what website can i order Clomiphene Charles Bowen (editor of the British Flying Saucer Review) responded to “The Big Breakthrough” with a letter on July 2, 1967, including a description of a visit from a man who sounds a lot like Tiny. I posted this a couple of years ago, but deleted the name. On further consideration, I decided to post it here. The possible Tiny candidate was Wade Wellman, the son of the novelist Manly Wade Wellman. I spoke with someone who had met him; he said Wellman was later institutionalized.
Wellman does sound a lot like Tiny, even down to the hat and the habit of reciting poetry. It may be an explanation for one notable Man In Black encounter. Even if it is, it raises more questions. Why didn’t he give his name? Why was he asking about inheritances? If he was interested in UFOs, why didn’t he ask about them? At any rate, here’s a bit more of the puzzle.
TINY. I am now seriously perturbed. In November I received a letter from Wade Wellman who announced that he was flying over to England to do research in the British Museum (checking on a manuscript about vampires!). Wellman who forever was bellyaching about being too hard up even to pay a sub for FSR. He rang me on arrival, & I collected him at West Byfleet station on Saturday, Dec. 10. I discovered him to be a huge young man — at a guess 240 lbs. — & about 6 ft. 3 ins., fair haired, very thin on top. Wore a check shirt & ducks, riding high above his ankles, & thick soled shoes. He had a shabby overcoat, & sported a Russian style of fur hat! His speech was a monotonous, emotionless, expressionless, mechanical one-pitch perpetual motion. He often broke into poetry by Milton & Edgar Allan Poe, reciting it as though he had learnt it computer fashion. He drank the best part of a bottle of my Martini & got himself well sloshed — & ranted on about poor misunderstood Hitler etc. etc. My family regarded him rather as they might do a cobra, & expressed a feeling of repugnance. I thought he was a schizo. On the Sunday, just before lunch, he said “And now may I look at your FSR files?” I declined, lying that they were “At the office”. After lunch he upped & went. I saw him off, & have had one short letter since. He flew back to De Kalb, Illinois, after only two or three days here. What do you make of that?
Your maps received, but nothing of New Jersey (Wanaque) or W. Virginia, etc.
Yours ever Charles.
Great follow up! I recall reading somewhere about Wellman’s visit to England and that the Tiny mystery was solved. But, as you point out, it only deepens when one looks at all the particulars of the New Jersey episode. By now theres not much about Johns investigations that surprise me but this one just seems to an itch I can’t scratch. Doppelganger?
Comment by Clarence Carlson — January 20, 2016 @ 1:24 pm
Hi Doug. I had heard of this guy too. Don’t recall where I read about it, though. I’m a big fan of Manly Wade Wellman, and briefly interviewed the late Karl Edward Wagner for THE HORROR SHOW magazine in 1986. Karl was a neighbor of the Wellmans, and his Carcosa imprint republished some of Manly’s old works. Karl gave great assistance to the Wellman and his wife during Manly’s final days.
Comment by William Grabowski — January 21, 2016 @ 3:11 am
That’s all very interesting. I didn’t know Wellman’s trip had been written about. I suppose another possibility is that Wellman simply got a part-time job, and that the UFO connection had nothing to do with it. That doesn’t sound likely, but neither does the rest of it!
Comment by Doug — January 21, 2016 @ 9:17 pm
Interesting. I had not seen till now the allegation that Wade Wellman was put into a mental institution, and without evidence to that effect, I will review the claim with skepticism.
I spoke with him on the phone once, probably in the early 1990s, when I was at the Center for UFO Studies office in Chicago researching my UFO Encyclopedia. Wellman called, and since I was alone there, I picked up the phone.
He told me he was living in Milwaukee and working as an engineer. I knew who he was — he wrote some essays for FSR, and I was aware he was Manly Wade’s son — and I recalled Charles Bowen’s story, which he’d related to me not long after the notorious encounter. So I was on my guard. Wellman seemed normal enough, however. I don’t recall much of the substance of the conversation, except that one point he expressed admiration for Donald Keyhoe’s prose. I am of the view that Keyhoe’s writing was hackery out of the pulp school, but I said nothing.
Comment by Jerome Clark — January 25, 2016 @ 1:21 pm
Fascinating! The fact that he was the son of a celebrated Weird Tales author is fittingly Fortean. If Wellman was based in Illinois at the time, this begs the question of how he could possibly have heard of the family in NJ. Two far-out but quite Keelian possibilities could include a) possession by an outer agency; or b) doppelganger.
Comment by Anton — February 1, 2016 @ 5:52 am
Hello, Jerome, thanks for your comments. My informant was a friend of the family, who gave no details. He did say that he found Wellman as unpleasant as Bowen did.
Comment by Doug — February 2, 2016 @ 10:05 am
I have some tangential connections to this story. In the early 1980s, I knew Manly
Wellman and his wife Frances socially, as part of a group fantasy and SF writers in the
Chapel Hill, North Carolina area. (I was but an aspiring writer then). I don’t think I ever
met Wade Wellman, but I knew of him, chiefly from a novel he supposedly co-authored
with his father called “Sherlock Holmes’ War of the Worlds.” I say supposedly co-
authored because the novel is pretty bad, written in a grating imaginary Victorian style,
quite unlike Manly Wellman’s earthy, lyrical prose. The things done to Doyle’s immortal
detective and to Wells’ superlative alien invasion tale are pretty heinous. I suspect, with no
evidence at all, that Wade Wellman probably wrote the novel, got his father to edit it, and
sold it as a collaboration.
You can still get a copy of this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Further-Adventures-Sherlock-Holmes-
Worlds/dp/1848564910/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454592232&sr=1-
1&keywords=sherlock+holmes%27+war+of+the+worlds
but I don’t recommend it.
Manly Wellman died in April, 1986. Harlan Ellison was in town for a literary event, and he
knew Manly well. He delayed going to see Wellman, finding it hard to face an old friend
who was dying. As a result, he missed seeing Manly by just a short time.
In an earlier time (1976), I was a freshman in college at Chapel Hill. It was the end of the
fall semester, my first experience with college final exams. What did I spend one night
doing instead of studying? Reading “The Mothman Prophecies” for the first time. I sat up
late, reading the whole book in one sitting. My roommate had already gone home, so I
was alone. Sitting at my desk, leaning back on two legs of my hard desk chair, I devoured
Keel’s eloquent weirdness eagerly. I had gotten to the part about his strange and scary
phone calls when, at something like 1 AM, my phone rang. I fell off my chair and
scrambled to the phone. It was a wrong number.–not a UT but a drunk college student
looking for his buddy.
Paul B. Thompson
Comment by Paul B Thompson — February 4, 2016 @ 10:14 am
Paul — Thanks for the stories. I’d heard about that Doyle-Wells pastiche; I’ll probably steer clear of it. Glad to hear Keel was keeping students from their studies!
Comment by Doug — February 14, 2016 @ 8:40 am
I never thought John Keel and Manly Wade Wellman (my second favorite author after Andre Norton) would meet on the graph! Manly’s son as Tiny? The mind boggles.
As much as I like Wellman, biographical data on the writer has been hard to come by (at least by me). I know almost nothing about the son (but I’ll gladly blame the Sherlock Holmes book on him — gave me an excuse to sell it off). Paul I. Wellman, the western writer/historian, was Manly’s brother, but I don’t recall Manly ever mentioning that in any essay or introduction.
Wade looking for an old manuscript about vampires is not strange at all; he might have been doing research for his father or himself. M. W. Wellman prided himself in never using fake occult lore or books in his fantasy/horror tales. “The various books of supernatural science and philosophy herein referred to actually exist, or in one case is intriguingly rumored to exist,” as he writes in the Foreword of [i]Voice of the Mountain[/i] (1984).
I just remembered: Back in the ‘eighties I wrote a fan fiction novelette (or half of one) about Wellman’s character Silver John meeting John Keel — in Point Pleasant in 1966, when else? I wonder if the yellowing typewritten pages of “A Tale of Two Johns” is still around here somewhere . . .
Comment by Michael Winkle — April 25, 2016 @ 10:09 pm
The mind does pleasantly boggle at the idea of Wade as Tiny; this is, of course, only Charles Bowen’s suggestion. Silver John and John Keel! The mind boggles again…
Comment by Doug — April 30, 2016 @ 8:53 am
Keel spoke of a rich kid “from the area” who was a danger when he wasn’t institutionalized. He may have been responsible for the “cave with 25 skeletons” mentioned by Keel as having been found near Pt. Pleasant in 1975. I have been unable to find anyone who knows about the skeletons or the cave.
However, the “institutionalized” aspect might mean that Keel thought Tiny was killing people, or was the young man trying to grab locals girls. I just can’t figure out if Tiny is the “tall, dark-skinned, young man wearing a black coat and cap” who visited Mary Hyre and Mabel McDaniel. He sounds like our young stalker with the old-new car.
There is also another character Keel spoke of, who would “invite you down to his basement to look at his gun collection” before doing something heinous to you. I can’t tell if this could be Tiny or the stalker. If Tiny was ensconced at Lakin Hospital, however, it could be him. The problem is that Wellman had a pretty long drive to Pt. Pleasant from NC. It can be done in one day, but it is a few hours. But then again, Tiny had interesting transportation capabilities. Given what was going on the TNT Area at the time, he may have hired by the AEC spooks from Oak Ridge, whose experimental reactor was near Pt. Pleasant. That was a very tense time during the Cold War, and the whole valley was a tinderbox of spies.
Comment by Andrew Colvin — August 7, 2016 @ 8:27 pm
https://thesaucersthattimeforgot.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-ufologists-that-time-forgot-wade.html
Comment by 8th Street — October 11, 2017 @ 8:57 pm
Thanks! I’ve been curious about Wellman, ever since I read Bowen’s letter.
Comment by Doug — October 13, 2017 @ 10:02 am