By Raymond A. Keller, a.k.a. “Cosmic Ray,” the author of the international awards-winning Venus Rising Trilogy (Terra Alta, West Virginia: Headline Books, 2015-2017)
One can understand Dominick Lucchesi’s obsession with extraterrestrial women. The various contactee accounts that most captured his fancy were those that struck some resonance in his personal life. Dominick experienced real encounters with female emissaries of other worlds. Although it took him 15 years to come out with it, in his own words, the early experiencer recounted his very first such episode at the UFO convention convened in New York City’s Woodstock Hotel on the evening of 16 September 1969, attended by the Cosmic Ray and North Coast Mike in their early years as flying saucer investigators from the Greater Cleveland, Ohio, area.
In Dominick Lucchesi’s Own Words
Revelations from Outer Space: A True and Startling Tale
On the night of 17 January 1954, I was contacted by an amateur radio operator who resides in the immediate vicinity of my home. The nature of the contact was to the effect that in experimenting with higher frequency receivers, the ham radio operator had decided to utilize a radical new antenna designed by my brother Frank for the purposes of power reception and transmission.
It was my neighbor’s idea that by using the antenna for the purpose of the reception of signals, he could amplify incoming signals to tremendous proportions, thereby increasing the otherwise limited range of the receiver. He stated that he had carried out this experiment in an odd manner. First, he had connected the antenna by a switch circuit to the incoming leads so that he could, by the throw of a switch, introduce the new antenna into the circuit. This would enable him to compare the signal values, or difference between the two.
Having completed his hook-up, he switched to normal antenna and began to tune the higher frequency bands, watching his signal meter flick slightly as it began to pick up slight disturbances on a band that was in the ultra-high frequency range. Out of curiosity, he switched in the new antenna and was amazed to hear a voice emanating from the speaker while the signal meter pegged on full stop. He claimed the voice to spoke to him, as if it knew he could hear it. The voice said, “You are in proper resonance. Do not change your settings.”
Becoming frightened, he cut the switch on and off in a flurry of indecision. Then calming a little, he sat to listen. It was a few minutes before the voice resumed. It said, “Contact someone who can understand…. Space….”
Static interference blocked the reception between the words. “….far…. distant…. Do not turn receiver off…. Contact…. Someone who will understand…. Space…. Velocity interferes with frequency…. Contact…. Now….down soon near…. Wait…. Switch…. Resonates….or….contact our unit….”
The receiver went silent and the signal meter skipped to zero. Putting on his jacket, he ran to my house and told me this story. My curiosity aroused, I went with him to his home and radio room. I sat in silence as he told me over and over that it really happened. I looked at the receiver that was still turned on and picked up the pad on which he had taken down the message. Putting together the words of the message, “Switch….Resonates,” and feeling a little foolish as I did so, I began to send by flipping the on and off switch of the receiver in Morse code. I sent the following: -.-. — -. – .- -.-. – …. . .- .- over and over, “Contact hear—- Contact hear—– -. — .— Now—- Now.” Then, leaving the switch on, I sat back and waited, looking frequently at the sweep hand on my watch.
After about twelve minutes, the mater needle flicked to full scale and a voice emanated from the speaker. Quickly picking up pad and pencil, I took down the message. The voice had a slight alien accent that was like nothing I ever heard before. I believe it sounded slightly Asiatic in intonation, but can’t be sure. This is the message in its entirety:
“You are Contact Seven—– You are Contact Seven——– Hear! Hear! Do not turn receiver off———- Do not turn receiver off—- Static—- (interference for about 30 seconds, then message resumes).
“Listen close—- Listen close—Listen close———- We will be seen if you follow main highway westward….” There was a repetition of the same message several times.
At this point, the voice began to get clearer, as it continued: “Be on highway in exactly 16 minutes— 16 minutes—- 16 minutes. Stop vehicle near swampland—- Stop vehicle near swampland—- look toward sky westward—– Look toward sky westward—– follow, follow, follow, follow to destination…….. Blue glow—- Blue glow….” This message was repeated in its entirety three times.
The message continued with, “———-Now, Now, Now, Now, Now,” which faded into nothing as the meter slowly returned to zero signal.
The first episode of the Outer Limits television program, broadcast on the evening of 16 September 1963, featured the “Galaxy Being,” an electro-magnetic entity accidentally brought down to Earth from the Andromeda star cluster as a radio engineer was using a small California town’s commercial station’s KXKVI facilities to research microwave background radiation in outer space and capture some of it in his own invention of a three dimensional television set. The galaxy being was not satisfied with staying put in the “boob tube,” however, and decided to take a tour of the Central Valley environs, accidentally killing a few people with lethal doses of cosmic rays. Some of the contactees in the 1950s and 1960s, to include Dominick Lucchesi, claimed to first contact extraterrestrials via ham radio sets. One has to wonder if Leslie Stevens, the author of the “Galaxy Being,” was inspired by such amazing accounts as provided by Lucchesi? Photo is from archives of United Artists, Los Angeles, California.
Looking at my companion Vince to see his reaction, I asked what he thought of the message. He was at a complete loss of words. The only highway I knew of that aimed westward through swampland was S3. Figuring to follow the strange occurrence to its end, I told Vince that he should put on his jacket and come along. We arrived at the middle point where the highway intersects the New Jersey swamps about a mile past the Hackensack River. In exactly 12 minutes, and looking westward over the peaks of the Orange Mountains, we searched the sky for a blue, glowing object.
While wondering if the message had been interpreted correctly, it was Vince who first noticed the glow; and I had to follow his pointing finger to find it. I estimated its distance as about three miles by noticing the slight cloud formation which it had penetrated. It was extremely faint; and had I not known where to look, I would have missed it entirely. Occasionally, it would flicker out for about 15 seconds and would appear again.
By this time, I was driving along the highway, maintaining a steady speed of fifty miles per hour, without realizing we had traveled 45 miles and were on U.S. Route 6 in the vicinity of Hackettstown. An abrupt change of direction of the object forced us to turn into a secondary road southward; and we found ourselves in an isolated district with an occasional farm breaking the landscape. Having been in the general area once before, I thought we were in the Schoolboy Mountain area.
Suddenly, the object glowed brighter and began to grow in size. I could not tell whether it was stationary and we were moving toward it, or if it was moving toward us. A loud humming vibration filled my ears. I could even feel the car vibrate in unison. Without realizing I had turned into a dirt road that was overgrown with weeds, and coming to an opening in the trees, I turned off my headlights. I then waited for my eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. Continuing to repent of the fact that I had no flashlight, I became cognizant that by this time Vince was begging me to turn back. He was even trying to push me away from the driver’s seat. Fearing that he would leave, I took the keys out of the ignition and stepped out into the high grass. Suddenly, I was overcome by a feeling of intense and insatiable curiosity which overcame all traces of fear. I walked toward the field in which the object seemed to settle.
My eyes gradually accustomed themselves to the darkness as I pushed aside the brushes and weeds. And then my hair stood on end; and I froze momentarily. My throat constricted, for something stood in the center of the path, blocking my way. I overcame the momentary panic. My own pride would not allow me to show fear. I did not know whether to say something ridiculously outrageous or ridiculously common. My mind was flowing like a kaleidoscope.
I heard myself say, “Who are you?” The figure turned about and started to walk away from me. A strong compulsion made me follow and all fear left. It was supplanted by a feeling of resignation to whatever may follow. I guess I was tired. I don’t know.
After walking about 25 yards, I saw the dim outline of an egg-shaped structure with an open port in its side that gleamed dimly with a fluorescent cast. Limned in the light, the figure I followed took on a more normal appearance. AI saw it was a man in a loose fitting coverall tied at the ankles and wrists. On his head, he had a tight-fitting, skin tight helmet with small projections on the ear flaps, like tiny hearing aid buttons. He walked straight into the craft without even turning around.
I was momentarily interrupted in my observations. Vinnie run up and grasped my wrist from behind, trying to pull me away from the thing. I do not remember the remark I said to him, but let go and stood beside me quietly as the realization of the series of events struck him.
He said, “What should we do now?”
Without answering and fearing I would have to act now, I ran for the open port and walked into the craft. I estimated its size and construction as about fifty feet in length and ovoid in shape, with no rivets or external projections being apparent, except for a band or rim about four feet in width and two feet in thickness. It was circling the outer part of the hull. There were large squares spaced along this rim, whose outer surface looked like a metallic mosaic, like a photo cell. I made the mistake, however, of touching the sides of the port with my hands and recoiled at the slight electric charge of the hull.
The floor deck inside the port was of non-reflective, dull black composition that felt like sponge rubber, but with such a smooth surface that I sensed it was not. I noticed that the port was in actuality an airlock; and passing through a second port, I found myself in a circular room with a grilled round lamp shining down from the domed ceiling.
My senses, for some reason, were acutely sharp. A buzzing noise, like a swarm of bees, emanated from the ceiling fixture. I felt my whole body tingling from inside out. I felt slightly lighter, for some reason. I went and touched the walls. They were smooth like glass, but non-reflecting. The construction did not seem as alien as it seemed advanced. That’s the only way I could phrase it.
In the middle of the floor there was an upright cylinder that seemed to be rotating slowly, descending about seven feet from the ceiling overhead. When it came to a stop, a door slid open from the top. It beckoned me to step into it, which I did. The door closed and the cylinder, which apparently was an elevator, carried me to an upper deck. I found myself in what appeared to be a control room.
There were two men sitting at the control chairs. They turned around and smiled in a friendly manner. One of them waved his arm in a gesture. It seemed that he wanted me to sit near the panel with him. I did so and noticed the simplicity of the panel before me. There was a large screen in front of the two men that had lines moving along it, like an oscilloscope in a radio shop. The panels were inlaid with small knobs and buttons. There were no switches and levers in the whole cabin.
I was startled to see a female walk in. She sat at one of the panels. She was dressed in a gray coverall, differing only in color to the ones the men were wearing. I did not know whether to speak or remain quite. I tried to observe any strange physical characteristic. I noticed the men’s necks were heavily muscled and corded. They were wiry in build; and for their size, seemed extremely strong. I was the eyes that had the oddness of appearance, an oddness I could not define.
I began to get jumpy at the silence; and at the same time, did not want to be the one to break it.
Contact with the “Space Girl”
The girl must have sensed my discomfort. Walking over to another panel, she removed a transparent chart from an illuminated surface and handed it to me. Immediately after she picked up the chart, a shaded but honeycombed impression momentarily formed on the panel’s surface, but then quickly re-illuminated. The chart seemed similar to celluloid; but when bent, it would not crack or tear.
The diagram had a maze of lines and figures on it. Instinct told me it was a chart of sorts; but I could not recognize the form of writing. Nevertheless, there were a number of the configurations that were similar to ours. I felt a light touch on my shoulder. I turned around to notice another girl smiling at me in amused observation.
She said, “Your friend awaits you outside. I spoke to him; but he refused to enter our conveyance. The other three do not know your tongue. It was for that reason they did not speak.”
I noted that her voice was emotionless, yet friendly. She wore a garment similar to a sun suit. Her hair fell to her shoulders like a page-boy hairdo. Her eyes were intensely alive. On her head rested a red beret with a diamond-studded, golden bee pin.
I spoke to her in a statement. I said, “This is a spacecraft.”
She acknowledged with a nod. I asked, “Why did you contact us?” She shrugged and told me that their sensitive receivers had indicated a circuit which was in tune electrically with their transmission apparatus and decided that it deserved consideration. Upon my asking why they had come to the planet Earth, she answered with the fact that they (she and her crew) were to their civilization what our explorers and scientists are to our culture.
I fumbled in my jacket pocket for the pad and pencil I had taken from Vinnie’s radio bench. I held them up to her with a questioning glance. She nodded her head in approval and answered the following questions without hesitation, and in extreme patience. I wondered if now, that I had the supreme opportunity, I could ask the right questions. What was paramount in my mind? Everything had seemed to lose perspective and value. My very senses reeled under the implications.
As if in a dream, I acted. These are the questions I asked. It is for you, the believers and the unbelievers, to judge as to whether they were the proper ones or the wrong ones. What would you have done? What would you have asked?
Dominick Lucchesi sketched his own version of Commander Aura Rhanes based on his personal encounter with her along with the description provided him by California contactee Truman Bethurum. The original sketch is located in the Gray Barker Collection in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and was reproduced with permission along with a lengthy account of the Commander’s activities, on page 71 of my most recent book, Cosmic Ray’s Excellent Venus Adventure (Terra Alta, WV: Headline Books), 2017. All the Venus books are fully illustrated throughout and available on amazon.com while supplies last.
The “Q and A” Session
- What is your name and where are you from?
- My name is Captain Aura Rhanes and I am from the planet you know as Venus.
- What is the driving force of this craft?
- The only way I could describe it in your tongue would be to state that it is an electro-dynamic turbine. However, I do not think you would understand fully how it operates.
- What is the name of your ship and what is its purpose?
- Our ship is called the Spartacus. It is a scientific exploration vessel.
- Do the Earth governments have a vehicle similar to yours?
- Yes, they have one, but only in general outline. The underlying principles are common; but your present level of technology is, as yet, too impractical for implementation.
- Do you have a base on the planet Earth? If so, could you tell me where?
- We have several on the Earth, as well as the side of the Moon that you cannot observe from the surface of your world. There are bases in Antarctica and some areas of South America, as well as under your larger and deeper bodies of water.
- Does your government intend to invade any of the nations of Earth?
- We do not have a type of government that you would readily understand. While we will not invade any of your nations, we will work clandestinely to see that any dangers directed towards us are averted.
- What is wrong with the human race, as it is known?
- The humans do not think in a logical manner. They are quite emotional. Environmental conditioning and educational standards remain at the lowest order. Your teachers, for the most part, are no more intelligent than their pupils, at least as far as the whole conceptualization of the interplay between mind and logic is concerned.
- What is the best way to gain knowledge?
- Knowledge may best be gained through its transmission by telepathic means, initiated by someone who knows how this is properly done and can assist the receiver in their development of cumulative memory channels.
- Do we have to accept things on faith?
- There should be no such emotion as faith. It retards progress in the logic-mind-matter-energy–reaction, thus creating a barrier toward further thoughts on any specific trend one is pursuing. But saying this, I still have to admire the humans for their capacity to be inspired by it, to even risk their own lives if they fervently believe in something. That is the mark of a true revolutionary, to even die for the people, if necessary.
Living with the Humans
- Have you ever lived amongst Earth people?
- Yes. But few and far between are the encounters we enjoy with men and women of Earth who possess a mind that is at the same time both exhilarating and progressive, in conjunction with our own.
- Do you enjoy physical contact with the opposite sex?
- Yes.
- Well, isn’t that an emotion?
- I wouldn’t say that it was an emotion in the manner that you are thinking, right at this moment. But it is a sense, much like pain, sight, smell, etc. There is a definite sense of physical feeling, but not emotional, as Earth people think. We’re not into all the drama you humans attach to it.
- I’m not sure I catch where you are going with that answer. Could you clarify this for me?
- At this moment, Dominick, you were thinking in terms of the physical sense-love-contact. Eliminate the love and you have, well, sense-contact. Love is the term you people have used to rationalize a number of physical-mental senses that you are unable to isolate separately, and in their entirety to the whole of the logic-mental-concept.
- Then you are recommending that human race should not love?
- I want you to understand the full array of senses that you term love; and then utilize these senses and you will arrive at something much better than the term you use to describe the conglomerate sensations that you term love.
- Do you consider, then, that these questions I am asking are of a low order, or even childish in some sense?
- No, not at all; but they are the natural questions that would be asked by a person at your point of mental evolution, one who has explored the progressive thought concept.
- In what way do you attempt to accomplish this?
- Collectively speaking, we accomplish this by living logically and attempting to impart our knowledge to lower orders of celestial life. Of course, in doing this, we can only divulge information that the particular beings in question are capable of assimilating in an intelligent and progressive manner.
- What is the average human intelligence rating?
- In attempting to answer your question, I would require a complete census of the many intelligences found inhabiting this and other universes. Of course, were you to ask what your inherent intelligence rating may be, we can safely state that you are above the lower order in many ways, but in the higher orders ranking only in various phases of intellectual progressiveness.
- How does our philosophy differ from yours?
- Philosophy, as you call it, is nothing but the effort of your minds working in conjunction with your ego and foolish emotional facilities attempting to prove and deceive yourselves into thinking that you are able to assimilate and propound knowledge of cosmic proportions; when in actuality, it is not practical nor progressive to attempt to understand a concept of proportions that your finite minds cannot follow.
- Can you propound one of these concepts?
- I will attempt to answer your question to the best of my ability. First, you must understand that mere words do not convey the actual thought concepts of the individual. They only stir the mind and imagination of the persons who hear or read these words, so that they may interpret them in their own way of thought formation. The only way that a person can convey a mental concept is through the power of telepathic communication. Why should a person strive to understand the infinite, when he or she is finite? A person should strive to understand the mind only to the extent or term of…. a mind-time cycle of existence, and not beyond, as that is useless to the mind itself.
Really, you Earthlings have the foolish idea that it is possible to convey actual concepts by word pictures. Yet, everyone through thinking of the same thing would visualize the actuality differently in their own mind. Think back to your own Plato and his story of the shadows on the cave wall.
Significance of Radio Communications in Flying Saucer Encounters
What is highly significant about Lucchesi’s case is that it was facilitated by direct radio communications from a Venusian saucer pilot. Interestingly, contemporary radio astronomers utilize huge interstellar dishes or vast arrays of smaller radio telescopes linked to a central computerized network in the hope of finding and communicating with intelligent beings on other distant worlds or even in other dimensions lying outside our own space-time continuum. All of these unprecedented efforts come at a great cost to the taxpayers of many countries. While the discovery of radio transmissions directed to Earth by some distant outer space civilization would be a momentous event, and one that would ultimately justify the cost of the project’s public funding, a few researchers, both concerned scientists and interested ufologists, have speculated that perhaps extraterrestrials or ultra-dimensional beings, operating their craft in the vicinity of our planet, have already beamed sundry electronic communications to various contacts right here. This may have been going on since the very invention of radio. In my first book in the Venus Rising series, I elaborate on the early radio experiments and alleged extraterrestrial communications received by the electronics wizard, Nikola Tesla (b. 1856), beginning in the year 1898 and up through his death in 1943. Tesla claims that via his own invention of the so-called “Tesla-Scope,” he was in direct radio communication with super scientific civilizations on both Mars and Venus.
Rare photo snapped by Dominick Lucchesi from Keller Venus Files depicts renowned anthropologist and archaeologist Dr. George Hunt Williamson descending from the dais at the First Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention held at Giant Rock, Landers Field, California, on Sunday, 4 April 1954. Lucchesi attended the convention on behalf of the Nexus flying saucer magazine.
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Also, just two years before Lucchesi’s own extraterrestrial experiences, the renowned Arizona-based pioneer astro-archaeologist, Dr. George Hunt Williamson (1926-1986), was claiming that he was in “off-and-on again” radio communications with the occupants of a flying saucer from Venus. Williamson was also noted as being one of the witnesses to the master of the mystic arts George Adamski’s encounter with a Venusian saucer pilot named Orthon at Desert Center, California, on 20 November 1952. Williamson drew a sketch of Orthon as being a beautiful young woman. This was subsequently published in the 4 December 1954 issue of Valor: The Magazine of Soulcraft, headquartered in Noblesville, Indiana. This astounding sketch has also been reproduced in my book, Final Countdown: Rockets to Venus (Terra Alta, West Virginia: Headline Books, 2017).
He also took plaster casts of the extraterrestrial’s footprints, and forwarded these to a Livermore Laboratories physicist using the alias of “Peter Kor,” in December 1956. Kor, in a letter to Gray Barker of the Saucerian Press in Clarksburg, West Virginia, described the footprints as being from a small, size-6 shoe with rather indistinct markings. On Sunday, 17 June 2018, Northeast Ohio UFO investigator, Michael A. LaRiche, and I drove out to Mr. Kor’s home in the Greater Cleveland area and asked him about the footprints. Kor, now in his late 80s but in a very spry condition, noted that one of the footprints broke in half sometime en route to his home, after it was mailed from Dr. Williamson’s residence in Prescott, Arizona. Kor kept the footprints for three months before Dr.Williamson asked for them back; and he dutifully returned them. Unfortunately, he did not take any photographs of them while they were in his possession. Soon after the footprints were back in Dr. Williamson’s custody, the anthropologist-archaeologist set off for Peru in an attempt to discover evidence for the presence of ancient astronauts that once inhabited the western cordillera of South America, the Andes Mountains range.
“Did the footprints appear to be made from the imprint of a small woman’s or a girl’s shoe?” I inquired. “Yes, they did,” said Kor. He also explained that Adamski and Dr. Williamson had been corresponding with him when he was writing for various publications of Raymond A. Palmer such as Amazing Stories, Fate, Mystic and Search in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before the famous encounter at Desert Center. He invited the two most well-known saucer experiencers and researchers of the age to come up to Cleveland and present some lectures. Adamski and Dr. Williamson took Kor up on his offer and met for the first time right before they addressed a maximum capacity crowd of 500 in a downtown Cleveland hotel for an event promoted well ahead by Kor in conjuction with local research groups, the Cleveland UFO Society and the Cleveland Ufology Project. Kor described Adamski as a “true mystic at heart” and Dr. Williamson as a “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed researcher, a true seeker.”
At the same time that Dr. Williamson was asserting that he was talking with Venusians via a ham radio set, the United States Air Force established a TOP SECRET program code-named MQ707, the purpose of which was to establish telecommunications with highly advanced extraterrestrials in the hope of coaxing them to land one of their ships at Edwards Air Force Base in California. This was to take place on a certain date and time where President Dwight D. Eisenhower could clear his schedule, fly out to California and meet the flying saucer occupants in person.
At the forthcoming From Venus with Love conference, sponsored by Rob Potter’s thepromiserevealed.com and to be held on the slopes of Mt. Shasta from 27-29 July 2018, I will be revealing much more concerning Peter Kor and his connections with George Adamski and Dr. George Hunt Williamson, replete with some amazing photographs both current and past, harkening back to those early days of the contactee era.
Peter Kor, first generation ufologist and columnist for Raymond Palmer’s esoteric publications (L) with Dr. Raymond Keller (R), author of the Venus Rising Trilogy, in Mr. Kor’s Northeast Ohio home, on 17 June 2018. Photo was taken by Michael LaRiche.
In penultimate paragraph of letter above dated 8 December 1956 from “Kor” to Gray Barker, the Mystic magazine writer explains that only “some of the markings” are plainly visible from Orthon’s footprints, versus Williamson’s drawings of them in Adamski’s books that depicted more distinct lines throughout. Follow-up letter from Barker to Kor dated 12 December 1956, also displayed here, asks for clarification on this matter. Venus author Cosmic Ray Keller and Northeast Ohio ufologist Michael LaRiche interview Kor at his home in the Greater Cleveland area in June 2018 and confirm Orthon’s footprints were a small woman’s moccasin or shoe, size six, and that the markings were too indistinct to arrive at any comprehensive conclusions. The real name of the alias “Peter Kor” has been blocked out of both letters to protect his identity.
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Origins of the Richard Shaver Mystery
Perhaps the most phenomenal of paranormal experiencers was Richard Shaver. Like Peter Kor, Shaver was intimately associated with Raymond A. Palmer and all of his esoteric publications emanating out of Amherst, Wisconsin. Competition among science magazines, both factional and fictional, was tight throughout the 1940s. Palmer needed an edge, and he found it in the early 1943, when he presented his associate editor at Amazing Stories, Howard Browne, with a letter that had arrived in the mail from Dick Shaver of Berwick, Pennsylvania, purporting to reveal the truth about a race of malicious beings called the Dero that were living under the surface of the Earth. Palmer had read the long letter from beginning to end and then asked Browne for his opinion about it. “I read a third of it,” said the associate editor, “and then I tossed it in the waste basket.”
Palmer fished the document out of the “circular file,” however, and kept it for future reference. He saw some great potential in Shaver as an up-and-coming science fiction writer. He polished up Shaver’s article and then ran it in its entirety in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories. Palmer was delighted. A flood of mail came in. Readers of Amazing Stories insisted the story was true because they had been plagued by Deros or Dero-like creatures for years. The result was spectacular with sales of Amazing Stories shooting up through the roof. Subscriptions were up four-fold.
Richard Shaver’s first novel, “I Remember Lemuria,” appeared in the March 1945 issue of Raymond A. Palmer’s Amazing Stories.
The Great Anomalist, John A. Keel, Pontificates
John A. Keel (1930-2009), the editor and publisher of Anomaly, and the author of numerous books and countless articles on flying saucers and other ongoing mysteries, was considered one of the greatest paranormal researchers of the twentieth century. In my opinion, one of Keel’s most important articles, “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers,” appeared in the Winter1983, issue 41, of the Fortean Times (London, United Kingdom: Dennis Publishing). In an excellent biography of Raymond A. Palmer, Keel dedicates numerous paragraphs to Richard Shaver. Of particular bearing on the subject of this essay, Keel wrote the following concerning Shaver’s account of the Dero and the rising popularity of Amazing Stories:
John A. Keel edited the Anomaly newsletter, wrote countless articles and numerous books about our mysterious universe that he referred to as the “Super Spectrum.”
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“Actually, Palmer had accidentally tapped a huge, previously unrecognized audience. Nearly every community has at least one person who complains constantly to the local police that someone- usually a neighbor- is aiming a terrible ray gun at their house or apartment. This ray, they claim, is ruining their health, causing their plants to die, turning their bread moldy, making their hair and teeth fall out, and broadcasting voices in their heads.
“Psychiatrists are very familiar with these ‘ray’ victims and relate the problem with paranoid-schizophrenia. For the most part, these paranoiacs are harmless and usually elderly. Occasionally, however, the voices they hear urge them to perform destructive acts, particularly arson. They are a distrustful lot, loners by nature, and very suspicious of everyone, including the government and all figures of authority. In earlier times, they thought they were hearing the voice of God and/or the Devil.
“Today they often blame the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or space beings for their woes. They naturally gravitate to eccentric causes and organizations which reflect their own fears and insecurities, advocating bizarre political philosophies and reinforcing their peculiar belief systems. Ray Palmer unintentionally gave thousands of these people focus to their lives.
“Shaver’s long, rambling letter claimed that while he was welding he heard voices which explained to him how the underground Deros were controlling life on the surface of the Earth through the use of fiendish rays.”
In the footnotes to this article, Keel points out that, “It is interesting that so many victims of this type of phenomenon were welding or operating electrical equipment such as radios, radar, etc., when they began to hear voices.”
For Dominick Lucchesi, this was the signal point for the entry of the Venusian observation patrol craft Spartacus’ Captain Aura Rhanes.
Doing her part to raise feminist consciousness, Evelyn Smith of Indianapolis, Indiana, a.k.a. Captain Aura Rhanes, the Commander of the Spartacus, a Venusian observation patrol craft deployed from the far side of our Moon, posed for artist Ed Emshwiller of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1953 issue (Volume 5, Number 4), to highlight Kay Roger’s story, “Letter to a Tiger,” about a powerful female revolutionary from outer space. The heroine can pass through inter-dimensional gates. In a few months after this portrait appeared on the cover of the science fiction magazine, Captain Rhanes would visit radio engineer Dominick Lucchesi near his New Jersey home. See http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?61375.
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You must understand though the touch of your hand,
Makes my pulse react.
That it’s only the thrill of boy meeting girl,
Opposites attract.
It’s physical—-
Only logical.
You must try to ignore that it means more than that. Ooooh!
What’s love got to do, got to do with it?
What’s love?—-but a second hand emotion.
What’s love got to do—- got to do with it?
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
–Tina Turner, “What’s Love Got to Do with It” in Private Dancer album, 1984
See http://www.kaltblut-magazine.com/tbt-tina-turner-whats-love-got-to-do-with-it/.