Over the years, there have been countless stories that I have immensely enjoyed in Fortean Times, but I have to agree with Paul Sieveking’s choice as one of his favourites, from “Here Is the News” [FT390:45]:

Liberace Returns

On 10 February 1989 the inhabitants of the tiny town of Fyffe in Alabama witnessed the return to Earth of the late glittering pianist Liberace – double-size, 12ft (3.6m) tall – who descended from a golden banana-shaped spacecraft via a moving stairway and played a medley of Hollywood showstoppers with glowing fingers on a floating piano. Talk of the apparition brought chaos to the town with 4,000 cars jamming the main street on 6 March. A “UFO expert” said: “Too many people have seen strange things for it to be a hoax.” (Portsmouth) News, Daily Star, 7 Mar 1989 [original report FT55:33].

The report involving Liberace’s glorious return to Earth aboard a UFO at first seems totally unbelievable, until the component details of the story are broken down into separate sections – with the 12-foot-tall glittering Liberace apparition, the bananashaped spacecraft, the moving stairway, the glowing fingers, and the importance of the Fyffe landing site, along with the ensuing chaos in Alabama.

WładziuValentino Liberace (American pianist, singer and actor) known as “Lee” to his friends and “Walter” to his family, was born on 16 May 1919 in West Allis, Wisconsin (a suburb of Milwaukee), and died on 4 February 1987 in Palm Springs, California; or, if you would rather believe Liberace is not of this Earth, on 4 February 1987 he returned to his homeworld, the planet Pompadore.

It is no coincidence that Liberace appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show on CBS on 25 November 1967. As any UFO buff knows, in 1969 Jackie Gleason was invited by President Richard Nixon to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida to view the dead aliens recovered from the Roswell crash of 1947. Gleason even constructed his house in the shape of an UFO, naming it “The Mothership” (for the full story, see ). In what I believe is Liberace’s most memorable movie scene, he played the part of a casket salesman in (1965), based on Evelyn Waugh’s satire of the funeral industry and Forest Lawn Cemetery in Southern California. And, as life imitates art, Liberace’s body is presumably entombed with those of his mother and his brother George, at Forest Lawn Cemetery, Hollywood Hills, in Los Angeles. In 2009 at the Leicester Square Theatre in London,  , began its run, depicting the entertainer’s heavenly “trial” following his death. Whether it is labelled “Heaven” (the abode of God and the blessed dead), “the heavens” (the expanse of sky and space over the Earth), or a “heavenly body” (a planet, star, or other celestial body), Liberace is in the Great Beyond. Thus, his reappearance as an apparition can be likened to a divine vision of a saint or other religious figure.