Brad Steiger & Joan Whritenour Flying Saucers are Hostile (1966)
Steiger wrote about a million books, many of which have been described as sensationalist, and even most tin-foil hatted of History Channel junkies seem to regard him as unreliable. I'm sure his critics have a point - despite the raw irony of one group of saucer nutcases looking at another group of saucer nutcases askance whilst muttering about the dubious credibility of their evidence - but the fact is that Steiger wrote some massively weird and entertaining stuff, regardless of whether or not any of it's actually true.
Once was that the charity shops runneth over with cheap saucer paperbacks, and aside from a few of the same blurry photographs which turned up again and again - even those which had been long since proven fake when someone found the actual model and length of fishing line - most of them were as dull as fuck: page after page after page of a farmer who saw a light and how it definitely wasn't a weather balloon. Steiger on the other hand never seemed bothered by whether anyone actually believed him and happily shared even the most preposterous and hence entertaining reports in a spirit which was more Charles Fort than J. Allen Hynek - and to give credit where credit is due, Steiger's tentative theorising about what it could all mean is usually less ridiculous than that of Fort with his silly ideas about stars being volcanoes in the sky.
As might be gathered from the title, this one focusses on accounts of the saucer people acting like wankers, marking a shift from the previously held folk mythology of benign space brothers as reported by George Adamski and others. Whether or not one believes, the book remains a fascinating record of its time, a world in which mass communication was very much a new thing, back when there was still a lot of darkness around the edges where the inexplicable might still lurk; and it works because a mountain of horseshit with some element of truth will always feel a more intuitively plausible description of the preposterous than pure horseshit and nothing else. In other words, maybe some of it happened, or at the very least, for something which didn't happen there seem to be a hell of a lot of people who think it did, which is in itself interesting.
Steiger churned this stuff out at least as fast as people could buy it, and his back catalogue brims with titles such as Discover Your Own Past Lives, The Wisdom Teachings of Archangel Michael, and others I wouldn't even touch with yours; but regardless of the actual homeopathic truth quotient of whatever tale he's spinning, I can't help but be impressed by the cut of the cloth.
Steiger wrote about a million books, many of which have been described as sensationalist, and even most tin-foil hatted of History Channel junkies seem to regard him as unreliable. I'm sure his critics have a point - despite the raw irony of one group of saucer nutcases looking at another group of saucer nutcases askance whilst muttering about the dubious credibility of their evidence - but the fact is that Steiger wrote some massively weird and entertaining stuff, regardless of whether or not any of it's actually true.
Once was that the charity shops runneth over with cheap saucer paperbacks, and aside from a few of the same blurry photographs which turned up again and again - even those which had been long since proven fake when someone found the actual model and length of fishing line - most of them were as dull as fuck: page after page after page of a farmer who saw a light and how it definitely wasn't a weather balloon. Steiger on the other hand never seemed bothered by whether anyone actually believed him and happily shared even the most preposterous and hence entertaining reports in a spirit which was more Charles Fort than J. Allen Hynek - and to give credit where credit is due, Steiger's tentative theorising about what it could all mean is usually less ridiculous than that of Fort with his silly ideas about stars being volcanoes in the sky.
As might be gathered from the title, this one focusses on accounts of the saucer people acting like wankers, marking a shift from the previously held folk mythology of benign space brothers as reported by George Adamski and others. Whether or not one believes, the book remains a fascinating record of its time, a world in which mass communication was very much a new thing, back when there was still a lot of darkness around the edges where the inexplicable might still lurk; and it works because a mountain of horseshit with some element of truth will always feel a more intuitively plausible description of the preposterous than pure horseshit and nothing else. In other words, maybe some of it happened, or at the very least, for something which didn't happen there seem to be a hell of a lot of people who think it did, which is in itself interesting.
Steiger churned this stuff out at least as fast as people could buy it, and his back catalogue brims with titles such as Discover Your Own Past Lives, The Wisdom Teachings of Archangel Michael, and others I wouldn't even touch with yours; but regardless of the actual homeopathic truth quotient of whatever tale he's spinning, I can't help but be impressed by the cut of the cloth.
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