September 16, 2014--Flying Saucers Have Landed!

Only two books remain from my adolescent 12-book "library"--Guadalcanal Diary, that 1943 best-seller which was given to me by my Uncle Ben, which is noted for its portrayal of gritty Marine-corps camaraderie; and George Adamski's, Flying Saucers Have Landed, which appeared 10 years later at the then height of the flying-saucer craze.

Adamski is one of the original contactees, claiming to have closely encountered space aliens who whisked him to the moon and other planets in their UFOs. His book is about that and, spectacularly, also includes an insert of glossy photos of spaceships that look like, well, saucers with tea cups placed on top or fluorescent cigar-shaped extra-terrestrial craft.

I understand my interest in the Marine-Corps manly camaraderie part--I was a too-skinny kid who had few friends, none of them very manly. But I am not sure why flying saucers were such an obsession. As they were for much of the nation living in Cold War fear of an impending nuclear cataclysm.

Maybe that's the point--the impending doomsday scenario. If we couldn't scare off the Russians with our own ICBMs, and they decided to nuke us, maybe some friendly space aliens would scoop us up and carry us off to the safety of the far side of Venus.

Today, belief in UFOs also works well with conspiratorial thinking.

If things are a seemingly out-of-control mess, there must be reasons for this that absolve us of responsibility. We can't have anything to do with causing Islamic jihadists to rampage across the Middle East. It couldn't possibly be even partly our fault that we are rapidly seeing the decline of two-parent families and same-sex marriage. If we weren't under alien control our schools would work better, people of color would calm down, women would stop wanting abortions, no one would be messing with our guns, or, above all, enable someone like a Barack Obama to become president.

This must all be part of an intergalactic conspiracy. Since real Americans left to our own devices and under our own control would never allow any of this to happen, there must be forces that have taken over our bodies, minds, and souls. Alien invaders and others who are disguised to look like humans are living among us in sleeper cells ready to strike and take control and dominate us when signaled by their masters to do so.

And to many who believe in this scenario, this explanation, that moment of total subjugation is near.

If you doubt this, for insomniacs, seven nights a week between 1:00am-5:00am Eastern Time, on AM radio, tune in to Coast to Coast hosted by George Norry. You will hear all about UFOs, parapsychology, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained phenomena. Begun in 1984 by Art Bell, Coast to Coast is heard on nearly 600 station in the U.S. and has more than 3.0 million listeners, many of whom call in to report their own UFO sightings and abductions. Others tell about their ESP experiences or what they experienced when surviving clinical death (a hint--seeing angels and ghosts of long-departed relatives is part of the answer).

Last week Coast to Coast dealt with subjects ranging from how the Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax, suspicious suicides throughout history (Cleopatra, Adolf Hitler, Kurt Cobain, and of course Marilyn Monroe), shamanism, biblical cycles, and how 9/11 was not caused by airplanes or explosions but by "directed energy technology."

And that was just last week!