Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

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).