1927 UFO Photo From Mexico

This photo, taken in 1927 in Mexico, is interesting! Read more about it on Inexplicata-The Journal of Hispanic Ufology. (A great blog by the way.)

SPACE PATROL! (1950)

My husband "George" went to a live taping of Space Patrol in Los Angeles when he was about six years old. (I was either not born yet or about a year, two years old, then!) He doesn't remember much about it, just that the exterior of the building was "beige," and he brought up on stage but, darn it, he doesn't remember details. He loved the show when he was a kid, of course, looking at the clips now, they're hysterical...though kind of charming. I love the "Space O' Phone."

Space Patrol was a half hour show, but they had a daily 15 min. show that aired daily in L.A., and was syndicated.

Space Patrol, out!

Happy Birthday Tim Binnall!

It's a little late but a HUGE BIG FAT ALIEN ESOTERIC HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO TIM BINNALL!!!!!

Hope you a great birthday Tim!

INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN 1957 SCI-FI TRAILER

My Favorite Martian

Some of my favorite TV shows when I was a kid were shows like My Favorite Martian, Bewitched, Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. Probably not surprising.

I really liked My Favorite Martian for some reason. The show starred Bill Bixby as Tim O’Hara, hep young, human bachelor (who was also the Hulk and the Magician, as well as the father in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father) and Ray Walston, as “Uncle Martin,” the martian. The show ran from 1963 to 1966.

I think it was a combination of the cute upstairs apartment, it was in L.A., I had a crush on Bill Bixby,-- and, he played a reporter, another cool thing, lol -- I was fascinated by the idea of having a Martian for an "uncle." I liked the music too. (I just thought of something, how ironic and frustrating for the character, Tim O'Hara, to be a reporter and yet not get the scoop on the biggest news of the century; that a real live Martian was living in your apartment!)

Like most of the sit coms where the main character is different, usually non-human (like a genie, or a Martian or from space, or a witch, etc.) only one human knows the truth. Human and alien/witch/genie/what have you get into all kinds of trouble because of this, all while trying to keep everyone else from finding out that the relative, wife, nanny, etc. are non-human, magical beings of some kind. And there’s usually a human that’s suspicious -- they’re not sure what, or why, exactly, but they know something isn’t right. Remember Mrs. Ghostly in Bewitched? Or detective Bill Brennan in My Favorite Martian.

Uncle Martin spent much of his time trying to repair his spaceship so he could get back to his planet. His attempts at fixing his craft often caused all kinds of problems for everyone around him.

Listen to Saturn

This is really wonderful, in an eerie way. You can listen to Saturn on the JPL site. One thing that is so spooky, in a magical wondrous way, is that these sounds sound just like what you’d expect to hear in some old flying saucer movie.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1613

Vampira Goes to the Big Sleep

The actress that was "Vampira" has passed on. Read more on Adam Gorightly's Untamed Dimensions.

Sex and Rockets

Looking at the Radio Mysterioso site, I found an ad for this book: Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, by John Carter, with an introduction by Robert Anton Wilson. Seems like another book to add to my long list of books!

So who was Jack Parsons, I asked myself. An extremely interesting person! From Wikipedia:

John Whiteside Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons on October 2, 1914 – died June 17, 1952), was an American rocket propulsion researcher at the California Institute of Technology and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Aerojet Corporation. He was also an enthusiastic occultist, and one of the earliest American devotees of Aleister Crowley.

Parsons was also an avid practitioner of the occult arts, and a follower of Thelema. He saw no contradiction between his scientific and magical pursuits: before each rocket test launch, Parsons would invoke the god Pan.

There's more, much more . . . definitely an intriguing person in the world of the strange!

Spaceship Under the Apple Tree

While we’re talking about children’s flying saucer books, my husband mentioned today that he remembers one of the first books he read when he was about six or seven, and that was Spaceship Under the Appletree, 1952. He remembered he liked it, and that the cover was green. So here it is:

I also found this version of the cover, but it’s not as nice:

It’s going for a quite a bit too, though not as much as Susie Saucer. Amazon.com has about half a dozen listings for the book, ranging from $31.15, to $94.91.

It's Susie Saucer!

I love this one! This one's from 1952. Another big thanks to UFO POP.com, where I found this image.

I also found this, from the

Susie Saucer, the youngest of all flying saucers, was specially chosen to fly to earth with flame, the lord of venus. There she met Ronnie The Rocket and, disobeying Flame's orders, she flew away to play with him.

Biblio.com has an edition for sale, at only a mere $1,550.00. On the Alibris book site, it's selling for $1,552.00.

"Flying Saucers for Everybody!"

This is from a neat site: Karl Schroeder's Science Fiction.

"Flying Saucers for Everybody (Mechanix Illustrated, March, 1957) was written by a Mr. Frank Tinsley, who as it turns out was a frequent and enthusiastic contributor of SF to magazines such as Amazing Stories. I believe he was also an illustrator who did some work on the Tom Swift books.

The rest of the article is a nice piece on memories of reading about flying saucers, inventions and the future in magazines like Popular Mechanics.

Early UFO Images

I was a little surprised, and delighted, to find illustrations dealing with the ideas of UFOs, flying saucers, and machine type things from space, from the 1900s to around the late 1930s. UFO Pop.com is a great resource for images, as well as just goofing off and searching the internet.



I like the phrasing on this one: "early scientification." Not sure what that means, but it sounds, well, "scientifical!"


This one is interesting: fears of giant sized flying saucer machines attacking high rises and sky scrapers like the Empire State building, etc.

The Bamboo Saucer

Vintage poster for the movie The Bamboo Saucer (1968) It's not one I've seen (yet.)

From 1954: Faking UFO photos

From 1954: How To Fake a Flying Saucer

An article from more than fifty years ago on how to fake flying saucer photos: “A Flying Saucer has been in my house . . .” by Vinicius Lima.

UFO Online: WW II Foo Fighters

On Dan Dare’s UFO Online blog, he has an article up about the Foo Fighters of WW II. (the article was written by Fran Black.):

In the 1938 comic strip Smokey Stover, a firefighter was known for his line, “Where there’s foo, there’s fire.” From Smokey, aircraft pilots borrowed the term “foo fire” to describe the various unexplainable phenomenon seen in the skies over Europe and the Pacific theatre during World War II. While Allied pilots initially thought the flying objects were German secret or psychological weapons, after the war it was discovered that sightings were also reported by the enemy, who had assumed the crafts were US-made. To this day, the sightings remain a mystery.

You can read the rest here.

Dana Howard Synchronicity

UFO Trickster is about. I've been intrigued by Dana Howard's contactee stories, having written two articles in the past month about this. Greg Bishop took a photo of the church she went to; it's still there, though no longer a Venusian mediumnistic church of course. (See post below or visit UFO Mystic.com.)

This all led me to begin work on a project about Howard, and I checked e-bay for any books by her. Only one was listed;the seller lives in the town next to mine. AND, the seller has a shop in my town, about a mile from me. So I'm off to buy the book.

The book is Up Rainbow Hill, 1957.
Kind of spooky, eh? Do the Space Brothers have anything to do with this?

Oldest UFO Photo?

Writer Richelle Hawks has a very interesting article on UFO Digest right now: On The Right Track: Toward Solving the Mystery of the First Known UFO Photograph. Just what is that thing anyway?

Greg Bishop on Female Contactees

Greg Bishop on UFO Mystic, has nice words about my article on Dana Howard, much appreciated. He expands on the topic of female Contactees, and has a photo of Dana Howard at Giant Rock, great find!

Contactee Dana Howard in Understanding

Contactees Dana Howard in Daniel Fry's Understanding newsletter.

I received a nice e-mail from Sean Donovan, who runs the Daniel Fry.com website. He let me know that Dana Howard wrote or appeared in several issues of Fry’s newsletter Understanding, and very kindly provided links to more information. (The Daniel Fry website is a valuable resource, well maintained. It takes a lot of work to do something like that!)

In Understanding, Volume 1, Number 10, October 1956 issue, Howard wrote Upon Another Dawn. Dana Howard writes about a New Age that “will soon be delivered.” This new era is one of love, “replacing the worn our concept of “fear God whom thouh hans’t not seen anc can’st never know.” “ Of the spaceships, she writes:

While flying saucer sightings have been somewhat on the wane this past year, many more around the world are making subjective contact with space people. The reports are identical in every instance . . . the outlook on life has been changed in "the twinkling of an eye." Some are cognizant of these space visitors. Others know intuitively they have made contact. They know because something inside tells them it is so.

Venus is the new heaven in Dana Howard’s world, and America is the home of this New Age of love and higher understanding:

"Only this, our Planet Venus, has known the fullness of perfection. But, step by step each and every planet in the broad universal system must climb the golden stairs. Child of Earth . . . your own America is the hope of your planet. She shall rise to her greatness, a haven for all who seek rest. With the coming of the New Dispensation, America, the land that has housed so many races, shall rise. Her banner of freedom shall wave in all its glory."

Under the wise leadership of those from On High, people will be gathered together in one fold. In that day America will 'become the brightest star in the galaxy, for right here in our own land we will establish an empire: of peace.

Nick Redfern on The Allende Letters and the VARO Edition . . .

I like what Nick Redfern writes in his review of the book The Allende Letters and the VARO Edition of The Case for the UFOs over on UFO Mystic:

If, like me and Greg, you are a fan of old-time Ufology and that long-gone era when (A) UFOs really were shaped like Flying Saucers; (B) long-haired space-beings with entertainingly-stupid names and from far-off galaxies demanded we disarm our nukes, stole our soil and stopped the engines on our cars; (C) there existed a UFO research group - NICAP - that actually achieved things, beyond the bickering and name-calling that typifies much of today’s scene; and (D) Ufology was actually fun, rather than just deathly serious, pompously self-important, and amusingly ego-driven, then this is a book you are definitely going to want: a very-welcome reprint of a decidedly strange book that has become legendary in ufological circles: The Allende Letters and the VARO Edition of The Case for the UFOs.

I started this blog because I share this philosophy. It’s not a waste of time or a case of beating a dead horse, as some criticize (this looking back on UFO history/flying saucer era) it’s for the above reasons, as Redfern stated. And more; maybe we can discover new things by looking back now and then. We can apply to what we learn from old cases and stories as we explore new cases and stories. Take a look at Nick’s post for more. The book is yet another one on my ever growing list of UFO and Fortean books.

New link for The Skeptoid Zone

New official url for my blog The Skeptoid Zone: http://www.theskeptoidzone.com/