http://iowabookgal.com/moduless.php John responds to June Larson, who was supplying him with UFO clippings. Back then, this was all done with paper and postage, which cost money, so he’s trying to narrow down the subject matter and reduce costs. $30 or $40 a week was expensive, particularly since he was earning less with UFO research than he had with comedy writing. Of particular note here, I think, is his list of subjects of interest.
Coral Lorenzen responds to John’s distress about alien interference by reminding him not to “let your fear get you by the throat,” and to be wary of unreliable and unbalanced witnesses. She fills him in on her recent run of bad luck, adding that if she were afraid someone or something was influencing her, she’d “have gone to the looney bin this year.” She also reports on some recent UFO activity in her area. One footnote: the movie “Phenomena 7.7” was a documentary by Frank Stranges, now apparently lost; the number referred to the percentage of sightings the Air Force considered unexplained.
John and the Lorenzens are writing each other almost daily at this point. Coral Lorenzen’s letter from May 23, 1966, goes further into her idea that aliens were planning to put sleeping drugs in our water supply. She also comments on the wave of UFO books, and on a recent episode of the TV show “The Open Mind.” That was probably “Are Flying Saucers Only Science Fiction?”, which aired on February 27 of that year, with Donald Menzel, Frank Salisbury, John Fuller, Leo Sprinkle, and J. Allen Hynek, moderated by Eric Goldman.
John replies to Coral’s last letter. He plans to interview “the Milne woman”; does anyone know who that might be? He confesses that he finds himself “acting more and more paranoiac,” and says that Coral Lorenzen’s theory (that aliens plan to put drugs in our water supply) is not as bad as some of the material he’s collected. Jeane Dixon may be less familiar now; she was a popular astrologer and prophet at the time. Mort Young, as mentioned earlier, was a reporter for the New York Journal-American, and author of the book UFO: Top Secret.
We continue with John’s “Official Correspondence” file for 1966. Coral Lorenzen writes a long, rather chatty letter about Jim Moseley and Major Keyhoe, her speculations on aliens putting drugs in our water supply, and the Villas Boas case. Both she and John seem to feel that “the reconnaissance is drawing to a close,” and that a more serious invasion may be imminent.
After a phone conversation with the Lorenzens, John admits himself “badly shaken up.” As far as I can tell, they talked about the many sightings of UFOs near reservoirs, and both were convinced the aliens were hostile. John thought they hoped to change the earth’s atmosphere; the Lorenzens thought they planned to poison the water supply. Incidentally, rumors about LSD being dropped into reservoirs were common that year.
John also dismisses John Fuller’s Incident at Exeter as “surface stuff,” but thinks Mort Young is on the right track. He speculates on the failure of the Agena rocket on May 17, and, in a footnote, suggests that the aliens took Villas Boas’s cigarette lighter because they breathe inflammable gas.
Coral Lorenzen writes John a long letter, focusing on two famous cases. First she defends Villas-Boas’s account of his sexual experience with an alien, although she doesn’t really answer John’s questions about the different versions of it. Then she describes what later became known as the Cisco Grove Encounter, in which a hunter named Donald Shrum was besieged by a UFO on September 4, 1964. The “IGY photos” mentioned in the PPS were taken by Almirs Barauna in Trindade, Brazil, in January, 1958, during the International Geophysical Year.
June Larson, an industrious UFO researcher, writes to John to fix a price for the material she’s sending him. She’s optimistic about the state of ufology, and hopes that John, Mort Young, and Major Keyhoe can encourage “serious research.”
John writes Jim and Coral Lorenzen, acknowledging a packet of photos they sent on the 12th. He’s intrigued by the Villas Boas story, but notes discrepancies between the report in Flying Saucer Review and the original interview with João Martins and APRO member Dr. Olavo Fontes. He also comments on Ms. Lorenzen’s article “The Reason?” in the November 1963 APRO Bulletin, which speculated that the military wanted to keep its knowledge of UFOs secret from the aliens, not from the public. (You can read the article here.)
ADDENDUM: By mistake, I originally identified Ms. Larson’s letter as one from Ms. Lorenzen. They were both sending John material for his proposed Playboy article at the time. My apologies!
We continue with a brief exchange of letters between John and Coral Lorenzen, concerned mostly with photos and the problems of documenting sources. Noteworthy here is John’s first response to the account of Antônio Villas Boas (whom he calls Bolas, for some reason). Villas Boas was a Brazilian farmer who reported a sexual encounter with an alien; John and Coral discuss the case in more detail in later letters. Also to be noted is John’s mention of “Fuller’s second book.” That would be John Fuller’s book on Betty and Barney Hill, The Interrupted Journey, which would be summarized in Look, October 4 and 18, 1966, and published later that year.
John writes to Mort Young, a reporter for the now defunct New York Journal-American, whose book UFO: Top Secret was to come out the next year. John hopes the “triumvirate” of the two of them and John Fuller “can succeed in breaking this case wide open.” The Mrs. Larson he mentions is June Larson, who sent him many UFO clippings.
I started this blog ten years ago; the first post was on September 6, 2009, a few months after John died. As a postscript, here’s a note he sent me in 1991, not long after we met, after seeing me perform a set at Caroline’s Comedy Club in NYC. Keep reading his books, Keel fans!
