Flying Saucers Uncensored

Harold T. Wilkins Flying Saucers Uncensored (1955)
I found this in Half Price, incorrectly libraried away on the science-fiction shelf, or possibly correctly depending on how you tend to view this sort of thing. It seemed promising with a back cover listing chapters on The Coming of the Titans, Stories of Colossal Space Ships, and the Mystery of the Martian "Death Ceiling" - no idea why the aforementioned death ceiling should be in quotation marks, and I can't even remember what Harold had to say about it; and this sort of thing seems to be getting a bit thin on the ground these days, what with the presumably increased collectability of vintage saucer literature and today's potential readership apparently being more interested in fat orange men from New York than little green ones from Mars. The author's home address is even given in the back should you notice anything a bit weird which he might want to write about. I couldn't really not buy it.

Unfortunately, Wilkins was very much a student of the Charles Fort school of paranormal journalism, writing in a very similar style and looking you right in the eye without flinching as he states that most reputable scientists now agree that both Atlantis and Lemuria existed and had flying machines. This would be okay but for his book settling into a steady and distinctly Fortean rhythm of endless newspaper excerpts reporting strange and inexplicable occurrences, many of which aren't even particularly weird. Therefore, as soon as Wilkins settles on, for one example, the subject of mysterious explosions, it becomes difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the impending twenty pages of single paragraph newspaper articles quoted verbatim on the topic of inexplicable bangs, punctuated only by somewhat minimalist commentary just in case we've forgotten the involvement of an author.

Strangely enough, a few days following this fire, the water mains in this same San Mateo region broke, and for hours streets and highways were flooded. The explanation was—just 'faulty valves' . . . . But much stranger is this: Two boys were riding bicycles in Millbrae, near San Mateo. They were not riding together, nor did they know each other; yet they suffered similar injuries at about the same time, 4PM. Neither could remember how the accidents occurred, or what happened just before the accidents. Both suffered head injuries and one was injured in other parts of his body. One of the bicycles was smashed.

I expect it was aliens, although Wilkins doesn't actually say, preferring to taunt us with an enigmatic just ordinary accidents, reader? despite that none of the rest of us have any fucking clue because we weren't there and the account is patchy at best. Such flim-flam is, I suppose, at least marginally preferable to the chapter on mysteriously shattered windows to which our host's contribution is the occasional interjection of here we have some more accounts to confound the scientists, and where one such interjection actually uses the word followeth. Fort did the same thing with endless lists of claims, few of which appear significantly mysterious, all working up towards an overarching loopy theory about how we're all living inside a hollow sphere and stars are in fact upside down active volcanoes. Wilkins doesn't even bother to pull all of this random crap together by means of some hypothesis which would at least justify our suffering, instead being content to bury us beneath endless newspaper articles while pulling a spooky face. Brad Steiger has been known to peddle some preposterous shite in his similarly themed books, but at least he kept it entertaining. I have to admit I may have skimmed the second half of this one.