Google Doodle Mystery Solved: Happy Birthday, H.G. Wells

Sept. 21, 2009— -- The mystery of the alien-themed 'Google doodles' has finally been solved.

For the past few weeks, the search engine's usually bare home page has hosted a series of unexplained images featuring the paranormal.

First, it displayed an image of a UFO ostensibly abducting the "o" in "Google. "

Ten days later, instead of spelling out "Google" in the typical blue, red, yellow and green letters, all of the letters (except for the "l") resembled crop circles, the mysterious patterns of flattened crops that have fascinated people for years.

Today, the logo shows an all-out alien attack on an otherwise pastoral-looking landscape.

The tech giant has been known to change the so-called Google "doodle" to correspond with holidays and special events -- pumpkins on Halloween, voting booths on Election Day, shamrocks on St. Patrick's Day, etc.

But these most recent images have gone live without official commentary from the company.

Until now.

On the company's blog, Google revealed last night that the series of out-of-this-world images was intended to celebrate the contributions of H.G. Wells, author of the science fiction classic "The War of the Worlds."

"You might have noticed an unexplained set of doodles on the Google home page and a couple tweets from our official Twitter stream, @google, over the last two weeks," the company said. "We're finally acknowledging the reason for the doodles with an official nod to Herbert George, who would be 143 years old today."