Youth Will Have Its Day Adult hoaxers often anticipate monetary reward, or the perquisites of fame. Younger hoaxers, want notoriety, too, but their ability to put one over on adults brings special fun. In 1967, fourteen-year-old Ronnie Hill of Oriental, North Carolina, had a clever idea. On July 21, he snapped a blurry photograph of … Read more
Conspiracy Alert Because of Kenneth Arnold’s recent notoriety, and the unresolved mystery of what Arnold saw above Washington’s Cascade Mountains on June 24, Army Air Forces Intelligence dispatched two officers to Puget Sound. After conducting interviews, snapping photos, and retrieving what may have been residue from the peculiar spray, Lt. Frank Brown and Capt. William … Read more
Mysterious Debris at Maury Island Some sources suggest that ABC-television’s The Invaders (1967–68)—the ongoing agonies of a saucer witness who can’t convince authorities that fiendish extraterrestrials are here—was based on the experiences of Harold Dahl, a local searching for salvage logs near Maury Island in Puget Sound, Washington, on June 21, 1947, three days before … Read more
Hans and Stig Meet the Monsters A pair of young-adult Swedish hoaxers, Hans Gustafsson and Stig Rydberg, insisted that they witnessed the landing of a disc some sixteen feet in diameter in woods near Helsinborg on December 20, 1958. The day really got interesting when jellylike creatures that apparently intended to drag the pair into … Read more
Billy Meier Has a DellaFavorite Swiss-born Eduard Albert “Billy” Meier-Zafiriou aka Billy Meier claimed frequent contact with flying saucers and aliens, dating, he said, to 1942, when he was just five. The visitors came from the planet Erra, in the Plejares star system. Their intentions were benevolent, and grounded in concern for undesirable qualities inherited … Read more
The Straith Letter Frequent contactee George Adamski (see chapter twelve) inadvertently convinced many within and without the UFO community that his accounts of hobnobbing with Nordic Space Brothers were hoaxes. Although Adamski remained resolute and stood by his stories, he failed to convince UFOlogists Gray Barker and Jim Moseley. Late in 1957, the pair concocted … Read more
Bad-Luck Saucer Con artists that mated flying saucer tech-tomfoolery to promises of quick returns for smart investors might prosper . . . for a while. In Baltimore in 1957, a fifty- one-year-old man named Otis T. Carr sold stock in OTC Enterprises, a company he had established two years before. Otis Carr’s product was free … Read more
From Here to Obscurity Howard Menger, a thirty-four-year-old Lebanon, New Jersey, farmer who claimed to have met a female angel as she emerged from a spaceship in 1941, was in the news again during the 1956 Christmas season. On December 29, Menger invited four people to meet a spacewoman—not at a spaceship or other high-tech … Read more
Disaster at the Naval Yard Not long after publication of his 1955 book The Case for UFOs, Morris Ketchum (M. K.) Jessup received a highly critical letter. Jessup had speculated in his book that antigravity technology motivated flying saucers from other worlds. The letter he received was written in fractured English and signed by “Carlos … Read more
The Elusive Mr. Allingham Flying Saucer from Mars is a 1954 book by a Briton named Cedric Allingham. In it, Allingham claimed to have witnessed a saucer landing at Lossiemouth, Scotland, and spoken with a humanoid alien that left the craft. A local fisherman named James Duncan also witnessed the landing and signed an affidavit … Read more
