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Menger, Howard (1922– )
Howard Menger (pronounced men-jer), a
New Jersey sign painter who was sometimes
called the East Coast equivalent of George
Adamski, rose to prominence in flying-saucer
contactee circles in the 1950s. In his first public
appearance, on Long John Nebel’s radio
show on New York’s WOR, on October 29,
1956, Menger claimed lifelong contacts as
well as “flashback” memories of an earlier life
as an extraterrestrial. The space people were
mostly from Venus, and prominent among
them were beautiful, blond women. In early
1956, when the contacts intensified, Menger
began taking photographs of alleged spacecraft.
He also claimed interplanetary flights in
the company of “Aryan-type” beings and produced,
among others, pictures of the lunar
surface taken from a flying saucer.
Conservative ufologists scoffed at Menger’s
tales and rejected his photographs as absurdly
unconvincing. Writing in Saucer News, Lonzo
Dove deemed them “so evidently faked that it
is almost foolish to even criticize them”
(Dove, 1959). When the anticontactee National
Investigations Committee on Aerial
Phenomena challenged Menger and other
contactees to submit to polygraph examinations,
Menger declined.
His supporters flocked to his High Bridge,
New Jersey, farm, where some reported seeing,
from a distance, “spacemen” in luminous uniforms
and other oddities, attributed by skeptics
to effects engineered by Menger confeder-
Howard Menger with a “free energy” machine (Fortean
Picture Library)
ates. One supporter apparently was Connie
Weber, an attractive young blond woman to
whom Menger, a married man, had turned his
romantic attentions. Menger declared Weber
to be the sister of a spacewoman he had met
in 1946. For her part, Weber “recalled” that in
previous lives she had been a Venusian and
Menger had been a Saturnian (a relationship
she documented in a lurid 1958 book, My
Saturnian Lover). On one occasion, four followers
of Menger’s were invited separately
into a dark room, where each had a brief audience
with a spacewoman concealed in shadow.
When a sliver of light accidentally caught the
supposed spacewoman, however, one of them
recognized Weber. Subsequently, Menger left
his wife and married Weber.
By the time his book From Outer Space to
You appeared in 1959, Menger had largely
withdrawn from the saucer scene. The next
year, interviewed on Long John Nebel’s television
show, Menger startled his host and audience
by seeming to disavow his former claims.
In the 1960s, he changed his story, now as-