Authentic Music From Another Planet

Our celebration of Moon Day continues with one of the oddest outsider-music artifacts I've ever come across - an entire album of music and narration from 1956 by someone claiming to be a UFO contactee. And I stumbled across it while perusing my local library.

In the 1950's, at the height of the flying saucer scare, a New Jersey sign-painter named Howard Menger not only had an abduction experience, but he claims that he later came across a remote building housing a piano with more keys then found on Earth pianos, and that he began to play music guided by alien hands.

Our resident expert in such matters, Greg "Spacebrother" Bishop, notes that "an attractive young woman named Connie Weber appeared at one of Menger’s gatherings. He thought that she was the reincarnation of a blond spacewoman that he had known (in the biblical sense) in a previous life on Venus. He soon left his first wife and family to begin a new life of lectures and touring on the Contactee circuit....Connie wrote a book entitled My Saturnian Lover about her previous interplanetary relationship with Menger." Gotta find that book!

Apparently the aliens were from The Planet Of Crappy Music, judging by the snoozy piano/accordion instrumentals found on this big 28-minute file. There's nothing spacey or futuristic about it, except for all the echo that drenches everything - music and narration. And despite his description of the alien piano, there's no microtonal sounds here. Maybe that's why the aliens came - to get better tuneage for those long interstellar road trips. The narration is priceless, however. Now I know what The Bran Flakes sampled on the first song on their "Hey Won't Somebody Come And Play?" album.

Howard Menger - "Authentic Music From Another Planet"

Sorry for the sound quality, and for the size of the file - I got this from a cd I found in the Los Angeles Central Library while looking for something else entirely. Much to my surprise, there's a whole shelf of UFO/conspiracy-related audio documentation. This track is from a collection called "Saucerology: Tales of Giant Rock (Contactees Vol. 2)," compiled by Wendy Connors as part of her Audio History of Ufology Series. She apparently used to have her own label, but the website's gone. I checked out a number of these Conners compilation disks from the Library Shelf O' Mystery, but there's little music to be found on them. Mostly just inaudible interviews and news reports.
Menger just died earlier this year.