DEATH OF A CONTACTEE

One of the colourful characters of the early contactee era has recently died. UFO writer and blogger Greg Bishop reports:
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"Famed UFO contactee Howard Menger died at his home in Vero Beach Florida on February 25th, 8 days after his 87th birthday. He is survived by Connie Menger, his wife of over 50 years, four children, (two by a former marriage) and many grandchildren.

" …in 1956, [Menger] appeared on the Long John Nebel radio show, along with contactee George Van Tassel. He talked about contacts with space brothers (and more specifically -sisters) who appeared to him beginning when he was ten years old. Some of his later published descriptions sound distinctly sexual in nature, although he carefully couched them in language that could be construed as platonic.

"He also started taking pictures of the space people and their ships, although most who saw the photos say that they are quite indistinct. On August 4th of 1956, Menger said he was invited on board one of the flying saucers. The next month he said that the space people took him for a joyride where he saw alien civilizations on other planets and structures on the Moon.

"Later that year, an attractive young woman named Connie Weber appeared at one of Menger’s gatherings. He thought that she was the reincarnation of a blond spacewoman that he had known (in the biblical sense) in a previous life on Venus. He soon left his first wife an family to begin a new life of lectures and touring on the Contactee circuit. Many investigators visited the Menger home and interviewed witnesses whose stories varied with the telling or did not match
each other…

"In 1960, Menger appeared on a TV show with Nebel and basically recanted his entire story. He later said that he was involved in some sort of Army test of public reaction to possible alien contact. "

This pattern of proclamation then denial, often immediately folowed by an almost equally preposterous claim, seem to be a pattern with many contactees and UFO experiencers.

Nebel recalled his 1960 interview with Menger in his 1961 book, Way out World:

"Where he had once sworn that he had seen flying saucers, he now felt that he had some vague impression that he night have on some half-remembered occasion possibly viewed some airborne object -- maybe ... Howard Menger backed up and backed up until he fell into a pit of utter confusion"

Apparently in 1963 when he met James Moseley he was trying to raise money by marketing a radio controlled saucer model (see my namesake's own contribution to this field) and repeated the claim that he was involved in an elaborate, Pentagon-staged, hoax. He later told his publisher, Gray Barker that the book was "fact/fiction".

If you're interested a copy of his book From Outer Space to You can be picked up on Amazon HERE.