The Real Deal!

The Real Deal!—Ufology:

An Audio Primer 1939-1959

By Alfred Lehmberg

Wendy Connors is the real ufological deal.  Such is succinctly so.

I say this confiding, honestly, that I report a great deal of raw understatement, but I'm trying to avoid any hyperbole that might degrade the sincerity and so then the effectiveness of this unashamed, if effusive, review.  Superlatives are deserved richly, appreciation is acknowledged gladly, and respect is tendered even in reverence.  The reader is informed that I've been (and very publicly!) accused by canted detractors as having "absolutely zero" cognitive (BS) filters. I remind the reader that I had abundant enough filtration to sift out he who would accuse me of the lack of same... Ms. Connors, on the other hand, is legitimately unfettered by the need of any filtration.

Why?

Because Wendy Connors is very highly respected as a researcher, and I'm not the only one who says so! She has been endorsed by ufological commentators as wildly divergent in intellect, contribution, and cant as Jerry Clark and Andy Roberts (leaving it to the reader as to which of them describes the high mark and which the low...) but Connors' reputation as a researcher is of the highest order!

Yeah, I'm unabashedly impressed with Wendy Connors, myself. She's a genuine ufological doyen of the first water!  You appreciate her courage and the jewel-like quality of her contribution immediately!  In her written work, she is one of the intrepid few able to take a subject too easily dismissed or wrongly interpreted, otherwise, as the threatening "fearful" of fearful unknowns, and with wit and erudition establishes, for these UFOs, an enduring and sensible educational framework for the rational, interested, and healthily curious. Additionally, she allows, as a welcome result of her work, a more useful understanding of UFOs that might be alternatively enjoyed... ...knowledge, reader, is generally that antithesis of fear!

The fruits of Ms. Connors latest research assesses the taproot of modern ufology. You see, from the very beginning, and at the very start—even before the UFO flap in 1947, and as I have written before—CREDIBLE people were giving CREDIBLE reports to CREDIBLE officials running CREDIBLE investigations, and these reports were, in turn, considered CREDIBLE by the even the more elevated, higher ranking, and ultra-hyper- CREDIBLE!

In other words, at the start of the public interest in ufology, intelligent, educated, and powerful people thought that these UFOs*—admitted as a physical reality to actually be there in the first place!!!—were intelligently guided craft... not of this Earth! That's a fact, folks!  I risk a digression to wonder where that conclusion went in the current reality... but I think we know.

We know that the just previous is a fact because in the old, more naively innocent—and less duplicitous—ufologically *uncontrolled* days, these persons, and many, many others were recorded saying so! That's a fact, too!

Where are all these old recordings then? What has become of them? Where did they go?

They were momentarily lost to senseless history; that's where they were! They were at the bottom of old trunks, in dusty drawers and forgotten—unvisited—rooms. They were mislabeled, misfiled, and mistaken for something else! Moreover, they were corroded and damp and mildewed... in the process of disintegration, aurally illegible, and fading into complete and final oblivion!  Not so now...

Wendy Connors has reversed this ignoble fading of recorded history (...to that awful finality of tragic loss); she has mounted, and succeeded in, an arduous rescue of this history from that oblivion! Additionally, she provides for a new kind of ufological credibility that would have been lost to us but that she facilitated, expanded, and clarified the MEMORY of it for our eventual benefit! There just can't be too many superlatives for the magnitude of this work! No hyperbole here!

Errol Bruce-Knapp, Art Bell, and George Noory have historical precedents (and record their programs for history), or maybe the reader thought these gentlemen sprang fully formed from the forehead of Zeus in the late 20th Century! No, latenight radio has long been the province of the paranormally twitchy, almost for as long as there has been radio. Among these was a popular late night talk-show host by the name of "Long John" Nebel. He was the "Art Bell" of his time.

Nebel (et. al.), by way of example, had all the ufological luminaries on his radio program and much of what they said, way back when, would raise the hair on the back of a complacent neck, even today. These seminal programs, among many, many others, would have been lost but for Wendy Connors diligence, computer skill, and poignant sense of real history!

Nebel is only a fraction of what you could hear, reader! There are pilots and engineers and air traffic controllers! There are doctors and reporters and conservative professional persons! There are military officers, famous radio personalities, and named scientists! There are persons such as yourself, reader, presuming your innocence or an honesty or a sincerity plainly heard in many of these astonished voices from the past... real and uncontrived persons recounting their unbelievable encounters in a manner more easily believed, than not!  Cue the dire organ music!

Y o u ... a r e ... t h e r e, good reader! Ms. Connors makes you a fly on the wall for "things are now as they were then, except you ... are ... there"! You're there for a true to life accounting of a historical actuality regarding the highly strange that would have been heard (or remembered!) no other way! This is a one-of-a-kind, kind of thing.

Connors provides a time machine, actually—a time machine with the focus on the seminal ufological. Why, one of the segments is the specially abridged "War of the Worlds" program that Orson Wells produced in the 30's! The reader will recall that this is the radio program about an invasion from Mars by hostile beings that many astonishingly believed (!) ...and where Americans, by the way, gave a damned good accounting of themselves, actually (!), despite believing that they were being invaded by monsters from beyond! Damned good! ...Whatever the reader has heard, otherwise! I digress.

Connors' work is a dazzling array, a panoply, a huge range, a plethora of the highly strange... (!) Fascinating voices in this astonishing assemblage speak to a real world actuality of the ufological! Hear the authentic voices of persons you'd only read about as they share their amazing accounts and startling testimonies! ...Dr. Willey Ley, Dr. Allen Hynek, Frank Scully, Donald Keyhoe, Captain Edward Ruppelt, Major Dewey Fournet... the list seems unending!

Additionally, there is a lot more than meets the eye with this true -wealth- of a compilation! It is not just a mere collection of dead voices (they throbbed with life once, same as you!). No, one gets a sense, as one listens over and over again ( ...one can with this collection!), that the ufological struggle by individual human beings has been needlessly endured for decades! One begins to perceive how people have tried to make sense of what they had witnessed, or how they tried to rationalize their out-of-the-box experiences! One appreciates how they fought then, as they fight now, for sense and sensibility when confronted with the... abject "weird" and highly "strange"... that is the larger reality many of us remain convinced is the reality!

Ms. Connors has produced a compact disc, a volume one, entitled Ufology: A Primer in Audio 1939—1959, with nearly eight hours of the uncompromised history you've never heard before... and that I've barely described in this review. This one disc contains over a hundred recordings of ufological history as it happened, reader! I think it is as valuable as some the better quality text-books I've purchased and gotten less out of... for a hundred... or a hundred and twenty dollars!

Connors only wanted twenty dollars for the disc, reader! It was a steal! Orson Wells in 1938, all by *himself*, is worth that... and the disc contains seven and a half more hours of quality historical material!

If the reader knew someone interested in UFOs, they'd have loved this in their Christmas stocking! Without question, it's a quality work to have in any documentary library!

It's the real deal, folks. ...UFOs are real; we are not alone...

Consider: it's not the beginning of the end, or even the end of the beginning—It's the beginning of the beginning! "... and you are there...," reader! Wendy Connors, of the now lapsed "Faded Discs," makes these enigmatic recordings, decidedly, less faded, and succinctly puts you there, right where they are! Maybe the reader can find it on the net.  I'll look around a little and update what I found out in comments.

Closing, here was an opportunity to spin up on how it really was—give that future a real PAST and so, therefore, a more solid foundation!

Verily! Read on!

LISTEN TO THE COLLECTION HERE
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* UFOs!  Unidentified Flying Objects.  Not birds, bolides, boosters or balloons or that tediously unreasonable appellation of the psychosocial crowd bordering on intellectual insult: UAP... unidentified aerial phenomena...  This may be a mechanism to push the goal posts of UFOs anywhere the operator wants them to go in a denial loop the result of cognitive dissonance and the operator's  inability to absorb new information.  See reader, where unidentified "object" connotes an artifice real in time and space and the very fabric of the existential,  UAP, in the ultimate get out of jail free card on the other hand, reduces a "highly strange physicality" to a nebulous phenomena defined as not even having to be there at all.  This leaves the reluctant observer a safe zone of wiggle room unearned and undeserved and not a little unhealthy.