50 YEARS OF ALIEN ABDUCTIONS

David Jefferis on close encounters:

On the night of September 19-20, 1961, the US couple Betty and Barney Hill reckoned they experienced a close encounter with a UFO. During the incident they ‘lost’ two hours, but survived intact, to file a report to US Air Force investigators the very next day. They claimed to have seen a silent, cigar-shaped craft, crewed by up to 11 humanoid aliens.

The Hill Incident

There was no hard proof for their story, but the Hills insisted it was true, and that they had been kidnapped for a short time by the UFO. The event became the first widely-publicized claim of an alien abduction, and was later published as the best-selling 1966 book The Interrupted Journey and the 1975 TV movie The UFO Incident.

Well, the Hill Incident took place half a century ago, and assorted UFO stories have rarely been out of the media since, or indeed, from toy and model company brochures. So what’s available right now?

Atlantis UFO invader from outer space

This 1:48 scale model is a retro-delight, and should be in the collection of any sci-fi fan. Neatly moulded, with a 159 mm (6.25 in) circular fuselage, the UFO is equipped with a pair of propulsors and a clear central canopy, inside which an alien pilot sits. 

The ET pilot is moulded in luminous plastic, so if you want a glow-in-the-dark creature, you have it. If not, then paint his skin green (or any shade you fancy) for a more realistic effect.

Area 51 UFO from Pegasus

Pegasus Hobbies produces the nifty UFO above to 1:72 scale. It's based on a design described in various accounts and sightings in and around the notorious ‘Area 51’ military base in Nevada. The Pegasus Area 51 UFO is 210 mm (8.25 in) in diameter, and comes complete with landing gear and open hatch panels, plus a set of closed hatches if you want to complete it as an in-flight machine. Clear diffused green lenses are supplied, which would make internal LED lighting an attractive option.

Busch picture shows a cute mottled auto-camouflaging UFO, plus assorted occupants.

Busch diorama

This German company supplies hundreds of model rail accessories, but the Busch UFO diorama makes a change from the more run-of-the-mill offerings. The nominally 1:87 scale UFO Flying Saucer kit features assorted lights and flashing effects, plus a quartet of ETs (‘extraterrestrians’ in Busch-speak) and one robot. The kit can be assembled in two modes - standing on extended landing gear, or taking off on what Busch calls an ‘energetic beam’, actually a slim plastic rod. 

Parts layout for the Busch UFO.

Supplied lighting components

The kit comes with a set of coloured LED bulbs and pre-assembled electronic controls. Excellent stuff, and all complete except for the required 14-16 volt power unit, which you need to supply yourself. When assembled, the Busch UFO is 152 mm (6 in) across, and measures some 76 mm (3 in) high when settled on its landing legs. While it is notionally to 1:87 scale, you can change that at will, depending how you feel. Ah... the freedom that pure fiction delivers!

Read about Betty and Barney Hill here.

Visit Busch here.

Visit the Atlantis Model Company here.

Visit Pegasus Hobbies here.

ELVIS LIVES! TAMIYA POSTER CAMPAIGN RECKONS SO, ANYWAY

SMN report:

We mostly associate Tamiya with top-line traditional plastic kits - and quite rightly, for they are superb products, as we recently showed with the newly-released 1:32 scale P-51D Mustang. But Tamiya doesn’t stand still, and the company recently paid the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Vietnam to create an ad campaign based around the catchline, ‘Tamiya Put It Together’. 

Print ad series

Ogilvy & Mather’s solution to the brief was a series of print ads featuring fictional kits based on popular and continuing conspiracy themes - Elvis Presley lives, Roswell UFO aliens, Moon Landing hoax, Who killed JFK, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. Fictional the kits may be, but O&M put much hard work into the visuals, which look really convincing until you look hard, and notice a few pointers to the truth - for example, the Lunar Rover sports a 1950s-era auto steering wheel, a cute in-joke we reckon, as the originals had side-stick controllers.

Request to Tamiya

However, and this is a big request Tamiya - why don’t you make these for real? The subject matter is endlessly fascinating, and the subjects are all begging to be turned from advertising campaign to plastic in a box. Any Elvis fan would love to add him to their collection, as would movie-buffs for Marilyn, space nuts for Apollo, UFO believers for Roswell, and politicos for a JFK set. A shelf-top diorama featuring a 1:24 or 1:12 scale figure, surrounded by relevant memorabilia would look terrific.

So come on Tamiya, please let’s have them soon!

While we’re at it, note the business card created by the team at Tamiya Siam - a card-sized runner, with detachable letters. Great idea!

STEALTHY STARS AND STRIPES - ITALERI’S COLOURFUL F-117A

By Mat Irvine
It’s 26 years today since the Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk went into service with US forces, though it was another five years before the ‘stealth fighter’ was revealed to the public.

At first the F-117A seemed rather like a Model T Ford - you could have it in any colour as long as it was black. Since then however, the aircraft has been painted in various shades, including this colourful version with stars and stripes adorning the underside.

The kit comes from Italeri, last major bastion of the Italian model kit industry, (though it has acquired one of the others, Protar), and is a version of Italeri’s existing 1:72 scale kit. Two schemes are provided - both have the flag, but one has black upper surfaces, the other features low-visibility grey. The stars of the flag are provided as one decal for the nose area; for the stripes you need to paint white first, then apply seven red decal strips when the paint has dried. Otherwise, Italeri’s model assembles easily, with no real difficulties.

I made the diorama above to show the F-117A flying near the vast Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, which houses many secret US aircraft projects. Whether any are based on ‘alien technology’ is a question I’ll leave for now, but all the ‘black’ (secret) projects have likely been tested here, from the U-2 spyplane to the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117A - and probably others still to be revealed.

One place near Nellis, (and I’m talking ‘relatively’ near, as you cannot approach the base closely) is the small town of Rachel, Nevada. Outside Rachel, you will find the ‘white mail box’, infamously thought to be linked to secret UFO goings-on, and my diorama shows this, plus a jeep and its driver, waving to the pilot.

Back to the kit, and one small point: the back of Italeri’s box lists one aircraft as coming from ‘Groom Lake, New Mexico’. In fact, the lake is within Nellis Air Force Base, so it should be Nevada. ‘Groom Lake’ is one of the shorthand names often applied to the whole place – along with ‘Dreamland’ and of course, ‘Area 51’...

The Italeri F-117 is available from stores and online suppliers, including Amazon here.

UFO INVASION GROUP HEADING TO PLANET EARTH?

Now that summer’s nearly here, the UFO spotting season is well underway. And with news that massed groups of mystery lights were spotted over England and Europe this week, perhaps it’s time to wonder again at what goes on at Area 51, in Nevada.

Pegasus Hobbies' nice 1:72 kit envisages one possible answer - maybe the recent UFOs were squadrons of circular flying craft that were built here on terra firma, purportedly reverse-engineered from a mystery UFO that crashed many years ago. One mechanical engineer even claimed to have work on a ‘flying disc simulator’, communicating with an alien being called J-Rod.

Ah well, here at SMN Towers, we’ll just have to stick with the Pegasus kit here.

The London Daily Mail has a good feature on these recent events here.

Book review: Scale Spacecraft Modelling

This chunky paperback provides you with 208 colour pages, packed with useful information. It's the second Mat Irvine model book I've reviewed recently, and it maintains the fascination factor, this time for space modellers.

Mat provides a comment or a picture on just about everything to do with the subject, from the early days of spaceflight up to the present, and (most interesting for me) space-dreams and science-fiction sections, which cover all sorts of subjects from a Doctor Who Dalek to an Area 51 Roswell UFO.

Highly recommended for handy hints and ideas. Published by Crowood at £16.99 GBP or $29.95 USD, and the Amazon store may well offer a deal price on this.