2026 October 16 • Friday

A year after launching their regular UFO column, Man to Man magazine came up with a Red Scare angle. Indeed, they actually use the phrase “UFO gap”.

As usual, there isn’t much salient information but there are some nice photos.

The main concerns are that the USSR has already made first contact with extraterrestrials or that they have merely solved the UFO mystery and the explanation is “unstartling”.

2026 October 14 • Wednesday

Another men's magazine, Man to Man magazine, started a UFO department with their January 1967 number.

They invite readers to write in with their UFO encounter stories and get started with a classic sighting, complete with some wonderful photos that have been used in some UFO documentaries.

In charge of this new regular feature is a "Long Island businessman" who has lectured on UFOs and made their study a "life-time hobby". He doesn't use his real name but goes by the delightful pseudonym Mercator Saturnus Player.

Carl Jung gets a quote here, but it's not his famous remark about UFOs being a manifestation of a collective unconscious but about how the authorities should reveal what they know about the subject.

2026 October 12 • Monday

Rupert Hine's incredible electronic score for The Shout is the 923rd Soundtrack of the Week.

There's a lot of cues here and a lot of variety of sounds. It can be spacey or kind of electropop-computer. It can be total dread ambience or even be sound effects for the film. There are also some musique concrète pieces.

Long and thick synth tones form a background for airier, flute-like synth lines in "My Wife Is Waiting for Me", for isntance, while much of "Trapped" sounds like an amplified and angry fly.

What sounds like recordings of tortured human breathing start off the title track, which explodes into a howl of sonic intensity.

"Bass Drone" is like a stripped down Vangelis Blade Runner cue while "CS80 Strings" is sunny and angelic-sounding.

Real church organ dominates "Harry's Funeral" and then "EMS seq1" is a straight sci-fi loop with keening synth notes.

There's a whole track of ring modulator ideas and some unsettling mixes of different instruments and sources, such as in "Tailcoated Shaman".

It's all pretty amazing.
2026 October 09 • Friday

When was the real golden age of UFOs in the US? The 1950s, maybe, but I think they were still going strong in the '60s. They certainly became staples of men's magazines of that decade. Here is, for our first example, the December, 1969, issue of Saga magazine, with "Worldwide UFO Maneuvers" on its cover.

The article itself is a collection of anecdotes of the familiar "someone saw a UFO and then something strange happened" variety. Power failures, heat waves, cars going out of control, humanoid figures wearing what appear to be diving suits and using hand-held paralysis rayguns on people.

Nothing in here is verifiable or even sourced, beyond vague citations such as "Australian Flying Review", with no date or issue number. (This was probably supposed to be Australian Flying Saucer Review.)

But it's a bunch of names, places and dates and typical UFO encounter stuff, all inconclusive, all pretty typical, all easy to invent. Once you've read a bunch of these, it seems like it would be pretty easy to make them up.

And even if UFOs still had traction in the '60s, by 1969 it might have been pretty played out. This UFO article here gets bottom billing, after Ann-Margret and Snowmobile Ski-chuting. (Surfing was kind of played out by then too.)

In the back there's one of those body-building ads that were very common in magazine and comics for decades. But this one features "movie and T.V. star" Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though his first movie did not, I believe, come out until 1970 (though only a couple of months after this magazine's cover date).

2026 October 05 • Monday

The 922nd Soundtrack of the Week, and the first 2026 Shocktober selection, is Don Peake's music for The Hills Have Eyes.

This has to be one of the best examples of using a little to get a lot. There's a piano, a synthesizer, some percussion and some strings and that's pretty much it.

Most of the cues rely on the piano and synth to create moods of dread and terror, with strings and percussion added for extra effect as needed.

It balances texture and atmosphere with some urgent driving moods. Somewhere in "Stealing The Baby/Lynne Is Shot/RV Fight/Finding The Walkie Talkie" a drum kit playing a rock beat comes out of nowhere and the synth gets to groove for a while.

A similar surprise rock/funk idiom appearance comes in "Ruby Runs With Baby/The Rabbit/Brenda Sees Mutant/Dead Mom Decoy". There aren't a ton of swinging parts in this score but when they happen, they're great.

This release includes some alternate versions of those as well as wind sounds created by synth, some axe hit stings and a couple of tracks of just percussion.

"Criminal" by Public Image Ltd. changes the feel entirely by keeping some of the rock elements but steering the music into a sparer, jagged, not funky but not exactly not not funky either place..

I don't really remember that song or the next one, "So Long Cowboy" by Westworld. Time to watch the movie again!

The last song on the record Sheryl Crow's "Hundreds of Tears", which has an appropriate dramatic and emotional feel to it.