter-1963/vol-8-no-5/
“Buck Blaming Radar For Saucer Shortage.” Springfield Leader and Press, June 29, 1964, p. 17. https://0-thelibrary-newspapers-com.coolcat.org/image/299585321/?match=1&terms=%22Buck%20blaming%20radar%22
“Buck Nelson Offers Reward in Home Fire.” Springfield Leader and Press, February 20, 1969, 47. https://0-thelibrary-newspapers-com.coolcat.org/image/305446301/
“By the Way.” Springfield Leader and Press, May 8, 1958, p 33. https://0-thelibrary-newspapers-com.coolcat.org/image/300295220/
Clark, Jerome. Extraordinary Encounters: An Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrials and Otherworldly Beings. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000.
Hill, James L. “To the Editor:.” Sunday News & Leader, January 6, 1957, B4. https://0-thelibrary-newspapers-com.coolcat.org/image/298131673/
Kersen, Thomas Michael. Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2021. https://thelibrary-sprin.na.iiivega.com/search/card?id=bb0fcc96-b455-5ede-ac50-99e930a4e27d&entityType=FormatGroup
Los Angeles Directory Co., Los Angeles Directory Co’s Riverside (California) City Directory 1942, 1942. https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/search/collections/2469/records/203060581
Nelson, Buck. My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus. 1956. West Plains, MO: Quill Press Company, 1961. https://thelibrary-sprin.na.iiivega.com/search/card?id=da596ab5-0973-5368-a671-9487345af609&entityType=FormatGroup
Obermark, Jerry. “Cult ponders ‘space brothers.’” Southeast Missourian, June 28, 1966.
“Ozarks Notes.” Sunday News & Leader, June 6, 1965, D1. https://0-thelibrary-newspapers-com.coolcat.org/image/300107848
“Ozarks Notes.” Sunday News & Leader, June 11, 1967, D3. https://0-thelibrary-newspapers-com.coolcat.org/image/300102790/
Partridge, Christopher. UFO Religions. London: Rutledge, 2003.
Randolph, Vance. The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society. New York, NY: Vanguard Press, 1931. https://thelibrary-sprin.na.iiivega.com/search/card?id=aeeea033-dbe1-54fe-8d1a-59c447984e72&entityType=FormatGroup
Steinhoff, Ken. “Buck Nelson’s Spacecraft Convention,” Cape Girardeau History and Photos, January 22, 2014. https://www.capecentralhigh.com/cape-photos/buck-nelsons-spacecraft-convention/
“Trip to Venus Talk Packs Sunday School.” The Spokesman-Review, March 23, 1956. Chicago Tribune Service.
"United States, Census, 1940," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QSQ-G9MT-67TJ?cc=2000219&wc=QZX5-SS5%3A790105301%2C803271801%2C803325201%2C953629201 : accessed 26 August 2025), California > Riverside > Riverside Judicial Township, Riverside, Ward 7 > 33-62A Riverside Judicial Township, Riverside City Ward 7 bounded by (N) Jurupa Av; (E) Palm Av; (S) W Arlington Av; (W) Phoenix Av, Central, Streeter Av > image 27 of 30; citing Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, NARA digital publication T627. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, RG 29. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2012.
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