The Venusians, this space traveler warned his audiences, were already infiltrating the earth and he intimated that they were ready to move in case we didn’t cease atomic testing.

His next two trips to Venus were purely social.

The highlight of his lecture, when he awes his audience, is when he whips out his proof:  (1) a blood smear on a slide—­genuine Venusian blood, (2) an affidavit from his landlady stating he wasn’t home on three occasions, and (3) a photo of a Venusian walking in Los Angeles’ McArthur Park.  The mere fact that the Venusian looks like any Joe Doakes walking down the street is a picayunish point.  Venusians look just like us.

And it hasn’t stopped.  During the big UFO flap of 1957 a man stumbled onto a landed saucer and chatted awhile with its occupants.  A few months later, soon after the atomic powered U.S.S. Nautilus made its historic trip under the polar ice cap, this same man snorted in disgust.  He packed his suitcase and started on a lecture tour.  Months before he’d been there in a flying saucer.

Once again people shelled out hard cash to hear his story.

Wherever you are, Mr. P. T. Barnum, you are undoubtedly grinning from ear to ear.

But there is a sober side to this apparently comical picture.  The common undertone to many of these stories “hot from the lips of a spaceman” is Utopia.  On these other worlds there is no illness, they’ve learned how to cure all diseases.  There are no wars, they’ve learned how to live peaceably.  There is no poverty, everyone has everything he wants.  There is no old age, they’ve learned the secret of eternal life.

Too many times this subtle pitch can be boiled down to, “Step right up folks and put a donation in the pot.  I’m just on the verge of learning the spaceman’s secrets and with a little money to carry out my work I’ll give you the secret.”

I’ve seen a man, crippled by arthritis, hobbling out into the desert in hopes that his “friend who talks to the Martians” could get them to cure him on their next trip.  I’ve seen pensioners, who needed every buck they had, shell out money to “help buy radio equipment” to contact some planet to find out how they’d solved their economic problems.  I saw a little old lady in a many times mended dress put down a ten dollar bill to help promote a “peace campaign” backed by the Venusians.  She’d lost two sons in the war but had four grandsons she wanted to keep alive.  A couple died and left $15,000 to a man to build a “longevity machine” so others could live.  The Martians had given him the plans.

A woman died of thirst and exposure in the Mojave Desert trying to reach the spot where a man told her he was going to “make a contact.”

Some of it isn’t comical.