Flying Saucers Over Los Angeles: The UFO Graze of the '50s

by Dewayne B. Johnson and Kenn Thomas

This study chronicles the earliest years of the flying saucer flap, beginning 24th June 1947. Starting with cases such as the Roswell crash and the Maury Island incident, the book continues with... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0932813542
• ISBN13: 9780932813541
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

UFO spotters have history on their side

By digging up and adding to the 1950 manuscript of writer DeWayne B. Johnson, researcher Kenn Thomas (author of "Popular Alienation," "The Octopus: The Secret Government and Death of Danny Casolaro" and publisher of the Steamshovel Press) has shown in "Flying Saucers Over Los Angeles" that UFOs are as American as unlimited defense spending, and are not the sole obsession of nutjobs. The book chronicles dozens of provocative news accounts from the 1940s onward, including the "Battle of Los Angeles" in February 1942, in which the US military fired over 1,400 rounds of ammunition at a strangely shaped craft, which General George Marshall thought was an enemy spycraft. The book cites umpteen examples of sightings of saucer and cigar-shaped craft in the period after World War II, as seen by credible witnesses, such as police and pilots. Even in the 1950s, before the age of massive distrust in the government, there were just too many sightings to be dismissed as mass hysteria, hallucinations, weather balloons, aerial phenemona, etc. Johnson's work, as relayed and amplified by Thomas, also explores explanations of alien technology, but comes down on the side of UFOs being military-created. Overall, the Johnson/Thomas approach to the material is well-researched, responsible, logical and void of histrionics. There's even a very entertaining appendix of news clippings from the 1940s and 1950s, which not only puts the history of UFO study into perspective, but also provides a window to the social history of the period through the other news stories that shared the newspapers' pages. The language of "journalism" in these mid-century pieces from the LA Daily News, The LA Times, and the Daily Mirror (yes, Angelenos once had a choice of more than one bad paper) is often quaint, hilarious, and creepily contemporary. For instance, one front page story recounts a Kevorkian-style mercy killing trial. Such nuggets are all a bonus for readers interested in getting an introduction to the history of the UFO situation in America, or to bolstering their viewpoints. History is indeed on the side of those who know that strange, top-secret objects flit around the sky on a daily basis, and that they're footing the bill for it all.