Flying Saucers

First published, 2015.

None of the photographs or text are the designers own.

Cover and internal design © Madison Packer, 2015.

Cover Photograph © Ralph Crane, 1957.

Edited by © Madison Packer, 2015. madisonpacker.squarespace.com/

No extraterrestrial lifeforms were harmed in the making of this publication.

CONTENTS

1 ALIEN ABDUCTION! 2 FLYING SAUCERS 3 WAR OF THE WORLDS 4 THE ROSWELL INCIDENT 5 MEN IN BLACK 6 SPACE BABIES? 7 FLYING SAUCER FILMS

ALIE

U D B NA

S N O I CT

!

These abductions are real, and they are occurring worldwide. In short, alien visitors have been picking up and examining humans from all over the planet. All indications are that the number of people being picked up is in the millions worldwide. The patterns exhibited and the procedures performed are in many cases exactly like the ones we use to study wildlife and animals on our planet. Watch any nature show on television and you will see what I mean. We catch, tag, and take fluid samples from animals to study genetics, sociological interaction, and physical development. However, in this case, what complicates matters is the high level of our alien visitor’s technology. Their technology is so far advanced that it causes problems when trying to document and understand exactly what is going on.

THE TECHNOLOGY We are dealing with alien beings with technology that goes beyond our imagination. Their technology defies our definition of physical laws. Some of the things you are about to read are seemingly impossible, and many of the things will simply be unbelievable or difficult comprehend. That’s OK! I am not here to convince you of anything. I am simply

sharing with you what has been reported by thousands of people around the world.

By many accounts several of the alien races are literally millions of years ahead of humans in technology. Think about this.

Think of what we have developed just in the last hundred years. One hundred years ago there were no automobiles, airplanes, televisions, or telephones. Now imagine millions of years of such development. It’s almost incomprehensible. Try this: write out a list of all the things we have now that we didn’t have when your parents were your age. You’ll be astonished!

ABDUCTEES For the purposes of the discussion about what I call abductions, I am going to refer to the people being beamed up and examined in spaceships as abductees. The very terms abduction and abductee imply a violation or an act against your will, certainly something not in your best interest.

In fact this may or may not be true.

A case can and has been made that abductees may be voluntary participants at a level of consciousness our scientists do not yet understand. The events could also be compared to a small child undergoing a surgical procedure in a modern

hospital. If no one were available to explain things to her, she might easily conclude she is being punished, or at least that things are being done to her against her will. Just something to think about.

EXPERIENCERS This is a term some people use instead of abductee. It is in recognition that these experiences may not truly be abductions.

This term can also include contacts with alien beings that do not fit the abduction scenario.

CONTACTEE I consider this a whole different class of people. Contactees are people who claim to be in contact on an intellectual level with beings from other worlds or dimensions. There are many, many people around the world like this, and quite frankly, their stories sound every bit as credible as the abductees’ stories. For the most part none of these people are attempting to make money or gain fame with their stories and there seems to be no motivation for them to make up such tales. The most well known contactees and their remarkable stories are profiled in ‘The Best Cases of Alien Encounters’ on this website.

THE BEGINNING Generally, abduction experiences happen in the home or while driving a car. Makes sense. If you want to abduct people you have to go where they are, especially late at night. And that’s usually at home in bed or driving a car. However, and this is important, abductions can and do occur anywhere, from hotel rooms, hospitals, prisons, in the city, and out in the country. Forget that old stereotype that only Gomer in the backwoods gets beamed up. A Harvard-educated CEO of a major corporation is just as likely to be an abductee.

Abductees often feel that an abduction experience is about to occur. They may see strange lights in front of them or hear weird humming noises. They often feel apprehensive for no other apparent reason. They will often simply state, “I knew it was going to happen.”

USUALLY AT NIGHT Occurring most often late at night or in the early morning hours, the person will see figures or small beings at the foot of the bed. If they try to run, yell, or scream they find that they are paralyzed, except for their eyeballs, which for some reason, they can sometimes move. Even if

they get a sound out, nobody else in the house can hear it. Everyone in the house will have been “switched off.” Not asleep, their brains and central nervous systems will somehow have been disconnected. A spouse lying in bed next to an abductee will appear more dead than alive.

HOW THEY HAPPEN The abductee is then literally floated out of bed and out of the house, right through solid walls, doors, and often through closed glass windows. If they’re in a car, they’ll be beamed right through the roof of the car. They will ride on a beam of pale blue light, usually accompanied by one or more small beings. Many abductees are floated into a small craft about thirty feet across. That craft then takes them to a larger mothership. Sometimes the abductee is beamed a tremendous distance from the house into the mothership. When this happens, the abductee can see the ground, trees, and surrounding houses receding rapidly below. There is a lot of physical evidence confirming these beamings. Abductees have been returned to their beds with bits of leaves and branches in their hair that could only have come from the tops of tall trees that they brushed against while being beamed up.

I CAN ASSURE YOU THAT, GIVEN THEY EXIST, THESE FLYING SAUCERS ARE MADE BY NO POWER ON THIS EARTH. - PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN, 4 APRIL 1950, AT A PRESS CONFERENCE.

FLYING SAUCERS DID YOU KNOW? IN THE SOVIET UNION,

SIGHTINGS OF UFOS WERE OFTEN PROMPTED

BY TESTS OF SECRET MILITARY ROCKETS.

The first well-known UFO sighting occurred in 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane. Arnold estimated the speed of the crescent-shaped objects as several thousand miles per hour and said they moved “like saucers skipping on water.�

In the newspaper report that followed, it was mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-shaped, hence the term flying saucer.

Sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena increased, and in 1948 the U.S. Air Force began an investigation of these reports called Project Sign. The initial opinion of those involved with the project was that the UFOs were most likely sophisticated Soviet aircraft, although some researchers suggested that they might be spacecraft from other worlds, the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). Within a year, Project Sign was succeeded by Project Grudge, which in 1952 was itself replaced by the longest-lived of the official inquiries into UFOs, Project Blue Book, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

From 1952 to 1969 Project Blue Book compiled reports of more than 12,000 sightings or events, each of which was

ultimately classified as 1. “identified” with a known astronomical, atmospheric, or artificial (human-caused) phenomenon or 2. “unidentified.” The latter category, approximately 6 percent of the total, included cases for which there was insufficient information to make an identification with a known phenomenon.

An American obsession with the UFO phenomenon was under way. In the hot summer of 1952 a provocative series of radar and visual sightings occurred near National Airport in Washington, D.C. Although these events were attributed to temperature inversions in the air over the city, not everyone was convinced by this explanation. Meanwhile, the number of UFO reports had climbed to a record high. This led the Central Intelligence Agency to prompt the U.S. government to establish an expert panel of scientists to investigate the phenomena. The panel was headed by H.P. Robertson, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and included other physicists, an astronomer, and a rocket engineer. The Robertson Panel met for three days in 1953 and interviewed military officers and the head of Project Blue Book.

They also reviewed films and photographs of UFOs. Their conclusions were that 1. 90 percent of the sightings could be easily

attributed to astronomical and meteorologic phenomena (e.g., bright planets and stars, meteors, auroras, ion clouds) or to such earthly objects as aircraft, balloons, birds, and searchlights, 2. there was no obvious security threat, and 3. there was no evidence to support the ETH. Parts of the panel’s report were kept classified until 1979, and this long period of secrecy helped fuel suspicions of a government cover-up.

A second committee was set up in 1966 at the request of the Air Force to review the most interesting material gathered by Project Blue Book. Two years later this committee, which made a detailed study of 59 UFO sightings, released its results as Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects—also known as the Condon Report, named for Edward U. Condon, the physicist who headed the investigation. The Condon Report was reviewed by a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences. A total of 37 scientists wrote chapters or parts of chapters for the report, which covered investigations of the 59 UFO sightings in detail. Like the Robertson Panel, the committee concluded that there was no evidence of anything other than commonplace phenomena in the reports and that UFOs did not warrant further investigation.

This, together with a decline in sighting activity, led to the dismantling of Project Blue Book in 1969.

...

Despite the failure of the ETH to make headway with the expert committees, a few scientists and engineers, most notably J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who had been involved with projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book, concluded that a small fraction of the most-reliable UFO reports gave definite indications for the presence of extraterrestrial visitors. Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), which continues to investigate the phenomenon.

Aside from Project Blue Book, the only other official and fairly complete records of UFO sightings were kept in Canada, where they were transferred in 1968 from the Canadian Department of National Defense to the Canadian National Research Council. The Canadian records comprised about 750 sightings. Less-complete records have been maintained in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Greece. In the United States, CUFOS

and the Mutual UFO Network in Bellvue, Colo., continue to log sightings reported by the public.

In the Soviet Union, sightings of UFOs were often prompted by tests of secret military rockets. In order to obscure the true nature of the tests, the government sometimes encouraged the public’s belief that these rockets might be extraterrestrial craft but eventually decided that the descriptions themselves might give away too much information. UFO sightings in China have been similarly provoked by military activity that is unknown to the public.

UFO reports have varied widely in reliability, as judged by the number of witnesses, whether the witnesses were independent of each other, the observing conditions (e.g., fog, haze, type of illumination), and the direction of sighting.

Typically, witnesses who take the trouble to report a sighting consider the object to be of extraterrestrial origin or possibly a military craft but certainly under intelligent control. This inference is usually based on what is perceived as formation flying by sets of objects, unnatural—often sudden—motions, the lack of sound, changes in brightness or colour, and strange shapes.

That the unaided eye plays tricks is

well known. A bright light, such as the planet Venus, often appears to move. Astronomical objects can also be disconcerting to drivers, as they seem to “follow” the car. Visual impressions of distance and speed of UFOs are also highly unreliable because they are based on an assumed size and are often made against a blank sky with no background object (clouds, mountains, etc.) to set a maximum distance. Reflections from windows and eyeglasses produce superimposed views, and complex optical systems, such as camera lenses, can turn point sources of light into apparently saucer-shaped phenomena.

Such optical illusions and the psychological desire to interpret images are known to account for many visual UFO reports, and at least some sightings are known to be hoaxes. Radar sightings, while in certain respects more reliable, fail to discriminate between artificial objects and meteor trails, ionized gas, rain, or thermal discontinuities in the atmosphere.

“Contact events,” such as abductions, are often associated with UFOs because they are ascribed to extraterrestrial visitors.

However, the credibility of the ETH as

an explanation for abductions is disputed by most psychologists who have investigated this phenomenon. They suggest that a common experience known as “sleep paralysis� may be the culprit, as this causes sleepers to experience a temporary immobility and a belief that they are being watched.

THE WORLDS WAR OF THE WORLDS WAR OF THE WORLDS WAR OF THE WORLDS

Orson Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. Wells’ 19th century science fiction novel War of the Worlds for national radio. Despite his age, Welles had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of “The Shadow” in the hit mystery program of the same name. “War of the Worlds” was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little idea of the havoc it would cause.

The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.”

Sunday evening in 1938 was primetime in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway.

Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” Putrid dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. An announcer broke in to report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then the dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey.

Soon, an announcer was at the crash site describing a Martian emerging from a large metallic cylinder. “Good heavens,” he declared, “something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here’s another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me … I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… it … ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped

with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.”

...

The Martians mounted walking war machines and fired “heat-ray” weapons at the puny humans gathered around the crash site. They annihilated a force of 7,000 National Guardsman, and after being attacked by artillery and bombers the Martians released a poisonous gas into the air. Soon “Martian cylinders” landed in Chicago and St. Louis. The radio play was extremely realistic, with Welles employing sophisticated sound effects and his actors doing an excellent job portraying terrified announcers and other characters. An announcer reported that widespread panic had broken out in the vicinity of the landing sites, with thousands desperately trying to flee. In fact, that was not far from the truth.

Perhaps as many as a million radio listeners believed that a real Martian invasion was underway. Panic broke out across the country. In New Jersey, terrified civilians jammed highways seeking to escape the alien marauders. People begged police for gas masks to save them from the

toxic gas and asked electric companies to turn off the power so that the Martians wouldn’t see their lights. One woman ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!”

When news of the real-life panic leaked into the CBS studio, Welles went on the air as himself to remind listeners that it was just fiction. There were rumors that the show caused suicides, but none were ever confirmed.

The Federal Communications Commission investigated the program but found no law was broken. Networks did agree to be more cautious in their programming in the future. Orson Welles feared that the controversy generated by “War of the Worlds” would ruin his career. In fact, the publicity helped land him a contract with a Hollywood studio, and in 1941 he directed, wrote, produced, and starred in Citizen Kane—a movie that many have called the greatest American film ever made.

“SO GOODBYE EVERYBODY, AND REMEMBER THE TERRIBLE LESSON YOU LEARNED TONIGHT. THAT GRINNING, GLOWING, GLOBULAR INVADER OF YOUR LIVING ROOM IS AN INHABITANT OF THE PUMPKIN PATCH, AND IF YOUR DOORBELL RINGS AND NOBODY’S THERE, THAT WAS NO MARTIAN...

IT’S HALLOWE’EN.”

THE ROSWELL INCIDENT

THE ROSWELL INCIDENT

THE ROSWELL INCIDENT THE ROSWELL INCIDENT THE ROSWELL INCIDENT THE THE ROSWELL ROSWELL INCIDENT INCIDENT THE ROSWELL INCIDENT

In early July 1947 an incident occurred in the desert just outside of Roswell, NM. Many people have heard of the Roswell UFO crash, but very few people know the details of the incident. The following account of the 1947 UFO incident was taken from public records, from information provided by the International UFO Museum and from the press release for UFO Encounter 1997.

...

On the evening of July 3, 1947 Dan Wilmot, a respected business owner, and his wife were sitting on their front porch when they saw a bright saucer shaped object with glowing lights moving across they sky at 400-500 miles per hour. Dan Wilmot estimated that the unidentified flying object was about 20-25 feet across.

The flying object appeared from the Southeast and disappeared to the Northwest. Dan Wilmot reported his unusual sighting to the Roswell Daily Record.

In early July W.W. (Mac) Brazel, the Foreman of the J. B. Foster Ranch rode out to check his sheep after a night of intense thunderstorms. Mac Brazel discovered a large amount of unusual

debris scattered across one of the ranch’s pastures. Mac Brazel took some pieces of the debris, showed them to some friends and neighbors and eventually contacted Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox.

Suspecting that the materials described

by Mac Brazel might be connected with military operations, Sheriff Wilcox notified authorities at the Roswell Army Air Field (subsequently renamed Walker AFB) for assistance in the matter. Major Jesse Marcel, the Intelligence Officer at the 509th Bomb Group, was involved in the recovery of the wreckage which was initially transported to Roswell Army Air Field. On July 8th the Roswell Daily Record’s headline story revealed that the wreckage of a flying saucer had been recovered from a ranch in the area. When questioned Major Jesse Marcel disclosed that the wreckage had been flown from New Mexico on to higher headquarters.

Colonel William Blanchard, Commander of the 509th Bomb Group, issued a press release stating that the wreckage of a crashed disk had been recovered. A second press release was issued from the office of General Roger Ramey, Commander of the Eighth Air Force at Ft. Worth Army Air Field in Ft. Worth, Texas within hours of the first press release. The second press release rescinded the first

press release and claimed that officers of the 509th Bomb Group had incorrectly identified a weather balloon and its radar reflector as a crashed disk.

The Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell had a contract to provide ambulance and mortuary services for Roswell Army Air Field. Glenn Dennis, a young Mortician who worked for Ballard Funeral Homes, received several phone calls from the Mortuary Officer at the air field prior to learning of the recovery of the wreckage.

Glenn Dennis was asked about the availability of small hermetically sealed caskets and for his recommendations on the preservation of bodies that had been exposed to the elements for several days.

His curiosity aroused, Glenn Dennis visited the Base Hospital that evening and was forcibly escorted from the building.

This behavior only incited Glenn Dennis’ curiosity and he arranged to meet a nurse from the Base Hospital on the following day in a coffee house. The nurse had been in attendance during autopsies performed on “several small non-human bodies�. Glenn Dennis kept drawings of aliens that the nurse had sketched on a napkin during their meeting. This meeting was to be their last and Glenn Dennis could learn no more about the alien bodies, as the nurse was abruptly transferred

to England within the next few days. On July 9th the Roswell Daily Record revealed that the wreckage had been found on the J.B. Foster Ranch. Mac Brazel was so harassed that he became sorry he had ever reported his find to the Chaves County Sheriff.

In the following days virtually every witness to the crash wreckage and the subsequent recovery efforts was either abruptly transferred or seemed to disappear from the face of the earth. This led to suspicions that an extraordinary event was the subject of a deliberate government coverup. Over the years books, interviews and articles from a number of military personnel, who had been involved with the incident, have added to the suspicions of a deliberate coverup.

In 1979 Jesse Marcel was interviewed regarding his role in the recovery of the wreckage. Jesse Marcel stated, “... it would not burn ... that stuff weighs nothing, it’s so thin, it isn’t any thicker than the tinfoil in a pack of cigarettes. It wouldn’t bend. We even tried making a dent in it with a 16 pound sledge hammer. And there was still no dent in it.”

Officers who had been stationed at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio (where the

wreckage was taken) at the time of the incident have supported Jesse Marcel’s claims.

Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., eleven years old at the time of the incident, accompanied his Dad during the retrieval efforts. Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr. has produced detailed drawings of hieroglyphic like symbols that he saw on the surface of some of the wreckage. Dr Marcel testifies regularly on his belief that a UFO of some type crashed in Roswell.

The Men In Black is now a motion picture experience, but eyewitness accounts of these shadowy figures have been documented for 50 years, and they have become as integral to UFO lore as the Philadelphia Experiment, Roswell, Area 51 and crop circles. Aptly described as “sartorial agents of silence”, they are believed to move in groups of two or three. They wear black suits and ties, travel in similarly coloured Cadillac’s and turn up at the houses of those who claim to have seen UFOs. They will warn these witnesses not to pursue their investigations.

...

They may confiscate any “evidence” that the “contacted might have collected.

They seem to have telepathic powers, they are uncannily well informed, and give the impression that they work for the government - although U.S. intelligence agencies have denied all knowledge of them. They are born of the same kind of paranoia that underpins sightings of flying saucers and claims of extraterrestrial abduction. The most common post Roswell stories are victims losing several hours of their lives, after witnessing a blinding light, and for years afterwards suffering

recurring nightmares about being experimented on by aliens.

Just as the stories of abductions and close encounters are remarkably alike, so the stories arriving from different corners of the world about The Men In Black are uniform in content. And they go back almost as far as the first recorded UFO sighting, in 1947, when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted a group of shimmering discs hovering over Mount Rainier in Washington. Almost immediately afterwards came the “Maury Island Incident” in which a man named Harold Dahl claimed he had seen some flying doughnut-shaped objects, one of which had dropped a lump of metal on his dog’s head. Dahl said he had then had breakfast with a stranger wearing a black suit who drove a 1947 Buick Sedan and warned him to keep silent. The Maury Island Incident was later reported to be a hoax. Genuine or otherwise, this didn’t deter The Men In Black, who pursued a tight schedule for the next 50 years. Albert K Bender, for instance, director of a research group entitled the International Flying Saucer Bureau, abruptly announced his retirement following a visit by three men with eyes that shone like flashbulbs. “If we hear another word from your of fine, you’re in trouble,” they warned him. Several years

later, in 1968, Bender published a book in which he explained The Men In Black in more detail: they were, he claimed, from somewhere called Kazik; he had visited their spaceship in Antarctica; they had told him that their agents had infiltrated the Pentagon.

In 1971, UFO author Timothy Green Beckley published a pamphlet entitled MIB - Aliens Among us, in which he revealed a US Air Force memorandum apparently written by one Lt Gen Wheless. It warned military personnel to be on the alert for people impersonating air force of fixers, describing a person in a USAF uniform who “approached local police and other citizens who had sighted a UFO�. Apparently, this shadowy figure assembled them and told them that they had not seen what they thought they had seen. Nor should they talk to anyone about their imagined sighting. As would be expected, sightings of The Men In Black were documented throughout the Sixties and Seventies when the fashionable nihilism spawned by the Vietnam war, nuclear threat and the arms race gradually mutated into academic orthodoxy. In an atmosphere dominated by Cold War paranoia, assassinations and Watergate, every conspiracy theory gained validity. One of the most interesting and most detailed

descriptions of a Man In Black was given in 1976. Dr Herbert Hopkins, a psychiatrist based in Maine, had no previous link with this field, except that he had been treating a youth who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. Here is an abbreviated account of the whole episode, as Hopkins told it to UFO Review: “I was alone in the house. The telephone rang and the voice on the other end identified itself as a member of a New Jersey UFO research organization. I agreed that he could talk with me about the abduction case. He said that he would be right over. I walked from the telephone in the hallway to turn on a light and the man was already coming up the stairs. If he was as close as across the street, or even next door, he couldn’t have possibly gotten here so soon.“ His attire struck me as a little odd. He wore a neatly tailored black suit, black shoes, black socks, and a black tie. He also wore a black Derby. I thought, ‘God, this man looks like an undertaker.’ “We sat down and I said to myself, ‘This character is as bald as an egg.’

He didn’t have any eyebrows or eyelashes and his skin was a dead white colour. His nose was very small and it came down to just above the upper lip. His lips were ruby red. “He had the appearance of a clothing store dummy. His sump looked

as if it had never been worn before. He spoke flawlessly English with no accent, completely neuter, like you would get from a machine that could talk.” He was wearing gloves. They looked like grey suede. He 5 brushed his lips with the glove, and when he put his hand downy the back of his glove was bright red. I said to myself; ‘This guy is wearing lipstick.’

Then I could see that his mouth was perfectly straight. He did not have what we call lips, so the lipstick was there as some sort of decoy. “He could apparently read my mind. He told me I had two coins in my left pocket, which I happened to know for a fact. “He asked me to hold a bright new copper penny up in my fingers, and he made it disappear in a bright blue light. I didn’t smell or feel anything. I was just fascinated at that point. “I got a little uneasy when he ordered me to destroy the tapes and any other correspondence and anything to do with UFOs. He said that if I didn’t do so I would suffer the same fate as Barney Hill” [a renowned ‘contactee who had died under mysterious circumstances]. “I truly believe that this individual was from another planet.

He is not an invader. I don’t think so anyway. But I do feel he, and others like him, are around, nosing about...”

The nature of these visitations has

changed little in the past ten years, and stories still abound about peculiar interrogations conducted by men who, rather scarily, look like Bryan Ferry. In 1985, a report emerged from Venezuela in which two doctors claimed that they had seen two men wearing black suits and shades emerge from a magenta Ford Mustang and then climb up a ladder into a UFO. Nine years later, Mike Lonzo, a researcher n Pennsylvania, visited an old woman who told him that she had been approached by two individuals wearing black dinner jackets. They demanded she give them a black stone that was in her back Fyard because it had the power to destroy the world. She complied. Then they asked her out to dinner in a restaurant in Pittsburgh.

Testis urzu, testis rullis. Everyone from Hawking to Asimov has had their say. We have been offered humanoids and reptoids, angel hair and hoaxes, interdimensional gateways and autopsies. The result is a virtual truth, so out there no one knows what is real. Eyewitness accounts of abductions and interplanetary travel have been indistinguishable from the parallel universe presented by screen writers from The Day The Earth Stood Still in 1950. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, an astronaut is transformed into a hybrid that is half man, half alien - a fantastic idea you may think,

and one that could only exist in science fiction. But in America, Jenny Randles has published Star Children - “the stories of people who believe they are the offspring of aliens and humans”. The Men in Black, chic and scary, are still an unexplained phenomenon. Psychiatrists may throw out phrases such as “fantasy prone personalities”, “disassociative states”, and “constructive perception”; debunkers will do their work and describe rational causes; but no one has pinned down The Men In Black and, consequently, disparate suppositions have been spawned in this arena of strange perceptions.

Theorists who affiliate UFOs not so much with outer space as with the paranormal suggest that The MIB are a form of demonic psychic energy similar to the poltergeist. Some have said that The Men in Black were linked to a branch of the US Air Force Special Activities Centre known as the 1127th Field Activities Group, which was said to comprise a group of underworld figures who were specialists in lock-picking and intimidation. Others argue that The Men in Black were Tibetan monks who followed the Dalai Lama and the Khamba riders into exile, and placed their yogic powers at the service of the CIA. This could help to explain why many reports of MIB describe their features as

Asian. John Keel, a leading UFO investigator, has pointed out that, “a large proportion of the available UFO literature is based on hearsay and speculation. Many of the real and important problems have been suppressed at the source by the witnesses themselves or have been ignored by superficial investigations which concentrate on obtaining descriptions of the objects rather than studying all the events and factors surrounding the sightings.

“Many of the aspects which have preoccupied UFOlogists for years have proved to be misleading or have failed to contribute to a better understanding of the whole. The UFOs represent only a small part of a much larger phenomenon which is now occurring on a worldwide scale. By being more thorough and objective in our investigations we can - and will - learn more about the main phenomenon itself.”

But objectivity holds little sway in a land where meta-logic makes faith and pseudo-science gives rise to all manner of extraterrestrial hypotheses. You could put it all down to protean psychoid phenomena.

Or you could simply agree that everyone loves a good story.

“

RUSSIA AND THE U. S. HAVE ANNOUNCED THEY ARE DEFINITELY PLANNING SEVERAL SPACE MACHINES. SO IT’S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THE FIRST SPACE SHIPS OR SATELLITES MAY ENCOUNTER OTHER INTERPLANETARY MACHINES, MANNED OR OTHERWISE. OUR SPACE DEVICES MAY EVEN BE CLOSELY APPROACHED BY SUCH ALIEN MACHINES...

- MAJ. DON KEYHOE USMC, NOVEMBER 29, 1957

“

Almost from the start, sex and UFOs were inseparable bedfellows. The adventure of 23-year-old Antonio Villas Boas on 16 October 1957 in Brazil is probably the most famous case of interstellar intercourse.

Antonio was ploughing a field on the family farm when the engine of his tractor cut out; at the same time, an object with purple lights descended from the sky.

Humanoids in spacesuits emerged from the object and took him into their craft, subjecting him to what seemed like a medical examination.

They stripped him, spread a strange liquid over him and took a sample of his blood. He was left alone in a room for what seemed a long time, until a beautiful, fair-haired woman arrived.

She was naked and Antonio was instantly attracted to her. Without speaking or kissing, they had sex, during which she growled like a dog. Despite his strange circumstances or perhaps because the alien liquid had Viagra-like properties Antonio was soon ready for a second helping. Interviewed later, he said: “Before leaving she turned to me, pointed to her belly, and smilingly pointed to the sky.�

Before letting him go, his captors gave Antonio a guided tour of the spaceship.

Antonio went on to become a successful lawyer and still stood by his story over 30

years later.

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Equally lurid stories of sexual liaisons with UFO occupants came from the world-famous contactees of the 1950s.

Howard Menger, for one, had regular meetings with Marla, a beautiful blonde from space who claimed to be 500 years old. She projected “warmth, love and physical attraction,” which he found irresistible.

Menger divorced his wife to marry Marla (aka Connie Weber). From July 1952, Truman Bethurum had many meetings with Aura Rhanes, the captain of a flying saucer, whom he found to be “tops in shapeliness and beauty”.

Bethurum’s wife wasn’t so impressed with this “queen of women” and cited Rhanes in her divorce petition. From the late Forties to the early Sixties, female contactees in contrast to today’s female abductees are few and far between. This is more than made up for by the astonishing story of Elizabeth Klarer, who in 1956 fell in love with Akon, a scientist who took her to his home planet, Meton. There, he seduced her, saying:

“Only a few are chosen for breeding purposes from beyond this solar system to infuse new blood into our ancient race.”

This smooth talk worked; “I surrendered in ecstacy to the magic of his lovemaking,” she wrote later.

Klarer said their “magnetic union” produced a perfect and highly intelligent son named Ayling.

She was sent back to South Africa alone and died in 1994; as far as we know her starman and son live on somewhere beyond Alpha Centauri. Rather ordinary tales of ‘contact’ are thus transformed into heroic fantasies of youthful virility.

Antonio Villas Boas claimed to have done what any healthy young man would have done in the same situation; he and Elizabeth Klarer delivered the goods, helping to save an alien race from extinction. Scientific ufologists, more interested in ‘hard’ evidence (like radar traces, photographs and forensic samples) condemn this ‘wet’ material as too subjective, relegating claims of sexual assault and abduction to the fields of psychology and folklore (which they likewise distrust).

The early contactee literature provides a rich variety of such stories and, whatever their validity, it is a pity they

have been largely neglected or ridiculed.

Antonio Villas Boas. When ufologist John Keel visited college communities in Northeast America during the mid-1960s, several young women told him they had been raped by aliens, and young men confessed that aliens had extracted their semen.

By the 1970s, the idea of hybrid ‘space babies’ was more widely known but taken seriously only by UFO cultists who, said Keel, feared, that “the flying saucer fiends are engaged in a massive biological experiment creating a hybrid race which will eventually take over the Earth.” A decade later, these notions were part of mainstream ufology. Serious researchers some of them academics, like John E. Mack and David Jacobs openly declared their belief that the ‘Greys’ were taking sperm and ova from human abductees. It was common to hear female abductees tell of being impregnated, of the ftus taken from their wombs, and of later being shown their hybrid babies in a nursery on a flying saucer.

...

In the 1970s, a 19-year-old Californian

girl attributed the birth of a blue-skinned, web-footed baby to being gang raped by six blue-skinned web-footed humanoids who attacked her after she watched their spaceship land on a beach. Similar stories of lusty mermen (the ocean has some affinity with space) can be found in folklore and are usually given as explanation for the birth of deformed babies with reptilian or fish-like characteristics.

Some researchers are aware of intriguing similarities between the lore of witches and fairies and modern abduction reports, and nocturnal sexual encounters with supernatural beings of all types can be found in most cultures to the present day. In the past, hundreds of men and women confessed (not always under torture) to sexual intercourse with demons.

Some shapeshifting demons were said to lie with a man (as a succubus) to obtain sperm and then (as an incubus) impregnate a woman with it.

Ufologists, in particular, have been aware of the structural similarities between accounts of fairy and alien encounters. A recent study by James Pontolillo compared 1517th century accounts of sexual relations with demons to 20th century encounters with aliens and concluded that both traditions expressed a fundamental fear of female sexuality but today

the male body and mind are just as likely to be under attack. Communion author Whitley Strieber famously described being sodomised by a narrow, 1ft (0.3m)long alien probe. He felt that, while inside him, it seemed alive and was surprised, on its removal, to find it was a mechanical device. In my own research I have interviewed ‘Martin Bolton’ who had visions of, and telepathic communications with, three young space women. On behalf of these entities, he window-shopped for female attire and watched porn films. They were the ‘goodies’; the ‘baddies’ beamed pain to his brain and for a three-year period stretched his penis during the night.

On sevry also includes a male protagonist having his genitals examined before sex with an alien female.

Whatever the genesis of such reports, we have to consider that folk have reported sexual contact with all manner of supernatural beings throughout history.

Either the aliens have been conducting their beastly experiments for millennia, or such stories meet some deep-seated socio-psychological need. Until any solid medical evidence is provided, the latter hypothesis seems the more likely.

“

YOU NOW FACE A NEW WORLD, A WORLD OF CHANGE. WE SPEAK IN STRANGE TERMS, OF HARNESSING THE COSMIC ENERGY, OF ULTIMATE CONFLICT BETWEEN A UNITED HUMAN RACE AND THE SINISTER FORCES OF SOME OTHER PLANETARY GALAXY. THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD WILL HAVE TO UNITE, FOR THE NEXT WAR WILL BE AN INTERPLANETARY WAR. THE NATIONS OF THE EARTH MUST SOMEDAY MAKE A COMMON FRONT AGAINST ATTACK BY PEOPLE FROM OTHER PLANETS. - GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR- OCT. 8, 1955

“

FLYING SAUCER FILMS OF

THE MID 20thth CENTURY

In the mid-1940s and the 1950s, scores of people began to report seeing mysterious flying discs in the sky. It could have been mass hysteria caused by the trauma of going through one massive war and the fear of another, but Hollywood was happy to capitalize on the paranoia. Aliens ships descended on the cinema and have continued blowing up Washington, D.C. to this day.

INVADERS FROM MARS Touch here to view the trailer!

There are two schools of thought about Invaders from Mars, a semi-legendary low-low-budget 1953 story of a young boy who sees a spaceship land near his back yard, after which his parents and others transform into possessed, soulless saboteurs with tiny control devices implanted in their necks. One school regards this peculiar little film as dreck of the cheapest sort, a kiddie matinee of paperboard sets, oaken dialogue, actors who’d be more at home in local car lot commercials, an irksome reliance on stock footage, and silly Martian “synthetic Mutants” costumed in green velour footy pajamas with visible zippers up their backs. Pure Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder. On the other side of the aisle, there are those

who honor it as a textbook Cold War paranoia alien infiltration psychodrama, as a flawed yet mesmerizing masterpiece of expressionist design and symbol-rich photography, a movie that spins its meager resources into a metaphorical dreamstate tapping universal childhood fears of otherness and personal powerlessness.

Dr. Caligari with rayguns. And you know what? They’re both right.

Invaders from Mars has acquired quite a reputation over the years, thanks to the hand of its director/designer William Cameron Menzies, whose bona fides included a designer’s Academy Award for Gone With the Wind and director credits such as Things to Come and The Thief of Bagdad. With a budget less than $300,000, he and cinematographer John F. Seitz (Sunset Boulevard, The Lost Weekend) used minimalist sets and forced perspective to lift otherwise merely juvenile claptrap into something... if not extraordinary, then at least by no means ordinary. Menzies’ idea that we see everything from a small boy’s dream pointof-view offers such striking compositions as a child’s idea of a police station (stark and stretched, as if designed by Dali), of a scientist’s lab (towering test tubes frame the image like jail-cell bars), and of the principal set, an oddly foreshort-

ened grassy knoll, on the far side of which loved ones are taken body and soul. The boy, David (Jimmy Hunt), is around 12 years old and says “Gee!” a lot, but he’s a smart and observant amateur astronomer who wakes to a world where all of the supposedly safe adults, even policemen, are dangerous enemies. Of course, the U.S. army rolls in brandishing tanks (and WWII stock clips) to attack the Martians’ underground lair, but it’s David who finally saves the day.

Those who’ve looked beneath the occasionally Ed Wood-like surface of Invaders from Mars report seeing sideshow mirror-distorted reflections of America’s Red Scare fears. The national phobia of a subverting Communist menace, of enemies hidden within normal-looking people, rattled at fever pitch through the 1950s and found its most famous expression in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (‘56), a classic owing more than a little to Invaders from Mars. Or is David, as some suggest, an abused child? That interpretation sees this “dream” manifesting a textbook subconscious playing-out of trauma filtered through an imagination fueled by what his mother derides as “those trashy science fiction magazines.”

The people who populate his nightmare (or is it? Cue weird music) are an odd as-

sortment. Mom (Hillary Brooke) is plastic and passive even before she’s taken over; the Martian-controlled dad (Leif Erickson) is belligerent and physically violent and threatens the boy to keep silent about it.

David’s saviors are outsiders: astronomer Dr. Kelston (Arthur Franz) — whose magic telescope and bizarre all-knowing prescience have already divined the scheme behind the “synthetic mute-ants” near the “hush hush” rocket base where Dad works — and beautiful Dr. Pat Blake (Helena Carter), a protector who’s not a parent and therefore can be simultaneously safe, lovingly physical, and chastely sexy. (That off-the-shoulder rip in her dress is telling.)

David’s parents are telepathically controlled by the trippy “Martian Intelligence,” a disembodied green head with tentacles encased in a glass globe.

It wordlessly puppeteers the adults and several hulking pop-eyed, green-pajama mutants (the chubby one is good for a chuckle) until its destruction comes in a drawn-out, hallucinatory climax that defies all reason except dream logic. When David wakes only to see the spaceship land in his backyard again just as in the dream, has he experienced a precognitive vision of things to come, or is he trapped in an ever-looping nightmare forever? Either way, it’s a suitably weird cap on a series of

weirder off-kilter scenes.

Invaders from Mars really is laughably camp and an often goony 79 minutes, but if that were its totality it would be utterly dismissed like so many of its kin today.

Instead, to many viewers — especially those who first saw it at the age of eight or so — its effect is unnerving and memorable. This deliriously stylized snapshot of early-1950s ideas and attitudes is good for any suitably impressionable eight-yearold, or for indulging the eight-year-old, or “Media Studies” student, within you.

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL Touch here to veiw the trailer!

The quintessential alien visitation tale of its era, The Day the Earth Stood Still was mythically embedded in the minds of the pre-Spielberg generation that first saw it in childhood; viewed now, its influence on subsequent genre variations is as difficult to overstate as its number of ludicrous imitators. If not the first science-fiction film made by a Hollywood studio for adults (a distinction Kubrick always claimed for his 2001), it marked a leap past bug-eyedmonster serial juvenilia and attempted to defuse Cold War paranoia via anti-authoritarian wit and somber reckoning with Atomic Age danger. It’s a thinking kid’s

movie, yet its crafty fun stays in balance with its self-consciousness as a prestige message picture.

Iconic from the get-go (the first line of dialogue is “Call headquarters!”), Day begins with a shimmering saucer hovering over the monuments of Washington, landing on the Ellipse to disgorge interstellar ambassador Klaatu (the angular, authoritatively British Michael Rennie). Surrounded

by Army units, he is immediately wounded in the arm by a trigger-happy soldier, and his giant robocop companion Gort defensively vaporizes a tank and a couple of rocket launchers.

When his efforts to organize a summit of all Earth’s nations are halted by geopolitical stalemates, Klaatu escapes a hospital room to observe Terran habits undercover in a D.C. boarding house, where he gradually confides in sharp but vulnerable war widow Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her spunky son (Billy Gray). After the alien reaches out to an Einstein-like professor (Sam Jaffe) to aid him in assembling the world’s scientists to hear his warning to the human race and engineers an eerie global demonstration of power, the authorities tighten the dragnet and the visitor must rely on Gort and Helen to save his life and mission. (Neal gets to unleash one damsel-worthy scream before

delivering an order to the metallic sentry that’s the movie’s most enduring line.)

Released in the midst of the Korean War and the prime of McCarthy, the film achieved a unique relevance for a “spaceman” movie by unambiguously advocating for peace and grounding its pulp story in social reality. Beside the then-state-ofthe-art effects and an indispensable, theremin-laced score by Bernard Herrmann, director Robert Wise and screenwriter Edmund North establish the anxiety and xenophobia of a Soviet-fearing populace as easily transferred to the messianic Klaatu (whose pseudonym is the Christian-tinged “Mr. Carpenter”). A frumpy boarder suspects the space traveler is actually a Red spy; the widow’s fatuous insurance-salesman suitor (Hugh Marlowe) asks, “What do you know about him?” as a preamble to envisioning himself as the richly rewarded captor of “the monster.”

And the highly evolved Klaatu’s stern ultimatum isn’t bleeding-heart idealism but falls within the parameters of ‘50s statecraft: “Stop fighting or we’ll destroy you” fits Truman-style containment policy without many contortions.

Despite the centrality of this severe admonition to the plot, Day’s capacity to entertain is still carried by its stylish visual assurance, Rennie and Neal’s touching

faith in each other, and a boy’s pleasure in buying otherworldly gemstones from a “screwball” adult for $2. And Gort remains an awesomely cool robot.

IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE Touch here to view the trailer!

It Came From Outer Space is one of a handful of science fiction films from the 1950s that plays as well today as it did on its original release, this despite the fact that its original 3D elements seem to be lost. It was also the first science fiction effort of director Jack Arnold, and one of three excellent 3D features that he made (the others were Creature From the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature) during that format’s short-lived history. It was also, along with The Incredible Shrinking Man, one of the two most sophisticated films he ever made in that genre. Additionally, it was Arnold’s first opportunity to use the desert setting that seemed to inspire him in some of his best subsequent movies.

Based on a story by Ray Bradbury, the movie starts off in a gentle, lyrical mode, almost reminiscent of ‘Our Town’, as the narrator introduces the tiny Arizona town where the action will take place.

Writer John Putnam (Richard Carlson), a

new arrival to the town and an amateur astronomer, is looking at the skies with his fiancĂŠe, schoolteacher Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush), when they see what looks like a huge meteor crash into the desert.

Putnam and Ellen go to the site of the crash and find a huge crater. When he goes down inside, Putnam sees what is very obviously some kind of vehicle or device embedded in the ground, but before he can show it to anyone, a rock slide buries what he saw. He reports that a spacecraft of some kind is buried there and is duly ridiculed by the local press and some of his own colleagues in the astronomical community, and even Ellen has her doubts.

The local sheriff, Matt Warren (Charles Drake), is downright hostile because he believes that Putnam is not only an interloper, but has also taken Ellen away from him. Putnam is at a loss as to what to do, and doing something -- or, perhaps, not doing anything -- becomes a critical matter when various townspeople start to disappear, including Ellen, to be replaced by alien “duplicates.� A small but significant part of this action is told from the standpoint of the aliens, who are only glimpsed in brief flashes as they move through the desert and the underground caves where they are hiding. Putnam ultimately comes

to understand that the aliens are actually benign and only need time to repair their ship and leave; but by then, the sheriff and the rest of the town have started taking his original warning seriously and their intervention threatens the lives of everyone. Reason and a peaceful approach prevail, but only just barely, and the space travelers are allowed to go on their way -in return, they restore the real townspeople. The movie ends on a hopeful note as Putnam predicts that someday, when we’re ready here on Earth, the visitors will be back to make formal, peaceful introductions.

FORBIDDEN PLANET Touch here to veiw the trailer!

Fasten your seat belts, fellows. Get those space helmets clamped to your heads and hang on tight, because we’re taking off this morning on a wonderful trip to outer space. We are guiding you to “Forbidden Planet,” which is appropriately at the Globe. And we suggest you extend an invitation to Mom and Dad to go along.

For this fanciful interstellar planet, which has been dreamed up at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and put on the screen in Eastman color and properly spacious CinemaScope, is the gaudiest layout of

gadgets this side of a Florida hotel. It offers some of the most amusing creatures conceived since the Keystone cops.

Best of the lot is Robby, a phenomenal mechanical man who can do more things in his small body than a roomful of business machines. He can make dresses, brew bourbon whisky, perform feats of Herculean strength and speak 187 languages, which emerged through a neon-lighted grille. What’s more, he has the cultivated manner of a gentleman’s gentleman. He is the prettiest piece of mechanism on Planet Altaire.

You will note we said “piece of mechanism.” The prettiest thing there, by far, is Anne Francis—also known as Altaira—the daughter of Dr. Morbius. He is the lone American scientist who has survived from a previous trip that was made to this distant planet twenty years before. And it is he and his beautiful daughter—who, we might add, has never been kissed—that intrigue and confound the handsome space-men that descend in their flying saucer to see what’s what.

Take it from us, they see plenty—and so, we promise, will you, if you’ll take our advice and fetch the family, from 8 to 80, to the Globe. You’ll see the dry and ragged face of a worn-out planet, looking for all the (modern) world like some

of those handsome illustrations in the slick-paper picture magazines. You’ll see the vast subterranean powerhouses built by the superhuman Krells who inhabited this far-off planet 2,000 centuries before earth-man was born. And you’ll see—or, rather, you won’t see—the fearful monster created by the Id, which (according to Dr. Morbius) is the evil impulse of the subconscious mind.

You won’t, see him because he is invisible, but when he gets caught in the electronic grid that the fellows put around their flying saucer and he glows a fiery red, you’ll get a vague idea of his giant proportions. And, brother, will you hear him roar!

Don’t ask us who deserves top credit for the creation of this film—whether it be Irving Block and Allen Adler, who wrote the story, or director Fred McLeod Wilcox or screen-playwright Cyril Hume. The people who built the vast arrangements of queer machinery and multicolored lights that constitute the flying saucer and the fabulous ranch-house of Dr. Morbius did their share.

So did Louis and Bebe Barron, who developed the “tonalities”—the accompaniment of interstellar gulps and burbles—that take the place of a musical score. And so did Walter Pidgeon as Dr.

Morbius, the counterpart of the old “mad scientists,” and Leslie Nielsen as the captain of the spaceship and Miss Francis and all the crew. Also, a mention is merited by whoever is inside Robby, the Rover Boyish robot, and whoever speaks his courteous words.

Certainly, every one of them had a barrel of fun with this film. And, if you’ve got an ounce of taste for crazy humor, you’ll have a barrel of fun, too.

EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS Touch here to view the trailer!

Our journey through space travel science fiction has our coordinates locked onto the 1950s The most Ultra of the Ultra-Swank decades. Receding in our aft view screen is the pulp pre-war period of the 1930s and 1940s – the times of cowboys in space. They rode rockets instead of horses and blasted bad guys with ray guns instead of six-shooters.

Our mid-century destination is where the science in science-fiction takes over the controls! We land squarely in the realm of motion pictures- mostly black and white and often projected on the mosquito obscured screens of drive-in theaters. The plots may still be thin, the dialog contrived and the budgets no

bigger than a plutonium neutrino but it’s all arc-welded together by the blazing brilliance of the the god in the white lab coat- The Scientist! This is the height of the Cold War and the near vertical climb of American consumerism. Any moment science will end all life on the planet- but in the meantime let’s get that new Hydramatic Futurific Buick with the built-in color TV dishwasher! Rest assured that nothing in these movies has anything to do with real physics, astronomy or any of that other complicated stuff. There is always a part of the script where a scientist explains science in a scientific sounding way- often accompanied with a chart. It’s all just long words and scowls and professors puffing on pipes.

Then the movie gets back to the alien slime monster and other good stuff.

Exceptions to the rule: here is an unusual example from 1950s truly scientific “Destination Moon”. The whole movie can be seen here. The space themed 1950s ‘B’ science fiction movie came in two flavors.

There was the one where the aliens came to visit us- and the ones where we went to see them. Sort of like grandparents- only with lots of screaming and tentacles. If the aliens were coming to see us then there were scenes of Generals in Pentagon offices hysterically urging scientists in labs

to develop a last minute weapon. This amazing scientific weapon would make the aliens want to go back home- they were destroying our cities, experimenting on our women and drinking all our beer.

This new scientific breakthrough had to be done without spending special effects money. Maybe an ultrasonic beam that only required some high pitched warbling on the soundtrack. Viewers believed it because they had tube powered hi-fi’s in the den and ‘ultrasonic’ had that science ring to it. “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” is a shining example of of the deadly ultrasonic beam principle. Psychologists tell us the world menaced by alien invaders was a metaphor for the threat of atomic war…also bed-wetting and male pattern baldness. There was plenty of pathos and terrified crowds running and a lost child or abandoned puppy amongst it all. It was all pretty predictable unless it was a sci-fi film from some crazy place like Great Britain.

Then things were all mixed up and the alien was a hot babe in PVC who needed a bunch of guys in a pub for breeding purposes. If it was a movie about going into space then another formula was followed.

A young hero scientist would talk an old rich guy into paying for his new brussel-sprout powered rocket ship. Govern-

ment space agencies did not exist yet and it was the American Way to rely on private enterprise and ingenuity. Often the old rich guy would go along even though he had a secret medical condition that would kill him off at an inconvenient moment.

There was also the beautiful niece of the old rich guy. She just happened to have a PhD. in atomic physics. She would would make coffee, scream when monsters appeared and prove she could do real science just like the men. Then she would make sandwiches to go with the coffee.

To complete the crew there was a requirement for a mechanic who knew how to fix rockets but could otherwise hardly spell his name. He would play the harmonica. Sometimes the young hero scientist would bring along a colleague and rival who would compete for the affections of the pretty scientist niece. He would sacrifice himself to save the others and so the hero would get the girl. Different movie, different actors - same crew. There were many moments of scientific danger awaiting our outer space crew. Terrific forces of acceleration, far worse than ever experienced by real astronauts, crushed our heroes into grotesque, gurgling special effect wonders. Swarms of meteors, attracted to any unsuspecting rocket ship, lurked at every slow plot point.

Despite all the slide rule calculations there were always little slip-ups- like not packing enough fuel or none of the crew had ever landed a rocket before.

Spacesuits were whatever was available from the Army-Navy surplus store. Alien planets looked a lot like the hills twenty minutes outside of Hollywood. Outer space cities were always conveniently hidden underground and resembled the leftover streamlines of a Busby Berkeley musical. The alien cities were usually filled with a population of beautiful women who needed Earthmen to replenish their population.