“Space! The Final Frontier” sums up the cinematic sentiments of the 1960s, but several years before that a bunch of kids in Brainerd pulled off the Great UFO Hoax.
It all started with the 1956 film Forbidden Planet with my fascination with the many-sphered Robby the Robot. It was so captivating to my ten-year-old imagination that a dream was born. H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds adaptation was released as a movie in 1953 and, I think, had been on TV several times, tucked away in everyone’s consciousness from then on.
Could all the neighborhood be made to think that aliens had arrived on the planet and were invading the area around Wiley Avenue? Forgotten in time is the wild imagination and daring that this idea birthed.
Planning took some time, but one night in the summer of 1962 spaceships, aliens, a robot, and a single AM radio station captured the angst and the dreams of families throughout Brainerd and East Ridge.
It wasn’t all that hard. I was ten years old. The key players had code names: X, Y, Z and K, Doug, Denny, Jeff and “The Grifter”.
There was a growing fear brought in by the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The West was fearful of a nuclear Pearl Harbor. The Soviets had launched Sputnik in 1957. This was at the tail end of the McCarthy era. President Eisenhower was forced to pass new initiatives that increased spending and launched the space race. Test families would soon move into fallout shelters.
The first thing we did was to sneak out of the house. We weren’t fearful of Russians, but of Dad!
The next thing we did was to gather in a field behind our house on Wiley Avenue and launch UFOs. These were simple contraptions made of plastic bags from the dry cleaners, plastic straws, cellophane tape, and birthday candles. If you set them up just right with the top sealed, you could light the candles at the bottom set up on a crisscross framework of plastic straws and the rising heat would lift these fragile diminutive hot air balloons into the sky, floating with the night breeze as soft glowing lights moving low across the horizon.
Then it was a simple matter to call Tommy Jett on the Night Train on the 50,000-watt WFLI to inform him that “something was in the sky in Brainerd, and it looked like aliens”. This was grist for the mill and was soon heard in the midst of Beatles’ mania on the radios of thousands of young people. Momentum was building.
What followed was/is hard to believe.
We took flashlights in the dark and paraded with the small lights intentionally bobbing up and down though out a nine-block area. To top it off, we had captured hundreds if not thousands of lightning bugs and put them in cowboy hats atop our heads. As we walked and lights came on up and down the streets, we took our hats off and clouds of swirling blinking bug-lights created a cloud-like fluorescent whirlwind. The effect was of something, who knew what, of an uninvited interloper, perhaps threatening our very existence.
We would soon skedaddle back across roofs and through open windows to bed pulling covers over our camouflaged bodies. Hoping that Dad was late to the party.
But the last thing we did was, I must say, bold.
We had created an amateur copy of Robby The Robot in a garage and one older Juvenile Delinquent put on the suit and walked up Wiley Avenue. To make sure he was seen ( and don’t try this at home) we attached sparklers to several dog's tails and set them off. They ran barking – none were hurt – and howling through every front and back yard, enough to wake, not the dead, but Dads, some with World War II weaponry. If they were lucky, they saw the shape of a robot disappearing in the distance.
Police were called. Fire engines were called. Veterinarians were called. Tommy Jett was called. (Even Luther talked of it the next morning.)
It all worked as planned. Young boys were questioned, but X, Y, S and K were never unmasked. (K the Grifter will remain anonymous. He is still on the run after defrauding gullible citizens in a battery powered car swindle.)
Soon the McReynolds’s family moved into a fallout shelter on Cameron Hill. We began to hide under our desks during drills at O.L.P.H. We helped boost public opinion for the space race and the trips to the moon were envisioned. (All the parents are now passed on to their reward. I can safely tell this story without pitfalls.) This was also the beginning of “Fake Media.”
Not a bad night for a bunch of 10-year-olds in 1962 in Brainerd.
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Doug Daugherty can be reached at dedsr1952@gmail.com