Mysteries of yesteryear.

Re-reading, as an adult, a book one last read in childhood is a strange and sometimes saddening experience. I have just finished The Expanding Case for the UFO by Morris K. Jessup. I last saw it when I was ten years old. I can still remember its dark blue wrapper with blurred photos purporting to be those of UFOs. It was printed at the height of the UFO craze when both my mother and I were convinced of the reality of flying saucers. Everyone thought that it was only a matter of time before the aliens landed and revealed their motives - a belief that was helped along considerably by the media and the movies of the times. Flying saucers were  the 'climate change' of the Fifties.
Jessup's book is an oddity. He lists great numbers of sightings from around the world, which serve to remind us how hot the topic was at the time. But for the bulk of his text, he goes backward in time, laying the foundations of the 'ancient astronaut' theory which was later to be exploited by Erich Von Daniken.
He also devotes a large portion of the book to selenology ( a subject in which he was well educated). He describes the vast number of anomalies and changes reported on the surface of the Moon over the past hundred and fifty years. He believed that the beings piloting the saucers were originally from Earth - the remnants of a superior civilisation. He suspected that they were using the Moon as a base.
Among the other lunar oddities he noted was what has come to be called the Linné Affair - an occasion  in the nineteenth century when the crater of that name was said to have disappeared. It led to an explosion of interest in lunar observation, and in due course it was announced that Linné was back.
In the 1950s, of course, this was intriguing. There was no way I could check it out - I had no telescope, and there were few good photographs of the moon. It was a mystery to be savoured.
Alas for mystery. Now, with a few taps on my keyboard, I can obtain a good picture of Linné (see below). No UFOs, no sign of engineering works. Just a cold, stark empty crater, unchanged for millions of years.
I have said that I believed unshakably in flying saucers at the age of ten. But I wonder - if someone had told me at that age, that someday I would have my own computer at home, and with it obtain fine photographs from every corner of our solar system  - would I have believed it? I don't think so. I wasn't that gullible.