Buck Nelson, the Ozark Spaceman

**Dom Bettinelli** (0:00)
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You're listening to episode 430 of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, where we look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason. In this episode, we're talking about the Ozark spaceman, Buck Nelson. I'm Dom Bettinelli, and joining me today is Jimmy Akin. Hey Jimmy. How do, Dom? Folks, be sure to stay around for the end of the episode. We'll have your feedback on our recent episode number 419, Zombie Marriage, Holy Roman Emperors, Jesus's DNA and more weird questions. But first, on a remote ridge in the Missouri Ozarks, 12 miles from town, lived a farmer named Buck Nelson. He had no telephone, drank filtered rainwater, and had been crippled by back pain for years. Then in July 1954, he stepped out his kitchen door, looked up at three disks in the sky, and waved a flashlight at them.
What followed is a story of a healing ray, a 200-year-old space pilot, and a 385-pound dog that shook hands like a man.
Buck took a round trip to Mars, the moon, in Venus, there were 12 laws of God dictated to him under the stars, and there was a saucer convention held every June on his farm. There were also men in black. So who was Buck Nelson? What happened on his visits to other planets? And how did an Ozark Ranch become, for several summers, the saucer capital of the Midwest? That's what we'll be talking about on this episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. So Jimmy, what's today's mystery?

**Jimmy Akin** (1:50)
Well, today's mystery is one in an occasional series that we're doing on UFO contactees. Contactees were people who claimed to be in regular contact with the occupants of UFOs or flying saucers, as they were commonly called. And that's as opposed to people who claimed to be abducted by aliens. With contactees, everything they did with the aliens was voluntary. They weren't kidnapped. They were invited aboard the saucers and they chose to go.
We began this series earlier this year with George Adamski back in episode 411 And Adamski was a Polish-American writer who said that he met a man from Venus. There were many other contactees though in the 1950s and 1960s. Both men and women.
Standard UFO researchers criticized them heavily, but they had their own followings and could be quite popular. Today, we're looking at one of them, Buck Nelson. And there will be a surprise and twist late in our story, so keep your ears peeled for that.

**Dom Bettinelli** (2:55)
Where did today's mystery happen?

**Jimmy Akin** (2:58)
In Mountain View, Missouri. It's a small town in Howell County in the Ozark Mountains of south-central Missouri. It's about 200 miles or four hours by car from where I live in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Mountain View is a very small town. The population was around 1500 in the 1950s, and the town sits on a wooded plateau with hollows, springs, and limestone caves, and like the Ozarks in general.
About 12 miles outside of Mountain View was a ranch owned by a farmer named Buck Nelson. The ranch had no phone lines. Buck drank filtered rainwater, and his spring went nearly dry every summer. Buck describes the location this way.

**Buck Nelson** (3:46)
This is a beautiful, heavily wooded mountain country, but water is very often a major problem. Many people, including myself, use filtered rainwater.
My spring, which is the one where these spacemen got water, goes nearly dry at times. The land is rocky and hard to work, and the wood ticks seem to enjoy blood more than wood.

**Jimmy Akin** (4:09)
But Buck believes that his ranch was special. He said magnetic currents under the ground crossed at his farm, and he said this was why the space people had chosen to land there, though he himself was kind of an unlikely candidate for contact.

**Buck Nelson** (4:23)
One of the things that people here on Earth find so hard to accept is the idea of spacemen coming to such a humble person as myself, and another is why they should come to such an isolated spot as my ranch. That has been their need.
We would shoot them down, no doubt, and try to ask questions afterwards. Another reason they come to my place, or rather this part of the country, is that the magnetic currents are just right here. This is a section of the country where there are caves. It might mean something to a scientist.

**Jimmy Akin** (4:57)
And it's true that there are caves, lots and lots of caves. In fact, the Ozark Plateau has one of the densest cave systems in the United States. This is because of the underlying karst geology. Karst is a kind of landscape that has lots of soluble rock, like limestone, which rainwater can dissolve and cut caves into over millions of years. There are 8,000 to 10,000 or more caves here in the Ozarks, though nobody is sure of the exact number because they haven't all been charted. So the true number will be higher.