Flying Saucers over Los Angeles
The UFO Craze of the 1950s
Dwayne B. Johnson and Kenn Thomas
Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois, USA, 1998, $16.00
Flying Saucers over America
Steamshovel Supplement to Flying Saucers Over Los Angeles
Steamshovel Press, 1998, $20
Two more productions from the prolific Kenn Thomas. Flying Saucers Over Los Angeles is a hitherto unpublished dissertation by Dwayne Johnson written at UCLA in 1950/51 about the then on-going UFO flap over and around Los Angeles. The original dissertation has been illustrated with dozens of photographs of UFOs, magazine covers, and portraits of personnel of the period, some in quite dazzling colour reproduction. Johnson, a journalism student at UCLA, was no dummy, and his thesis is a very interesting, well researched analysis of the flap. The combination of the 1950s reportage and research plus contemporary graphics, DTP and printing technology gives a wonderful snapshot of how this phenomenon must have seemed at the time to an intelligent and reasonably open-minded observer.
The Steamshovel supplement is about 200 A4 pages of photocopies of newspaper articles from the period on the UFO flap and various other subjects related to it. Before reading this I had no idea just much coverage UFOs had received in the United States in the 1947-50 period. Read side-by-side the book plus supplement provide a probably unique reconstruction one of the first major UFO flaps of the post-war era.(1)
Note
- Steamshovel is at POB 23715, St Louis, MO 63121. The $20 price quoted is for the US: outside the US I would add $5 for airmail postage.