re: Pictures from days gone by....

1949 Fabric Advertisement

Photographs taken at the 4th Annual Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention, at the Giant Rock Airport near Landers, California (May, 1957). 1,200 "earthlings" gathered in the Mojave Desert to share stories of alien encounters, attend lectures, and watch the skies for extraterrestrial spacecrafts.

Irving Lerner, who directed the B-movie masterpiee (and Scorcese fave) Murder by Contract (1958)











Today I learned:

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Alleged Soviet espionage

Irving Lerner was an American citizen and an employee of the United States Office of War Information during World War II, and he worked in the Motion Picture Division. Lerner allegedly was involved in espionage on behalf of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU); Arthur Adams, a trained engineer and experienced spy who escaped to the Soviet Union in 1946, was Lerner's key contact.

In the winter of 1944, a counterintelligence officer caught Lerner attempting to photograph the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory; Lerner was acting without authorization. The model for the cyclotron was used for the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for uranium enrichment; and, research work at Stanford using the cyclotron led to the Manhattan Project at Hanford, Washington, dedicated to producing plutonium for the bomb dropped in Nagasaki. Lerner resigned and went to work with Joseph Strick for Keynote Records, owned by Eric Bernay, another Soviet intelligence contact. Arthur Adams, who ran Irving as an agent, also worked at Keynote.

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4th Annual Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention

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Ah, the good ol' days before the nut jobs started Cosplay...

Fascinating stuff. I've had a number of Keynote 78rpm jazz records over the years, and would have never imagined the label was either a commie front or a hotbed of spies. Less of a stretch, regarding "Murder by Contract," which always seemed to have a touch of underlying subversiveness about its narrative. Although, it's been about thirty years since I last saw the film. I mostly remember the film's music score including a Perry Bodkin riff that later was used in the "Beverly Hillbillies."

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Hback

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This is fake

If it's fake, it's been fake for many years, because I saw this same photo years ago. I think I'll put the movie on my watch list and see for myself.

Edit:

It's not fake. Go to about 2:30 in this clip.

youtube

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this is from the Twilight Zone episode "You Drive"