Pulp International

vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news

AIRBORNE IN THE USA

Aliens seem inordinately attracted to the United States. Maybe it's the free drink refills


Talk of UFOs—sorry UAPs—is ramping up in the U.S. again, which means it’s time for one of our periodic buckets of ice water over the debate. There are no alien craft in the skies. There, we did it. We’ve already gone through the reasons why. Condensed version: aliens could learn everything they wanted to know about Earth without coming here. They could hang out undetected behind Uranus—heh heh—and intercept endless radio and television transmissions. Or they could send undetectable drones the size of gnats here. If they came to Earth physically they would have stealth technology. The list goes on. But today we’re interested in a slightly different question. Why does the U.S generate 92% of global UFO sightings?

You ever notice, also, that it’s the U.S. that has all the secret data, hidden wreckage, and refrigerated bodies? The unlikelihood of aliens visiting the U.S. to the near exclusion of the rest of the planet, and the hubris that drives that belief, is worth note. If you’re an alien, why not land in Tanzania? There’s some pretty interesting shit there. Why not India? There are 1.5 billion people there worthy of study. It seems to us that the fantasy of government held UFO secrets needs to be intertwined with the U.S. or else it doesn’t really work. Why? Well, we’ve travelled around a bit, and not all governments are the same. Some are far less interested in keeping secrets. We feel pretty confident that if the government of, say, Iceland, or Finland, or New Zealand learned something about UFOs they’d simply say so.

By the same token, some governments have so little in the way of a national security apparatus we doubt they have the capability to keep extraordinarily large secrets. If a UFO crashed in Belize or Nepal we bet everybody in and out of government would know within days. All it takesis for aliens to do one of their periodic oopsy-daisys somewhere other than the U.S.—or the other highly secretive nuclear powers—and the beans would probably be spilled. This is why UFO sightings are concentrated in the U.S., with its incredibly opaque government. The idea of UFOs elsewhere spoils the fun, because the point isn’t so much aliens as it is conspiracies.

It’s easy to imagine the leader of a smaller nation seeing good reason to share definitive proof of alien life. Geopolitics works on two tiers, with nuclear armed nations existing outside international law. We bet dozens of leaders would be interested in throwing sand in the gears of those nations’ global domination machinery by offering proof that Earth is being observed by infinitely more powerful (and wise?) entities. And you know what? When we think of it that way, maybe we should believe after all. Could proof of alien life stop warfare? There are certainly worse things to believe in. So come on, bobble-headed intergalactic saviors. All of a sudden, we’ve found the faith.
 
UFOs

WON’T GET UFO-ED AGAIN

More people are talking about alien visits but they still aren't happening.


Have you noticed the uptick in talk about UFOs the last couple of months? The subject is being discussed on websites like Scientific American and BBC, in the pages of publications like the New York Times, and even in the corridors of power in in Washington, D.C., where a while back Congress demanded that the Pentagon produce a report on the subject. Donald Trump and Barack Obama have talked about it. Retired Nevada Senator Harry Reid even went so far as to say that weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin may have fragments of a crashed UFO in its possession.

All we have to say is here we go again. We know a lot of people really believe in the existence of alien UFOs, but here’s when we’ll believe: when one arrives, an alien climbs out and says. “Greetings, Earthling. Take me to your leader. We ask because we couldn’t figure out which of you is in charge of this clusterfuck.” Let us be clear. We aren’tUFO agnostics. Agnostic would be to neither believe nor disbelieve—in other words to cop out. We’re UFO atheists. When the only alleged evidence consists of hearsay, anecdotes, blurry photos of pie tins on strings, and indistinct FLIR footage, we feel safe saying they don’t exist.

The idea of UFO sightings being legit hinges upon numerous assumptions. That aliens have the ability to come to our vicinity. That they have the ability to come to our vicinity and want to observe us. That they want to observe us and prefer to do it up close rather than from a vast distance. That they want to observe us up close rather than from a vast distance and aren’t interested in disguising themselves. That they aren’t interested in disguising themselves and don’t care what effect that might have on us. And that their up close methods of observation would be detectable to us in the first place. Think stealth or nanotechnology. We human doofuses already have the basics of those figured out. Aliens would have the capability to observe us by using machines the size of gnats, a far more likely option than soaring around the sky chased by F-35s.

The list of assumptions UFO believers gloss over goes on, but the biggest problem, in our view, is that aliens could learn far more about us from our broadcasts and data emissions than in person. Even our detection and defense capabilities, assuming they wanted to understand those, would be easier to learn from intercepting and decrypting the code through which they operate, rather than with field encounters. And surely none of us think super-advanced aliens wouldn’t be able to break military encryptions?

They could also, from millions of miles away, decipher our languages, observe our many warring cultures, ponder our crazy taboos, note our hundreds of fanciful religions, puzzle over our destruction of the very environment we need in order to survive, be horrified over our caste systems based on the presence of a pigmenting chemical in our skin cells, and be astounded over the fact that most of the above is true because we’ve created a global system that elevates and rewards ruthless, dangerous people. All the major tribes of Earth (U.S., Russia, China, et al) are led by people prone to violence. Would aliens really want to bother with creatures like that?

So while we keep up with UFO reporting—as required by our status as a pulp website—we don’t believe aliens are the cause. If they’re anything, they’re advanced drones. But the alien UFO stories will keep coming. We think humans, or at least some humans, will believe even the most outlandish fantasy if it makes them feel good, or makes them feel frightened or outraged. If you doubt that the latter is true, just ponder the epochally sad fact that fantasies about a pedophile ring in a Washington D.C. pizza parlor have had an indelible effect on American politics. In short—people are amazingly gullible. Despite anything Harry Reid says, we don’t think Lockheed has alien UFO bits in a top secret warehouse.

All that said, we also do not believe humans are alone in the cosmos. Scientifically, the assumption that we’re alone makes no sense. Plus wouldn’t that be utterly depressing, the idea that we’re the smartest creatures in the universe? We’re hanging off a cliff edge like Indiana Jones, groping for a stray tree root to save us as our sacks of gold threaten to pull us to our doom. If nuclear war and global heating don’t send us hurtling into the abyss, resource depletion and social collapse will. The system we put in place to deliver prosperity is now eating the foundations that enabled it to stand in the first place. We can’t be the smartest beings in the universe. We think aliens exist—but immeasurably far across the cosmos. And if we’re wrong, and they’re actually among us, all we can say is: reveal yourselves, and please help.
UFOs, sci-fi

INDEFINITE OBJECTS

There's more than just a killer virus flying around out there.


Just in time to distract you from the unstoppable flying virus, the U.S. government has gotten people talking about something else aerial and threatening—unidentified flying objects. This happened yesterday, when the Pentagon released footage of two close encounters of the mysterious kind. The videos are from the cameras of navy fighter jets and were made during two separate encounters in 2004 and 2015. One of the pilots had discussed the 2004 incident with the New York Times in 2017, and described an oblong object forty feet long hovering over the Pacific Ocean, accelerating “like nothing I’ve ever seen.” The newly released footage corroborates his account, seemingly. The 2015 video, which is FLIR footage, or infrared imagery, shows a rapidly moving object above cloud cover but seen from the vantage point of a higher flying jet. The pilot says over his radio, “Yeah, [that’s] a fuckin’ drone, bro.” Someone responds, “There’s a whole fleet of them. Look on the ASA.” Response: “My gosh!” Followed by: “They’re all going against the wind. The wind’s 120 knots from the west.” Response: “Look at that thing, dude.”

Well, what can we say? Probably the same thing we’ve said before, which is that if alien civilizations were advanced enough to come light years from another star system we’d certainly never see them. We primitive earthlings have already figured out rudimentary stealth tech, and are seriously working on invisibility, and we presume we could see aliens that came from a distant advanced world? For that matter, why would they even need to get near us? We can read license plates from space with our primitive satellites. Why wouldn’t aliens be able to set up in undetected orbit and observe everything they needed? Of course, maybe they’re here and we can see them because they don’t care if we do, but if that were true why not take a really good look? Why not hover above Sunset Boulevard and rubberneck at all the party girls and film execs?

In our opinion, the first pilot got it right. That’s a fuckin’ drone, bro. Consider: an advanced drone could perform high-g maneuvers far beyond the capabilities of a human pilot to withstand, and if it were sent up against military jets, since they can’t fire outside a wartime setting without chain-of-command approval, you get a real world test andyour drone back. But alien hunters are creaming their undies right now, and why not? The footage is interesting. And we admit, of course, we weren’t there, and we aren’t pilots. Our drone opinion is just that. What you see here are screenshots we made, but you can view all the fun video for yourself in the document library of the Naval Air Systems Command, located here. Whether you believe in UFOs or not, watching the videos is at least a break from reading about the virus again.

Edit: the Pulp Intl. girlfriends demur. They suggest it’s possible the aliens are just playful dicks, like this fella here that got a laugh from ruining a guy’s paddle boarding experience.

New York Times, UFOs

INVASION EARTH

Maybe they're angry they weren't invited to the slumber party.

This chaotic scene of terrified earthlings in their pajamas being swarmed by UFOs is one of the cooler vintage book covers you’ll see. Behind the Flying Saucers was Frank Scully’s discussion of the origin of extraterrestrials, with a finger pointed squarely at the U.S. government for covering up evidence of their existence. He first aired his views in 1949 in his column in the publication Variety, and the next year expanded upon them in book form. The art, which was painted by Earle Bergey, is from the 1951 paperback edition.

Behind the Flying Saucers was one of the first UFO books and its influence has been enduring. Scully inspired the name of Gillian Anderson’s immortal character on The X-Files, and we’ve seen this paperback online going for as much as $150. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology you don’t have to pay that much, or anything, for that matter, because you can read the entire text online here, or download it just about anywhere.

As to whether any of what Scully wrote was true, like we’ve said before, if aliens could fly here from millions of light years away we’re pretty sure they’d have mastered the ability to go unobserved. We also think that an advanced race—after seeing how we kill each other by the millions, destroy our habitat, tolerate mass starvation, and are locked in a bizarre system of debt peonage designed to enrich an entrenched few—would not only do a screeching U-turn back to the far reaches of the cosmos, but would put up a giant intergalactic advisory sign telling travelers to steer clear of Earth at all costs. But we digress. Since the universe is too vast not to contain extraterrestrial life of some sort, maybe visitors have been here. You never know.

Popular Library, Variety, The X-Files, Frank Scully, Earle Bergey, Gillian Anderson, cover art, literature, television, UFOs

UNFRIENDLY SKIES

Nobody knows what it was, but they tried like hell to kill it.

This photo appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers this month in 1942 after West Coast anti-aircraft batteries opened up on a mysterious aerial object supposedly seen hovering in the skies above L.A. The object was sighted in the early morning of February 25 and fired upon for about two hours. The next day Army spokesmen said the barrage had been the result of a false alarm caused by war hysteria, which leaves you to wonder what sort of non-existent object could be pinned by multiple searchlights as it moved across the sky.

Another official explanation was that the object was a weather balloon, which of course raises a completely different question, namely, how did more than 2,000 exploding artillery shells fail to bring down something so flimsy? These shells caused three deaths on the ground, and they weren’t even aimed there. UFO aficionados, of course, say it was an alien craft. That’s debatable, not for any scientific reason, but based on simple logic. Consider: we puny humans have already made major advances in stealth tech, yet we think we’d be able to detect an alien craft that came from the gulfs of space to observe us? That’s called pure hubris, and we don’t subscribe.

So that leaves one other explanation. It was a deliberate Army drill involving a weather balloon, an exercise designed to test anti-aircraft capabilities, shock Los Angeles residents and thus gauge the potential for mass panic, and ram home the idea to the masses that the Japanese were lurking out there somewhere. In order to believe this scenario one has to assume the anti-aircraft gunners had the shittiest aim in the historyof hurled projectiles, however the three obvious benefits we’ve listed for conducting such a drill make this by far the most logical scenario. Of course in the end, we weren’t there, so we’re only speculating about this obscure historical event. We can be sure of only thing—there will never be a definitive answer. 

Los Angeles, World War II, Los Angeles Herald, Los Angeles Times, UFOs

RESIDENT ALIENS

The truth is in there.

Sometimes you don’t need art, only a good headline. Example: this Midnight from May 1968 that loudly accuses the White House—i.e. Lyndon B. Johnson—of hiding the truth about UFOs. What was the truth? Basically, that aliens have been among us for decades, for reasons as yet unknown but undoubtedly nefarious. Midnight was a tabloid that ran three standard types of cover images—horrifying gore, random beautiful women, and criminal misadventures—so this all-text look was a bit of a departure for them, but we think it’s quite good. It certainly grabbed our attention. We’ll have something a bit more in character from Midnight soon. 

Midnight, Lyndon B. Johnson, UFOs, tabloid

AMERICAN HISTORY X

We wanted to believe, but finally we just took matters into our own hands.

We never saw The X-Files when it was on television, so recently we began downloading and watching this historic show from the beginning. Right now we’re halfway through season four, and that cancer in Scully’s head looks like it’s going to be a real bitch. Anyway, we got to thinking how cool an I Want To Believe poster would look on Pulp Intl., but when we scoured the Internet for one we came up empty. There were plenty of posters for sale, of course—on Ebay alone there were at least a dozen sellers offering them—but most of them were wrong. Wrong UFO, wrong sky, wrong trees. So we built our own from a hi-rez screenshot and you see the result. We hear that there were several versions on the show, but the one we’ve seen through season four looks like the one above, and now it’s yours, just because you were smart enough to visit this website. If you’re a fan of the show, feel free to add the image to your blog, and—because we’re way too purist to ruin our pretty work with a Pulp watermark or some other ridiculousness—don’t forget to tell everyone where you got it. 

The X-Files, UFOs, television

VISITATION LIGHTS

Declassified UFO dox show no evidence aliens have visited Earth, despite many sightings by public.

The British National Archives today released a stack of Ministry of Defence documents detailing more than 800 UFO sightings in Britain between 1993 and 1996, including one incident in which floating lights were seen by 70 police and military witnesses. We said it before: technologically advanced aliens would be undetectable. If any have visited our planet, we wouldn’t know about it. Our primitive human-made satellites can read license plates from space, so we tend to think aliens would have devices so sensitive they wouldn’t need to come anywhere near Earth to observe us. Moreover, even if they physically visited the planet for purposes of, say, abducting and anally probing us real hard, we wouldn’t necessarily recognize an alien craft as such. But one thing we do have a clue about is the aliens’ intent. If they exist, they’re hostile. We know because if they were benevolent they’d abduct Rush Limbaugh. Doubtless his sheer bulk poses technological challenges in terms of levitating him to the mothership, but we’d be willing to push from this end if it helped.

Britain, Rush Limbaugh, UFOs

STATING THE OVNIOUS

Aliens are unimaginably advanced but haven’t figured out stealth technology.

Personally, we think if aliens were able to traverse the immense gulfs of space to visit Earth, by definition they’d be technologically advanced enough to prevent us from seeing them. But UFO believers are legion, and UFO websites continue to grow in popularity, particularly in France, where unidentified flying objects are known as Objets Volant Non-Identifié, or OVNIs.

The images here are from the French website forum-ovni-ufologie.com. From top to bottom they were shot—or perhaps faked, depending on your beliefs—in Catalina, U.S.A. July 9, 1947, Bulawayo, Rhodesia 1953, Barra-da-Tijuca, Brazil 1952, Liege, Belgium 1990, Phoenix, U.S.A. 1997, Lac Chauvet, Puy de Dôme, France 1952, and above Lago di Cota, Costa Rica 1971.

France, Belgium, Brazil, Costa Rica, Rhodesia, Santa Catalina, Liege, Phoenix, UFOs

NON ESCAPE CLAUS

And to think, I had you people on my nice list.

Above: Santa Claus may seem as though he’s being robbed or approached by police, but this odd shot is a still frame from a Universal Newsreel, circa 1957, and shows him arriving at a department store in a flying saucer. We guess it indicates how obsessed people were with UFOs back then. Or maybe it’s a little joke about upgrading from a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Either way, it’s a weird image.

Universal Newsreel, Santa Claus, UFOs
Femme Fatale Image

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1918—Wilson Goes to Europe

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sails to Europe for the World War I peace talks in Versailles, France, becoming the first U.S. president to travel to Europe while in office.

1921—Arbuckle Manslaughter Trial Ends

In the U.S., a manslaughter trial against actor/director Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle ends with the jury deadlocked as to whether he had killed aspiring actress Virginia Rappe during rape and sodomy. Arbuckle was finally cleared of all wrongdoing after two more trials, but the scandal ruined his career and personal life.

1964—Mass Student Arrests in U.S.

In California, Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest at the UC Regents’ decision to forbid protests on university property.

1968—U.S. Unemployment Hits Low

Unemployment figures are released revealing that the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 3.3 percent, the lowest rate for almost fifteen years. Going forward all the way to the current day, the figure never reaches this low level again.

1954—Joseph McCarthy Disciplined by Senate

In the United States, after standing idly by during years of communist witch hunts in Hollywood and beyond, the U.S. Senate votes 65 to 22 to condemn Joseph McCarthy for conduct bringing the Senate into dishonor and disrepute. The vote ruined McCarthy’s career.

1955—Rosa Parks Sparks Bus Boycott

In the U.S., in Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott resulted in a crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city’s African-American population were the bulk of the system’s ridership.

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WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT

Cover art by the great Sandro Symeoni for Peter Cheyney's mystery He Walked in her Sleep, from Ace Books in 1949.

PARIS BLEUS

The mysterious artist who signed his or her work as F. Harf produced this beautiful cover in 1956 for the French publisher S.E.P.I.A.

RAISE EM UP

Aslan art was borrowed for many covers by Dutch publisher Uitgeverij A.B.C. for its Collection Vamp. The piece used on Mike Splane's Nachtkatje is a good example.

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