A kind of mysterious figure in the ranks of contactees is Dr. George Mario of St. Louis. He seems to have entered the field rather late in its development since I didn’t hear about him until the end of 1959. At that time I received a message from an Ottmar Kaub, who was “Secretary to Dr. George Mario, Director of U.F.O. Research, with 60,000 members worldwide, who has been on the space ships known as flying saucers more times than most of the contactees of the world.” The letter continued and revealed that “The Brothers and Dr. Mario” were inviting me to take a saucer ride at some early, but undecided, date. Then, rather unexpectedly, I must admit, Mr. Kaub devoted the remainder of the letter to promoting a violin that he had “invented, designed and built.”
Later a second letter arrived, which opened with the line:
“Dr. George Mario has asked me, his secretary to…etc.” and it was signed “Dr. George Mario.” Whether this indicates that there are two Marlos, one secretary and one employer, or that the doctor fired Kaub and became his own secretary, or whether he is a dual personality, I don’t know.
Less than a year ago, several more messages came from Mario and Kaub, one announcing that the time for the trip to outer space had been just about set. From other sources I discovered that a date had been “set” several times, but always postponed. However, one invitation read, in part:
“Among those accepting so far are Gray Barker, Ray Palmer, Jack Benny, Art Linkletter, Jack Paar, and Arthur Godfrey.”
In a conference call with Jackie Gleason, Gray Barker told the great comic that Mario’s saucer was supposed to pick up various people around the country and take them to an island off the coast of Brazil. After a conference everyone was to be returned to his or her home. Since that time I’ve received at least two dozen letters from Mario and company, but to this time no saucer junket has come off, and I’m afraid that the good doctor has sort of faded from the light
Borderline Science Research Associates was another of the saucer groups regularly issuing printed material. Under the directorship of Meade Layne, long-time saucerite, “Clips—Quotes and Comments,” the voice of the organization, came out on the first of every month. Although much preoccupied with saucerdom, it also speculated about and offered opinions on many other of the occult or legitimate sciences. There was also Max Miller’s Saucers and Space Craft Digest and dozens more, but the furthest out of all was probably James W. Moseley’s Saucer News. The wildest, not because it told the most fantastic tales, but because it told the impossible as though it was reporting unusual, but unquestioned, fact. On the other hand, even more fascinating was its manner of exposing complete absurdities as though there could have ever been any question as to the ridiculousness of the assertion. An interesting example of this concerned a man named Less Childers.
This contactee began his pitch with the claim that he was a royal prince of the planet Tythan located eight-and-a-half light years away. Naturally, when he arrived on earth he put aside his real name for a while—Prince Neosom. Things were pretty rough during the earlier part of his life here. “The Three Men in Black,” sometimes mentioned by Gray Barker, have killed him three times, he claims, which isn’t bad—even for a Tythanian.
On one of these occasions he was shot in the back of the neck, taken to a hospital, and died. When the intern stepped out of the room for a moment, space people from a saucer hanging over the city brought him back to life and he vacated the premises. Understandably, he explains, there are no records of this since the hospital people would never admit losing a body!
At one point in his adventures he married a woman named Beth, and before the ceremony was over he had promoted her to the rank of Princess Negonna. Interestingly, Moseley’s journal asked, “…what happened to Childer’s first wife and five children? Perhaps they were sent to Tythan, or possibly the Three Men in Black got them.”
Since I’ve not heard of him for some time, maybe he returned to his home planet and is trying to convince them that there are people on a little bit of rock in the sky eight and one-half light years away, a place called Earth.
In one issue of Saucer News, a Richard Ogden lays claim to the title of the man who can “prove that we have visitors from outer space.” To support his contention, he makes a series of twelve prophecies. The first one is that “in the 1960 presidential election, it will be Stevenson vs. Nixon. Nixon will win.” Obviously it is unnecessary to go any further. (Moseley by the way, predicted Stevenson by 1,860,000 votes, in the same issue.)
Not infrequently saucerology has been guilty of the worst possible taste, often in the area of religion, sometimes in the realm of sex. The crudest and most offensive example of the latter related to a blood mark that appeared at Gray Barker’s bookstand at the Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention in September, 1960. When the sample was analyzed by a firm in Hollywood, their conclusion was that it was a specimen of “menstrual discharge.” A good deal of speculation was bandied back and forth across the continent, among saucerites, regarding the mystery of its appearance, its meaning, purpose, and the like. The only constructive comment forthcoming from the entire sordid affair was Barker’s observation:
“There seems to be a great deal of sex connected with saucers, and an occurrence such as the Giant Rock ‘psychic blood’ phenomenon would, in our opinion, be typical of the Space People, especially when we consider the low level of intellect they have demonstrated so far through the contactees.” Which, coming from one of the leading researchers and writers on the subject of saucers, is pretty interesting.
Dan Martin is one of the more recent contactees, but his story essentially falls into the Adamski or Angelucci category, although he does add a twist by introducing Mercurians into his claims.
Actually there are dozens of other amazing people to talk about and thousands of other stories. When I rush past someone like Dan Martin with thirty-two words, it’s only because I’ve already overloaded the space allotted to flying saucers, not because his “report” is lacking in power to astonish. In the magic world of ufology and flying saucerdom there are people and places and things and dimensions and universes you couldn’t even dream about, let alone imagine, but someone has dreamed about them, or imagined them—unless, of course, it’s all true.
Unfortunately, there have been times when I’ve been a little unhappy with some of the stuff that has been shoved at me in the name of space people. These times have fallen into several main slots. Occasions when a contactee has offended my intelligence—not by being incredible, but by being unbelievable without being fascinating—but this has been rare.
Another area of offense has been religious. I recall unfavorably the evening when one of the people I’ve mentioned earlier argued with me because I wouldn’t permit him to announce over the air that “Jesus was the pilot of a flying saucer.”
A third bit that has always bugged me is the “I cure incurable diseases” pitch some of them toss around.
And lastly the racist propaganda which keeps cropping up from one group to another. In this area, regrettably, I’m unable to name names and cite occasions, since the allusions are always so carefully phrased so that the offenders could easily deny the intention of their remarks. But the meaning is there, never doubt it. As is usually the case, the unfavoured parties racially speaking, are the Jews and Negroes, and the theme of both Fascism and Communism seems to echo from behind the scenes on more than a few occasions. But it’s all part of the action.
And that’s the way they come, and stay, and go. Each one has his reason for being in on the operation. Ufologist or saucerite, everyone is serving his own purpose. Either he’s spreading a message he believes, or a message he doesn’t believe but can sell, or he’s making a market for a book—or he’s very sick. Everyone has his private drive.
But man is a stargazer. He swings on the unknown. It frightens him, but it fascinates him. He gets hung up on it, and in a way so have I. Although I’ve heard the weirdest and the wildest, I’m always waiting for another saucer story,
a little weirder and a little wilder. I don’t buy any of it—but I’m a sucker for a guy with a far-out gaff.
CHAPTER 5—THE $20,000,000 TICKET TO THE MOON PLUS SOME IMPOSSIBLE INVENTIONS
“Yes, an’ no, an’ mebee,
an’ mebbe not.”—David Harum (Edward Noyes Wescott)
“THE OTC-X1 Circular Foil Craft” is almost certain to go down in history—somewhere. Fact or fiction, farsightedness or fraud, I can’t pretend to judge, but fantastic, fascinating, and incredible? Yes. As the cataloger of the impossible in this country, I give you a square count, neighbors—there was never anything like the story of the OTC-X1. There were never—well, hardly ever—people like unbelievable “scientist” Otis T. Carr, and the promotional wizard Norman Colton.
I first encountered Carr when he was operating out of Baltimore. Of course, since then he has managed his way across the continent to Apple Valley, California, and back again, leaving an unbelievable series of adventures in his footsteps.
For a quarter of a century this remarkable gentleman served in the capacity of night clerk for innumerable hotels. He chose this manner of making a living because it permitted him time to experiment and meditate. Years were spent in the study of the laws of physics and metaphysics, chemistry and alchemy, biology and technocracy; and, on occasions, he discovered and invented laws that were all his own. These latter included concepts of anti-gravitation, electromagnetism, neutron accumulation, and other pretty esoteric-type bits.
It doesn’t take too much imagination to visualize the young O. T. Carr clerking, as he actually did, in a hotel where the great inventor Nikola Tesla lived. We can picture how the eager young man took every opportunity to talk with the genius who conceived of alternating current and other modern miracles. There they would sit, among the dozens of pigeons Tesla had flying in and out of his room, discussing the abstractions of the universe, with Carr running out for peanuts for the birds, and back for more speculation. And, according to OTC., during all this time Tesla was revealing fantastic scientific secrets which he never told to another soul.
And the years went by for Otis Carr.
Eventually he began to get things under way, establishing, at least in name and on stationery, “OTC. Enterprises, Inc.” The purpose of this corporation was to design, construct, manufacture, promote and merchandise the “OTC-X1 Circular Foil Spacecraft.”
According to inventor Carr, he had discovered how to capture and utilize the “gravity factor” in revolving machines. He said he could control “free energy,” which was “everywhere,” and build a ship to go to the moon. Or, as stated in “Information Bulletin No. 3,” dated December 23, 1957:
“Any vehicle accelerated to an axis rotation relative to its attractive inertial mass, immediately becomes activated by free-space-energy and acts as an independent force. We have shown that a charged body, so accelerated, indicates polarity in a given direction. The dip needle points, say, up toward the top of the body. But mount this whole rotating body, with its spindle, on another platform and rotate this platform on a spindle, then, if the counter-rotation is greater than the initial forward rotation of the body, a dip-needle on the second platform will point down while the first dip-needle points up, indicating the complete relativity of polarity. When the exact counter-rotation matches the forward rotation, the body loses its polarity entirely and immediately becomes activated by free-energy (tensor stresses in space) and acts as an independent force.”
On the other hand, it might be put this way:
“Mxhyn ppfgdnt llojwnzx osossenfoump mxmhsgsred alal…” but I’m afraid I’m merely echoing Carr.
The first “OTC-X1 Circular Foil Spacecraft” was conceived as 45 feet in diameter and 15 feet through the middle. Accommodating three passengers, its flight range was to be 1,000 miles from earth. OTC Enterprises, Inc., loudly announced that it would deliver a fully completed OTC-X1 from any place in the country, orbit one or more times outside the earth’s atmosphere, and land it wherever specified.
The price on delivery? A mere 20,000,000. Twenty million bucks. Naturally, quantity buying offers its advantage here, as elsewhere. Each additional identical unit is only $4,000,000.00. All deliveries within twenty-four months.
One of the more refreshing aspects of the Carr bit is its flexibility. On one promotion piece we were told that the forty-five foot diameter was a minimum, and that breadths of one hundred feet were likely, too. Yet, the smaller need was also considered with the “family-size ten-foot diameter” model the corporation was projecting, which was to sell for less than the price of an automobile. With the midget model, you would be able to spin your family across town, about the country, or even around the world, whenever you desired.
It’s quite possible that you’re saying that this was some small crackpot company, a couple of thousand dollar operation with big ideas, but if so you’re very mistaken. This was, and at this writing is, a big-time, top-level action.
Take, for example, one of their many promotional brochures. This is an 8” ×11” piece, printed on high grade textured stock in four colors. The legends on the jacket read “OTC Enterprises, Inc….Brings you Atoms for Peace…The Gravity Electric Generator, the Utron Electric Battery, Solar Energy Devices, Electro-Magnetic Machinery (and) Free Flight in Space.” These are thirty-two beautiful pages rife with elaborate diagrams, graphs and renderings, including a 40”×8” foldout. It’s a brochure that ranks with the best that Madison Avenue has to offer, and it’s one of many.
Another of these extraordinarily powerful pieces is executed in black and white, and genuine silver. This particular bit is on the “Utron Electrical Accumulator” and is so titled, with a subtitle “The Geometry of Space in Fourth Dimensional Physical Form.” On the center-fold are four illustrations of the “accumulator” in excellent artwork. The shape is that of two cones placed base to base. Each cone is perfectly round and the line of one side in relationship to its opposite side is a ninety degree angle. Therefore, if the object is viewed from the top, or bottom, one has the point centered, and the edge forms a complete circle; however, if it is viewed from the exact side, with one point on the upper right and the other on the lower left, it takes the shape of a perfect square. To wit, it is both a perfect circle and a complete square. According to Carr, this proves that he has solved the age-old, and presumably unsolvable, problem of “squaring the circle.”
And who is the man behind this sensational promotional and public relations job? Who is the man who is often called the “brains” of Otis T. Carr? His name is Norman Evans Colton. What is he like? That’s very, very hard to say; it’s almost as hard to answer as the question—“What does he think?”
Norman is a small, well-dressed, dark-haired, blue-eyed man with a very charming manner who moved from association with a public relations firm to the far more demanding and infinitely more exciting position of “Director of Sales Engineering for OTC Enterprises, Inc.” This title, however, means even more than it may seem to, for covered by Colton’s broad administrative command is everything, apparently, other than the actual “scientific theorizing” which makes all of these wonderful things possible(!).
When I first brought the OTC story to my radio listeners, both Otis and Norman appeared, sharing the time available in explanation of the OTC-X1 and allied experiments. However, from that time forward it has been Norman who seemed to be the dynamic force. Certainly it was he who most eloquently spoke for the new world of OTCism. He answered questions in a manner which was, if not intelligible, entertainingly confusing, generally leaving the interviewer with the feeling that no one in the world really could understand him, but that it was the world’s fault and not his.
Then came the night of the conversation between the eminent physicist Dr. Wallace Minto and Norman Evans Colton. It’s completely impossible to tell you how unbelievable the discussion was, but this was the general effect of a small portion of it:
MINTO: What you have stated is in direct opposition to New-ton�
��s Third Law of Motion.
COLTON: Dr. Minto, we are in favor of bringing many of the more old-fashioned scientists up to date. You might say that Mr. Carr would like to see some of them repealed and revised versions introduced.
MINTO: But Mr. Colton, modern science still accepts as true the scientific law referred to.
COLTON: And it is a good thing that all the old traditions aren’t lost.
MINTO: I’m afraid I don’t quite see the connection, but let’s touch on something else. How does this utron accumulator, that powers the craft, work?
COLTON: Very hard, especially if you speak softly to it. Seriously, though, when the full absorption effect of the accumulator permits the concentration of the anti-gravitational free-energy available you inaugurate a series-reaction of natural responses and a remarkable, but scientifically valid, phenomenon occurs—it goes up.
MINTO: I’m afraid that I’m forced to be blunt, Mr. Colton; none of that makes any sense.
COLTON: Exactly. It is the new approach that will win the pathway to the stars. The basic principle of anti-matter and anti-sense will serve to open an entirely new universe of speculation. The word is out, it’s on the wing. The word is “OTC.”
MINTO: That’s a word?
With all respect to the distinguished Dr. Minto, I have to give you a square count, friends, when Norman starts to roll no one can pin him down. He’s really fantastic when he gets swinging. Straight talk, crooked talk, single talk, double talk, and triple talk. Weave them all together, and you have the technique Colton uses to blanket any conversation with whole cloth and a yard wide. This is an intriguing and a charming guy, but I have to admit that I don’t buy a single word he says. Maybe it’s because he’s just a little too good.
Long John Nebel Page 8
