IS SOMETHING UP THERE? by Dale White

This is a pretty good UFO primer for kids covering the usual midcentury narrative, from Kenneth Arnold and the Foo Fighters onwards to the Flatwoods Monster and the Condon report. Author Dale White references heavily from John G. Fuller's Incident at Exeter in an early chapter, but oddly enough doesn't mention Betty and Barney Hill despite covering a wide range of cases. White also goes over NICAP's involvement with the issue, Father Gill's sightings in New Guinea and other foreign reports, and explanations of strange weather phenomenon that can be mistaken as UFOs.

White's style is measured, and he does a fine job conveying the scale and layered contradictions of the subject. Good stuff! But the plot thickens: an online listing for the original hardcover edition reveals that White is a pseudonym for none other than Bigfoot authoress Marian T. Place!

Did she or original publisher Doubleday think young boys wouldn't read a UFO book by a lady? She didn't publish her Bigfoot work under a male pseudonym! Her papers are in a collection at Arizona State University, and offer some information on that front:

Place has written under her own name and under two pseudonyms. She recalls that "I began writing [about such subjects as] hunting, fishing, Forest Service and other state and federal fish & wildlife, grazing, [and] water projects, to mention only a few. I studied my markets before submitting and observed [that] the kind of ... subjects I was interested in were done by men. So, I chose to use the pen name of Dale [my uncle] and White [a portion of my middle name, Whitinger]. For about 10 years or more I was known as Mr. White. The other pseudonym, R. D. Whitinger, was used briefly only for westerns - i.e. bang-bangs, pulps. I was experimenting with several kinds of writing, and this one was not for me."

That online listing for Is Something Up There? also includes some promotional writing on Place, dating to the early '80s:

Scholastic Book Services, 1969 (original pub. 1968)

TREASURE HUNTING by Brad Steiger

Hot on the heels of Warren Smith's Finders Keepers, ol' reliable Brad Steiger delivers his own treasure hunting text with the bold, fresh title of ... well, Treasure Hunting. Steiger thanks Smith for the use of his treasure archives, and I'm assuming they collaborated on writing their respective volumes because there's very little overlap between them. Steiger tackles the Oak Island mystery that Smith preferred to leave out, and the chapter here would show up slightly abbreviated in Steiger's pseudonymous 1972 Eric Norman title Beyond the Strange. Treasure Hunting is structured like any of Steiger's classic Forteana titles, just one short chapter after another, onward to the end, with plenty of cheesy dialogue and fictionalized reconstructions. Steiger also reuses the list of metal detecting/treasure hunting companies that Smith assembled in Finders Keepers. That humorously vague "tip" about some streams in some parts of South Carolina showing "good color" is also present in both volumes - don't make it too easy for us, guys!

Venturing abroad, Steiger gives us a pair of lost underwater nazi jackpots with Erwin Rommel's Corsican fortune and the lethal treasure of Lake Toplitz, which claims the life of diver Alfred Egner in 1963 as well as two unnamed men, brutally murdered, who may very well be completely made up for Steiger's storytelling purposes. Rumor and legend cloud the waters of the mind and provide Steiger with lots of plausible deniability ... he's not always sure if a treasure even exists at all, but he's just doing his part passing on the info! Again, these volumes are for daydreaming dads to fall asleep reading in their easy chairs, or maybe drum up a little business for Gardiner Electronics and the like when dad plunks down part of the vacation fund on a metal detector - "It'll be fun, Junior!"

The backpage ads cover some UFO/Forteana and Old West titles, along with a classic treasure hunting title, Lost Mines and Hidden Treasure by one Leland Lovelace, originally published 1956.

Ace Books, 1967

NEW UFO BREAKTHROUGH by Brad Steiger and Joan Whritenour

Brad Steiger and partner in crime Joan Whritenour deliver a tight little text, presenting the more conspiratorial side of Ufology circa 1968 as a NEW UFO BREAKTHROUGH!

The main threads entwined are Gray Barker's Men in Black, Carl Allen (alias Carlos Allende) and his Philadelphia Experiment, and the sinister Shaver Mystery, with additional color provided by Brinsley Le Poer Trench's hippy dippy Sky People and those dear old Dropa Stones. Brad and Joan highlight more than a few people who were threatened or silenced for their attempts at UFO truth, including Carl Allen, Ufologist Morris K. Jessup, and superstar writer of the "Strange" Frank Edwards. Something strange is definitely going on ... Shaver's deadly Deros almost got to me today, and prevented this update entirely! Allen said that the lack of evidence for his teleportation story was actually proof of the Navy's coverup, naturally, while Jessup's death by suicide was really a hit job because he was getting too close to the truth. Ditto for Frank Edwards' death by heart attack. Edwards himself claimed that government pressure forced sponsors to drop his successful radio show after he began focusing on UFOs. Interestingly enough editor Ray Palmer, who popularized the Shaver Mystery as a true story and stands as one of the major figures on the darker side of Ufology, tells Steiger and Whritenour that he doesn't believe in the mysterious Men in Black, having been visited many times by government agents who were always upfront with their credentials! John Keel rails against Ufology's failures in the face of government stonewalling, claiming that he's been two steps behind the MiB multiple times while chasing UFOs.

Barker, Allen, Jessup, and Keel

After outlining the sinister saucer silencers and their brave critics, Steiger and Whritenour quote one Bob Stiff, reporting staff at Whritenour's Florida based UFO newsletter Saucer Scoop, on the "tragic case" of one Mary R., a young Oklahoma girl terrified into catatonia by a UFO sighting. Her mother then receives threatening calls from the silencers! Stiff gets too close to the case and ends up threatened himself! High drama and high strangeness, as twisted as anything penned by Gray Barker or John Keel.

The authors wrangle Wilhelm Reich and his bogus Orgone energy into their UFO coverup based on his arrest by the FBI and his later troubles with the FDA. The FBI claims mistaken identity, saying they only took him in because they mixed him up with a communist bookstore owner with the same name. Glad that's cleared up! The authors tread on dangerous ground defending Reich against charges of sexual impropriety, casting him as a liberated genius striving to better humanity ... an alternate view might be that he was a sex creep cultist using "liberation" as a cover for abuse. For a slim little volume, Steiger and Whritenour pack in a lot of dense material, and pulling a single thread can lead down a dangerous number of rat holes.

Co-author Joan Whritenour (1937-2014)

More saucer attacks follow, including Snippy the horse, with quotations from NICAP and more reporting from Bob Stiff. Next, the Dropa Stones are dusted off to support ancient UFO visitations, along with those fake quotes about nuclear war from the Mahabharata. The authors are kind enough to explicitly cite Paulwels and Bergier, as opposed to von Daniken who simply plagiarized their groundbreaking work. Some great Bigfoot/UFO cases follow including the Florida Sandman that Steiger and Warren Smith use in some of their other books. We get into some truly weird Biblical interpretation courtesy Brinsley Le Poer Trench, who decodes Genesis as a creation story for galactic humanity. The destruction of Atlantis and Velikovsky's catastrophism tie in too, as does Olaf Jansen's The Smoky God, another story of the inner earth a la Shaver. This is another bit that Steiger (and Smith) would recycle many, many times. 

We're getting towards the end, and Steiger and Whritenour toss in a random chapter on alchemy to fill things out, with a dialogue between the authors and an invented alchemist character, Augustus Magnus. Weird. Joan Whritenour finishes with a chapter on "psy-war" and the "mental rape" some contactees are experiencing via voices from the void. Whritenour joins with John Keel and Jacques Vallee in doubting these experiences are extraterrestrial at all, and fears that someone very earthly is planning something sinister ...

Above, a 1974 edition by Tandem for the UK. What a grueling grind! Compelling but draining, pure nonsense but skillfully arranged, Steiger and Whritenour at the top of their game. Recommended for a window into the vintage dark side of Ufology.

New UFO Breakthrough is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1968

THE U.F.O. REPORT by Irving A. Greenfield

The meat of Greenfield's book is his investigation of a series of UFO sightings in Sag Harbor, Long Island, not to be confused with the much more famous Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia UFO incident the same year of 1967. Greenfield beats feet around town, interviewing locals and dropping in at the famous (and now long shuttered) Black Buoy Bar. Among the witnesses is 11 year old Susan, who describes a craft similar to the Socorro, New Mexico sighting of Lonnie Zamora. Greenfield places a lot of weight on her sighting syncing up with Zamora's, as they occurred thousands of miles apart and almost contemporaneously.

The gumshoe routine is some good stuff, but we also have to slog through the standard UFO history lesson with Kenneth Arnold, the Air Force, Contactees, etc. We've read all that before! And Maury Island too! Poor Captain Thomas F. Mantell's crash is gone over again, with Greenfield convinced that the Air Force is withholding evidence of otherworldly destruction. The evolution of phantom airships to "modern" flying saucers is explained by Greenfield as the aliens keeping pace with our own technological progress. The year 1967 sure was a busy one for UFOs. Between the writing and publication of Greenfield's book, the University of Colorado was revealed to be behind the Air Force's new study on UFOs. The Northeast blackout of 1965 is pondered as possibly UFO related, thoughts shared by Allen Louis Erskine in Why Are They Watching Us? also published in 1967. (Update Sept 3 2023: according to Hilary Evans in his catalogue of his personal UFO library, Erskine was a pseudonym used by Greenfield!)

Typos and misprints abound. Socorro is misspelled as "Sorcorro" and poor J. Allen Hynek has his name misspelled as "Hynke" throughout the first half of the book before the editor notices and corrects it in the second half. This is before Hynek's change of heart on UFOs, and Greenfield excoriates him for the infamous "swamp gas" explanation Hynek gave for a series of sightings over southern Michigan in 1966.

Lancer Books, 1967

COVER UPDATES: STRANGE WORLD and WORLD OF THE WEIRD

An Ace Star edition for Frank Edwards' Strange World, with a copyright of 1964.

And Brad Steiger's World of the Weird from Belmont Books, 1970.

WHY ARE THEY WATCHING US? by Allen Louis Erskine

FIFTEEN YEARS IN THE MAKING! Clocking in at a slim 124 pages with some very large text, it's hard to imagine how author Erskine spent all that time. This meager volume delivers all the same old midcentury UFO meatloaf, barely reheated despite the blistering ad copy about "frightening facts" and how this book might just save the entire planet. At least you can't say that Tower Books didn't know how to dress up a piece, as they give us another one of those fun covers with a menacing model UFO.

Those flying Swedish jelly bags are back, as is Antonia Villas-Boas and his very close encounter ... although perhaps out of modesty for his sake Erskine leaves him anonymous, decent chap. By now we should know the Hill's story by rote, and all the back and forth between J. Allen Hynek, debunkers like Philip J. Klass, the USAF and the Condon Committee. Things like the Mystery Airship flap of 1897 and Mantell "dogfight" crash of 1948 are trotted out again, we get a quick sidetrack to Ezekiel's Wheel, and by the time we're begging for some reprieve Erskine finally shakes it up and blames the great Northeast Blackout of 1965 on UFOs! 

(Update Sept 3 2023: According to Hilary Evans in his enormous catalogue of his personal UFO library, Erskine was a pseudonym used by Irving A. Greenfield which accounts for their shared interest in the Northeast Blackout of '65 being UFO related.)

In 1975 Tower Books put this title out again with a Chariots facelift, which must have been de rigeur judging by the frequency of reissued bold text plain faced covers we've seen!

Table of contents:

1.  UFOs Swarm Over the Northeast (5)

2.  UFO Overflights (20)

3.  From Beyond (41)

4.  The 1947 Flap (63)

5.  Fighter Pilot Dogfights UFO (69)

6.  The Ghost of Mantell (71)

7.  UFOs at White Sands (75)

8.  UFOs - The Illusion Becomes Real (77)

9.  "The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth" (83)

10. They Have Landed and Made Contact (89)

11. What Caused the Blackout? (98)

12. Yes, We Have Pieces of a UFO (103)

13. What UFOs Are Not (107)

14. The $300,000 Snow Job (110)

15. A Touch of Human Interest (114)

16. What's the Answer? (121)

Tower Books, 1967