A fond farewell to the UFO House, the Outer Banks landmark from a funkier universe
In its day, the Futuro House attracted every passing eyeball on the Outer Banks — a silver spaceship parked on the dunes, skulls dangling from its porthole window, its owner greeting beach traffic in a green alien mask.
A ramp made from license plates beckoned people inside rainbow-shaped rooms decked out with feather boas and Mardi Gras beads — relics from a funkier universe.
Nicknamed the Frisco UFO, the house on N.C. 12 in Frisco announced to tourists that they had stumbled into an atypical beach vacation free from boardwalks and high-rise hotels, more likely to involve Blackbeard’s ghost and a tiki bar.
“Various aliens stare at you from the windows,” a fan wrote on Roadside America in 2008. “There is even a matching small boat next to the UFO, which brings up the question: Why would aliens with advanced space travel technology need a dinghy?”
‘Heartbroken’
Last Wednesday night, Frisco’s flying saucer met a fiery end, burned down to a sliver of its plastic hull in a blaze with unknown causes. Barring alien stragglers, no one lived inside the aging landmark, so the fire stopped short of any human casualties.
But on Hatteras Island, the loss stings worse than a man-o-war, triggering cosmic tears.
“I’m pretty sure everyone on the island is heartbroken,” said Melodi Schwartz, born and raised in Hatteras village. “I know I am. It was almost like the lighthouse to us.”
The UFO House dates to a 1970s ad in Playboy magazine, a six-page spread tempting readers with the ultimate in bachelor pad living. The prefab plastic spaceship houses were the brainchild of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, and its fan site The Futuro House lists only 63 remaining worldwide — none in North Carolina.
Schwartz can still remember the day the spaceship landed on Hatteras Island in 1972, looking like an intergalactic Airstream trailer with submarine windows. A Baltimore doctor and his wife ordered it from the Whole Earth Catalog, the era’s hippie shopping guide.
“It was quite a big deal,” she recalled. “People from all over the island went to look at it. They put it right in front of a dune so it looked like it landed there.”
Meeting hall, hot dog stand
The Futuro led a storied life, bouncing between lots along the thin strip of barrier island, at one time serving as headquarters for the Buxton Fire Department, meeting hall for the Girl Scouts and office for the defunct Monitor Newspaper. For a time, a proprietor sold hot dogs there, advertising the frankfurters as “out of this world.”
Then ex-Marine Leroy Reynolds bought it in 1994 and inhabited his alien digs with style, giving it beaded curtains and a purple ceiling, hanging spaceman stories from Weekly World News on the walls. Soon after, he would don a racing suit and mask, waving to tourists from inside the ship.
“I would wait until people were taking pictures and slip down out of the door and sit down behind them just for fun,” he told PBS in 2018. “Everybody that comes here, after they leave they’re smiling. They come here crappy and they leave smiling.”
More recently, once the saucer showed its age, he jostled with Dare County over its renovations, which never came to pass. Even in a weakened state, used mostly for storage, the Frisco UFO withstood hurricanes and tropical storms before succumbing to fire.
‘An acute signpost’
Locals crowded online to console Reynolds, grieving the loss of character on an island grown less unique.
“I know both locals and frequent visitors are saddened by the loss of this cherished touchstone,” said Valerie Crew in Kitty Hawk, “but I feel there are some older, lifelong residents who view the demise of the UFO house as an acute signpost that the Outer Banks, as we once knew it, is slipping away piece by piece.”
Somewhere, an alien planet mourns its emissary lost on Earth — an eccentric ambassador carrying no weapon but a smile.
