Recently saw the new Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie. Loved it, an excellent homage to the genre. Fun, classy, and the earrings! Also great soundtrack. Directed by Guy Ritchie, and all that you'd expect from a Guy Ritchie film.
The movie is based on the television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. which I watched faithfully as a kid. I even joined the fan club! And in proper spy mode, I used a different name -- an alias, you know -- which for some reason infuriated my mother, as I remember.
This is Men in Black, card #23, from the Saucer People boxed trading card set from Kitchen Sink Press, 1992. The set has thirty six cards, with comic book style illustration on front, and information about the UFO event or researcher on the back.
"Some believe them to be government agents, others think they are Saucer People."
I love the objectified female in distress; fearful of the Men in Black who are, apparently, being quite rude to her boyfriend. Tight red dress, frightened… who will rescue her? Or will the Men in Black get her?
The info on the back of the card has nothing to do with the image on the front; the story on the back tells us of George Cook, head of the Pennsylvania NICAP group, who had several run-ins with MIB in 1967.
One of my favorite researcers, Philip Coppens, on the John F. Kennedy assassination:Killing Kennedy In his article, Coppens takes a look at the conspiracy theory that Kennedy was killed because of his knowledge of UFOs -- and what he planned to do with that knowledge. Coppens has his own ideas about that, as you'll find when you read the article.
At UFO Digest, Sean Casteel reviews Tim Beckley's reprint of two stories of two female contactees, Dana Howard and Gloria Lee. (I wrote the intro for the Gloria Lee book.) As Sean points out, there are UFO researchers who reject the contactee era as embarrassing nonsense, or, as he puts it, attack Tim Beckley for exploitation:
Though Tim Beckley believes his motivations should be seen as altruistic, to others they are controversial even appalling. There are still some purists in the field who believe that “contactee” is a dirty word. Yet all things considered, Beckley is doing the UFO community a huge service by reprinting hard to find books from the 1950s, books written by early UFO experiencers who were the first to claim contact with the aliens after the initial sighting by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 that started it all.
Over at UFO Mystic, I have a post about Tim Beckley's new release on two contactees: Dana Howard and Gloria Lee. I wrote the introduction for Gloria Lee's book. One woman's story was positive, one ended tragically. Were the entities, or "aliens" truly ETs or something else altogether?
The cover art by Carol Ann Rodriguez is beautiful!
An item on Lon Sticker’s Phantoms and Monsters about Elvis and his life long interest in UFOs inspired me to write about the time I met Elvis in Los Angles when I was working at the Free Clinic. (see my post on UFO Mystic.) That was one of my brushes with fame, and esoteric in a round about way, since Elvis had a strong curiosity about UFOs and believed in extraterrestrial life.
Another esoteric brush with fame is, I think, waaaaaaaay cool. It concerns Boris Badenov. Yes, that Boris Badenov! Legend has it that the character actor Akim Tarmioff was the inspiration for the spy character Boris Badenov of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. Here is what a Wikipedia entry has to say about Akim’s inspiration:
Badenov's name is a play on that of the 16th-century Russian Tsar Boris Godunov ("bad enough" vs. "good enough"). His accent and explosive temper are an homage to Hollywood actor Akim Tamiroff, especially Tamiroff's role in The Great McGinty, a 1940 movie directed by Preston Sturges.
Akim (Mikhailovich) Tamiroff, the Russian born character actor who appeared in dozens of films and television shows was often typecast as a Mexican or Greek, among other ethnic characters. He played spies, cops, thieves; all manner of roles. Among the films Akim appeared in:For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1943, Lord Jim, 1965, Oceans 11, 1960, Topaki, 1964, and dozens more.
Akim was married to my grandfather’s niece, actress Tamara Shayne. My mother lived with them when she was in her late teens (that would be in late 1940s, early 1950s) when she first arrived in Los Angeles from Oregon. I met them once when I was little; I remember Tamara as being stand offish , but Akim was pretty nice, very funny and playful.
Truly, how cool is it that one of the iconic cartoon characters, Boris Badenov, was based on a family member? (Another fun esoteric synchronistic fact: my mother’s name is a variation of Natasha.)
Is it fair to say Boris was a MIB? No, it just sounded good for the title. Boris was short, fat, and hardly MIB like in behavior or appearance. He was an Eastern European/Russian spy, bumbling, the bad guy, created during the Cold War, when the spy business was everywhere. It still is; and actually, we’ve come back around to Russian spies recently, with movies like SALT and the plethora of Russian spies on television shows.
I have other claims to esoteric fame, which I'll write about in future columns.
Bruce Duensing, at Intangible Materiality, on the contactees. A very different perspective: The Gravitational Field of the Contactees. In thinking about what do "they" want, Bruce puts forth:
And so we ask, "What do they want?" Consider for a moment a one word reply. Nothing.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't. For much of UFO, anomalous and paranormal interactions, maybe the answer is that "they" don't want anything. They just are.
Bruce considers the interactions between contactees and the entities and presents some interesting perspectives;for example, are our desires and anxieties contributors to the experience?
I can never do Duensing justice so I'll stop now. Visit his site and read his article if you want something new to turn over regarding the contactee experience.
I'll just say that, while I remain utterly inarticulate as to why abductees, contactees and other experiencers of high strangeness should be considered seriously and not just as some quaint yet embarrassing aberration better left alone if one is a "serious" UFO researcher, it is important to explore this realm, without the finality of the decree "they were all frauds."
It has been noted that names of witnesses to UFOs and other strange phenomena sometimes repeat themselves. An article by Frank Altomonte references an obscure 1957 case from my local area which is significant in this regard.
The original account was related by Coral and Jim Lorenzen in their 1967 book Flying Saucer Occupants (which is actually one of my favorite UFO books.
I have this book in my collection; a neat find at the Goodwill awhile back. I remember the TV show,starring Roy Thinnes, who played David Vincent, an architect who found out that aliens are, indeed, among us. The show aired from 1967 to 1968.
This is a bit overdue, I just haven't had time until today to listen to the interview, but Tim Binnall's recent guest on Binnall of America is Ann Druffel. This is one interview you cannot miss! Ann is co-author (with D. Scott Rogo) of The Tujunga Canyon Contacts, and FIRESTORM: DR. JAMES E. McDONALD's FIGHT FOR UFO SCIENCE, published in 2003. Tunjunga Canyon was one of the first books I read on the UFO/abduction subject, and it was one of the books that threw me into this area.
Ann Druffel, and this interview, is a great resource into UFO history. Her ideas and experience, her insights, into the abduction phenomema are very interesting and refreshing.
Ann has been invovled in NICAP, and so much more. You can listen to the interviews here. Ann's website is here.
I discovered that AMC.com is offering all episodes of the original Prisoner on-line, for free. Great news! Go here to watch. I say "original" because AMC is in production for the remake, starring Ian McKellen as Two and Ji Caviezel as Six.
Patrick McGoohan, British actor and star of the 1960s British TV series The Prisoner passed away. He was eighty years old.
The Prisoner was one of the top five coolest TV programs, in my opinion. Still love that show. It didn't really have anything to do with flying saucers or UFOs, but it still counts. Just does. Here's a clip of the opening of the show.
I'm particularly interested in the contactee era, including female contactees. It seems that the female contactees aren't as well known, but there were female contactees, like Dana Howard, sisters Betty and Helen Mitchell, and Elizabeth Klarer. Adding to the list of female contactees is Greg Bishop's (UFO Mystic) item on contactee Mollie Thompson.
Thompson recorded songs about her meetings with space people. Here's what she had to say in a fairly recent letter (she's still alive):
I’m sure you have guessed by now that I never actually met and spoke with flesh and blood space people in silver suits who had arrived in their vehicles: flying saucers or UFO’s.
Vehicle is the key word here; my songs were the vehicle to carry my thoughts and ideas out into the world. But as for who wrote them ?? I was NOT telling lies when I said that it was not me…certainly not the “me” that is sitting here writing this.
This is, I think, part of the phenomena. It's easy to dismiss the contactees as nothing more than liars, frauds. But I've always thought there was something more going on there than just the simplistic, knee jerk reaction that they were all kooks and hucksters. While possibly not literal experiences, they were still real experiences. Not unlike the abduction phenomena. (For example, my own experiences.)
I found this item to be a bit of synchronicity; just yesterday I came across this quote from Allen Hynek: "The part we ignore…may contain the clue to the whole subject." ~ The UFO Experiece: A Scientific Inquiry. I liked it so much I put it up on my Orange Orb blog.
Greg Bishop's article on Thompson is full of information, like links leading to a site about Thompson and YouTube videos.
I have a fear and distaste of clowns. I also have a fear and distaste of these weird puppets in Space Patrol, and Thunderbirds. I remember, as a kid, just feeling very creepy watching these kinds of programs. I love the sound effects and the space cities and machines; it's just the puppets that got to me, and still do. Just can't get over the sense that there's something unwholesome going on, as well as something I'm missing , something I'm just not getting. But, my personal clown/puppet neurosis aside, Space Patrol, like this clip from the early 1960s, is still a vintage goodie. According to the blurb on You Tube there was a DVD boxed set of Space Patrol released a few years ago but it's hard to find. Space Patrol was called Planet Patrol in the U.S. because there was another program called Space Patrol at that time. (With humans.)
