Earlier this month, Google began a series of mysterious logos with a UFO-related theme, that caused quite a buzz of speculation.

The first one (which I blogged about) showed a UFO *abducting* one of the “O’s” in Google. Google accompanied the logo with a tweet in binary code that translated as “All Your O are Belong to Us” – a clear reference to computer game Zero Wing.

The next in the series showed the Google logo as a series of crop circles, with the “L” being abducted by another UFO. This was accompanied by a tweet consisting of Google Map co-ordinates leading to Woking – the town in which the Martians first land in H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel The War of the Worlds.

A few people began to speculate at this point about the doodles being a lead up to the 143rd birthday of H.G. Wells on September 21.

Well, it seems they were right! Google have today launched a new logo showing a village under attack by alien tripods, with only the “G” and the “E” in Google clearly visible with the rest presumably abducted or barely hinted at within the design. A click on the logo leads to search results for H.G. Wells. I expect we’ll see a tweet from Google confirming this later today.

At the moment the logo is only viewable on Google New Zealand and Google Australia but expect to see it roll across the regional domains as the rest of the world wakes to September 21.

Happy Birthday H.G. Wells!

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