ARCHIVAL UPDATES: ARE THE INVADERS COMING?

Steven Tyler's hopeful-but-skeptical UFO text Are the Invaders Coming? is now available to read and download at archive dot org! Whither our man of mystery? He wrote one more book on the paranormal and then disappeared into the unknown ...

Courtesy Tower Books, 1968.

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

LOST CITIES OF THE ANCIENTS - UNEARTHED! by Warren Smith

A tome for the ages, Warren Smith's ultimate Zebra special clocks in at a whopping 395 pages, over twice as long as his other entries. There's a dirty little secret at the dark heart of his jungle escapade though: he only wrote the half of it! Smith's pulled a neat trick by excerpting huge passages from "ancient scribes" etc, amounting to 143 pages of 395 being quoted text. The final line of the book encapsulates his approach to these quotations: "I leave it to you, the reader. What do you think?" There's little in the way of analysis and absolutely zero fact checking or research going on beyond presenting these strange tales in bulk, but it's strangely hypnotic.

Smith's scribes and their contributions:

- Hiram Bingham, "The Discovery of Machu Picchu" article from Harper's, 1913 (approx. 4,000 words quoted)

- William Montgomery McGovern, Jungle Paths and Inca Ruins, 1927 (approx. 11,000 words)

- John T. Short, The North Americans of Antiquity, 1880 (approx. 6,300 words)

- Willard Barbrooke Grubb, An Unknown People in an Unknown Land, 1911 (approx. 12,000 words)

- E. G. Squier, Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Inca, 1877 (approx. 990 words)

Smith also uses heavy quotations from Dr. A.M. Renwick's Wanderings in the Peruvian Andes from 1937, and reprints an interview with Morris K. Jessup from his inaugural Zebra special Secret Forces of the Pyramids. Ivan T. Sanderson and Gordon Creighton are cited for musings on UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle. 

It's effective mystery mongering and a tribute to Smith's talent how far he can spin a yarn off of some anecdote from a dusty archive. Newspaper articles also contribute some weird monster tales, with Patagonian plesiosaurs, the tongue ripping terror of the mapinguari, and the brutal El Sisemite making sketchy appearances. It wouldn't be a Smith special without another appearance by that goddamn Venezuelan vicious hairy dwarf, either! Some monsters are only too human, as the Wrath of God himself Lope de Aguirre proves.

Another ripping tale: Erich von Daniken's Ecuadorean caves of wonder, which supposedly housed impossible ancient tech and records. Smith runs with von Daniken's story for a whole chapter on secret tunnel systems and lost precursor civilizations. The simple fact that von Daniken fabricated these caves from whole cloth is no matter to Smith, even when von Daniken admitted as such in a 1974 interview for Playboy, two whole years before this book's 1976 publication. Smith brings in a story from Ray Palmer's Search magazine for some Shaver Mystery tinge too.

Smith's thesis, such as it is, follows the basic ancient astronauts/lost civilization template of "White gods" bringing civilization to the savages, with special focus on Quetzacoatl, the plumed serpent who's been interpreted as a white European man on down since the conquistadores. These racial/colonial frameworks obviously have resonance to this day, as far flung as doctrine for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to the inspiration for a modern million dollar TV boom.

True to penny-pinching form, Zebra's proud proclamation of FULLY ILLUSTRATED amounts to 11 grainy black and white photos interspersed through the text.

Table of contents:

Preface: South America, Mystery Land of the Ancients  (i)

1.  The Lost Cities of the Ancients (5)

2.  The Lost World of El Gran Paytite (22)

3.  The Marauding Monsters of South America (36)

4.  The Patagonian Plesiosaur and Other Mysterious Monsters (57)

5.  Mysteries of the Incan Builders (75)

6.  The Mysterious City of the Clouds (92)

7.  An Ancient History Carved in Stone (110)

8.  The Enigma of Pre-Columbian Explorers (148)

9.  Witchcraft, Wizards and Indian Magic (171)

10. Mummies, Tomb Robbers and Ancient Cities (211)

11. Mystery of South America's Subterranean Tunnels (246)

12. Amazon Warriors of Ancient America (264)

13. The Riddle of History in Stone (289)

14. Machu Picchu: City of Mysteries (309)

15. Mysteries of the Megalithic Monuments (321)

16. The Tantalizing Enigma of Tiahuanaco (339)

17. Incredible UFO Activity in South America (354)

18. Space Gods and Miracle Workers (372)

Lost Cities of the Ancients - Unearthed! is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Zebra Books, 1976

OPERATION EARTH by Brinsley Le Poer Trench

Once again, author Brinsley Le Poer Trench wants to make it plain: gotta make way for the Homo superior! As an arch-reactionary hippie, Trench sees the New Age as an opportunity to open our minds to our lost heritage as children of the spacemen, and he links this awakening to an ancient war between the benevolent Space Brothers and malevolent imposters from beneath the Earth. Everything from the Bermuda Triangle to the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, from Atlantis to Antonio Villas-Boas, is cited as evidence in his melding of the Shaver Mystery with classic Contactee cant.

Trench is logical within the confines of the subject matter, studiously documenting his connections with an extensive bibliography. That his thesis is irrevocably cracked is only natural considering the eclectic personalities involved with the clique behind the Flying Saucer Review.

Operation Earth is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Tandem Books, 1975 (original pub. 1969)

GODS DEMONS AND UFO'S by Eric Norman

"The Pope is a speed freak!" Wowza! Warren Smith returns as Eric Norman for some far out space nuts and a smorgasbord of Saucerian surprises. His big bombshell story is about the mysterious (and nonexistent) Dropa Stones, a supposed carved record of alien contact in Ancient China which is sadly too good to be true. Smith interviews a Saucer Cult in California, digging into some of the theological nuances of UFO saviors, and gives the usual rundown on OOP Artifacts that should prove extraterrestrial intervention in our history. This includes a standby of misquoted verses from the Bhagavad Gita which "prove" the existence of prehistoric nuclear warfare. As researcher Jason Colavito illustrates, these mangled verses have been passed down through multiple paranormal texts, including Erich von Daniken's, ever since Pauwels and Bergier's seminal The Morning of the Magicians was published in 1960.

In contrast to Frank Edwards' turgid tome Strange World from yesterday, Smith's writing crackles with mad energy that threatens to run off the rails. Everything hangs together even with such editing gaffes as Carl Sagan's name consistently misspelled as "Sagen" and ancient astronauts compared to "powerful lizards" ... that's supposed to be wizards! Smith would later recycle his entire chapter on Nebraska highway patrolman Herbert Schirmer's UFO encounter for his UFO Trek and a bit on the "mysterious" origins of the Eskimo for his The Hidden Secrets of the Hollow Earth, both from 1976.

Sometime in the early 70s Lancer would reissue Smith's book under the title Gods, Demons and Space Chariots, a quickie facelift designed to cash in on the popularity of Chariots of the Gods? by the previously mentioned von Daniken, from whom Smith originally lifted many of the stories for his text. Now there's something else to make your head spin! Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Table of contents:

1.  Angels, Spacemen and UFO's (5)

2.  The New Age Belief (23)

3.  Legends of the Sky People (43)

4.  UFO's and the Puzzle of the Pyramids (63)

5.  Angel's, Demons, and UFO Entities (81)

6.  Mysteries, Oddities and Curiosities (119)

7.  When Giants Walked the Earth (139)

8.  Giants From the Skies (155)

9.  An Incredible UFO Contactee Case (169)

10. Guidelines for the Future (195)

Lancer Books, 1970

COSMIC DEBRIS: All the Saucers Fit to Print

A goldmine of flying saucer titles are listed in this ad from the December 1958 issue of Flying Saucers: The Magazine of Space Conquest.