Westall's decision to use folklore to give depth to this story of secret alien visitors is not entirely original. Any number of other science fiction writers have done it before Urn Burial—for example, Keith Laumer in A Trace of Memory (1963)—and others have done it since— for example, Judith Moffett in The Ragged World (1991). The idea that humanity's concept of the devil may be some distorted memory of an alien lifeform probably originated in Arthur C. Clarke's classic Childhood's End (1953) and was also used with success in the BBC television serial Quartermass and the Pit (1958). The concept of the long-buried alien artifact stumbled upon by accident is also common in science fiction. Stephen King's The Tommyknockers (1987) is a notable recent example. And the bestseller racks have been full of supposedly nonfictional accounts of ancient astronauts and abduction by flying saucers for several...