Howard Menger's High Bridge contacts (1932 and 1956 to 1959)

Howard Menger was born in Brooklyn on 17 February 1922. His family moved to High Bridge, in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, when he was eight. He became a sign painter and served in the Army with the 17th Tank Battalion. He also said that people from space had been meeting him since he was a boy.

Around 1932. Menger was ten. In a quiet wooded area near his home he met a woman about as tall as his mother. She had long golden hair and golden-coloured eyes. Her clothing was translucent and seamless, like nylon ski wear. "I have come a long way to see you, Howard… and to talk with you," she said. She answered his questions before he could ask them. Her people, she said, had been watching him for a very long time. She warned of future wars and destructions. Then she promised to return.

She did, he said. In June 1946 she told him he would form groups and teach people. Through his Army years, male space beings met him at postings in Mexico, California, Hawaii and Okinawa. On Okinawa he was taught pacifist philosophy and "universal law."

In 1956 the visitors came back to High Bridge. That spring Menger saw a huge fireball turn into a bell-shaped saucer about 40 feet across. On the ground it reflected the sun like a mirror. Two men stepped out. Later, a girl.

August 2, 1956. About 12:45 a.m. A bluish-white object approached from the west, descended near him and hovered about two feet above the ground. It had portholes around its upper section and three ball-like structures underneath. An opening formed in its lower part. Then came a tall man with long blond hair, broad shoulders and a slim waist, in a ski-type uniform that covered everything but his head and hands. Menger raised his Polaroid and photographed him in silhouette against the glowing craft, from about 50 feet.

There was a space woman too. She touched a device on her belt and disappeared. Menger said the craft took him to the Moon. On the first trip it did not land. In September it entered a translucent dome about 150 feet across, lit from inside by coloured lights.

October 30, 1956. Menger went on Long John Nebel's WOR radio show beside George Van Tassel. On November 1 he appeared on The Steve Allen Show. He spoke at Van Tassel's Giant Rock convention in May 1957. In 1958 he married Connie Weber, who wrote My Saturnian Lover as "Marla Baxter," and he released an LP, Authentic Music from Another Planet, with piano pieces he said a Saturnian musician had taught him. In 1959 Gray Barker's Saucerian Books published From Outer Space to You.

The saucer world was divided. Leonard Randolph found close parallels with the story of George Adamski, down to aliens in "ski trousers and turtleneck sweaters." Critics called the photographs a hoax and said Menger lied about not having read Adamski's books. His Polaroids had no negatives. Radiation interfered with film, he said.

July 17, 1960. On Nebel's TV show Menger said he "may have been hoaxed or hypnotized during the events described in his book, and was not at all certain that his experiences had been real." Later he suggested government agents were behind an elaborate hoax. Later still he stood by the story again, saying the beings only had bases on Venus and were not native to it. Jerome Clark offered his own reading: "Perhaps Adamski and Menger created fantasy worlds for their followers and at some point entered those worlds themselves."

Menger died on 25 February 2009. No government investigation of his claims has surfaced. Yet his tall, blond, ski-suited visitors remain a founding example of the "Nordic" alien of the 1950s contactee movement. His farm also turned up in another story. Frank Stranges said his photos of Valiant Thor were taken at an informal UFO gathering there. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid notes that the Thor story did not exist until 1967.