Howard Menger, one of the most charming and colourful of the golden era UFO contactees, died on 25 February at his Florida home. He was 87.
Reports Greg Bishop:
…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.
Greg has a lengthy obit at his UFO Mystic site.
In 1957 Howard and his then wife Marla made an LP, ‘Authentic Music from Another Planet’. To honour his passing I present a piece I assembled back in 2002, which mixes some of Menger’s narration from that album with ‘Babyfood’ by Coil.