THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
April 2, 2017
www.theparacast.com
Ray Stanford Exposes Old-Time Flying Saucer Contactees on The Paracast
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY A PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to After The Paracast, plus a higher-quality version of The Paracast free of network ads, and chat rooms when you sign up for The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes, the Paracast+ Video Channel, episode transcripts, Special Features, Classic Episodes and there’s more to come! We’ve just begun to add podcasts and videos from Paul Kimball’s “Other Side of Truth.” Check out our new lower rates, starting at just $1.49 per week, plus our “Lifetime” membership and special free eBook offers! For more information about our premium package, please visit: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio.
This Week's Episode: In the early days of the UFO field, such characters as George Adamski, Daniel W. Fry, Truman Bethurum, George Van Tassel and others gained some measure of fame — or infamy — when they claimed to be in regular contact with beings from other planets. UFO researcher and amateur paleontologist Ray Stanford, and his twin brother Rex, were there to observe these people in action; the good, the bad, and the ugly. Ray will tell you how Adamski and Fry faked their UFO photos and movies to help spread their wacky tales of ET contact. You’ll learn, also, about a possible case of genuine contact with someone from “out there.” As he tells us, there’s “a lot to share.”
Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet
After The Paracast -- Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on April 2: After recording an episode of The Paracast, Ray Stanford told Gene and Chris that he completely forgot to recount a few more wacky tales about some of those flying saucer contactees, such as Adamski’s encounters with Hollywood film technician Norman S. Kossuth, who gave the contactee a 16mm camera with which to take movies of alleged spaceships, and about one movie that may depict a genuine UFO. Ray also recalls the story of contactee Lee Crandall, who claimed to be in touch with an entity known as Brother Boco, someone who allegedly flew through space in a Venusian craft made of “magnetized dove feathers.” And did ET actually repair Adamski’s indoor plumbing?
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums.
About Those “Legendary” Flying Saucer Contactees
By Gene Steinberg
The granddaddy of flying saucer contactees is probably George Adamski. He burst into fame in 1953 as author of “Flying Saucer Have Landed,” where he recounted an alleged meeting the previous year with a handsome spaceman in the California desert. He accompanied the tale with totally absurd photos of the space craft in which the visitor traveled.
It didn’t take long for the story to be dissembled in the UFO field. The supposed eyewitnesses to the encounter actually didn’t see what actually went down, and had to take Adamski’s word that it really happened. The photos? Barely up to the chintzy special effects you’d see in the low-budget sci-fi “B” films of the day.
In the famous Adamski exposé issue of Jim Moseley’s Saucer News, one of Adamski’s followers quoted him as saying that you sometimes had to enter through the back door to present the truth. In short, it was about the message not the medium.
While Adamski had a group of loyal followers, I was surprised to learn a while back that there’s still an active web site devoted to him and his work. I was even offered the opportunity to interview the proprietor of that site, someone who believed Adamski was the “real deal.”
To me that’s long ago and far away.
Well, after Adamski became famous — or infamous — other contact tales emerged from various and sundry previously unknown individuals. Some were clearly influenced by Adamski. One of those characters, a sign painter by the name of Howard Menger, was sometimes referred to as the “Jersey Adamski,” because of the similarities in the appearance of the beings he met.
Menger had his own set of photos, but the ones I saw depicted apparent paintings of flying saucers rather than actual images of some craft. One of them, widely published, closely resembled Klaatu’s spacecraft during the final scene of the classic 1951 sci-fi film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
I didn’t pay much attention to Menger until the days when I was working for Moseley at Saucer News in the mid-1960s. One day Jim had a call from Menger suggesting they have lunch.
I thought it was mighty peculiar at the time, since Jim was one of Menger’s most vociferous critics and, in fact, had made it quite clear he didn’t believe any of those contact claimants.
Curious indeed!
Well, Jim and I met Menger one afternoon at a diner across the street from the magazine’s tiny offices in midtown Manhattan.
Menger seemed friendly enough and I listened quietly as he explained to Jim that he had come to disbelieve those contacts, that he had met up with extraterrestrials. Instead, he had a new story to tell, that he had become a pawn in an alleged test by the U.S. Army to gauge the possible impact of alien contact.
This was interesting enough, maybe even slightly credible. But things really became strange when he repeated his new claim on a local TV show hosted by legendary talk show host, Long John Nebel.
Now while Long John was a great radio performer, and he did all right in his rare public appearances, he couldn’t quite translate his popularity to television. Gifted at long-form radio, the time constraints of commercial TV just didn’t suit him.
Long John invited Menger on the TV show, no doubt expecting to hear the same wacky tales of meeting attractive visitors from Saturn and other planets. Instead, Menger proceeded to recant his claims in the same way he dissembled them before me and Jim.
Long John did not appreciate Menger deviating from his usual spiel, and, from what I recall of the episode, barely suppressed his anger with near-silence and a stern demeanor. You can be assured that Menger joined the ranks of those who were persona non grata to the sometimes temperamental talk show host.
Menger eventually moved to Florida, and began to build flying saucer models with the promise that he might actually perfect one that could fly. He sent a few non-working samples to Jim over the years, but the project — if you can forgive the pun — never took off.
Not long thereafter, I left Saucer News, moved south and began to seek my fortune as a radio broadcaster.
It would be real easy to dismiss the claims of people like Adamski and Menger and assume they were just making things up. Certainly these two, and other saucer contactees, went overboard in creating transparently fake flying saucer photos that fooled very few. They spoke of meeting human-like entities that allegedly came from such planets as Venus, Mars and Saturn.
While the Saturday morning sci-fi shows of the 1950s — which catered largely to children — often depicted aliens from those planets, real science soon got in the way. Actual probes of Venus, for example, revealed a genuine hot house, with temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Reports of possible canals on Mars were shown to be wrong. While I suppose it’s possible Mars may have been inhabited at one time in the distant past, perhaps millions of years ago, today we recognize it as a barren world with a thin atmosphere.
That there are signs of water on Mars and the Moon doesn’t mean that humans can exist there without the need for spacesuits or a carefully controlled and sealed environment. But the contactees could only think in terms of the sci-fi images of the day in devising their stories. The march of knowledge quickly passed them by.
Now I suppose it’s possible some of these people had one or more genuine encounters with the unknown. Only they couched their stories in the language of pop culture, perhaps to make them more palatable to their intended audiences. So at a time when flying saucers were popular, might as well speak of extraterrestrials who could easily pass for human if they walked among us.
Or maybe they made up all those stories out of whole cloth just to seem important and, perhaps, to gain a measure of fame and fortune.
Among this strange group were eccentric characters who sometimes went overboard in the effort to make their stories seem credible. Twins Ray and Rex Stanford, still in their teens in those days, had the chance to meet many of the better-known contactees and discovered the secrets of their photo and movie fakery.
Ray’s first-hand accounts of those meetings are endlessly entertaining, which is why I invited him to appear on the April 2, 2017 episode of The Paracast and our premium podcast, After The Paracast. But is it at all possible that one or more of those saucer contactees really met ETs after all? You may be surprised at the answers to that question when you listen to these shows.
Copyright 1999-2017 The Paracast LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
April 2, 2017
www.theparacast.com
Ray Stanford Exposes Old-Time Flying Saucer Contactees on The Paracast
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY A PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to After The Paracast, plus a higher-quality version of The Paracast free of network ads, and chat rooms when you sign up for The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes, the Paracast+ Video Channel, episode transcripts, Special Features, Classic Episodes and there’s more to come! We’ve just begun to add podcasts and videos from Paul Kimball’s “Other Side of Truth.” Check out our new lower rates, starting at just $1.49 per week, plus our “Lifetime” membership and special free eBook offers! For more information about our premium package, please visit: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio.
This Week's Episode: In the early days of the UFO field, such characters as George Adamski, Daniel W. Fry, Truman Bethurum, George Van Tassel and others gained some measure of fame — or infamy — when they claimed to be in regular contact with beings from other planets. UFO researcher and amateur paleontologist Ray Stanford, and his twin brother Rex, were there to observe these people in action; the good, the bad, and the ugly. Ray will tell you how Adamski and Fry faked their UFO photos and movies to help spread their wacky tales of ET contact. You’ll learn, also, about a possible case of genuine contact with someone from “out there.” As he tells us, there’s “a lot to share.”
Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet
After The Paracast -- Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on April 2: After recording an episode of The Paracast, Ray Stanford told Gene and Chris that he completely forgot to recount a few more wacky tales about some of those flying saucer contactees, such as Adamski’s encounters with Hollywood film technician Norman S. Kossuth, who gave the contactee a 16mm camera with which to take movies of alleged spaceships, and about one movie that may depict a genuine UFO. Ray also recalls the story of contactee Lee Crandall, who claimed to be in touch with an entity known as Brother Boco, someone who allegedly flew through space in a Venusian craft made of “magnetized dove feathers.” And did ET actually repair Adamski’s indoor plumbing?
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums.
About Those “Legendary” Flying Saucer Contactees
By Gene Steinberg
The granddaddy of flying saucer contactees is probably George Adamski. He burst into fame in 1953 as author of “Flying Saucer Have Landed,” where he recounted an alleged meeting the previous year with a handsome spaceman in the California desert. He accompanied the tale with totally absurd photos of the space craft in which the visitor traveled.
It didn’t take long for the story to be dissembled in the UFO field. The supposed eyewitnesses to the encounter actually didn’t see what actually went down, and had to take Adamski’s word that it really happened. The photos? Barely up to the chintzy special effects you’d see in the low-budget sci-fi “B” films of the day.
In the famous Adamski exposé issue of Jim Moseley’s Saucer News, one of Adamski’s followers quoted him as saying that you sometimes had to enter through the back door to present the truth. In short, it was about the message not the medium.
While Adamski had a group of loyal followers, I was surprised to learn a while back that there’s still an active web site devoted to him and his work. I was even offered the opportunity to interview the proprietor of that site, someone who believed Adamski was the “real deal.”
To me that’s long ago and far away.
Well, after Adamski became famous — or infamous — other contact tales emerged from various and sundry previously unknown individuals. Some were clearly influenced by Adamski. One of those characters, a sign painter by the name of Howard Menger, was sometimes referred to as the “Jersey Adamski,” because of the similarities in the appearance of the beings he met.
Menger had his own set of photos, but the ones I saw depicted apparent paintings of flying saucers rather than actual images of some craft. One of them, widely published, closely resembled Klaatu’s spacecraft during the final scene of the classic 1951 sci-fi film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
I didn’t pay much attention to Menger until the days when I was working for Moseley at Saucer News in the mid-1960s. One day Jim had a call from Menger suggesting they have lunch.
I thought it was mighty peculiar at the time, since Jim was one of Menger’s most vociferous critics and, in fact, had made it quite clear he didn’t believe any of those contact claimants.
Curious indeed!
Well, Jim and I met Menger one afternoon at a diner across the street from the magazine’s tiny offices in midtown Manhattan.
Menger seemed friendly enough and I listened quietly as he explained to Jim that he had come to disbelieve those contacts, that he had met up with extraterrestrials. Instead, he had a new story to tell, that he had become a pawn in an alleged test by the U.S. Army to gauge the possible impact of alien contact.
This was interesting enough, maybe even slightly credible. But things really became strange when he repeated his new claim on a local TV show hosted by legendary talk show host, Long John Nebel.
Now while Long John was a great radio performer, and he did all right in his rare public appearances, he couldn’t quite translate his popularity to television. Gifted at long-form radio, the time constraints of commercial TV just didn’t suit him.
Long John invited Menger on the TV show, no doubt expecting to hear the same wacky tales of meeting attractive visitors from Saturn and other planets. Instead, Menger proceeded to recant his claims in the same way he dissembled them before me and Jim.
Long John did not appreciate Menger deviating from his usual spiel, and, from what I recall of the episode, barely suppressed his anger with near-silence and a stern demeanor. You can be assured that Menger joined the ranks of those who were persona non grata to the sometimes temperamental talk show host.
Menger eventually moved to Florida, and began to build flying saucer models with the promise that he might actually perfect one that could fly. He sent a few non-working samples to Jim over the years, but the project — if you can forgive the pun — never took off.
Not long thereafter, I left Saucer News, moved south and began to seek my fortune as a radio broadcaster.
It would be real easy to dismiss the claims of people like Adamski and Menger and assume they were just making things up. Certainly these two, and other saucer contactees, went overboard in creating transparently fake flying saucer photos that fooled very few. They spoke of meeting human-like entities that allegedly came from such planets as Venus, Mars and Saturn.
While the Saturday morning sci-fi shows of the 1950s — which catered largely to children — often depicted aliens from those planets, real science soon got in the way. Actual probes of Venus, for example, revealed a genuine hot house, with temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Reports of possible canals on Mars were shown to be wrong. While I suppose it’s possible Mars may have been inhabited at one time in the distant past, perhaps millions of years ago, today we recognize it as a barren world with a thin atmosphere.
That there are signs of water on Mars and the Moon doesn’t mean that humans can exist there without the need for spacesuits or a carefully controlled and sealed environment. But the contactees could only think in terms of the sci-fi images of the day in devising their stories. The march of knowledge quickly passed them by.
Now I suppose it’s possible some of these people had one or more genuine encounters with the unknown. Only they couched their stories in the language of pop culture, perhaps to make them more palatable to their intended audiences. So at a time when flying saucers were popular, might as well speak of extraterrestrials who could easily pass for human if they walked among us.
Or maybe they made up all those stories out of whole cloth just to seem important and, perhaps, to gain a measure of fame and fortune.
Among this strange group were eccentric characters who sometimes went overboard in the effort to make their stories seem credible. Twins Ray and Rex Stanford, still in their teens in those days, had the chance to meet many of the better-known contactees and discovered the secrets of their photo and movie fakery.
Ray’s first-hand accounts of those meetings are endlessly entertaining, which is why I invited him to appear on the April 2, 2017 episode of The Paracast and our premium podcast, After The Paracast. But is it at all possible that one or more of those saucer contactees really met ETs after all? You may be surprised at the answers to that question when you listen to these shows.
Copyright 1999-2017 The Paracast LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
