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30 June 2009
The Out-of-Towner
3 of 3 found this helpful People seem so enamored of the late Frank Stranges, I am hesitant to speak ill of him. I therefore cravenly defer to the researches of Glenn Campbell (the blogger, not the singer), who argues that "Dr." Frank E. Stranges probably held none of the degrees he claimed. That said, everyone who knew the guy seemed to adore him, so he must have been nice. He is best known in ufology for his alleged associations with a man from Venus named Valiant Thor. Valiant Thor? Yes, that’s what I said-- but just call him Val. Val is the subject of Stranges’ strangest book, “Stranger at the Pentagon.”
Common to all editions of this slender opus is the part where Valiant lands his flying saucer near the Pentagon in March, 1957. The Alexandria Police nab him and hand him over to Project Blue Book which duly arranges a meeting at the Pentagon involving the CIA, FBI, Secretary of Defense Forrestal, and President Eisenhower. Somehow, Stranges is eventually invited too, evidently because he was, “...a guest speaker at the National Evangelistic Center for 2 weeks,” and Venusians are Christian; See? Val tells Eisenhower that the earth is “in a precarious situation,” which Ike probably already knew. Fortunately, Val says, waves of Aliens will be landing all over the planet to help out. Ike seems rather blasé about all this, although Vice President Nixon drops in and assures Val that “You have certainly caused a stir...for an out-of-towner.” Val's offer to address the UN fizzles. Ike says his plan to save our planet would wreck the economy, so in one of the book’s many blows against plausibility, Val and crew opt to attend a confab at the New Jersey home of Howard Menger, a picayune UFO contactee. Here they are photographed by August Roberts, a confederate of such mischief makers as Gray Barker and Al Bender (although Stranges never mentions this association). Roberts seems to be the only source for the book’s photos of Val, who is invariably shown in earthly mufti, presumably because his wondrous, bullet-proof golden flight suit is still undergoing examination at the Pentagon.
Val takes a shine to Frank and materializes in the back seat of his car from time to time. He introduces him to his relatives, Donn, Thonn and Doc-- I am not joking. In 1968 he takes Frank aboard his flagship, Victor One, a 300-foot wide, double-decker saucer. Here, Stranges is invited to witness the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in real time on the ship’s phenomenal observational screen. Val warned Bobby not to run, of course, but was rebuffed, so the worst happens. (Val seems generally to experience trouble being taken seriously.) In one of the book’s most mind-boggling juxtapositions, everyone aboard the ship adjourns from watching RFK being shot and enjoys a jovial sit down dinner. Afterwards, Frank learns to use Venusian toilets, which prompts one Venusian lady to quip, “Do you want to take one home?”
Val may have left RFK to his fate, but he saves Stranges from several MIB scrapes, and faith-heals his broken back after a near-fatal car crash. I guess he was elsewhere when Frank met his demise in 2008, still insisting that his book was soon to be a major motion picture. I think not...the plot bears an obvious resemblance to 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” but not even Michael Rennie's robot could resuscitate this dud. So was Frank Stranges a fraud, a dupe, or just deluded? Or were Val, Thonn, Donn and Doc all actually here for a while? Perhaps Gort only knows.
24 June 2006
Making the Case for Space--Keyhoe's Last Saucer Book
6 of 6 found this helpful If you’re familiar with Donald Keyhoe’s prose style, you know what I mean when I say he writes like Mickey Spillane turned science reporter. This isn’t a bad thing. Keyhoe’s past included churning out action-packed aviation yarns for pulp-fiction magazines featuring heroes named "Phil Strange" and "Dick Knight." If his first-person narratives unfold like detective fiction, well, that just makes them more stimulating-- even if one wonders how any mortal could conceivably retain all the facts, dates, and descriptions that color the frequent conversations. Keyhoe, a retired Marine major, made his name in the UFO field when he published “The Flying Saucers are Real” in 1950. Three more hard-hitting saucer classics followed during that decade, and Keyhoe played a leading role in founding NICAP, the most prestigious of the early UFO groups. I remember talking to a NICAP photo analyst around 1972 who assured me that Keyhoe was no longer a major player, implying that he was past his powers, nearly senile, and doddering into his sunset years. Surprised, I asked whether Keyhoe had retired from the field altogether and the guy said, “Oh, well, he claims he’s writing another book—the ultimate UFO book—but forget it, it’s never going to happen!” I didn’t like the guy, so I chuckled a year later when Keyhoe’s new book appeared. Maybe it isn’t the ultimate UFO book, but you could call it that without straining credibility. The title “Aliens from Space” is an obvious slap at the encroachments of the ultraterrestrialists—the new wave of researchers in the ‘70s who maintained that UFOs were paranormal, not intergalactic. And in a way, this is the last great ETH book—the last pure defense of the extra-terrestrial hypothesis by a captain of the old guard. Sure, thousands of titles since have treated the saucers as spacecraft, but Keyhoe’s parting performance has the verve of a farewell concert featuring all the old hits. Mantell? Killed by an alien spacecraft. Hoyt Vandenberg and Douglas MacArthur? In on the secret. Fort Itaipu in Brazil? Heat-rayed by a saucer. The CIA? “The power behind the UFO secrecy.” The Condon Committee? An Air Force whitewash. The F-89 disappearance over Lake Michigan where Lieutenants Moncla and Wilson went missing? The aliens got them. New York’s power blackout in 1965? You guessed it. And Keyhoe continues hammering these themes, replaying every note on the interplanetary scale with such effortless virtuosity that no fair-minded reader could resist the performance. Of course, Keyhoe, like NICAP, has no use for contactees. Adamski, Sid Patrick, Mel Noel, all receive drubbings. Even Betty and Barney Hill are regarded as sincere but deluded confabulators. Keyhoe also hits clunkers when he indulges in wooly speculation about alien psychology, and attempts a few clumsy pages of ancient-astronauts conjecture. But this farewell volume—the last installment of the maestro’s saucerian pentalogy—is a worthy reminder that nobody puts the nuts and bolts in U.F.O. like Keyhoe, even if the ‘70s zeitgeist was divergently New-Age. This book makes a fitting end piece for the old aviator. It should be more ardently collected than currently seems the case, but time will change that. Donald E. Keyhoe died in Virginia in 1988, but if the Air Force ever shocks us by admitting they really have been covering up the truth about space aliens since 1947, somebody ought to erect a statue of the flinty old Major who knew it all along.
19 June 2006
Operation Trojan Horse: A Much-Maligned Masterpiece
6 of 6 found this helpful If you could look up “serious UFO investigator” in the dictionary, which you can’t, you might find Richard Hall’s picture next to the entry. Hall harkens back to the days of NICAP, has compiled important collections of hard evidence for UFOs, and is currently a higher-up with the Fund for UFO Research. I mention this because in 1997 Mr. Hall composed a list of the worst saucer books ever written, giving prominent mention to John A. Keel’s “Operation Trojan Horse.” Who is John Keel, and why don’t people appreciate him? For starters, Keel is not “serious” in the Donald Keyhoe sense of the word. He’s a Fortean gadfly who offended the UFO establishment by standing the extra-terrestrial hypothesis on its head while simultaneously producing the most compelling UFO book ever published. “UFOs Operation Trojan Horse” is Keel’s masterpiece. It is far from the most “scientific” UFO book available, and few would call it the most objective, but it is, ounce-for-ounce, the best saucer book around-- first, because Keel writes well (which is nearly unique among ufologists), and also because he is the first UFO writer to knit the bewildering array of saucer-related phenomena into a tidy gestalt—-a kind of unified-field theory that explains everything, not just the cases that fit particular worldviews. To put it simply, Keel maintains that UFOs are a hoax, but a hoax of cosmic proportions played on earthly percipients by extra-dimensional intelligences who manipulate our perceptions, imaginations, and beliefs. This has been going on forever, Keel argues, which accounts for the book’s interweave of UFOs, electronic anomalies, monsters, demons, poltergeists, and religious manifestations. Frankly, this is a scary book—a kind of gothic, Lovecraftian tome with an overlay of devious aliens, glowing discs, and black helicopters. It would all seem preposterous if it weren’t so intricately, almost poetically, crafted. Keel’s narrative is nearly Dostoyevskian in it’s portrayal of the hero-researcher who begins rationally enough, but finds himself inexorably sucked, page by page, deeper into a twilit world of Men in Black, terrifying nocturnal presences, and unearthly voices on the phone—and the reader is lured down the same path. By chapter 14, Keel admits questioning his own sanity. Caught up in the vortex of his subject matter, he admonishes his readers to avoid entanglements with the dark forces that underlie the UFO façade. Of course, ever since “Trojan Horse” first appeared in 1970, plenty of people besides Keel have questioned Keel’s sanity--but no other UFO researcher has offered a book of equal vibrancy, nor of such magisterial scope. Sure, Keel stretches a fact here and there, and he often asserts the undocumentable, but that’s the price of admission. While Jacques Vallee’s “Passport to Magonia” pioneered some of the insights Keel draws on, and despite the fact that Keel’s own “Mothman Prophecies” is far better known (since Hollywood mutilated it), “Trojan Horse” remains the UFO book to read if you are only going to read one...unless of course you are rigidly sober-minded. Such readers may prefer to sample Hynek, or Hall—-good men offering volumes of seriously empirical data. But if you feel like chasing phantom-black Cadillacs down the moonlit alleyways of infinity, grab “Trojan Horse.”
I predict you’ll be about halfway through it, and the phone will ring...and you’ll find yourself wondering, despite yourself, just for a moment...is it safe to answer?