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light-green station wagon bearing the license number WR E79. Menger had once owned such a vehicle, and with that license number. He was hauled into court to answer the charges. He had actually been nowhere near Bedminister on the night in question, and Sergeant Cramer’s testi- mony, as quoted by Menger, was most unusual. Cramer told the judge that he had pursued the station wagon to a red light at an intersection where it simply ‘‘disappeared.” Because visibility at that particular intersection was good in all directions for some distance, it’s a mystery how any car could just disappear there. It’s an even bigger mystery how that car could have been one that Menger had junked years before. “Well, what do we have around here? A phantom car!’’ the judge allegedly remarked. “‘I feel like either putting a man in jail for perjury or breaking a sergeant. This is the strangest case I have heard in all my years on the bench!’ The good judge didn’t know the half of it! One of Menger’s terrestrial contacts is supposed to have told him, “My friend, this earth is the battlefield of Armageddon, and the battle is for men’s minds and souls... there is a very powerful group on this planet, which possesses tremendous knowledge of technology, psychology, and most unfortunate of all, advanced brain therapy.... They use people not only from this planet, but people from Mars as well. And also other people of your own planet—people you don’t know about. People who live unobserved and undiscovered as yet....” The Menger book was published by Gray Barker in 1959 and enjoyed a small sale of a few thousand. The UFO hard core at the time was no more than 30,000, and if a UFO book, particularly a contactee book, sold 3,000 copies it was practically a best seller. Menger didn’t stop with the book. He issued a phonograph record which, he claimed, contained music composed by the space people—but it sounded more like Howard Menger plucking clumsily at a badly tuned piano. Then came the freakish climax, which was almost as fantastic as all ee a er that had gone on before. At one of his early broadcasts with Long John a crowd had gathered in front of the studio, and in it there was a striking blond girl named Marla. She and Menger met, and he later divorced his wife so he could marry her. Marla, Howard confided to friends, was from another planet. Marla’s real name was Constance Weber. ‘‘Marla’’ was her space name, she explained, and was the pseudonym that appeared on her book, My “You Are Endangering the Balance of the Universe!" / 183