Twenty years ago, ads in UFO mags appealed to bad-breath nerds and lame-brained losers.
7/7/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
A few years ago at a UFO conference I felt like I scored a big opportunity when I met someone selling off stacks of ancient UFO magazines at rock bottom prices. For maybe fifty-cents apiece, I walked away with more than fifty out-of-print UFO periodicals that are quite scarce today. I didn't have time to catch up on reading them until recently, during my trip to northern Arizona (a journey in which I went on a wilderness vision quest with native American Rahelio of Rahelio's Mystic Tours, which has been covered here at AlienZoo by Wiggz in his Travel articles). During a spare moment of that trip, I finally began plunging into those UFO mags. I was in for quite a surprise.
If you thumb through UFO magazines today, you'll find that most of them don't have conventional advertising. Most of the ads are for products being sold by the magazine or its writers, usually consisting of videotapes and books about ufology and related topics. Outside venders of UFO tapes generally take ads, too - Tim Crawford of UFO CENTRAL, for example, is an active advertiser in the U.S. magazine called UFO.
In the old days, going back to the late 1970s, it was a different world. UFO magazines were considered something low-brow, partially because of their ads. Judging by the advertising, they were cheap tabloid-level at best, and at worst, they were even sleazier, slimier, and more embarrassing to carry around in polite company.
Just for kicks, let's consider what some of those ads were and how they demeaned the reader. The bottom line is, they treated their readers like ninety pound weaklings and total losers. They assumed that you must be one of the most gullible human beings alive to buy their magazine because they actually seemed to expect that you would BELIEVE their bogus claims and incredible promises.
NOW! GET EVERYTHING YOU DESIRE AUTOMATICALLY! PROVEN MIND CONTROL SECRETS WILL BE YOURS INSTANTLY! That's the promise in an ad in the August 1979 issue of UFO REPORT.
But maybe you've never heard of UFO REPORT? In the 1970s, it was the cream of the crop of sources for UFO information. The covers promised TOP SECRET information and stuff that was gleaned DIRECT FROM OFFICIAL CIA FILES. The hyperbole on the cover was off-putting enough. Like, you'd have to be a moron to believe that for $1.25 at a news-stand you could purloin treasures that were direct from OFFICIAL CIA FILES and find other stuff that was TOP SECRET. You'd have to be the type with bad breath and horrible B.O. Take a shower, man. Brush your teeth.
But once you got past the cover and the wormy ads, the articles inside were generally of very high quality. They were thought-provoking and well researched, for the most part. They soared in quality reportage, and they definitely made a very strong case that UFOs are real, and that they are treated as Above Top Secret by the military.
Another surprise, in terms of content, regarding those old magazines, is that some of the top names in today's ufology show up as the writers. However a number of those writers had strong military connections, even then. Two cases in point: Air Force Captain Kevin Randle and Army Lt. Col. Wendelle Stevens. Other writers from the late 1970s who became major names in ufology: James Oberg (who later became NASA's #1 UFO debunker and who only recently has begun to bite the hand that apparently feeds him), Jerome Clark (editor of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies magazine called INTERNATIONAL UFO REPORTER, or IUFOR), George Fawcett, Lucius Farish (editor of UFO NEWSCLIPPING SERVICE), and of course Timothy Green Beckley (magazine editor of UFO UNIVERSE and a line of UFO books, most of which push the envelope of credibility to the outer edges).
What was the effect and end result of mixing intelligently-written, well-researched UFO articles with ads of a sub-moron, 33 IQ level? That's obvious. It created the appearance of "dumbing down" the content. The ads were the insurance policy that no one with an Establishment pedigree would ever take the stuff in these magazines seriously. Worse yet, the ads guaranteed that scientists and sociologists (who might well have benefited from the input many of those thoughtful articles offered about UFOs) would never be caught dead reading such a trashy mag.
Consider some of the other ads: You could mail in a coupon to obtain a book on TELECULT POWER, which would AUTOMATICALLY BRING YOU EVERYTHING YOU DESIRE. This book tells about a "fantastic Transmitter" that has already worked for countless men and women in all walks of life, OVERNIGHT, to: MAKE DIAMONDS AND JEWELS APPEAR OUT OF NOTHING! A FARMER RECEIVED A POT OF GOLD USING THIS SECRET! A BALDING MAN RENEWED THE GROWTH OF HIS HAIR! ANOTHER READER SAW BEHIND WALLS AT GREAT DISTANCES, WHILE ANOTHER GAINED THE POWER TO HEAR THE UNSPOKEN THOUGHTS OF OTHERS!
If you weren't in the mood to spend $7.95 to learn how to make a pot of gold magically appear on your farmlands, you could instead spend $4.95 on a COMPUTERIZED BIORHYTHM CHART that was guaranteed to improve your GAMBLING WINNINGS. If you weren't satisfied, you could return it within 365 days for a full refund. (I wonder how many people ever got their money back.) The biorhythm chart basically analyzed your lucky and unlucky days for the coming year, and the trick was to learn to gamble only on your lucky days. As the ad pointed out: 60% of Babe Ruth's home runs and 80% of his hits in major league baseball occurred on days when his biorhythm chart indicated personal strength. I don't suppose any government committee ever investigated how these people collected their statistics. Truth in advertising? Forget it. These were DELIBERATE, bold-faced LIES.
If you weren't interested in Telecult Power or Computerized Biorhythm Charts, you could always, with no obligation, read about 37 ways to start a HOME IMPORT BUSINESS for BIG PROFITS! Or for $10 (plus 70-cents postage) you could buy a book that would explain the DON SULLIVAN METHOD for PREDICTING THE OUTCOME OF THOROUGHBRED RACING!
If you wanted to earn an honest living without importing from overseas or betting on thoroughbreds, you could answer this ad instead: IMAGINE MAKING UP TO $100 IN A SINGLE HOUR, OPERATING A BUSINESS YOU CAN CARRY IN YOUR POCKET. In this business, you sell direct to consumers fake diamonds that are "so hard, so blazingly beautiful, that only a trained jeweler could be sure that it wasn't real!"
Then there was the full page ad saying you could CATCH MORE FISH, BIGGER FISH, OR YOUR MONEY BACK. This was an add for buying "Action" fish lures that "SWIM BY THEIR OWN POWER."
Imagine following this ad with a well-researched scientific article about how UFOs fly by an exotic power that is scarcely dreamed of by modern physics. You begin to see the pattern. NOTHING in the magazine will be believed.
In our motion picture, ROSWELL (1994 Showtime), there was a scene of a group of government officials, reminiscent of MJ-12, who discussed the implications of the discovery of aliens from space. As dramatized, they had in military possession a crashed flying saucer of extraterrestrial origin, which came down at Roswell in July, 1947, and they had decided to keep it secret from the public. They considered various techniques for protecting the secrecy. One of the MJ-12 sources pipes up and suggests: "Accurate information released by less than reputable sources, that's not such a bad technique." There it is in a nutshell. That's the game plan that magazines like UFO REPORT fulfilled in the 1970s. They released accurate information from less than reputable sources, because UFO REPORT, by the very sleaziness, ludicrousness, and ineptness of its advertising, turned itself into a less than reputable source.
My friends, we have Trouble in River City, and that's "Trouble" with a capital "T", which rhymes with "P", which stands for POPPYCOCK! That's what these magazines did for ufology. They turned it into POPPYCOCK. No, even more, they CONFIRMED what everyone sensible already suspected - that belief in flying saucers and UFOs was utter nonsense - a tabloid fantasy of the most air-headed kind.
This was a form of political trickery. We used to call it DIRTY TRICKS back in the days of Richard Nixon's CREEP (Committee for the Re-Election of the President). It meant an unsavory ruse that people would fall for - and that the Establishment would not "see through." If some did "see through it," they didn't talk about it. It would have been like talking about dirty laundry or used Kleenex.
UFO REPORT made the UFO world seem as credible as fishing lures that could swim by their own power. But the irony is, the magazine was the lure. And the power it was swimming by was the power of the secret intelligence services, just as it advertised on the cover. By promising "suppressed evidence" in magazines like this, they assured that the average man would think that there was NO suppressed evidence, and that anyone who claimed there was such evidence was making it up - just like TELECULT POWER that would automatically bring you everything you desire. Was the CIA behind it? Who knows? As President Clinton recently remarked in answering on a different subject: "That question is a dead-bang loser."
Fate magazine cover. Today, we're too smart to disregard ufology because of dirty trick tactics like this, aren't we? We "see through" the dirty tricks - or do we? Does the same game go on? We can exonerate UFO Magazine of the U.S. - almost. Occasionally, they run an ad in the back that offers readers the chance to meet EXOTIC ORIENTAL WOMEN. That one recurring ad has pulled the magazine back from what otherwise have been rather exceptional standards, and I think recently they stopped running it (though I won't be surprised if it shows up again). UFO MAGAZINE from Great Britain doesn't incorporate sub-tabloid ads. However, FATE magazine, which runs an intelligent monthly UFO CHRONICLES column written by Antonio Huneuus (and formerly written by Jerome Clark of CUFOS), does use ads that are a throwback to the UFO REPORTS of the 1970s. Of course, FATE magazine has been around longer than the others. Its persona is indelibly stamped in the public mind as a publication for "Believers" in everything from spirit worlds to the Loch Ness monster. Note that FATE did go through a facelift a few years ago, however, when it went from being a small pulp magazine to a regular news-stand periodical. But the "magic fishing lure" type of ads remained.
Of all of the early UFO writers who worked for UFO REPORT, Timothy Green Beckley, who became publisher of UFO UNIVERSE, maintained the UFO REPORT method and style, filling his recent UFO magazines with some rather slimy and embarrassing ads.
There are other fascinating points to be made about the early UFO mags, which as I stated, generally offered intelligent content. Consider the case of Capt. Kevin D. Randle, co-author of UFO CRASH AT ROSWELL, THE RANDLE REPORT, THE HISTORY OF UFO CRASHES, CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE, and probably dozens of other UFO books. (He has also written dozens of war adventure books under a pseudonym). In 1975, he was writing articles that bolstered the credibility of alien abductions. Articles such as "THE UFO KIDNAPPING THAT CHALLENGED SCIENCE." In that article in UFO REPORT, he reported on such cases as Betty and Barney Hill - and the Pascagoula, Mississippi, abduction of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker. He incorporated into his story the 1957 case of Villas Boas, who reported having sexual relations with an alien woman. Then he progressed to his main story, about the 1973 abduction of Dionisio Llanca.
In those days, Capt. Randle not only argued that all of these people were actually abducted by aliens, but he also supported hypnosis as a way to getting at all the facts of specific abduction encounters. Regarding hypnosis, he stated: "Doctors familiar with the technique know it is impossible to perpetrate a fraud under these conditions: Hickson and Parker HAD been abducted by aliens."
Impossible to perpetrate a fraud under hypnosis? I don't think Capt. Kevin Randle, Ph.D., would make that statement TODAY. Now, about quarter of a century later, Capt. Randle has co-authored a book entitled THE ABDUCTION ENIGMA which is a debunking book. In that book, he argues against every single case of alien abduction, trying to explain most of the instances away by claiming they were a result of "sleep paralysis," a sort of hypnogogic waking dream one may have just before the unconsciousness of sleep arrives. In his new book, Capt. Randle never refers to his history as a writer who believed in UFO abductions during the early days of UFO magazines. He never mentions or refutes his own arguments of years before. This is most curious. At one level, one could conclude that Capt. Randle has merely reconsidered the abduction enigma and has arrived at the opposite conclusion than the one he formerly held. But it's disconcerting that he never takes us through any steps to show how his thinking process changed or why the things he wrote and published in the mid-1970s should now be considered invalid. I personally still agree with much of what he wrote in the mid-1970s.
Another of the authors of those early magazines, James Oberg, was a debunker during those early days. He could always be counted on to express the opinion that the UFO being debated was something other than an alien spacecraft. In one of his articles, he delights in explaining away a certain case as having been the mistaken identification of a rocket booster. James Oberg has become known in recent years as "Mr. Ice Crystals." He's the one who played the role as the apologist for NASA over the STS-48 incident, in which shuttle footage showed what appeared to be a UFO making a right angle turn as it sped away from the shuttle. James Oberg claimed what we were seeing was ice crystals. Note that Richard Hoagland, in his video called "HOAGLAND'S MARS #2," does a brilliant job of refuting the ice crystal explanation. But James Oberg, for years, could always be counted on to defend the indefensible, if it meant trying to bolster an "official" explanation for a UFO.
Recently, James Oberg proved to be one of the pit-bulls who attacked NASA and JPL for withholding data. He claimed they knew well in advance that the recent Mars Polar Lander was going to fail, but that they withheld the announcement until it happened and then they denied that they had advance warning of it. NASA and JPL roared back, denying the charge.
It goes to show you that some of the players in ufology have remained the same, but like pro ball players, at different times they play for different teams. Also, frequently what they have to say has been released by "less than credible sources," thereby neutralizing its importance. And it's not clear that they mind it. It makes us ask, "who are they working for, anyway?" "What's their secret agenda?" Perhaps there is none, and they were only working for that fat paycheck tallied at 10-cents a word.
Until ufology truly crawls out of the hole that it was placed in by the UFO magazines of days gone by -- and still suffers from at the hands of a few magazines today - it won't establish credibility in "respectable" circles. The subject of UFOs has been successfully marginalized by this process, thus diminishing public alarm and reaction to what otherwise would be regarded as the most important subject in science, sociology, government, and the military today. I am talking about the news that contact with extraterrestrials has already taken place, and that the authorities "ain't talkin'." Truth? Fiction? In all fairness, I have to mention that Hollywood has cooperated for half a century with the process of "marginalizing" UFOs. From the 1950s INVASION OF THE SAUCERMEN to the 1990s WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? and MEN IN BLACK, Hollywood has played into the agenda of those who want to keep the topic "out there" rather than on the front page of the New York Times.
Which reminds me of one last and final offer, folks. For $2.95 plus postage (in 1975) you could buy a book called MEN IN BLACK - and the ad warns you "YOUR LIFE MAY BE IN DANGER IF YOU'VE SEEN A UFO! SILENCINGS, HUSH-UPS, WARNINGS, THREATS HAVE BEGUN TO INCREASE ALARMINGLY, ALL BECAUSE OF THE SINISTER MEN IN BLACK. DEFINITELY NOT MEANT FOR THE WEAK-HEARTED!"
I'm gutsy enough to take the TRUTH, my fellow readers. Are you? If so, rejoin Paul "The Lion-hearted" Davids here next week, same time, same website here at AlienZoo, for another serving of FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD!