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Saturnian Lover. Her Saturnian was Howard, for, you see, the space people informed him that he was originally from the planet Saturn. In the early 1960s, Long John Nebel landed a television show, and it was natural that he should invite Howard Menger to be one of his first guests. Menger was certain to be controversial, articulate and enthralling. Or so producer Parris Flammonde thought. On the night of the show, according to Mr. Flammonde, an unusually quiet and nervous Howard Menger walked into the studio. ‘I knew that his natural manner could be boyish, even shy,” Flammonde commented later, ‘‘but on this particular occasion he just seemed vague.” Long John sensed this, too, and broke his usual rule of never speaking to a guest before going on the air (‘‘Let’s not do the show now,” Long John will admonish. ‘‘Let’s wait until we’re on the air.’’). He said a few kidding words to his old friend, and then the red lights blinked on, and millions of viewers around the Northeast settled back to hear Howard Menger tell about his experiences with the friendly “‘brothers from outer space.” Instead, Flammonde recalls, “‘Vaguely, aimlessly, rather embarrass- ingly, he avoided and vacillated.... Howard Menger, Saturnian husband to a Venusian traveler in space, friend of extraterrestrials, annotator of ‘authentic music from another planet,’ master of teleportation, and saucerological sage extraordinaire—recanted! Denied almost every- thing.... His saucers might have been psychic, his space people visions, his and Marla’s other planethood, metaphoric. ““As a matter of fact, so did he retreat from his tales of the unreal, the reality of the immediate surroundings seemed to fade momentarily.... If he had exuded a sort of translucent indefiniteness when he arrived, he was close to invisible when he left.... To this day, the transition of the myth and personality of Howard Menger remains one of the most captivating enigmas of contactology.” Later, in letters to Gray Barker and Saucer News editor Jim Moseley, Menger termed his book ‘“‘fiction-fact”’ and implied that the Pentagon had given him the films and asked him to participate in an experiment to test the public’s reaction to extraterrestrial contact. He has helped us, therefore, to dismiss his entire story as not only a hoax, but a hoax perpetrated by the U.S. government! Moseley staged a circuslike Congress of Scientific Ufologists in New York in 1967 and flew Howard and Marla up from their current home in Florida. Howard, Jim reasoned, would be a strong drawing card for the far-out fringe. I met Menger briefly backstage the day he spoke to some 184 / Operation Trojan Horse