SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3
HEADLINE: LORD OF THE UFOS AND ALIEN LANDINGS DIES AT 83 John Ezard on a peer's unearthly obsessions
BYLINE: John Ezard
BODY:

'The Earth was colonised by space travellers and we are all descended from them. We all came from different planets originally. That's why there are different people with different coloured skins.'

'I did see one once. It was an eerie white light zig-zagging over North Kensington. I had to climb into the kitchen sink to get a good look at it through the window. It was fairly big. Unfortunately it's awfully difficult to describe; perhaps saucer-shaped.'

'When there was a cover-up in the US instigated by the CIA, the UFO group managed to get a 900-page document released which listed UFOs spotted over nuclear storage areas.'

'Suppose the UFOnauts decided to make mass landings in this country tomorrow. There could be panic because our people have not been prepared.'

LORD CLANCARTY'S family motto was "By Counsel and Prudence," but the eighth earl refused to allow himself to be beset by these narrow horizons.

He could trace his peerage back to Galway in 1793. Yet he dated his true inheritance much earlier, to 65,000 BC when aliens landed on Earth and seeded the human race.

We would all have known this, he believed, except for a conspiracy of silence by the presidents of the United States, France and Russia, the Ministry of Defence and Steven Spielberg.

He stuck to these and other convictions all his life and promoted them eagerly. He was not a natural orator. Once, challenged to prove that aliens were on Earth, he said, "Well, you do see a lot of strange people about, don't you?". He took his share of ridicule. But he had his hours of glory.

In 1979, the House of Lords ignored the "winter of discontent" and listened as he opened a full-scale debate on UFOs. And for these reasons the news of his death, at the age of 83, was received yesterday with sadness and more than a tincture of respect not only in the Lords but at the Festival of Mind, Body and

There at the weekend more than 100 listened to a lecture titled Co-operation with the Gods from Space - a sign that Clancarty's torch has passed to a younger generation as impervious as he was to charges of gullibility.

"He was a staunch supporter of the UFO movement through thick and thin," said the lecturer, Richard Lawrence, secretary of the Aetherius Society. "He broke new ground by bringing the subject into Parliament."

Until his seven books on flying saucers began to make money, Brinsley Clancarty sold magazine advertising space. As a peer, he cared diligently for earthbound matters. He attended almost every meeting of the Lords defence group and was interested in services for the sick, the poor and the alcoholic. "He was a terribly kind man," his friend Lord Kimberley said last night.

But he was best known as founder-president of the international UFO group Contact, for editing the Flying Saucer Review, and for setting up the International Unidentified Flying Object Observer Corps.

He believed in Shamballah, a mystical island in the Gobi desert where, according to myths, advanced beings lived. He talked of a civilisation beneath the Earth's crust, reached by tunnels from the North and South Poles and Tibet.

"From what I can gather," he said in his undramatic way, "these beings are very advanced."

Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters was the forerunner of a worldwide spate of UFO reports in 1979, creating wide interest in the Lords debate, during which Lords Kimberley, Oxfuird, Davies of Leek, and Cork spoke in Clancarty's support.

For the Government, Lord Strabolgi responded: "Where are these alien spacecraft supposed to be hiding? There is nothing to convince the Government that there has ever been a visit by a single alien spacecraft."

But public interest began to be channelled into new age religions and explorations. The UFO world currently splits into those purely interested in recording phenomena - "the trainspotters" - and those who believe in a mystical purpose.

The latter was the topic of Dr Lawrence's weekend lecture. "People are saying, let's stop the trainspotting and see who's on the train," he said. "I believe people from other planets will land when they feel it's going to get the best psychological response from us.

"Brinsley was a brave, pioneering man. Many like him who have been ridiculed in history have been vindicated."