Space Oddities: Our Strange Attempts to Explain the Universe

‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are …’ Are you a giant Nazi iceberg? On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union’s famous satellite Sputnik was launched into orbit, and the Space Age began. Or did it? Sputnik may have marked the beginning of humanity’s physical exploration of the universe, but we had already been exploring it with our minds for thousands of years, often with some very surprising results.

To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Sputnik’s launch (and seventy years since the first flying saucer sighting, in 1947), S. D. Tucker seeks out the strangest, most surprising and downright silliest ideas about outer space that have arisen throughout history.