Men’s Adventure Quarterly #11

Issue 11 of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, edited by Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, is the UFO issue. This time it’s all non-fiction articles from men’s adventure magazines dealing with the sinister visitors from outer space. But since the subject is UFOs most of these non-fiction articles are in fact pure fiction. But that makes them more fun.

And there are articles from some of the respectable UFO experts of the late 40s and the the 50s, such as Donald E. Keyhoe - the man who did more than anyone else to give belief in UFOs a vague gloss of respectability.

Some of the articles present lots of evidence although whether that evidence would stand up under any genuine investigation is highly debatable. Some of the most entertaining articles are pure moonshine and those articles are the most fun. I had no idea of the threat we faced from underwater UFOs.

The history of our civilisation for the past century or so has been an endless cycle of outbursts of mass hysteria. The UFO scare was just one of the mass hysteria outbursts of the 50s. There was of course the Red Menace, but there was also Juvenile Delinquency and of course the “comic books are undermining the moral fibre of our youth” scare.

The UFO scare was the most interesting.

In an odd way it was also the most plausible. In the late 1940s even reputable scientists were inclined to accept the idea of a universe teeming with intelligent life. The reasons why contact with alien civilisations was actually very very unlikely were not fully appreciated. When the UFO craze started to gather steam around 1947 it was not necessarily the province of cranks and nutters. It was really only in the 70s that belief in UFOs became a fully-fledged fringe belief.

Of course there was always an edge of paranoia. In some of the articles you can see the paranoia take on a vaguely political edge, with space aliens being seen almost as commies from space.

It’s also interesting to see just how much the government was mistrusted, even in the early 50s. There was also a certain degree of mistrust of the military. I’d never really thought about it before but the UFO scare really was the moment when a lot of people first seriously considered the idea that the government might be systematically lying to them. In the case of UFOs the government probably wasn’t lying, but it’s significant that people believed it might be.

There are as usual a number of photo features focused on some of the great science fiction babes of movies and TV, in this case including Anne Francis and Mara Corday. And there’s a cool photo feature on Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s wonderful UFO TV series.

This volume is beautifully presented and glossy which is what we’ve come to expect from this publication. And of course we get the original artwork from the various men’s adventure magazines.

This issue is a treat for UFO buffs. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several previous issues of Men’s Adventure Quarterly - #4 The Jungle Girl Issue, #6 the Heist Issue and #7 The Gang Girl issue. I highly recommend them.