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We Met The Space People is a thin booklet from 1959, written by two sisters, Helen and Betty Mitchell, and published by Saucerian Books of Clarksburg, West Virginia. It belongs to a whole genre of the 1950s, the "contactee" story, in which ordinary people say friendly beings from other planets chose them to carry a message to Earth.

Helen's version begins in the least cosmic place possible: "It all began when my sister, Betty, and I were in a downtown St. Louis coffee shop. We had been shopping and had stopped off to get a coke." Two men approach them "in a very mannerly way," "dressed in grey suits." They are from "a huge mother-craft orbiting the planet Earth," their names are Elen and Zelas, and the sisters "had been very closely watched by the Space People for the last eight years." The sisters laugh. "They were not laughing and were serious and stern."

A week later one of them is back in the same coffee shop with instructions for building "a device whereby we could contact the Space People." The sisters are "not allowed to take the drawn diagram of the device" with them; they have to memorise it. Later Helen rides with them "by automobile into Illinois" to a wooded spot where, she writes, they land when they have business in St. Louis. "Settled back behind an old barn" is the ship: a circular craft about 38 feet across, "a domed top, but no portholes." Much of the rest of the booklet is messages received on the device, from Mars and from a Venusian called Tregon.

The publisher matters. Saucerian Books was run by Gray Barker, whose 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers introduced the Men in Black to UFO lore, and who, the evidence now suggests, was privately sceptical of most of what he sold. Near the end the sisters deny a rumour that they went quiet because they "had been shut-up by the Three Men in Black": "we have not been visited by anyone who threatened us."