Not Your Daddy's Chevy...

Rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth published this little gem of a book in 1959. Oberth was born in Transylvania in 1894, read a lot of Jules Verne as a child and had a long and mostly distinguished career. Of course there was that embarrassing period during World War 2 when he was making rockets for the Nazis, but such 'issues' didn't seem to be much of a problem for scientists with skills America wanted during the Cold War, and in 1950 Oberth came to the United States to work with fellow ex-Nazi- er, I mean fellow scientist, Wehrner von Braun.

Always a forward-thinker, Oberth wrote several books on the future of rocketry and space travel, of which this is my hands-down favorite. Oberth's Moon Car has everything you need for a comfortable lunar stay, including a patio, complete with a derrick for winching supplies on board, a suspended beer keg, and a newspaper box-

But of course the cheapskate fuddy-duddies at NASA went bare-bones and bought this instead-



And they didn't even spring for the extended warranty, so the damned things still up there.

and so it goes...

They're Out There... Part 2

Here's another title from my UFO collection. "Space, Gravity and the Flying Saucer" was published in 1954.

Leonard G. Cramp is still alive, and unlike Gray Barker, was, and is, quite serious about the subject. An aerospace engineer who has been working on anti-gravity theory for decades, he has quite detailed theories about how 'saucers' are powered.



Again, I could not resist the cover.

Leonard G. Cramp's website.

They're Out There...

Among the things I collect are old UFO books. Some of the books published in the 1950s and early 1960s are real treasures. I'm not necessarily a believer in UFOs- though I'm not necessarily a skeptic either. Above all, I love the cover art and the dust jacket blurbs. Here's one of my favorites-


If you can't see it, the subtitle is "The true story of what happened to certain researchers and investigators who found out where the saucers come from".

The jacket blurb starts-

"One by one, the leading figures among flying saucer researchers, who have challenged the government denial that saucers come from outer space, have been silenced. Outwardly, nothing seems to have happened to these men. They are still alive, still living where they used to. But they no longer publish saucer research material and they will not talk about saucers or why they no longer will speak of them. Three men in dark suits have visited these saucer researchers. Nobody knows what they said, but it was enough to reduce their hearers to silence."

I have to admit, I have not yet read the book, but when I found it at a book fair some ten years ago, at the height of the X-Files craze, I had to buy it. Later it apparently helped provide inspiration for one of my favorite movies- Men in Black.

Interestingly, there are 37 copies of this listed on a popular database and, as usual, most of the booksellers listing it make no comment on the content at all- not a single word. The few booksellers who do say anything mostly simply quote all or part of the subtitle. Nobody, not one, out of the 37, has bothered to do a single second's research and provide any interesting information about this book- and there's plenty of interesting info out there. Has anybody ever heard of Google? Here's some interesting information about Gray Barker and his cohorts.

More to come...