Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs

by John A. Keel

  So he waited. And in 1957, the UFOs began to come to High Bridge. They were seen by many. There were even several witnesses who claimed they had stood by and watched as Howard went out to meet and chat with the “space people.”

  Menger’s book, From Outer Space to You, tells an even more bizarre story than George Adamski’s. He relates frequent visits with apparent terrestrials who introduced him into the unbelievable underworld of the “silent contactees”: ordinary men and women who seemed exceptionally knowledgeable about the UFO situation and who posed as businessmen, real estate dealers, and the like. He was, he said, called out in the middle of the night to take long trips to desolate landing areas. On one occasion he was allegedly instructed to buy a box of sunglasses and leave them in an isolated field at night.

  His book is filled with strange stories, most of them completely unpalatable to the UFO researchers who were seeking hardware and solid evidence that the UFOs were from outer space: stories that hinted of occultism, telepathy, extrasensory perception, and, as always, a simplified philosophy based upon the Golden Rule. Although there is some religious commentary in the book, Menger seemed obsessed with health foods and offered diet information that presumably had some relation to what he was learning from the ufonauts. The last sixty-three pages are devoted to a treatise titled, “A New Concept in Nutrition.”

  Sandwiched in between the landings and contacts, which he tells in a direct and convincing manner, Menger relates things like how a Sergeant Cramer in the village of Bedminister, New Jersey, had pursued a speeding light-green station wagon bearing the license number WR E79. Menger had once owned such a vehicle, and with that license number. He was hauled into court to answer the charges. He had actually been nowhere near Bedminister on the night in question, and Sergeant Cramer’s testimony, as quoted by Menger, was most unusual.

  Cramer told the judge that he had pursued the station wagon to a red light at an intersection where it simply “disappeared.” Because visibility at that particular intersection was good in all directions for some distance, it’s a mystery how any car could just disappear there. It’s an even bigger mystery how that car could have been one that Menger had junked years before.

  “Well, what do we have around here? A phantom car!” the judge allegedly remarked. “I feel like either putting a man in jail for perjury or breaking a sergeant. This is the strangest case I have heard in all my years on the bench!”

  The good judge didn’t know the half of it!

  One of Menger’s terrestrial contacts is supposed to have told him, “My friend, this earth is the battlefield of Armageddon, and the battle is for men’s minds and souls… there is a very powerful group on this planet, which possesses tremendous knowledge of technology, psychology, and most unfortunate of all, advanced brain therapy…They use people not only from this planet, but people from Mars as well. And also other people of your own planet—people you don’t know about. People who live unobserved and undiscovered as yet…”

  The Menger book was published by Gray Barker in 1959 and enjoyed a small sale of a few thousand. The UFO hardcore at the time was no more than 30,000, and if a UFO book, particularly a contactee book, sold 3,000 copies it was practically a best seller. Menger didn’t stop with the book. He issued a phonograph record which, he claimed, contained music composed by the space people—but it sounded more like Howard Menger plucking clumsily at a badly tuned piano.

  Then came the freakish climax, which was almost as fantastic as all that had gone on before.

  At one of his early broadcasts with Long John, a crowd had gathered in front of the studio, and in it there was a striking blond girl named MarIa. She and Menger met, and he later divorced his wife so he could marry her. MarIa, Howard confided to friends, was from another planet. MarIa’s real name was Constance Weber. “MarIa” was her space name, she explained, and was the pseudonym that appeared on her book, My Saturnian Lover. Her Saturnian was Howard, for, you see, the space people informed him that he was originally from the planet Saturn.

  In the early 1960s, Long John Nebel landed a television show, and it was natural that he should invite Howard Menger to be one of his first guests. Menger was certain to be controversial, articulate, and enthralling. Or so producer Parris Flammonde thought.

  On the night of the show, according to Mr. Flammonde, an unusually quiet and nervous Howard Menger walked into the studio. “I knew that his natural manner could be boyish, even shy,” Flammonde commented later, “but on this particular occasion he just seemed vague.”

  Long John sensed this, too, and broke his usual rule of never speaking to a guest before going on the air (“Let’s not do the show now,” Long John will admonish. “Let’s wait until we’re on the air.”). He said a few kidding words to his old friend, and then the red lights blinked on, and millions of viewers around the Northeast settled back to hear Howard Menger tell about his experiences with the friendly “brothers from outer space.”

  Instead, Flammonde recalls, “Vaguely, aimlessly, rather embarrassingly, he avoided and vacillated…Howard Menger, Saturnian husband to a Venusian traveler in space, friend of extraterrestrials, annotator of ‘authentic music from another planet,’ master of teleportation, and saucerological sage extraordinaire—recanted! Denied almost everything…His saucers might have been psychic, his space people visions, his and Maria’s other planethood, metaphoric.

  “As a matter of fact, so did he retreat from his tales of the unreal, the reality of the immediate surroundings seemed to fade momentarily… If he had exuded a sort of translucent indefiniteness when he arrived, he was close to invisible when he left …To this day, the transition of the myth and personality of Howard Menger remains one of the most captivating enigmas of contactology.”

  Later, in letters to Gray Barker and Saucer News editor Jim Moseley, Menger termed his book “fiction-fact” and implied that the Pentagon had given him the films and asked him to participate in an experiment to test the public’s reaction to extraterrestrial contact.

  He has helped us, therefore, to dismiss his entire story as not only a hoax, but a hoax perpetrated by the U.S. government!

  Moseley staged a circuslike Congress of Scientific Ufologists in New York in 1967 and flew Howard and Maria up from their current home in Florida. Howard, Jim reasoned, would be a strong drawing card for the far-out fringe. I met Menger briefly backstage the day he spoke to some 1,500 people gathered at the Congress. Long John introduced him from the stage. Menger was still shy and boyish, and his palms were covered with sweat. Although he had given many lectures and appeared frequently on radio and TV, his nerves were visibly raw that afternoon. “Here,” I thought to myself, “is a very scared man.”

  His brief lecture was a bitter disappointment to the little old ladies who had come to hear a message of hope and faith. His retraction on the Long John show a few years earlier was forgotten, and he made a conscious effort to please the crowd of believers by sticking to a positive pro-extraterrestrial line. He avoided discussing the CIA’s alleged experiment and his own misgivings about the reality of UFOs. Instead, he talked about the saucer he was trying to build in his basement, presumably from plans given to him by you-know-who, then he spent several minutes knocking the National Investigation Committees on Aerial Phenomena and its deputy director, Richard Hall, for their attempts to thwart his plans for a UFO convention in Florida, and finally, he got around to his controversial contacts.

  “I think the most important thing that happened to me,” he said, “was in High Bridge, New Jersey, in the summer of 1956. It was in August. The craft came down from the west. It looked like a huge fireball. I was frightened. Gradually, as it came closer, it slowed down. The pulsations subsided. A metallic appearance was plainly visible. It was no longer a ball of fire, it turned into what looked like a man-made craft, reflecting the sun as it came close to the ground. It was a beautiful sight, very similar to the one on the screen here. [He was showing a UFO movie.] It stopped about a foot and a half f
rom the ground. An opening appeared in the side of the craft. There was a small incline or platform. Two men stepped out, very nicely dressed in shiny space suits, such as what we have today for our astronauts, very similar. Of course, in those days—this was way ahead of the time. One man stepped to the left, and the other stepped to the right, and then another man stepped out, a man I will never forget as long as I live. He was approximately six feet one, maybe six feet two. He had long blond hair over his shoulders—yes, long blond hair. He stepped toward me, and the message he gave, of course, was what most people don’t want to hear, a message of love and understanding. He said he had come from outer space, which is what most people really don’t believe in. Someday they will.

  “I often wonder what would happen to these people who say, ‘Well, what proof do you have? If I could see a flying saucer or someone step out of a craft, boy, I would make sure the people knew about it.’ Well, I just wonder about that. If you realize what people go through when this happens to them. If you really think you have guts enough to come out and tell people. Of course, nowadays it might be a little easier, but in the early fifties it was very, very rough, especially when you are in business and you are trying to act like a reputable citizen and bring up a family and, you know, things like this in your community.”

  Yes, it must have been tough. And it must have required more than just a little guts for Howard Menger to first come forward with such a story and then later to publicly recant on television. I have talked with several different people who were around High Bridge in 1956-57. One of them is Ivan T. Sanderson who lives nearby and who knew Howard before, during, and after these episodes. Something strange was definitely happening to Menger and the people around him at that time.

  Did Howard Menger get rich from all this? On the contrary. He lost his sign-painting business and his reputation. In the end he had to flee to another state, where he is just barely eking out a living at his old trade.

  Howard Menger is not alone. There are many other tormented victims in this incredible drama. One of them was a traveling grain buyer named Reinhold Schmidt. Late on the afternoon of November 5, 1957, Schmidt entered the office of Sheriff Dave Drage in Kearney, Nebraska, and unfolded a tale of contact that was classical in every detail. He said his engine had stalled outside of Kearney, and when he got out of his car to check it, he saw a silver “blimp” in a nearby field. Curious, he walked toward it and was surprised when a kind of staircase opened up and unreeled toward him. A man in conventional terrestrial clothes stepped out to meet him, speaking in perfect German, a language that Schmidt understood.

  Repairs were being made, the man explained, and Schmidt was welcome to look around until the work was completed. Schmidt said there were four people aboard, two men and two women, all apparently normal except for one bewildering detail. They did not seem to walk, he noted; rather they seemed to glide across the floor of the craft as if they were on casters. He described glowing tubes of colored liquids inside the craft, but overall, it was as stark and as simple as the interiors described by other contactees.

  The four people were not very informative, as usual, but told Schmidt that he would know all about it—and them—eventually. The whole episode sounds very much like the “chance” encounters reported by the 1897 contactees.

  After about thirty minutes, Schmidt was asked to leave. The “repairs” were finished. The object took off, and the now-excited grain buyer headed for Kearney. Within twenty-four hours the authorities had him locked up in a nearby mental institution for observation. Air Force officers materialized and branded the poor man as a nut. A search of the alleged landing site revealed puddles of the purple liquid so common at such spots all over the world, and there were indentations in the ground where the object stood. But when the sheriff searched Schmidt’s car, he found an open can of oil in the trunk and accused him of having spread it around the site. Schmidt not only denied ownership of the can but pointed out, reasonably, that it would be rather foolish to drive around with an open oil can in the back of any car.

  Later, after he was released, Schmidt lectured widely and howled loud and long about the treatment he had received. Ufologists noted that his story improved with age, and new embellishments were added each time he told it. Apparently he claimed other contacts of some sort and revealed that he knew the location of a wonderful quartz mine in California. The space people had told him that this quartz would cure cancer.

  He started to raise money to mine the quartz, and eventually some of his investors hauled him into court, where he was indicted as a swindler. Thus, Reinhold Schmidt joined the unhappy ranks of the contactees—a thoroughly discredited man. Yet, his original story made as much sense as any other contactee story, and he seemed to experience many of the same problems reported by the other pawns in this ultraterrestrial game. There were repeated contacts and manipulations that convinced him of the apparent validity of the ufonaut claims and led him down the long road to total disaster.

  A massive flap condition existed throughout the world during the week of Schmidt’s unfortunate encounter. And there were a number of other contacts, all grouped within thirty-six hours of Schmidt’s. Some of these contacts produced details that tended to corroborate the others.

  On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union hurled the first man-made satellite into space. It was not visible to the naked eye. A month later, on November 3, 1957, Sputnik II carried the ill-fated Russian dog, Laika, into orbit. Three days after that, at 6:30 A.M. on the morning of November 6, a twelve-year-old farm boy, Everett Clark of Dante, Tennessee, got up to let out his dog, Frisky, and was nonplussed to see a strange glowing object resting in a field about 300 feet from the house. Thinking that he was dreaming, young Clark shuffled back to bed.

  A few minutes later he returned to the door to call his dog, and he saw that the object was still there. Several of the neighborhood dogs, Frisky included, were clustered around it, barking at four people, two men and two women, all normally dressed, who were moving around outside the oblong thing.

  One of the men, Clark later told reporters and investigators from the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), was trying to grab Frisky, but the dog growled and backed away. He said that these people were talking in a guttural tongue which sounded like the German soldiers he had seen in the movies. The man did catch one of the other dogs, but it snarled and snapped at him, and he let it go. Then the strange quartet turned and seemed to walk right through the walls of the craft, “like walking through glass,” Clark said. One of the men had seen the boy watching them and had made a motion for him to approach, but Clark declined.

  Dante, Tennessee, lies outside of Knoxville and is a long, long way from Kearney, Nebraska. Schmidt’s story of the day before did not appear in the area until after Everett Clark had made his initial report. Reporter Carson Brewer of the Knoxville News-Sentinel found an elongated impression in the field where the grass had been pressed down in area 24 feet by 5 feet. APRO’s investigators found that Clark was regarded as “a serious and honest boy” by his high school principal, and his grandmother said he had called her immediately after the incident (his parents had already gone to work) and that he was “hysterical.”

  Later that very night another farmer, John Trasco of Everittstown, New Jersey, reportedly went outside to feed his dog, King, when he saw a brightly glowing egg-shaped object hovering above the ground near his barn. A weird “little man” stepped timidly toward him, he said. He was about 3.5 feet tall, had a putty-colored face with large, bulging froglike eyes, and was dressed in green coveralls.

  “We are a peaceful people,” Trasco quoted the little man as saying in a high “scary” voice. “We don’t want no trouble. We just want your dog.”

  The taken-aback farmer said he managed to snap, “Get the hell out of here!” The “little man” scurried back to the object, and it shot off into the evening sky.

  On Wednesday night, November 6, true to the Wednesday phenomenon pattern, there
were the landings in Montville, Ohio; Dante, Tennessee; and Everittstown, New Jersey. Another weird contact took place near Playa del Rey, California, when three cars stalled along a highway called Vista del Mar. The drivers, Richard Kehoe, Ronald Burke, and Joe Thomas, got out to see what was wrong. The answer seemed to lie in the egg-shaped machine sitting on a nearby beach, surrounded by a blue haze. Two men apparently came from the object and spoke to the trio in difficult-to-understand English. According to Kehoe, the men were about 5 feet 5 inches tall, dressed in black leather trousers and light-colored jerseys. Their skin, he said, appeared to be yellowish green. They asked some very ordinary questions, Kehoe reported, such as, “What time is it? Who were we? Where were we going? And so on.” Chalk up still another apparently meaningless contact. After the men flew off in their strange machine, the motorists were able to get their cars started again.

  A final contact was reported that morning by a truck driver named Malvan Stevens. He said he was driving near House, Mississippi, about 7:25 A.M. when a large egg-shaped object dropped out of the sky and landed on the highway directly in front of him. Stevens, a forty-eight-year-old resident of Dyersburgh, Mississippi, said that he thought at first that it was some kind of weather balloon. Then he noticed that there seemed to be a propeller on either end and on top of the object. He got out of his truck and was confronted by three people, two men and a woman, all about 4.5 feet tall, with pasty white faces. They were dressed, he said, in gray suits, and they tried to talk to him in a rapid-fire language that he could not understand. One of them tried to shake his hand. After a few minutes of futile attempts at conversation, the beings got back into the object and flew off.

  Stevens later told some of his coworkers about the episode, and one of them passed it on to the Meridian, Mississippi, Star. Later, when the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization investigated, they found him to be highly regarded as “a reliable family man” and not one to make up tales or play practical jokes.