the pointless weblog

The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind Space and Time was a magazine series from 1980, published by Orbis. It was one of those things where they take a book, cut it up into 12 smaller pieces, and make you collect it each month and put it in a binder until it was complete. This probably cost twice as much as the book would have done in the first place.

This is the only copy of The Unexplained I have, annoyingly. Although, as this contains aliens, spaceships and the Loch Ness monster, I’m not really sure what else they could have had in the previous 11 issues. Crop circles I suppose, and maybe the Crabbus Man.

The best article in it is the one about close encounters with aliens, due to the illustrations.

I really want to meet an alien I think.

I found the magazine in a box full of my dad’s old physics magazines from the 70s in the loft. Inside it was a cutting from a Southend newspaper about UFOS. Although I’m not sure if he’d kept the cutting because of that or because of the beautiful lady on the other side.

I’m not sure which would be a worse and more guilty secret for a physicist - an obsession with UFOs orwith grubby Essex page 3 knock-offs. Or maybe he just really wanted a fur coat.

You can read the whole of this issue of The Unexplained below if you dare.

_____________

Image Gallery

(click on the images below to view them fullsize)

In the late 70s, Patrick Moore wrote a number of children’s science fiction stories about a young astronaut called Scott Saunders. There were six books in total, although I only have three (numbers 1, 2 and 5), unfortunately.

They aren’t very good, unfortunately. One of the best things about them is that half the characters speak exactly like Patrick Moore. The other characters are foreign and inevitably evil. The exciting denouement of The Terror Star - a story that takes in everything from super sentient alien computers to germans, space rays, and the inscrutable expressionlessness of chinese faces - involves a dastardly foreign brute deviously tricking his way to freedom from the honourable english spacemen who thought they had him in their grasp.

My favourite page in all of the books is probably Captain Armada’s appearance at the end. His cheerful face is a beautiful thing.

I also like the way on the covers the books change from An Original Armada to An Armada Original somewhere between book 2 and book 5. I wonder what terrifying event caused this. It is likely we shall never know.

_____________

Image Gallery

(click on the images below to view them fullsize)