Excerpt #12 from the long-awaited book that Chuck Blore has almost finished writing ...

www.chuckblore.com

OKAY, OKAY, I WROTE THE BOOK

When I think about my time at KELP the first thing that comes to mind ... not counting the station being located on the city dump which was hard to ignore ... the first thing is flying saucers and the three U S Air Force non-coms who not only saw them but suffered severe sunburn-like injuries inflicted by whoever, or whatever, it was in those unidentified flying objects.

As I mentioned before, as a result of the story told to us by the three airmen, we were broadcasting an hourly invitation for the aliens to use our frequency to communicate with “Your friends on the Planet Earth.” Well, apparently those creatures had nothing to say to us. Either that or they didn’t consider us their friends.

The invitation we produced ended with sixty seconds of static which, to my mind at least, represented the band-waves we were making available to the intruders. It was probably the most ardently listened to sixty seconds of static in the history of El Paso radio. We had broadcast it three or four times, when suddenly, right in the middle of the static we heard a series of little beep tones. The beeps had a definite pattern which was repeated several times. When we first heard it everyone in the station freaked. I damned near had a heart attack. My God, they’re communicating with us! What the heck do we do now?

I had our News Director, Ted Payne, get in touch with the Air Force base to explain the beeps and ask how we should handle it. Ted could be very assertive and forceful and even though he was initially told they had “No comment” he continued to insist he be put through to someone who could explain to the concerned citizens of El Paso just what the hell was going on. He eventually got through to the officer in charge(?) The Air Force rep said they had heard the broadcast and they were following up. We were essentially told they would handle it and we should butt out! Being a good news director, Ted invoked all the power of our little radio station, using the old “The people have a right to know if they are in danger” ploy. He was told the moment they know anything of any consequence we would be informed. Of course, even with that little bit of non-information we broke into our regular programming (BULLETIN. BULLETIN. BULLETIN.) to relay the Air Force promise to the concerned citizens eagerly listening to hear anything more. Ted had this very powerful voice and delivery and pledged to the people of El Paso that the full power of the entire KELP News Department (Actually Ted was the entire news department.) would be devoted to getting to the bottom of the UFO sightings, the mystery of the sunburned airmen and those frightening little beeps. We milked it for as long as we could but we never heard from the never heard from the Air Force again.

We did hear from a fellow in Austin, Texas, who had a ton of stuff told to show and tell. He informed us he was a commander in The Interplanetary Space Patrol. Commander Jefferies. He insisted that he had seen the saucers and their inhabitants up close, he had been on board the spaceships, had many meetings with the space creatures, he had examples of Martian money and Martian food and ... he had PHOTOGRAPHS of both the aliens and the vehicles.

“Herb,” I said to Mr. Golombeck, GM of both the radio and the TV station, “We have to get this guy on the air.”

“He’s a nut!” Herb was quick to grab the essence of what he was hearing.

“Yeah, but so what?” said me, the young PD. “This is hot! And it keeps getting better!”

“Putting him on the air gives him credentials.” Herb was obviously not buying into the promotional possibilities.

“The whole town is going wild about this stuff.” I argued. As I recall, I was jumping up and down.

“You don’t believe that.” said Herb, “The guy’s obviously a phoney and we are not going to use our air to promote his BS!”

“The guy has pictures!”

“Have you seen the pictures?”

“Yeah. He sent a whole package of stuff.”

I handed the pictures to Herb. He looked at them for a long time. “I think we owe it to our audience to put these pictures on TV. Let’s do a show with the guy and let people see these pictures. They are really something.”

“Yeah. I know.”

So, I called the Commander and made arrangements for him to come into town on the following Friday. We scheduled the show for Friday night which means I had only four days to produce and promote the show but with something as topical as this you want to get it on while this avid fascination is peaking. The radio promo for the TV show was a weird collection of space sounds behind what was a very close recreation of the conversation I had just had in Herb’s office. The TV show was something else.

I talked on the phone with Commander Jefferies of The International Space Patrol a couple of times about what we were going to do on the show. He seemed like a very reasonable guy who truly believed everything he was saying in spite of it all sounding like dialogue from a bad old black and white space-monster flick. The TV show was to be a half hour long and I figured we could probably stretch the showing of the pictures, the money, the food, and the “Authentic Martian military garb” which Commander Jefferies promised to be wearing, to about twenty fascinating minutes. Using every terrible black and white space movie we had in the TV station library we produced ten minutes of intro material. We must have had at least a half dozen of these Monogram Studios and Republic Pictures space gems from ancient movie packages to go through and I swear they were all the same. Some exact scenes from one priceless pic called, The Martians from Outer Space, I swear that was the title, were used in at least two other pictures. I got Ted Quillan, one of the Kelp jox who later would move with me to KFWB, to host the show. This was one of those things that if you believed any of what we were saying it was pretty good. If you didn’t believe, it was pretty bad, but almost purposely bad so that it was an early edition of what would one day be called, camp.

The show itself went pretty well. Commander Jeffries’ authentic Martian military uniform looked as though it had been made from some strange dark brown leaf-like material. It didn’t look bad but it was very strange and that somehow gave credence to some of his weird claims. He showed us the Martian money which looked like transparent pale blue rocks of different sizes and shapes. The Martian food looked very much like it was made from the same stuff as the uniform the commander was wearing. No one at the station wanted to taste it even though the Commander swore it would reverse the aging process. He then offered to sell it to our viewers for only $4.99 a box.. Quillan was quick to tell the audience that the station knew nothing about this “food” and could not verify its quality. Ted advised people not to buy it and added that the station would not stand behind what the Commander was saying about it. The Commander then pointed to a small pin he was wearing and told damn near everyone in the world ... at least the part of it which is occupied by El Paso ... the pin represented membership in the Interplanetary Space Patrol. When you see someone wearing this pin they are protected from any space aliens who are living here on Earth. The Commander then launched into a strong sales pitch about the pin and membership in the Space Patrol for only $49.00. Quillan tried his best to bring him back to the pictures of the aliens and the space craft but the Commander continued his pitch ... “Send your $49.00 to The Interplanetary Space Patrol in Austin Texas and you’ll be protected from and by the Martians among us.

I shouted into Quillan’s earphones “Shut him up. Disclaim everything he says and get him the f— off the air!!!!”

The program ended about five minutes early and we filled it with more of the crappy footage from those old black and white movies. It was the only thing we had handy but unfortunately it seemed like we were somehow endorsing the Space Patrol pitch.

The Commander was outraged at having been cut off and he stormed out of the station shouting about how he was going to tell the Martians to block our station from ever transmitting again.

In my office the phone had been ringing since the Commanders pitching began. I finally answered it, it was the sweet, mild mannered station manager, Herb Golombeck. “You’re fired!” He shouted, “You’re fired! You’re fired!

By the next morning Herb realized what had happened was nobody’s fault but the Commanders. I got my job back just in time to start helping to return the hundreds of letters filled with checks for $49.00, requesting an Interplanetary Space pin. And I’ve always wondered, if we got this many letters, how many were sent to the address the Commander had actually put on the air.

So if you see someone wearing a pin that looks a little bit like the Niki Swoop ...

(...to be continued)