home esoterica Original binnallofamerica.com Audio the United States of Esoterica merchandise contact

Lesley

Grey Matter

Lesley is also a columnist for UFO Magazine. Check it out !

Bookmark and Share

11.16.10

Saucerama

So last week, I went on kind of a vintage UFO kick. I have always been interested in vintage Ufology, but last week I got kind of obsessive about it or at least obsessive about vintage flying saucer magazines.

It all started when a friend sent me a 1961 issue of Flying Saucers magazine. Although, I have often bought vintage UFO books, for some reason, I had never thought about magazines.

Flying Saucers is awesome! It is edited by Raymond Palmer, who in an earlier time edited Amazing Stories and is the person responsible for having published Richard Shaver's Shaver Mystery.

The Shaver Mystery was published in June 1947, just a month before the "Roswell Crash." I suppose I could spin quite a conspiracy by pointing out the fact that Roswell isn't that far from Carlsbad Caverns, but I am not going there, at least not now.

There are many cool items and articles in this magazine, like Frank E. Stranges article "Preacher--What about U.F.O.'s?" However, what most fascinated me was a column called "From the Critic's Corner."

The critic or what we would now call a skeptic (or debunker) is Peter Kor. Thanks to Tim Beckley, I now know his real name was Tom Cornelia. He and Richard Shaver are going after each other about The Shaver Mystery, 14 years after it's publication. It all seems to hinge on whether or not you consider "fiction" to be a lie or that there may be some truth in things published as fiction. I have to say that skeptics back then or at least Peter Kor is quite different than the people that call themselves 'skeptics' today and also in some ways similar.

He is different because he is actually willing to engage someone point by point and do so without any name calling or inferences of woowooness. He also doesn't pull out the most standard UFO debunkery, like Venus or swamp gas. He seems to think that people do see UFOs, but they are some sort of electro magnetic anomalies. Well, and frankly, he is quite possibly right that some are.

The thing that did somewhat remind me of skeptics today was the outrage. You could almost see him shaking his fist in the air and demanding "explain that, Mr. Palmer!" Frankly, Mr. Palmer's explanations were somewhat weak, being that he wasn't Richard Shaver and was just repeating what he knew from Shaver.

Apparently, this is a continuing argument over several issues. So I no sooner finished reading it than I was at Ebay looking for more issues of Flying Saucers. So far, that quest has netted me 3 more issues of Flying Saucers and a one-shot magazine called "Enemies from Outer Space: The Flying Saucer Menace," written by Brad Steiger and "Flying Saucers: UFO Reports," both from the 1960s.

Then when I posted photos of those on facebook, it was pointed out to me that "The Flying Saucer Menace" was edited by August Roberts. Roberts was someone I had never heard of before, but he worked with Wendelle Stevens and they had published two volumes of "UFO Photographs: From around the World." So then I went to Amazon and Ebay, most of these volumes were $60 or more, but I did manage to find a vol 1 for $12 and a vol 2 for $15 and I snatched those up and now await their arrival. Probably not near mint, but I am not buying for resell value.

So right now, I sit back to see where this latest obsession will take me. What will I discover (if anything) in these old magazines? I would hope to discover something overlooked or lost, but that is rather doubtful. Likely, I will discover something overlooked, but not by everyone, mostly by me.

  • Check out Lesley's Blog HERE

    As well as her Beyond the Dial blog