Alan Virdon

Colonel Alan Virdon was the captain of a small ship leaving Earth in 1980, along with Jones and Burke. They were on a routine mission to Alpha Centauri which suddenly got caught in "radioactive turbulence" and crashed to an unfamiliar planet. Virdon was shocked to find a photo of New York from 2503, 500 years after they left Earth. He was a gentle man, we see a photo he carries with him of his wife and son, Chris. He wanted more than anything else to return to them and his Houston, Texas home, and was always optimistic of his chances. In the meantime, he tried to reason with any apes who would listen to him, and to bring compassion and twentieth century technology to both species. Zaius and Urko spoke of another spaceship having landed ten years before, but this mystery was never further explained.

Virdon was raised on a farm in Jackson County, Texas (near Houston), where he learned to ride horses. He learned wood-carving and butter-churning; and alligator-wrestling in Florida, and became proficient in just about every field of agriculture, engineering, medicine and technology. Virdon and Burke spent time, during their training, at 'Hanson Point' - a location they revisited centuries later (in The Deception).