One of the most fascinating time periods in modern history is the 1950’s. In the aftermath of the bloodiest war in history rose the threat of another potentially more lethal war. One with the power to wipe out most of life on the planet.  With the threat of atomic bombs causing school children to duck and cover under their desks and their families building bomb shelters, came an actual war against the communists in Korea and in the witch hunt for communists in American culture by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The war for equality in American life was evident in the beginnings of desecrating blacks and whites and the various lawsuits that resulted in allowing such things to happen. Which in one case, the president called in the national guard to allow this to happen.

Rock and Roll popped up on radios and jukeboxes,
Lucy, Superman and Gunsmoke popped up on our TV’s
and UFOs popped up in the movies and in our sky’s and came to earth to abduct us earthlings.

A photo of two 50’s young people and a supposed alien from another planet.

Is this on purpose?

Did Jimmy really live during this time?

Or Travel to it via Time Travel?

Or is this my own wild speculative conspiracy type theory?

Listed below for your nerdy amusement is a timeline of these events talked about on the show and how they connect to this very mysterious decade. Read it and then see if it answers these weird questions that I just asked. Added in to the all-ready produced podcasts that are mentioned in this timeline are some other potential future podcast topics that may or not be On The List. Or topics that I think should be on the list or at least be considered to be. I also just had too much fun finding things to add. I decided to split this into two parts.

Click on the red link to go to the JAMW podcast episode.

Click on the non-red link to go to some other relevant website.

Some of the descriptions unless said otherwise are taken from the Wikipedia write up of the event.

So just like Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel TV Series WandaVision stuck the inhabitants of Westview, New Jersey in a 1950’s magical simulation, I’m going to stick your imagination in a 1950’s mindset.  Just like the Randonautica phone app promises to take you on a magical, mystery journey in reality, My article will take you on a Magical mystery journey in your  imagination and hopefully inspire wonderous thought and speculation about just how I can make my premise hold up. Because with paragraphs like this I’m really stretching it.

Some of the topics listed in this time line come from this book.

Now let’s dive into the decade with these questions I will place at the back of your mind.

As I was washing dishes  one night at work, I wondered…

Jimmy Akin is often accused of being a time lord so if that is true…

I want to ask him these questions.

1. What is your cool time lord name? ex. The Doctor, The Master, River Song

2. What is Your Tardis disguised as? A phone Booth, A 1950’s Dinner?

3. What is your Time Lord Outfit?

4. Who were you in a past re-generation?

5. Who have been your companions?

It’s a little fuzzy if he is or isn’t a time lord.

And I wondered what’s the Weirdest thing to come out of the Fifties?

Ok let’s start our decade with….

1950 something

Before Roswell

An account of a UFO crash in southeast Missouri preceded the well-known Roswell, N.M., crash by almost six years. In 1991, the late Leonard Stringfield, an early UFO investigator and former civilian consultant to UFO operations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1950s, published an account of an alleged 1941 UFO crash near Cape Girardeau. Stringfield’s article appeared in the July 1991 issue of his “Status Report,” a monthly publication on UFO activities and investigations. The article was based on information received from Charlette Mann, who was a young child living in Cape Girardeau in 1941. At the time, Charlette’s grandfather, the Rev. William Huffman, was pastor of Cape’s Red Star Baptist Church.

Also in 1991 two old English guys, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, went public with the confession that they had been making crop circles throughout England since 1976, using ropes and planks and simple surveyor’s tricks. Crop Circle Jerks (skeptoid.com  Learn more about Crop Circles @  Astonishing Legends

DB Cooper

D.B. Cooper is a media epithet(actual pseudonym: Dan Cooper) used to describe an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 on November 24, 1971, extorted a US$ 200,000 ransom (equivalent to $1.26 million today and parachuted to an unknown fate.  He was never seen again, and only $5,880 of the ransom money has been found.

In the 1950s, France’s Dan Cooper comics chronicled the exploits of the titular Royal Canadian Air Force pilot. Since the skyjacker identified himself to the flight crew as Dan Cooper, it has been speculated that he borrowed his false identity from these comics…something that seems more than plausible given the similarities between both Coopers. The only problem is that the Dan Cooper stories were unknown to Americans in 1971, adding another speculative wrinkle to an already fascinating case. D.B. Cooper in Pop Culture: 15 Best Movie and TV Moments | Den of Geek Learn More about DB Cooper @ Astonishing Legends

 “Dr. Feelgood”

Dr. Max Jacobson  (July 3, 1900 – December 1, 1979) was a German physician and medical researcher who treated numerous high-profile clients in America, including President John F. Kennedy. He’s the one they call Dr. Feelgood. Jacobson came to be known as “Miracle Max” and “Dr. Feelgood,” because he administered highly addictive “vitamin shots” laced with various substances that included amphetamine and methamphetamine.

In the 1950s he treated such people as Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, music stars Maria Callas, Paul Robeson, Leonard Bernstein and Rosemary Clooney (aunt of George), actors Eddie Fisher and Ingrid Bergman and Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille.

Duga

Duga was a Soviet over-the-horizon radar (OTH) system used as part of the Soviet missile defense early-warning radar network. The system operated from July 1976 to December 1989. Two operational Duga radars were deployed, one near Chernobyl and Chernihiv in the Ukrainian SSR (present-day Ukraine), the other in eastern Siberia.

The Duga systems were extremely powerful, over 10 MW in some cases, and broadcast in the shortwave radio bands. They appeared without warning, sounding like a sharp, repetitive tapping noise at 10 Hz repetition rate,  which led to it being nicknamed by shortwave listeners the Russian Woodpecker. The Duga radar is heavily featured in the virtual reality game Proze: Enlightenment, a suspense/puzzle game with the theory that the radar is being used by mind controlling experiments during the 1950-60s. The game actually starts with the player ascending one of the pylons on a maintenance lift. Click here for the Chernobyl Podcast 

Government Acid

Petrochemicals took off in the 1950s. Coal had long been the primary source of organic chemicals, but the growing petroleum industry offered alternatives, and World War II accelerated their development. This trend was particularly evident in the United States, which finished the war with a strong, young petrochemical manufacturing base clustered on the Gulf Coast. By 1950, the industry had found its feet and, propelled by growing demand for synthetic resins and rubber, quickly spread around the world to supply the materials of modernity.

Klaus Schwab and the Great Reset

Klaus Schwab founded the The World Economic Forum (WEF), based in Cologny, Geneva Canton, Switzerland. It is an international NGO, founded on January 24, 1971. The WEF’s mission is stated as “committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas”

In May 2020, the WEF and the Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative launched “The Great Reset“ project, a five-point plan concerned with enhancing sustainable economic growth following the global recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. “The Great Reset” will be the theme of WEF’s Annual Meeting in August 2021.

The same economic system that created so much prosperity in the golden age of American capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s is now creating inequality and climate change. And the same political system that enabled our global progress and democracy after World War II now contributes to societal discord and discontent. Each was well intended but had unintended negative consequences. …-
A Better Economy Is Possible. But We Need to Reimagine Capitalism to Do It

For centuries, economic thinkers, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, have tried to identify the elusive formula that makes some countries more prosperous and successful than others. My curiosity about this topic spurred me, as a young professor of economics in the late 1970s, to research new ways of measuring national competitiveness.- On the Innovation of Nations (Dec. 15, 2013) New York Times

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith With 36,331 citations, it is the second most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950, behind Karl Marx‘s Das Kapital.

Jack the Ripper

Stewart Evans is the author of many books on the infamous killer ‘Jack the Ripper’.

I first became interested in ‘Jack the Ripper‘ as early as the late 1950s, when my parents took me to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, in London, where I saw, in the Chamber of Horrors, a framed original of the Metropolitan Police poster showing the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the ‘saucy Jacky’ postcard, asking if anyone recognized the handwriting.

In the movie Time After Time (1979)  British author H. G. Wells uses his time machine to pursue Jack the Ripper into the 20th century.

Learn more about Jack the Ripper @ MOST NOTORIOUS

Mark of the Beast

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, when giant telephone companies were seen as part of the shift from agricultural rural life to technological urban life, rural Christians labeled these companies “the beast.” They said the newly assigned three-digit area codes were the three digit “mark of the beast.” Is the COVID Vaccine the “mark of the beast”? — Christians and the Vaccine

Numbers Stations

According to an internal Cold War-era report of the Polish Ministry of the Interior, numbers stations DCF37 (3370 kHz) and DFD21 (4010 kHz) transmitted from West Germany beginning in the early 1950s.

Phantom Cats

In British folklore, British big cats, also referred to as ABCs (Alien, or Anomalous, Big Cats), phantom cats and mystery cats, feature in reported sightings of large Felidae in the British countryside. These creatures have been described as “panthers”, “pumas” or “black cats”. Current interest in big cat reports appears to stem from the late 1950s, with news stories of the Surrey Puma  and the Fen Tiger.  Learn More @ Dr. Polaris

Time Buried in Vatican Secret Archives

Chronovisor: The Time Machine That Captured The Crucifixion of Jesus. Imagine a time machine , that could capture, among other things, three dimensional holograms of the crucifixion and death of Jesus; a speech by Napoleon; Cicero’s first speech against Catiline; and the presentation of the Thyestes by Quintus Ennio in Rome in 169 BC, as well as many other significant historical events.  In the 1950’s Father Pellegrino Ernetti, (1925 – 1994) a Benedictine monk, distinguished musicologist, holder of the chair of Prepoliphony at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice, claimed to have created such a device, called the chronovisor. This time travel device is one of the Top 10 Things Possibly Hidden In The Vatican Secret Archives. Learn More about the Chronovisor @ ‎ Mystery Archives 

The Voynich Manuscript

According to the “letter-based  cipher” theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript “alphabet” through a cipher of some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters. This was the working hypothesis for most 20th-century deciphering attempts, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman in the early 1950s.

Wireheading

Wireheading is a term associated with fictional or futuristic applications of brain stimulation reward, the act of directly triggering the brain’s reward center by electrical stimulation of an inserted wire, for the purpose of ‘short-circuiting’ the brain’s normal reward process and artificially inducing pleasure. Scientists have successfully performed brain stimulation reward on rats (1950s) and humans (1960s).   The term is sometimes associated with science fiction writer Larry Niven, who used the term as early as the 1950s.   In Larry Niven‘s Known Space stories, a “wirehead” is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant known as a “droud” in order to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brain.

World Trade Center

The idea of establishing a World Trade Center in New York City was first proposed in 1943. The New York State Legislature passed a bill authorizing New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey to begin developing plans for the project, but the plans were put on hold in 1949.  During the late 1940s and 1950s, economic growth in New York City was concentrated in Midtown Manhattan. To help stimulate urban renewal in Lower Manhattan, David Rockefeller suggested that the Port Authority build a World Trade Center there. When the WTC was finally built it was  a large complex of seven buildings in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. It opened on April 4, 1973,

The original World Trade Center comprised the Twin Towers and were the tallest buildings in the world at the time of their completion. They were destroyed on the morning of September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda-affiliated hijackers flew two Boeing 767 jets into the complex in a coordinated act of terrorism. The attacks on the World Trade Center killed 2,753 people. The resulting collapse of the World Trade Center caused structural failure in the surrounding buildings as well. The process of cleaning up and recovery at the World Trade Center site took eight months, after which rebuilding of the site commenced. Learn More @ Blindspot: The Road to 9/11

In the  first book in the Time Tunnel series, “Time Tunnel: The Twin Towers,” re-imagines 9/11 as a critical inflection point in time, the outcome of which the government determines must be altered in order to reverse the course of the American empire.

 1950

 

Armed Forces Special Weapons Project

The Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP) began since 1947, to construct a number of underground Sites. The ten year project, spanning from 1947 to 6 May 1959, involved planning for the construction of deep underground military bases to “store nuclear weapons” after the Manhattan Project. The underground complexes are typically built into a mountain range. Global Security.org describes these complexes as being built “deep inside”. Two confirmed locations under this command was Manzano Base, NM and Killeen Base, TX.

Manzano Base, NM, referred to as “Site Able”, began its operations on  April 04, 1950, with major facilities completed by 1961. A presidential emergency relocation center was built deep inside Manzano Mountain as a command post for President Eisenhower. Global Security.org states on par 4, WMD, Manzano, that construction began in June 1947, and that the facility became operational in April 1950.

Many of our readers will remember Edward R. Murrow, the popular, cigarette-smoking news commentator of the 1940’s and 1950’s who gave the news a dramatic touch in his own distinctive style. Almost three years after the famous June 24, 1947 sighting in the Cascades of the state of Washington, Mr. Murrow engaged the pilot/witness Kenneth Arnold in a conversation about his historic experience.

Portions of that conversation are reproduced here in an exact transcript of the broadcast as it was heard nationwide on the evening of April 7, 1950. Some of you may have been listening to that broadcast. For you and for those who are somewhat younger, here it is, “the way it was.”Transcript of Ed Murrow-Kenneth Arnold Telephone Conversation

The Coming of the Saucers (2014) by Kenneth Arnold

Assumption of Mary

71 years ago, the dogma of Assumption of Mary was first promulgated by Ven. Pius XII
The Same Year St. Mother Teresa Founded the Missionaries of Charities.
The Same Year St. Maria Goretti was canonized a saint.
The Same Year Evelyn Waugh publishes Helena. This book follows the quest of Helena of Constantinople to find the relics of the cross on which Christ was crucified. Helena, a Christian, was the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine I. Much like Mary is the Mother of Christ who was crucified and who looks for her lost children.

March 1950
Paul Tillich (influential 20th Century theologian)
Do you think the pope will make a declaration about Mary’s assumption into heaven ex cathedra?

Reinhold Niebuhr (Popular American Reformed theologian)
“I don’t think so; he is too clever for that; it would be a slap in the face of the whole modern world and it would be dangerous for the Roman Church to do that today”.

November 1, 1950.
By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory. (Munificentissimus Deus, 44)

The feast day of Assumption is celebrated on August 15th 

The same day that
in 1483, Pope Sixtus IV consecrated the Sistine Chapel.
in 1549, St. Francis Xavier came ashore at Kagoshima (Traditional Japanese date: 22 July 1549).
in 1939, The Wizard of Oz premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, California.

Bennington Triangle

“Bennington Triangle” is a phrase coined by New England author Joseph A. Citro during a public radio broadcast in 1992 to denote an area of southwestern Vermont within which a number of people went missing between 1945 and 1950. The fourth person to vanish was eight-year-old Paul Jephson. On October 12, 1950. The fifth and last disappearance occurred sixteen days after Jephson had vanished.  It happen  on October 28, 1950, to  Frieda Langer, 53.  The only one whose body was found. No direct connections have been identified that tie these cases together, other than the general geographic area and time period.  Shirley Jackson  2nd novel Hangsaman (1951) is “loosely based on the real-life disappearance of a Bennington College sophomore in 1946,” referencing the case of Paula Jean Welden.

Learn more about the BT @ Episode 67: The Red Coats — Lore (lorepodcast.com)/

The Bermuda Triangle

The earliest suggestion of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle area appeared in a September 17, 1950, article published in The Miami Herald (Associated Press) by Edward Van Winkle Jones. Two years later, Fate magazine published “Sea Mystery at Our Back Door”,a short article by George Sand covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five US Navy Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bombers on a training mission. Sand’s article was the first to lay out the now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place, as well as the first to suggest a supernatural element to the Flight 19 incident. Learn More @ LEMMiN

The Triangle (2005)  a three-part US-British-German science fiction miniseries.

Boy Scouts of America

Boy Scouts of America membership rose dramatically between 1950 and 1960, from 2.8 million to 5.2 million. The 40th anniversary celebrated the theme of “Strengthen the Arm of Liberty.” As part of the theme, the BSA distributed over 200 replicas of the Statue of Liberty. The 8-foot-4-inch (2.54 m) copper statues are known as the “Little Sisters of Liberty”

Scouts to the Rescue (1939) A troop of Boy Scouts use a treasure map to find a stash of counterfeit notes and a lost tribe with a secret Radium deposit.
Follow Me, Boys! (1966)  Lem Siddons (Fred MacMurray) decides to put down roots and ends up starting a Boy Scout troop during World War II.

Commemorative BSA stamp first issued by the U.S. Postal Service on June 30, 1950

Declaration of Conscience

Declaration of Conscience as opposed to the Illumination of Conscience was a Cold War speech made by U.S. Senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith on June 1, 1950, less than four months after Senator Joe McCarthy’s “Wheeling Speech,” on February 9, 1950. Her speech was endorsed by six other liberal-to-moderate Republicans. In it, she criticized national leadership and called for the country, the United States Senate, and the Republican Party to re-examine the tactics used by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and (without naming him) Senator Joe McCarthy. Joe first came to the public spotlight with his  anti-Communism crusade with his Lincoln Day speech. On another interesting note Richard Nixonis first elected to the United States Senate.

The Devil’s Footprints

The Devil’s Footprints was a phenomenon that occurred during February 1855 around the Exe Estuary in East and South Devon, England. After a heavy snowfall, trails of hoof-like marks appeared overnight in the snow covering a total distance of some 40 to 100 miles (60 to 160 km). The footprints were so called because some religious leaders suggested that they were the tracks of Satan and made comparisons to a cloven hoof. Many theories have been made to explain the incident, and some aspects of its veracity have also been questioned.

There is little direct evidence of the phenomenon. The only known documents were found after the publication during 1950 of an article in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association asking for further information about the event. This resulted in the discovery of a collection of papers belonging to Reverend H. T. Ellacombe, the vicar of Clyst St George during the 1850s. These papers included letters addressed to the vicar from his friends, among them the Reverend G. M. Musgrove, the vicar of Withycombe Raleigh, the draft of a letter to The Illustrated London News marked ‘not for publication’ and several apparent tracings of the footprints.

There is a  legend  linked with the phenomenon of the “Devil’s Footprints”. In the early 19th century, there were reports of ghosts that stalked the streets of London. These human-like figures were described as pale; it was believed that they stalked and preyed on lone pedestrians. The stories told of these figures formed part of a distinct ghost tradition in London which, some writers have argued, formed the foundation of the later legend of Spring-heeled Jack. Spring-heeled Jack was described by people who claimed to have seen him as having a terrifying and frightful appearance, with diabolical physiognomy, clawed hands, and eyes that “resembled red balls of fire”. One report claimed that, beneath a black cloak, he wore a helmet and a tight-fitting white garment like an oilskin. Many stories also mention a “Devil-like” aspect. Others said he was tall and thin, with the appearance of a gentleman. Several reports mention that he could breathe out blue and white flames and that he wore sharp metallic claws at his fingertips. At least two people claimed that he was able to speak comprehensible English.

Learn More about The Mystery of the Devil’s Footprints @ Offbeat History: | Stuff You Missed in History Class  /and on Ep 15: of Astonishing Legends you can learn about Spring-heeled Jack.

Spring-heeled Jack (1989) by Philip Pullman
The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (2010) (The first book in the Burton & Swinburne series) by Mark Hodder

Discovery of Nephilim?

In 1950, Leg bones measuring 120 cms were found during road construction in South East Turkey. As per body ratio, the height of the owner of that leg bone must have been around 14-16 feet. Could it be the Nephilim?  15 Secrets of the Nephilim in the Bible to Know Nephilim Today on Earth – Mysterious Monsters (science-rumors.com)

Son of Angels, by  Jonah Stone. Children are born from Nephilim and are considered to be quarterlings
   1. Spirit Fighter (2012)
   2. Fire Prophet (2012)
   3. Shadow Chaser (2013)
   4. Truth Runner (2013)

The silicon-based vampiric creatures in the Tim Powers fantasy/horror novel The Stress of Her Regard (1989)are referred to as nephilim.

In episode 114 (17th episode of season 5) of The X-Files entitled All Souls, Dana Scully attempts to save three Nephilim who appear as young girls with several genetic deformations.

Dulce

Paul Bennewitz was an American businessman and UFO investigator who was convinced that he was intercepting electronic communications originating from alien spacecraft located outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Bennewitz soon believed that he had located a secret alien facility that he called Dulce Base. Their was apparently

Unethical human experimentation at Dulce involves allegations from several reports, that human adults, children, and babies have been abducted and sent to the unconfirmed Dulce Base, under MKUltra, since 1950. Unethical human experimentation at Dulce | UFO-Alien Database | Fandom

Special Investigations Richard Doty claimed that in the 1980s he was tasked with hoaxing documents and feeding false information to UFO researchers, including Bennewitz.

The question arises then arises. There is a theory that alien abductions could be demons pretending to be aliens. Because it’s always demons. This is supported by the fact that in a lot of these cases anti-religious messages are given by the aliens. Could this be possible? I have also been intrigued by the theory that gods worshiped in antiquity (specifically Mayan and Sumerian) may have been demons also. Would this fit the Catholic belief system? How would God allow this if true?

Espresso

Does CCC 2290 have anything to say about people’s addiction to coffee? We all seem to give coffee a pass even though people spend lots of money on it and develop significant physiological and psychological dependence on it. Find any humorous coffee meme and substitute the word “heroin,” and suddenly it isn’t so funny. In 1950, Coffee addiction became easier when Ernest Valente developed a new type of espresso machine that utilizes an electric motor to drive a rotating pump in order to create the high pressure for espresso extraction. This new espresso machine provides a more reliable continuous water delivery, and is first marketed under the brand of Faema.

Fall of Modern Day Jerusalem

April 24, 1950: Jordan officially annexes the West Bank and the part of Jerusalem it conquered in the 1947-1949 War. During Jordan’s nineteen-year rule of eastern Jerusalem, the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was desecrated with thousands of tombstones smashed or removed. The Jewish Quarter of the Old City was trashed by the Jordanian Army.

The Good Health of Sleep

This Encyclopedia Britannica film from 1950 explains the importance of establishing good sleep habits. While it can be quite interesting (and hilarious) to watch movies from this time period, let us not forget that the message they have for us is still true today! https://youtu.be/LjPZCCGeytw

Humani Generis

In his encyclical Humani generis, Pope Pius XII declares evolution to be a serious hypothesis, that does not contradict essential Catholic teachings.

Karl Keating

Karl Keating the founder of Catholic Answers, where Jimmy Akin works as one their top notch apologists, is born.

King Tut’s Tomb

King Tut’s Tomb (1950) with Heckle & Jeckle is released. (September 29, 1950)

The late comedian John Candy was born in 1950. He would grow up to star in such great comedies as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with comedian Steve Martin. Steve Martin would go on to star in remakes of ‘Father of the Bride’, and ‘Cheaper by the Dozen’, both originally released in 1950. The original Cheaper has a great scene where a reprehensive from Planned Parenthood comes to the house hold of Frank Bunker Gilbreth Sr. (Clifton Webb) and psychologist Lillian Moller Gilbreth (Myrna Loy) to try and get them to join her society only to be shocked by the household of twelve children. Steve Martin would grow up record this…

The Murder of Tutankhamen (2005) by Bob Brier

Lincoln’s Ghost

Some people get what they believe are glimpses of the spirit world when they see a blob, spot or circle of light visible in a photograph. In the photo below, some Paranormal experts think the translucent figure in the back right of the photo is none other then the full on ghost of good ol Abe Lincoln. The image was taken by photographer Abbie Rowe during Harry S Truman’s reconstruction of the White House in 1950. The Ghost experts think it the  “world’s most amazing ghost photograph” ever taken.

 

Magic and Religion 1950

Before Harry Potter was the big magical rage,  C. S. Lewis penned the  Chronicles of Narnia series (1950–1956) where children come and go between our world and Narnia, a land populated by talking animals where magic is done. In The Magician’s Nephew the Wood between the Worlds gives access to several worlds. In The Last Battle it transpires that all the worlds are joined together by a form of heaven.

Missing Airplanes

On January 26, 1950, the Douglas C-54 Skymaster serial number 42-72469 disappeared en route from Alaska to Montana, with 44 people aboard. The aircraft made its last radio contact two hours into its eight-hour flight. Despite one of the largest rescue efforts carried out by a joint effort between Canadian and US military forces, no trace of the aircraft has ever been found.  It is considered one of the largest groups of American military personnel to ever go missing

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (also known as MH370 or MAS370)  was a scheduled international passenger flight operated by Malaysia Airlines that disappeared on March 8, 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to its planned destination, Beijing Capital International Airport.  With all 227 passengers and 12 crew aboard presumed dead, the disappearance of Flight 370 was the deadliest incident involving a Boeing 777 and the deadliest in Malaysia Airlines’ history until it was surpassed in both regards by Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down while flying over conflict-stricken eastern Ukraine four months later. The combined loss caused significant financial problems for Malaysia Airlines, which was renationalised by the Malaysian government as Malaysian Airways in December 2014.

The search for the missing airplane, which became the most expensive in aviation history, focused initially on the South China Sea and Andaman Sea, before analysis of the aircraft’s automated communications with an Inmarsat satellite indicated a possible crash site somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.

Mormon Books

Joseph Smith gave us the Book of Mormon in March 1830. As of 2020, more than 192 million copies of the Book of Mormon had been printed and translated in to 112 languages. In 1950, LeGrand Richards gave us  A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, which became a best-selling Mormon book and was translated into many languages.

Nazi Gold

The Amber Room was a chamber decorated in amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors, located in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg.

Constructed in the 18th century in Prussia, the room was dismantled and eventually disappeared during World War II. Before its loss, it was considered an “Eighth Wonder of the World”. A reconstruction was made, starting in 1979 and completed and installed in the Catherine Palace in 2003.

The Amber Room was looted during World War II by the Army Group North of Nazi Germany, and taken to Königsberg for reconstruction and display. Its eventual fate and current whereabouts, if it survives, remain a mystery. In 1979 the decision was taken to create a reconstructed Amber Room at the Catherine Palace. After decades of work by Russian craftsmen and donations from Germany, it was completed and inaugurated in 2003.

The associated press reported in 1997 that The Federal Reserve Bank of New York melted down $23 million worth of Nazi gold bars and recast them in the 1950s, replacing the swastika with a U.S. seal, the New York Times reported today. The gold made its way to the vaults of lower Manhattan in 1950 after being sold on world markets by the Swiss National Bank during World War II.

Could this be the Amber Room Gold? Learn more about The Amber Room @ Endless Thread (wbur.org)

Nuclear Bombs and War

The U. S. Enters into the Korean War
President Harry S. Truman orders the development of the hydrogen bomb, in response to the detonation of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb in 1949.
General Douglas MacArthur threatens to use nuclear weapons in Korea.
Scientist Albert Einstein warns that nuclear war could lead to mutual destruction.

The Oak Ridge story featuring John Hendrix, The Tennessee Prophet

The Oak Ridge story; the saga of a people who share in history (1950) by George O Robinson is published. 

According to local tradition, John Hendrix (1865–1915), an eccentric local resident regarded as a mystic, prophesied the establishment of Oak Ridge some 40 years before construction began. Two years after World War II ended, Oak Ridge was shifted to civilian control, under the authority of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The Roane Anderson Company administered community functions, including arranging housing and operating buses, under a government contract. In 1959 the town was incorporated. Oak Ridge is a city in Anderson and Roane counties in the eastern part of the U.S. state of Tennessee, about 25 miles (40 km) west of downtown Knoxville. Oak Ridge’s population was 29,330 at the 2010 census.  It is part of the Knoxville Metropolitan Area. Oak Ridge’s nicknames include the Atomic City,  the Secret City the Ridge, and the City Behind the Fence.

Oak Ridge was established in 1942 as a production site for the Manhattan Project—the massive American, British, and Canadian operation that developed the atomic bomb. Being the site of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex, scientific and technological development still plays a crucial role in the city’s economy and culture in general

The Occult

What does the word Occult Mean?

Various twentieth-century writers on the subject used the term occultism in different ways. Some writers, such as the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno in his “Theses Against Occultism”, employed the term as a broad synonym for irrationality. In his 1950 book L’occultisme, Robert Amadou used the term as a synonym for esotericism,  an approach that the later scholar of esotericism Marco Pasi suggested left the term superfluous.

Jimmy Akin says that

In the past, highly respected, intellectual figures like St. Thomas Aquinas took occult phenomena seriously and had some things to say about it. Back then, the word “occult” had a different meaning. In Latin, occultus meant anything that was hidden—anything that people didn’t know about or understand. The world thus was filled with “occult” or hidden things and forces. These weren’t automatically contrary to the Faith, and “occult” had a neutral meaning. Just because men didn’t understand something, that didn’t mean it was evil.

 A novel about St. Thomas Aquinas, The Quiet Light by Louis de Wohl is published.

Polio vaccine

Before the Covid Vaccine was revealed to the world to cure the Coronavirus, a Polio Vaccine was discovered to cure polio.The first successful demonstration of a polio vaccine was by Hilary Koprowski in 1950, with a live attenuated virus which people drank.  The vaccine was not approved for use in the United States, but was used successfully elsewhere. Learn more about the  What People Can Learn From The Discovery Of A Polio Vaccine : NPR @ All Things Considered.

Private Revelation of Garabandal

Mari Cruz González (b. June 21, 1950) is born and is one of the 4 visionaries of the supposed private revelations of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary that are claimed to have occurred from 1961 to 1965 to four young schoolgirls in the rural village of San Sebastián de Garabandal in the Peña Sagra mountain range in the autonomous community of Cantabria in Northern Spain. The Virgin Mary in this series of claimed visitations is often referred to as “Our Lady of Mount Carmel of Garabandal”, because her appearance and dress looked like portrayals of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Garabandal apparitions are sometimes referred as “the continuation of Fátima.” The Apparitions included the prophecy of the Warning. The warning is described as a momentary stopping of time around the world, with all people then seeing the spiritual condition of their souls, and how they should amend their ways.

The Resurrection of Jesus

Gary Robert Habermas is born in 1950 . He is an American historian and New Testament scholar who frequently writes and lectures on the resurrection of Jesus. He has specialized in cataloging and communicating trends among scholars in the field of historical Jesus and New Testament studies. He is a distinguished research professor and chair of the department of philosophy and theology at Liberty University.

Roswell

“Behind the Flying Saucers” (1950) by Frank Scully, long time newspaper reporter and magazine writer, is published.

The Roswell Incident (1980) was published 30 years later and is the first book to introduce the controversial second-hand stories of civil engineer Grady “Barney” Barnett and a group of archaeology students from an unidentified university encountering wreckage and “alien bodies” while on the Plains of San Agustin before being escorted away by the Army. The second-hand Barnett stories were described by ufologists as the “one aspect of the account that seemed to conflict with the basic story about the retrieval of highly unusual debris from a sheep ranch outside Corona, New Mexico, in July 1947”.

Many alleged first-hand accounts of the Roswell incident actually contain information from the Aztec, New Mexico, UFO incident a hoaxed flying saucer crash which gained national notoriety after being promoted by journalist Frank Scully in his articles and 1950 book. The hoax included stories of humanoid bodies and metals with unusual properties.

A group of aliens from the 24th century called the  Ferengi travel back in time to 1947 and become the alien invaders in the Roswell UFO incident.

Science Fiction Standouts 1950

Destination Moon (1950) It was the first major U.S. science fiction film to deal with the practical scientific and engineering challenges of space travel and to speculate on what a manned expedition to the Moon would look like. Famed science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein contributed to the screenplay.

“Fool’s Errand”  by Lester del Rey published in Science Fiction Quarterly, Nov 1951 features Nostradamus.

Roger Sidney, a 23rd-century professor of paraphysics, travels back to ask an aging Nostradamus whether he truly wrote those uncannily accurate predictions that were not found until 1989, but Sidney overshoots his target and ends up searching for a young Nostradamus in a tavern in southern France.

“Fool’s Errand” was the second story del Rey wrote after moving to New York in 1944 where he rented a $3/week room near Ninth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, but Campbell rejected the story for Astounding as being too obvious. It was another seven years before Roger Sidney would find his way into the pages of Science Fiction Quarterly, one of the new spate of 1950s sf magazines.

If Nostradamus would accept the manuscript as being his, the controversy would be ended, and the paraphysicists could extend their mathematics with sureness that led on toward glorious, breathtaking possibilities. Somewhere, perhaps within a few feet, was the man who could settle the question conclusively, and somehow Sidney must find him—and soon!  Time-Travel Fiction (portmain.com)

I, Robot  (1950) by Isaac Asimov.

“Runaround“9 1942 (included in the collection ), introduces us to The Three Laws of Robotics. The Three Laws, quoted from the “Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.”, are: 

First Law

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The Martian Chronicles (1950) by Ray Bradbury is published. Features human-like Martians with copper-colored skin, human emotions and telepathic abilities. They have an advanced culture, but the human explorers are greeted with incomprehension. Bradbury wrote many other short stories set on Mars. A Catholic has to ask If people move to Mars, die, and are buried there, when the end times come and they are in their glorified body, Will they be living on Mars, back on Earth with the rest of us on someplace else?

The Sodders Missing Children

On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1945, a fire destroyed the Sodder home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, United States. At the time, it was occupied by George Sodder, his wife Jennie, and nine of their ten children. During the fire, George, Jennie, and four of the nine children escaped. The bodies of the other five children have never been found. The Sodders believed for the rest of their lives that the five missing children survived. 

The Sodders never rebuilt the house, instead converting the site into a memorial garden to their lost children. In the 1950s, as they came to doubt that the children had perished, the family put up a billboard at the site along State Route 16 with pictures of the five, offering a reward for information that would bring closure to the case. It remained up until shortly after Jennie Sodder’s death in 1989.

State and federal efforts to investigate the case further in the early 1950s yielded no new information. The family did, however, later receive what may have been a picture of one of the boys as an adult during the 1960s. The last surviving sister, along with the Sodder grandchildren, continued to publicize the case in the 21st century in the media and online. Learn More about the  Missing  The Sodder Children -@ Crime Over Coffee • A podcast on Anchor

 St. Peter’s Tomb

On December 24, 1950, the words of Pope Pius XII resounded throughout the world in his Christmas radio message when he said: “(…) The tomb of the Prince of the Apostles has been found! ” The Prince of the Apostles is none other than Peter, who was given the keys to the Church by Jesus himself. And on this day, the Christian faithful around the world learned that the Peter’s tomb had been found. But the truth behind this story is much more complicated and even today, 70 years later, there is considerable controversy regarding the claims about Peter’s tomb and lots of questions too.
Peter’s Tomb: A Mystery That Stretches From Rome To Jerusalem And Back | Ancient Origins (ancient-origins.net)

Stargate

1950 also saw the birth of Jonathan “Jack” O’Neill  who would grow up to be a  A United States Air Force Colonel and an Air Force Special Operations veteran who lead the  Stargate-SG1,  military team from Earth. SG-1 and a dozen other SG teams venture to distant planets using an alien portal known as a Stargate, which is housed in a top-secret United States Air Force military base known as Stargate Command (SGC) in the underground Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Learn more about Stargate @ This Link

Traditional Square Dancing

Traditional square dance is a generic American term for any style of American square dance other than modern Western. The term can mean (1) any of the American regional styles (broadly, Northeastern, Southeastern, and Western) that existed before around 1950, when modern Western style began to develop out of a blend of those regional styles, or (2) any style (other than modern Western) that has survived, or been revived, since around 1950.

On September 22, 1950, The World Dance Council is inaugurated.

In 1518, the city of Strasbourg was consumed by a strange epidemic: hundreds were struck by the irresistible urge to dance until they died. This incident of Dancing Mania was not the first, and no one knew the cause of such strange behaviour. Learn more dance mania @ The Morbid Curiosity Podcast: Dancing Mania (libsyn.com)

 

Where Are All the Aliens?

In a 1950 conversation at Los Alamos, four world-class scientists generally agreed, given the size of the Universe, that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations must be present. But one of the four, Enrico Fermi, asked, “If these civilizations do exist, where is everybody?” Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 million stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps 400 million galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14 billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. Webb discusses in detail the 50 most cogent and intriguing solutions to Fermi’s famous paradox.

 

 

Winchester

The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester. Located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, the Queen Anne Style Victorian mansion is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan. It is a designated California historical landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is privately owned and serves as a tourist attraction.

Since its construction in 1886, the property and mansion were claimed by many to be haunted by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles. Learn more about the Winchester Mystery House @ The Morbid Curiosity Podcast

Winchester ’73 is a 1950 American Western film directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea and Stephen McNally. Written by Borden Chase and Robert L. Richards, the film is about the journey of a prized rifle from one ill-fated owner to another and a cowboy’s search for a murderous fugitive.[2] Rock Hudson portrays an American Indian and Tony Curtis plays a besieged cavalry trooper, both in small roles at the beginnings of their careers. The film received a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for Best Written American Western.

Weeping Statues

A very small number of weeping statues have been recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, e.g. in Syracuse the shedding of tears from a statue in the house of a married couple (August 29, 1953) was recognized by the Catholic bishops of Sicily on December 13, 1953. Chemist Luigi Garlaschelli of the University of Pavia, who has not examined the statue, which is behind glass, theorizes that the tears are due to capillary attraction with moisture seeping through a fault in the glaze of the plaster statue.

 Weight Loss

According to an ad placed in the Oct. 1, 1950 issue of The Milwaukee Sentinel, “thousands” have lost weight by using the gadget, “handsomely made of lightweight aluminium and rubber,” to “break down fatty tissues.”

William Peter Blatty

William Peter Blatty (January 7, 1928 – January 12, 2017) wrote the 1971 novel The Exorcist, for which he won the Academy Award for the screenplay of its film adaptation and was nominated for Best Picture as its producer. The film also earned Blatty the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama as producer. He also wrote and directed the sequel The Exorcist III. The novel was inspired by a 1949 case of demonic possession and exorcism that Blatty heard about while he was a student in the class of 1950 at Georgetown University. As a result, the novel takes place in Washington, D.C., near the campus of Georgetown University.

Born and raised in New York City, Blatty received his bachelor’s degree in English from Georgetown University in 1950, and his master’s degree in English literature from the George Washington University. Following completion of his master’s degree in 1954, he joined the United States Air Force. After service in the air force, he worked for the United States Information Agency in Beirut. WPB on The World Over

Additional 1950  Trivia

• January 1– The International Police Association (IPA) – the largest police organization in the world – is formed.
• March 20– The Polish government daenacts a law to take possession of properties owned by Roman Catholic churches
• April 27: Apartheid: In South Africa, the Group Areas Act is passed, formally segregating the races.
• May 9 Ron Hubbard publishes Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
• September 9– The U.S. state of California celebrates its centennial anniversary.
• October 2– The comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz is first published in seven U.S. newspapers.
• Knox’s Translation of the Vulgate Old Testament (commissioned by the Catholic Church) is published.
• The popular automobile company Studebaker, begins its financial downfall.
• Television becomes widespread throughout Europe and North America.
• Dunkin’ Donuts (1950) was founded by William Rosenberg in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Some more notable births and deaths

Births
Dr, Peter Venkman  born on Sep 21, 1950 who would grow up to form the famous Ghostbusters supernatual fighting team. Peters’ sister is a Dominican Nun With a 1 woman traveling Show of St. Catherine of Siena.
Learn more about the Ghostbusters @ The (Original) Ghostbusters (sqpn.com)
Jack Putter was born on Mar 26, 1950. He would grow up to be the man who was injected with the miniaturized  Lt. Tuck Pendletontra traveling the innerspace within his body.

Deaths
Creator of Tarzan   Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875– March 19, 1950)
Bring Em’ Back Alive  Frank Buck, (March 17, 1884 – March 25, 1950)
1984 and Animal Farm author George Orwell (Jun 25, 1903 – Jan 21, 1950)
Servant of God Black Elk (December 1, 1863 – August 19, 1950)

1951

Alice in Wonderland

Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) is released.  The inspiration for Alice in Wonderla end was a girl named Alice Liddell. She was born  on May 4,  1852, 99 years before the release of the Walt Disney picture and died 17 years before it was released. on  16 November 16, 1934.  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol was published in 1865, the same year the civil war in America ended. Learn more about AIW @ Disney Story Origins Podcast

Angel Questions

A question often asked is How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The bigger question is Can Angels play baseball? That question is answered in the 1951 fantasy comedy Angels in the Outfield.

Ancient Egyptian Personality

This article about an Ancient Egyptian Personality is published. 

William F. Edgerton, The Strikes in Ramses III’s Twenty-Ninth Year, JNES 10, No. 3 (July 1951), pp. 137-14

The heavy cost of these battles slowly exhausted Egypt’s treasury and contributed to the gradual decline of the Egyptian Empire in Asia. The severity of these difficulties is stressed by the fact that the first known labour strike in recorded history occurred during Year 29 of Ramesses III’s reign, when the food rations for the favored and elite royal tomb-builders and artisans in the village of Set Maat her imenty Waset (now known as Deir el-Medina), could not be provisioned.

The Antichrist

The Antichrist will not be so called; otherwise he would have no followers… he will come disguised as the Great Humanitarian; he will talk peace, prosperity and plenty not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves… He will tempt Christians with the same three temptations with which he tempted Christ… He will have one great secret which he will tell to no one: he will not believe in God. Because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect. He will set up a counterchurch… It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the Antichrist that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ.Fulton J. Sheen, a Catholic bishop, wrote in 1951:

Elvis Origins

In 1951, in Greenbow, Alabama, young Forrest Gump is fitted with leg braces to correct a curved spine, and is unable to walk properly. He lives alone with his mother, who runs a boarding house out of their home that attracts many tenants, including a young Elvis Presley, who plays the guitar for Forrest and incorporates Forrest’s jerky dance movements into his performances.  There was also a mysterious looking man seen at the  boarding house dressed in white with a cowboy hat. This man seems to pop up alot  during the 50’s and elsewhere.

 

Hypnosis

In 1951, Palle Hardrup shot and killed two people during a botched robbery in Copenhagen. Hardrup claimed that his friend and former cellmate Bjørn Schouw Nielsen had hypnotized him to commit the robbery, inadvertently causing the deaths. Both were sentenced to jail time

Greek Gods

The Gods of the Greeks by Kerényi, Karl, 1897-1973

Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks (born Loretta Pleasant; August 1, 1920 – October 4, 1951) was an African-American woman[4] whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day. Learn more about HL @ Babes of Science or see the movie about her life or see a small youtube documentry about her.

La Salette Apparition

On September 19, 1851, the local bishop formally approved the public devotion and prayers to Our Lady of La Salette.
On September 19, 1951, was the anniversary of that private revelation approval.

Lost Army of King Cambyses

Count László Almásy (August 22/ November 3, 1895 – 22 March 1951) was a Hungarian aristocrat, motorist, desert explorer, aviator, Scout-leader and sportsman who served as the basis for the protagonist in both Michael Ondaatje‘s novel The English Patient (1992) and the movie adaptation of the same name (1996). One of the things that he searched for in his adventures is The Lost Army Of King Cambyses. According to Herodotus 3.26, the Persian King Cambyses sent an army to threaten the Oracle of Amun at the Siwa Oasis. The army of 10,000 men was halfway across the desert when a massive sandstorm sprang up, burying them all. Although many Egyptologists regard the story as a myth, people have searched for the remains of the soldiers for many years. Learn more about the LAOKC @ Into the Portal Podcast 

 

Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card (born August 24, 1951) is an American writer known best for his science fiction works. His novel Ender’s Game (1985) and its sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986) won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. A feature film adaptation of Ender’s Game, which Card co-produced, was released in 2013. Card also wrote the Locus Fantasy Award-winning series The Tales of Alvin Maker (1987–2003).

Our Lady of Guadalupe’s Eyes

Our Lady of Guadalupe is associated with a series of five Marian apparitions in December 1531, and a venerated image on a cloak. In 1929 and 1951 photographers said they found a figure reflected in the Virgin’s eyes; upon inspection they said that the reflection was tripled in what is called the Purkinje effect, commonly found in human eyes. Interestingly…

In August 2017, two links circulated on social media that suggested that NASA had announced it had deemed Mexico City’s Our Lady of Guadalupe tilma (a cloak or mantle made of cactus fiber upon which her face is said to be imprinted) to be “living”, in that the image reacts to outside stimuli. FACT CHECK: Has NASA Called the Image of the Virgin of Guadalupe ‘Living’? (snopes.com)

Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey  (September 4, 1918 – February 28, 2009),was an American radio broadcaster for ABC News Radio. He broadcast News and Comment on mornings and mid-days on weekdays and at noon on Saturdays and also his famous The Rest of the Story segments. From 1951 to 2008, his programs reached as many as 24 million people per week. Paul Harvey News was carried on 1,200 radio stations, on 400 American Forces Network stations, and in 300 newspapers. On April 1, 1951, the ABC Radio Network debuted Paul Harvey News and Comment, with a noon time slot on weekdays. The Rest of the Story premiered on May 10, 1976 on ABC Radio. The Rest of the Story consisted of stories presented as little-known or forgotten facts on a variety of subjects with some key element of the story (usually the name of some well-known person) held back until the end. The broadcasts always concluded with a variation on the tag line, “And now you know…the rest of the story.”  Learn the Rest of the Story @ Paul Harvey Archives – Main Page

Pre-Marvel Comics

Marvel was started in 1939 by Martin Goodman under a number of corporations and imprints but now known as Timely Comics, and by 1951 had generally become known as Atlas Comics. The Marvel era began in 1961, the year that the company launched The Fantastic Four and other superhero titles created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and many others. The Marvel brand, which had been used over the years, was solidified as the company’s primary brand. Learn more about Stan Lee @ Screen Rant

Science Fiction Standouts 1951

The Day the Earth Stood Still  (1951) It is based on the 1940 science fiction short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates.  Set in the Cold War during the early stages of the nuclear arms race, the film’s storyline involves a humanoid alien visitor who comes to Earth, accompanied by a powerful robot, to deliver an important message that will affect the entire human race. In 1995, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Hitler in Space:  Adolf Hitler raises a lot of mysterious questions. Such as actually what were his religious beliefs?  How did his death come about? DC Comics feature Hitler on several occasions. In Strange Adventures #3 (December 1950-January 1951), there is a story in which Hitler is captured by space aliens just before his attempted suicide. A fake corpse is left for the SS to find. As punishment for Hitler’s crimes, he is imprisoned for life alone on a rocket ship which will travel through space until he dies (the rocket ship can automatically manufacture its own food for him); during his waking hours, he is forced to listen to an endless loop recording of all the speeches he has ever made.

The Puppet Masters (1951)  by  Robert A. Heinlein, in which American secret agents battle mind controlling parasitic invaders from outer space. It was originally serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction (September, October, November 1951).

Spontaneous Human Combustion

Is this Spontaneous Human Combustion?

On July 2, 1951, the remains of 67-year-old Mary Reeser were discovered in her St. Petersburg, Florida apartment… and a strange sight it was. She had apparently died due to an extremely localized fire; only Mrs. Reeser and the chair she was last seen sitting in had been consumed, though the heat from the fire had caused other damage in the one-room apartment. Of the chair, only charred coil springs remained. Of Mrs. Reeser, there was little more; her 170 pounds had been reduced to less than ten pounds of charred material. Only her left foot remained completely intact, still wearing a slipper and burnt off neatly at the ankle, otherwise undamaged. A lump of vertebrae was also found and, stranger still, a small object… which was later declared by the coroner to be her shrunken skull.-
Garth Haslam, Spontaneous Human Combustion: A Brief History: An Anomalies Study (2016)

Learn about SHC @ Episode 44: From Within — Lore (lorepodcast.com)

Under God

The Catholic non-military Knights of Columbus initiated a campaign in 1951 for the public adoption of the phrase “under God” in the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance. One year after Supreme Knight Hart took office in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a law that officially added the words “under God” to the pledge. Learn more about the pledge @ Hip Hughes

 

Two Term Presidency

February 27,1951 – The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, is ratified.

Treaty of San Francisco

Treaty of San Francisco: In San Francisco, 48 representatives out of 51 attending sign a peace treaty with Japan, formally ending the Pacific War; the delegations of the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia do not sign the treaty, instead favoring separate treaties. Also The Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, which allows United States Armed Forces to be stationed in Japan after the occupation of Japan, is signed by Japan and the United States. On April 28, 1952, The Treaty of San Francisco goes into effect, formally ending the war between Japan and the Allies, and simultaneously ending the occupation of the four main Japanese islands by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Learn More @  Episode 46: The Basics of San Francisco Peace Treaty by Forgotten History of Pacific Asia War • A podcast on Anchor

Travel to Egypt

In this 1950’s travelogue produced by Castle Films, it gives someone amble reason to want to visit the wonders of Ancient Egypt in modern times and see the mysterious glorious pyramids.

LAND OF THE PYRAMIDS 1950s EGYPT TRAVELOGUE PYRAMIDS, CAIRO 56074 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

War With Germany Officially Over

On October 24, 1951, President Harry Truman finally proclaims that the nation’s war with Germany, begun in 1941, is officially over. Fighting had ended in the spring of 1945.

Most Americans assumed that the war with Germany had ended with the cessation of hostilities six years earlier. In fact, a treaty with Germany had not been signed. History.com

Learn more about WW2 history @ WW2 101

 

Weight Loss Film

Film by the National Dairy Council about how to lose weight by adjusting daily caloric intake.

Additional 1951  Trivia

• February 19– Jean Lee becomes the last woman hanged in Australia, when Lee and her 2 pimps are hanged for the murder and torture of a 73-year-old bookmaker.
• March 2– The first NBA All-Star Game of basketball is played in the Boston Garden.
• March 29- Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s The King and Iopens on Broadway, and runs for three years. It is the first of their musicals specifically written for an actress (Gertrude Lawrence). Lawrence is stricken with cancer during the run of the show, and dies halfway through its run a year later. The show makes a star of Yul Brynner.
• March 31: Remington Rand delivers the first UNIVAC I
• May 25– The first atomic bomb “boosted” by the inclusion of thermonuclear materials, is tested in the “Item” test on Enewetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands by the United States.
• October 3– “Shot Heard ‘Round the World (baseball)“: One of the greatest moments in Major League Baseball history occurs when the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson hits a game-winning home run in the bottom of the 9th inning off of Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca, to win the National League pennant after being down 14 games.
• October 4- Shoppers World, one of the first shopping malls in the United States, opens in Framingham, Massachusetts. (This is Near Where I Live)
• November 10– Direct dial coast-to-coast telephone service begins in the United States.
• December 17– We Charge Genocide, a petition describing genocide against African Americans, is delivered to the United Nations.
• The United States becomes malaria-free (excluding territories and possessions.

Some more notable births and deaths

Births
Singer Phil Collins (January 30, 1951) Has a cameo in  Steven Speilbergs’ Hook (1991) Wrote original songs for Disney’s Tarzan (1999)
Kurt Russell March 17, 1951) In another parallel universe Kurt was born as Colonel Jack O’Neil who would lead the Stargage or SG-1 team into this worm-hole gateway device just like the Jack O’Neil in our universe.  Learn more @ Stargate (1994) (sqpn.com)
Robin Williams (July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014) Starred in Steven Speilbergs’ Hook (1991) Aladian (1992) Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) Jumanji (1995)  A Night at the Musuem (2006)
American travel writer Bill Bryson, December 8, 1951

Deaths
Writer Sinclair Lewis, (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951)
Writer and Minister  Lloyd C. Douglas, (August 27, 1877 – February 13, 1951)

 

1952

 

America’s Dyatlov Pass

Five men from Yuba City, California, disappeared in 1978 after a trip to a nearby town. Four of them died, perhaps months later, and 1 was never found. Gary Dale Mathias was one of the five men and he was born on October 15, 1952. This is known as America’s Dyatlov Pass.

(AATIP)The Secret Government UFO Program

The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was an unclassified but unpublicized investigatory effort funded by the United States Government to study unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP). It was a lot like Project Blue Book, which was the code name for the systematic study of unidentified flying objects by the United States Air Force from March 1952 to its termination on December 17, 1969. The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was initially directed by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt and followed projects of a similar nature such as Project Sign established in 1947, and Project Grudge in 1948. Project Blue Book had two goals, namely, to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security, and to scientifically analyze UFO-related data.

Changing Sex

On November 4, 1952 the first successful sex reassignment surgery is performed in Copenhagen, making George Jorgensen Jr. become Christine Jorgensen.

Dead Man Alive

FBI Agents Arthur Dales and Hayes Michel arrest Edward Skur for contempt of Congress and supposed communist activities. Skur later supposedly hangs himself in his cell, causing much grief with Dales. Prior to attempting to inform Mrs. Skur of her loss, Dales spots the living Edward Skur and chases after him. The next day, Skur sends several local police to search for Skur. Later, he is pressured by Michel, Roy Cohn, and the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to change the report and say he didn’t spot Skur. He finally gives in to their demands. Travelrs Case

Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery

Excavations of Qumran and new cave discoveries (1951–1956, 2017, 2021)

In November 1951, Roland de Vaux and his team from the ASOR began a full excavation of Qumran.  By February 1952, the Bedouin had discovered 30 fragments in what was to be designated Cave 2. The discovery of a second cave eventually yielded 300 fragments from 33 manuscripts, including fragments of Jubilees and the Wisdom of Sirach written in Hebrew.  The following month, on March 14, 1952, the ASOR team discovered a third cave with fragments of Jubilees and the Copper Scroll.  Between September and December 1952 the fragments and scrolls of Caves 4, 5, and 6 were subsequently discovered by the ASOR teams.

With the monetary value of the scrolls rising as their historical significance was made more public, the Bedouins and the ASOR archaeologists accelerated their search for the scrolls separately in the same general area of Qumran, which was over 1 kilometer in length. Between 1953 and 1956, Roland de Vaux led four more archaeological expeditions in the area to uncover scrolls and artifacts.  Cave 11 was discovered in 1956 and yielded the last fragments to be found in the vicinity of Qumran.

While most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found by Bedouins, the Copper Scroll was discovered by an archaeologist. The scroll, on two rolls of copper, was found on March 14, 1952 at the back of Cave 3 at Qumran. It was the last of 15 scrolls discovered in the cave, and is thus referred to as 3Q15,

Dental Hypnosis

There is a huge range of societies in England who train individuals in hypnosis; however, one of the longest-standing organizations is the British Society of Clinical and Academic Hypnosis (BSCAH). It origins date back to 1952 when a group of dentists set up the ‘British Society of Dental Hypnosis’.

Desperate Coup in Japan!

The Kyūjō incident was an attempted military coup d’état in the Empire of Japan at the end of the Second World War. It happened on the night of 14–15 August 1945, just before the announcement of Japan’s surrender to the Allies. The coup was attempted by the Staff Office of the Ministry of War of Japan and many from the Imperial Guard to stop the move to surrender. The Allied occupation ended on April 28, 1952, when the terms of the Treaty of San Francisco went into effect. Also on October 19 – The state of war between the United States and Germany is officially ended.

England’s Got a New Queen

Elizabeth II was proclaimed queen throughout the Commonwealth after her father, King George VI, died in the early hours of February 6, 1952, while Elizabeth was in Kenya. As of 2021 the Queen still carries on.

Exorcism of Anneliese

Anna Elisabeth “Anneliese” Michel (21 September 1952 – 1 July 1976) was a German woman who underwent 67 Catholic exorcism rites during the year before her death. She died of malnutrition, for which her parents and priest were convicted of negligent homicide. She was diagnosed with epileptic psychosis (temporal lobe epilepsy) and had a history of psychiatric treatment, which was overall not effective. Several films are based on her story, among them the 2005 film The Exorcism of Emily Rose and the award-winning 2006 film Requiem, as well as the 2011 film Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes.

Fatima

In the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima in 1917, Mary asked that Russia be consecrated to her Immaculate Heart.  Pope Pius XII, in his Apostolic Letter Sacro Vergente of July 7, 1952, consecrated Russia to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Pius XII wrote,

“Just as a few years ago We consecrated the entire human race to the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, so today We consecrate and in a most special manner We entrust all the peoples of Russia to this Immaculate Heart…”

In 1952 the Pope said to the Russian people and the Stalinist regime that the Virgin Mary was always victorious. “The gates of hell will never prevail, where she offers her protection. She is the good mother, the mother of all, and it has never been heard, that those who seek her protection, will not receive it. With this certainty, the Pope dedicates all people of Russia to the immaculate heart of the Virgin. She will help! Error and atheism will be overcome with her assistance and divine grace.

This happen the same year the movie The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima is released in theaters.

Fictional Planets

Vulcan was a hypothetical planet supposed to revolve around the Sun inside the orbit of Mercury, invoked to explain certain irregularities in Mercury’s orbit. The planet was proposed as a hypothesis in 1859, and abandoned not later than 1915.

Learn More about the missing planet Vulcan @ World Science Festival/Unveiled 

Counter-Earth was a hypothetical planet sharing an orbit with Earth, but on the opposite side of the Sun (hence Earth and Counter-Earth would always be invisible to each other). The idea of a counter-Earth has never been a serious scientific hypothesis in modern times.

Twin Earths (1952–1963), was a comic strip by Alden McWilliams (art 1952–63, story 1957–63) and Oskar Lebeck (story 1952–57). The counter-Earth Terra orbits opposite Earth. The daily strip featured Vana, a Terran spy living on Earth to keep tabs on our technology, and Garry Verth, an FBI agent. In the Sunday strip, a young Texan named Punch explored Terra with its young prince Torro. This strip mostly consisted of travelogue-like views of Terran life; for example the fact that in their liberated society, women, who constituted 92% of the population, ran things.

Flatwoods Monster

The Flatwoods Monster has not hissed at boys in the little village of Flatwoods, West Virginia, since Sept. 12, 1952.

People grin about it now—and take Monster souvenir money, from hundreds of Monster tourists every week. But it scared people plenty back then, including the eyewitnesses: six boys aged 10 to 17, a dog and a Mom. History.com
Learn More about the FM @ BuzzFeed Unsolved Network

Gift of  the Magi

The Gift of the Magi is a segment of O. Henry’s Full House (1952)

 Limiting the President

April 8, 1952 – Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer: The U.S. Supreme Court limits the power of the President to seize private business, after President Harry S. Truman nationalizes all steel mills in the United States, just before the 1952 steel strike begins. Learn more about the Steel Strike @ The Steel Strike Showdown (1952) by This Day in Esoteric Political History on PRX

Lost Colony of Roanoke

Sci Fi Author (July 1952 – February 13, 2016) was born in Roanoke, Virginia, USA. He is author of The Joy of Booking (2011).

In 1587 a small colony was founded on an island off the eastern coast of North America in Roanoke Virginia. The settlement would have been the first permanent English colony in the New World, had the settlers not disappeared owing to unknown circumstances. The lost colony of Roanoke is one of the most-notorious mysteries in American history; the cryptic clues left at the abandoned settlement and the lack of any concrete evidence make it the focus of wild speculation and theories.- The Lost Colony of Roanoke | Britannica Learn more about Roanoke @ The Weird History Podcast /– Astonishing Legends/Has The Lost Colony of Roanoke Been Found? – History (historyonthenet.com)

The Multiverse

In Dublin in 1952, Erwin Schrödinger gave a lecture in which he jocularly warned his audience that what he was about to say might “seem lunatic”. He said that when his equations seemed to describe several different histories, these were “not alternatives, but all really happen simultaneously”. This sort of duality is called “superposition”. What he was describing we call the Multiverse.

The Mystery Begins

On November 25, 1952  Agatha Christie‘s murder-mystery play The Mousetrap opens at the Ambassadors Theatre in London; as of 2019, it continues next door at the St. Martin’s Theatre, and remains the longest continuously running production of a play in history.

Near-Death Experiences

In 1952, when near death experience was not a commonly used term, Jayne Smith had a near death experience when she was in a hospital delivering her second baby. Smith deeply inhaled anesthetic that led her to experience death. She didn’t know what happened to her and later she shared the story through a movie called ‘Moment of Truth.’

According to Smith, she was standing in a white light which she called the “carrier of love.” She saw a man there and asked him about her sins, as she was afraid of hell. She was told that sins are not the way you think of them. In that world, there are no sins and the only thing that matters is what a person thinks. Jayne returned back to her body after exploring the new world. 15 Real Near Death Experiences That Will Haunt Your Dreams Tonight (theclever.com)

Nemesis Theory

Nemesis is a hypothetical red dwarf. A white dwarf, also called a degenerate dwarf, is a real dwarf. It has a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. As was explained by Leon Mestel in 1952, unless the white dwarf accretes matter from a companion star or other source, its radiation comes from its stored heat, which is not replenished.

New Bible

When Were the Gospels Written is an interesting and mysterious question? Well maybe not as mysterious, but the Revised Standard Version (RSV) is an English translation of the Bible published in 1952 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. This translation itself is a revision of the American Standard Version (ASV) of 1901, and was intended to be a readable and literally accurate modern English translation which aimed to “preserve all that is best in the English Bible as it has been known and used through the centuries” and “to put the message of the Bible in simple, enduring words that are worthy to stand in the great Tyndale-King James tradition.”

The RSV was the first translation of the Bible to make use of the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah, a development considered “revolutionary” in the academic field of biblical scholarship.[1] The New Testament was first published in 1946, the Old Testament in 1952, and the Apocrypha in 1957; the New Testament was revised in 1971. The original Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (RSV-CE) was published in 1965–66, and the Apocrypha was expanded in 1977. The Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (RSV-2CE) was released in 2006.

In later years, the RSV served as the basis for two revisions—the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of 1989, and the English Standard Version (ESV) of 2001.

Phoenix Politician

Republican Barry Goldwater is elected United States Senator in 1952, defeating the Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland in 1952 from the home of the Phoenix Lights UFO Incent in 1997, the year My wife and I graduated Fitchburg State College.

Presidential Politics

On March 29, 1952  U.S. President Harry S. Truman announced that he will not seek reelection. On April 8, 1952  The U.S. Supreme Court limits the power of the President to seize private business, after President Harry S. Truman nationalizes all steel mills in the United States, just before the 1952 steel strike begins. The Court case for this action is called The Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer.

On November 4, 1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected as President of the United States in a landslide. He defeats Democratic Governor of Illinois Adlai Stevenson (correctly predicted by the UNIVAC computer). At the 1953 inauguration  Dwight Eisenhower gets lassoed while vice-president Nixon laughs. Richard Nixon, (the president behind the Watergate scandal) gives his famous “ Checkers Speech”  in September 1952.

Saint Benedict Joseph Labre

Fr. Michel Rodrigue is the founder and Abbott of a new fraternity approved by the Catholic Church: The Apostolic Fraternity of St. Benedict Joseph Labre. Learn More about FMR @ Where Peter Is

Saint Benedict Joseph Labre by Agnès de La Gorce was First published in 1952.

Learn more about St. BJL @ St. John Vianney RC Parish

Science Fiction Standouts 1952

Batman and Superman: “The Mightiest Team in the World” in Superman #76 (June 1952), Batman teams up with Superman for the first time and the pair discover each other’s secret identity.

A Sound of Thunder (1952) by Ray Bradbury  is published in Colliers, June 28, 1952. The butterfly effect means changes made in the past will affect the future.

City  (1952) by Clifford Simak

Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952) is a Republic Studios serial.  “Larry Martin”, must prevent Martian invaders from using a hydrogen bomb to blow Earth out of its orbit, so that the Martians can move a dying Mars into a closer position to the Sun. As in Radar Men from the Moon (also released in 1952), most of the screen time for each of the dozen chapters is spent on fistfights and car chases between the heroes and a gang of crooks hired by Narab and his extraterrestrial colleague Marex to steal and stockpile the Atomic supplies needed for construction of the H-bomb.

The serial is best remembered as one of the first screen appearances of a young Leonard Nimoy, who plays Narab, one of the three Martian invaders. In 1958, a feature film version of this serial, retitled Satan’s Satellites, was made by editing down the serial’s footage to feature film length.

Smoking Study

To address the criticism of the retrospective studies – and to strengthen the evidence that smoking is a cause of lung cancer – E. Cuyler Hammond, Ph.D., and Daniel Horn, Ph.D., scientists working for the American Cancer Society, started work on what is known as a cohort study.

In January 1952, Hammond and Horn engaged 22,000 American Cancer Society volunteers to help recruit a large group of American men aged 50 to 69 across 10 U.S. states and ask these men about their smoking habits. The scientists ended up with a cohort of about 188,000 men, who they eventually followed through 1955.-The Study That Helped Spur the U.S. Stop-Smoking Movement (cancer.org) Learn more how they stopped the smoke @ The BMJ

Tim Powers

Catholic Sci-Fi author Timothy Thomas Powers is born on February 29, 1952.

• Jimmy Akin’s review blog has an interview with Powers focussing on Three Days to Never.
• A 2006 Powers interview leaning towards his Catholicism is available on-line at Ignatius Insight.
• “Catholicism and the Rules of Fantasy” Tim Powers – Trying To Say God by Sick Pilgrim (soundcloud.com)
• Tim Powers: Trying to Say God | Jonathan Ryan (patheos.com)

 The Warrens

Edward Warren Miney (September 7, 1926 – August 23, 2006)  and Lorraine Rita Warren (January 31, 1927 – April 18, 2019)  were American paranormal investigators and authors associated with prominent cases of alledged hauntings. Edward was a self-taught and self-professed demonologist, author, and lecturer. Lorraine professed to be clairvoyant and a light trance medium who worked closely with her husband.

In 1952, the Warrens founded the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR), the oldest ghost hunting group in New England. Stories of ghost hauntings popularized by the Warrens have been adapted as or have indirectly inspired dozens of films, television series and documentaries, including several films in the Amityville Horror series and the films in The Conjuring Universe.

Learn more about The Warrens @ Mr. JackOLantern

Wrestling

Capitol Wrestling Corporation, the professional wrestling promotion that will later evolve into the modern day WWE, is founded by Jess McMahon and Toots Mondt.

Learn more @ Original Wrestling Documentaries

Additional 1952 Trivia

• February 20- Emmett Ashford becomes the first African-American umpire in organized baseball, by being authorized to be a substitute umpire in the Southwestern International League.
• March 21-The last two executions in the Netherlands take place.
• May 18 – Ann Davison becomes the first woman to single-handedly sail the Atlantic Ocean.
• June 19 – The Special Forces (United States Army) are created.
• June 28 – The First Miss Universe was held. Armi Kuusela from Finland wins the title of Miss Universe 1952.
• July 25 – Puerto Rico becomes a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.
• October 16 – Limelight opens in London; writer/actor/director/producer Charlie Chaplin arrives by ocean liner; in transit, his re-entry permit to the United States is revoked by J. Edgar Hoover.
• October 19-John Bamford, aged 15, rescues victims of a house fire, and becomes the youngest person to be awarded the George Cross.
• December 14 – The first successful surgical separation of Siamese twins is conducted in Mount Sinai Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio.
• Velcro is first introduced.

Some more notable births and deaths

Births
Space Traveler Holistic Detective Dirk Gently (March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001) who grow up to write the best selling non-fiction book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,

Sergeant Bosco Albert “B.A.” (Bad Attitude) Baracus born on May 21, 1952. In 1972, B.A. was part of a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. B.A. and these men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade
to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government they survive as soldiers of fortune. using their military training to fight oppression and injustice. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them…maybe you can hire The A-Team.”  B.A., along with Hannibal Smith, Templeton “Faceman” Peck, and H. M. Murdock make up the A-Team. Mr. Murdock is the great plus grandfather of Reginald Barclay, born in the 24th century.

Dr. Ray Stantz who would grow up to form the famous Ghostbusters supernatural fighting team.

Pee-wee Herman  born on August 27, 1952.
Chaos-Theorist Ian Malcolm born on October 22, 1952 who would grow up to be a consultant on the Jurassac Park project.

Mr. Potato Head

Deaths
The Three Stooges’s Curly Howard, (October 22, 1903 – January 18, 1952)
Catholic Novelist Fulton Oursler (January 22, 1893 – May 24, 1952)

 

1953

Akhenaten the Egyptian

 The Movie The Egyptian (1953) releases featuring ancient heretic Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten.

Astrology Column Study

In 1953, the sociologist Theodor W. Adorno conducted a study of the astrology column of a Los Angeles newspaper as part of a project examining mass culture in capitalist society.Adorno believed that popular astrology, as a device, invariably leads to statements that encouraged conformity—and that astrologers who go against conformity, by discouraging performance at work etc., risk losing their jobs.  Adorno concluded that astrology is a large-scale manifestation of systematic irrationalism, where individuals are subtly led—through flattery and vague generalisations—to believe that the author of the column is addressing them directly.  Adorno drew a parallel with the phrase opium of the people, by Karl Marx, by commenting, “occultism is the metaphysic of the dopes.” 

 

The Betz Sphere

Terry Mathew Betz was born in 1953. On March 27, 1974, Terry and his family Antoine, Jerri discovered a small metal sphere with a diameter of 8in. and weighing 22lbs. It did weird things and brought a lot of attention and conspiracy theories along with it. The object became known as The Betz Sphere. Learn More @ Ep 130: The Betz Sphere Part 1 — Astonishing Legends

Bohemian Grove

Every year in mid-July, a group of politicians, businessmen, and artists gather at a private campground in California. Critics claim they are a sinister conspiracy. Is this group sinister or just a party in the woods? This gathering takes place at  Bohemian Grove  in Monte Rio, California,  belonging to a private San Francisco–based gentlemen’s club known as the Bohemian Club.

The Bohemian Club’s all-male membership includes artists and musicians, as well as many prominent business leaders, government officials, former U.S. presidents, senior media executives, and people of power.  Members may invite guests to the Grove. Guests may be invited to the Grove for either the “Spring Jinks” in June or the main July encampment. Bohemian Club members can schedule private day-use events at the Grove any time it is not being used for Club-wide purposes, and they are allowed at these times to bring spouses, family, and friends, although female and minor guests must be off the property by 9 or 10 pm. 

After 40 years of membership, the men earn “Old Guard” status, giving them reserved seating at the Grove’s daily talks, as well as other perquisites. Former U.S. president Herbert Hoover was inducted into the Old Guard on March 19, 1953; he had joined the club exactly 40 years previously.

 Caligula

American actor Jay Robinson famously portrayed a sinister and scene-stealing Caligula in two epic films of the 1950s, The Robe (1953) and its sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954).

Death of Peter Pan

Walt Disney’s ‘Peter Pan’ (1953) was released.   Bobby Driscoll who voiced Peter Pan ended up dying homeless and broke after years of drug abuse. He was buried in a unmarked grave after a couple of boys found the 31-year-old’s lifeless body on March 30, 1968 in an abandoned apartment building. His body was finally identified about a year later. In other Peter Pan news,  On March 7, 1955 the Broadway musical version of Peter Pan, which had opened in 1954 starring Mary Martin, is presented on television for the first time by NBC-TV, with its original cast, as an installment of Producers’ Showcase. It is also the first time that a stage musical is presented in its entirety on TV, almost exactly as it was performed on stage. This program gains the largest viewership of a TV special up to this time, and it becomes one of the first great TV family musical classics.

Learn more about Bobby Driscoll @ ‎Talking Hart Island: Bobby Driscoll with Dave Bossert on Apple Podcasts

Dinosaurs

Why did Jesus make dinosaurs? Because Dinosaurs are Cool. In 1953 University of New Mexico graduate student William Chenoweth found three important sites where dinosaurs were preserved in Morrison Formation rocks. He found a fragmentary Allosaurus, sauropods, and Stegosaurus. Learn more about Dinosaurs @ ‎I Know Dino: The Big Dinosaur Podcast on Apple Podcasts

Eucharistic Fast 

 Pope Pius XII  wrote the Apostolic constitution Christus Dominus (1953)  continued to require fasting from midnight before receiving communion. But drinking water now did not break the fast. He also relaxed the fasting requirement for the sick and travelers, those engaged in exhausting physical labor, and for priests who celebrate several Masses on the same day. In 1957 he replaced the fast from midnight with a three-hour fast from solid food and alcohol and a one-hour fast from other liquids. Ordinary communicants would calculate the time until the moment they took communion; priests fasted based on the time they began saying Mass. The new fasting rules opened the way to scheduling evening Masses, which the fast from midnight regime made all but impossible for those desiring to receive Communion.

Frank Olson Thrown Out A Window

Around 2 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, November 28, 1953, Frank Olson plummeted onto the sidewalk in front of the Statler Hotel. The night manager rushed to Olson, who was still alive and who “tried to mumble something”. Olson died before medical help arrived.  Years later, the night manager recalled “In all my years in the hotel business, I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn.” Was it an accident as his family was told? Or did it have something to do with the CIA, biowarfare, LSD, and murder?

Gilbert and Sullivan

The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan is a 1953 British technicolor film that dramatises the story of the collaboration between W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Gilbert and Sullivan wrote 14 comic operas, later referred to as the Savoy Operas, which became the most popular series of musical entertainments of the Victorian era and are still popular today.

HEW

The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was created on April 11, 1953. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was renamed the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) in 1979. February 19, 1994, they were sent to  Riverside General Hospital to investigate a Toxic Lady named Gloria Ramirez making the hospital staff sick.

Hubble Telescope

Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953)^[1] was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology. Hubble’s name is most widely recognized for the Hubble Space Telescope, which was named in his honor, with a model prominently displayed in his hometown of Marshfield, Missouri.Learn more about the HT @ NASA Goddard

Catholics have their own observatory. The Vatican Observatory  is an astronomical research and educational institution supported by the Holy See. Originally based in the Roman College of Rome, the Observatory is now headquartered in Castel Gandolfo, Italy and operates a telescope at the Mount Graham International Observatory in the United States.^[1]

The Director of the Observatory is Brother Guy Consolmagno, an American Jesuit. In 2008, the Templeton Prize was awarded to cosmologist Fr. Michał Heller, a Vatican Observatory Adjunct Scholar. In 2010, the George Van Biesbroeck Prize was awarded to former observatory director, the American Jesuit, Fr. George Coyne

The Hugo Award is an annual literary award for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year, given at the World Science Fiction Convention and chosen by its members. The Hugo is widely considered the premier award in science fiction. The award is administered by the World Science Fiction Society. It is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. Hugos were first given in 1953, at the 11th World Science Fiction Convention, and have been awarded every year since 1955. The first book to win best novel was Alfred Bester* The Demolished Man. Learn More about the Hugo Awards @ CoNZealand

I Love Lucy

January 19, 1953 – 71.1% of all television sets in the United States are tuned into I Love Lucy, to watch Lucy give birth to Little Ricky, which is more people than those who tuned into Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration the next day. This record has yet to be broken.  Learn more about Lucy @ Facts Verse

 JFK Marries

September 12,1953 – U.S. Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy marries Jacqueline Lee Bouvier at St. Mary’s Church in Newport, Rhode Island.

Korean War Ends

On July 27, 1953 The Korean War ends, with the Korean Armistice Agreement: The United Nations Command (Korea) (United States), People’s Republic of China and North Korea sign an armistice agreement at Panmunjom, and the north remains communist, while the south remains capitalist.

 The Pinewood Derby

The pinewood derby is the wood car racing event of the Boy Scouts of America.  The first pinewood derby was held on May 15, 1953 at the Scout House in Manhattan Beach, California by Cub Scout Pack 280C (the present Pack 713). The concept was created by the Pack’s Cubmaster Don Murphy, and sponsored by the Management Club at North American Aviation. Learn more about Science and the Pinewood Derby @ Mark Rober

On March 1, 1953, Joseph Stalin suffered a stroke, after an all-night dinner with Soviet Union interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers Georgy Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin, and Nikita Khrushchev. The stroke paralyzes the right side of his body and renders him unconscious until his death on March 5. After Stalin died in March 1953, he was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Georgi Malenkov as Premier of the Soviet Union. However, the central figure in the immediate post-Stalin period was the former head of the state security apparatus, Lavrentiy Beria. Learn more about the DOS @ History Buffs.

Psychic Spy

Paul H. Smith was born in 1953 and would grow up to become party of the U.S. Army’s Psychic Espionage Unit, Center Lane (later known as Stargate).  He would author the book Reading the Enemy’s Mind: Inside Star Gate: America’s Psychic Espionage Program  ( 2005)

R.E.M. Sleep

September 4, 1953 – The discovery of REM sleep is first published, by researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman.

Ripley’s’ Believe it or Not

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is an American franchise, founded by Robert Ripley, which deals in bizarre events and items so strange and unusual that readers might question the claims. Originally a newspaper panel, the Believe It or Not feature proved popular and was later adapted into a wide variety of formats, including radio, television, comic books, a chain of museums and a book series.

The Ripley collection includes 20,000 photographs, 30,000 artifacts and more than 100,000 cartoon panels. With 80-plus attractions, the Orlando, Florida-based Ripley Entertainment, Inc.,  is a global company with an annual attendance of more than 12 million guests.

Learn more or not @ Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Youtube Channel 

In 1953 the comic book was being published.

The Rosenbergs

Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg  were American citizens who were convicted of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. The couple were accused of providing top-secret information about radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines and valuable nuclear weapon designs (at that time the United States was the only country in the world with nuclear weapons). Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed by the federal government of the United States in 1953 in the Sing Sing correctional facility in Ossining, New York, becoming the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to suffer that penalty during peacetime. Learn more about the Rosenbergs @ Decades TV Network

Science Fiction Standouts 1953

Attack from Mars:

Invaders From Mars (1953) is released.
War of the Worlds (1953) is released.

Childhood’s End (1953) by Arthur C. Clarke is released.

Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953)

Fahrenheit 451 (1953)  by RayBradbury is released.

Robert Sheckley‘s short story “King’s Wishes” (1953) features a genie who travels in time from the past in order to get advanced technology from the 20th Century. When the people he attempts to buy it from express concern it might cause a temporal paradox, the genie states he is from Atlantis, which will be destroyed along with the technology within a few years.

Ward Moores Bring the Jubilee  is a good example of the multiverse combined with time travel. It describes A time traveller from an alternate reality travels back to the Battle of Gettysburg and changes his own future into ours. This 1953 novel was well received and influenced Philip K. Dick‘s The Man in the High Castle.

The Seekers

The Seekers, also called The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, were a group of rapturists or a UFO religion in mid-twentieth century Midwestern United States. The Seekers met in a nondenominational church, the group originally organized in 1953 by Charles Laughead, a staff member at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. They were led by Dorothy Martin from the Chicago area (also called Sister Thedra), who believed a UFO would take them on December 21, 1954. They are believed to be the first such group to exist.  They were the subject of the book When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger; Laughead was given the pseudonym Dr. Armstrong and Martin given the name Marian Keech.

The Seekers are also an Australian folk-influenced pop quartet, originally formed in Melbourne  in 1962. Australla is home to the dreaded Drop Bears.

Trolly Problem

The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments in ethics and psychology, involving stylized ethical dilemmas of whether to sacrifice one person to save a larger number. n his commentary on the Talmud, published long before his death in 1953, Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz considered the question of whether it is ethical to deflect a projectile from a larger crowd toward a smaller one. One particular dilemma that has been proposed was in the Sci Fi story… “The Cold Equations” ( 1954), by Tom Godwin, in which a pilot must decide whether to retain a stowaway, which would cause his ship to run out of fuel, or complete his mission to deliver vital medicine for six settlers.

UFOs Debunkers

On June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw something odd in the skies of Washington state. When he landed, he touched off the modern era of UFO sightings.

Donald Menzel was a Harvard astronomer and one of the earliest UFO debunkers. Over the years, he offered several possible explanations for Arnold’s 1947 UFO sighting. Bruce Maccabee disputed Menzel’s explanations in a 1986 monograph.

In 1953, Menzel suggested that Arnold had seen clouds of snow blown from the mountains south of Mt. Rainier. According to Maccabee, such snow clouds have hazy light, not the mirror-like brilliance reported by Arnold. Further, such clouds could not be in the rapid motion reported by Arnold, nor would they account for Arnold first seeing the bright objects north of Rainier.

Zodiac

Zodiac Watches is a brand of Swiss watches owned and manufactured by Fossil Group. In 1953 Zodiac introduced the Sea Wolf as the world’s first purpose-built “dive watch” manufactured and marketed to the masses. The Zodiac Killer (or simply Zodiac or the Zodiac) is the pseudonym of an American serial killer  who operated in northern California from at least the late 1960s to the early 1970s. The unidentified killer originated the name in a series of taunting letters and cards sent to the San Francisco Bay Area press. These letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers). Robert Graysmith‘s book Zodiac advanced Arthur Leigh Allen, who died in 1992, as a potential suspect based on circumstantial evidence. He owned and wore a Zodiac brand wristwatch. Jack Mulanax of the Vallejo Police Department subsequently wrote Allen had received an other than honorable discharge from the US Navy in 1958.

Additional 1953 Trivia

• On January 2, 1953,  Rita Antoinette Rizzo made her solemn profession of vows at Sancta Clara Monastery in Ohio. She would later become Mother Angelica founder of EWTN
• January 22 – The Crucible, an historical drama by Arthur Miller written as an allegory of McCarthyism in the United States, opens on Broadway.
• March 19– The 25th Academy Awards Ceremony is held (the first one broadcast on television).
• April 13-The first James Bond Casino Royale (1953) by Ian Fleming is published.
• April 17– Mickey Mantle hits a 565-foot (172 m) home run at Griffith Stadium, in Washington, D.C., a candidate for the longest home run in baseball history. 
• July 9 – The U.S. Treasury formally renames the Bureau of Internal Revenue; the new name (which had previously been used informally) is the Internal Revenue Service.
• October 30– Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally approves the top secret document of the United States National Security Council NSC 162/2, which states that the United States’ arsenal of nuclear weapons must be maintained and expanded to counter the communist threat.
• December–The Fall of Sexual Morals begins in America as  Hugh Hefner publishes the first issue of Playboy magazine in the United States, featuring a centerfold nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe; it sells 54,175 copies at $.50 each.
• December 8– U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers his Atoms for Peace address, to the United Nations General Assembly.
• December 10– Albert Schweitzer is given the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.

Some more notable births and deaths

Births
Louis Tully born on April 18, 1953. He would grow up to be involved with Gozer Ghostbusters affair of 1984.
Jason Nesmith, born on  June 13, 1953 who would grow up to play Commander Peter Quincy Taggart, the commander of the NSEA Protector on the  TV show Galaxy Quest.
 Hulk Hogan,  born on August 11, 1953

Deaths
Catholic writer  Hilaire Belloc, (July 27, 1870 – July 16, 1953)

1954

The Bilderberg Group

The Bilderberg meeting (also known as the Bilderberg Group) is an annual conference established in 1954 to foster dialogue between Europe and North America.

Capital Riots

The 1954 United States Capitol shooting was an attack on March 1, 1954, by four Puerto Rican nationalists wanting Puerto Rico’s independence from US rule. They shot 30 rounds from semi-automatic pistols from the Ladies’ Gallery (a balcony for visitors) of the House of Representatives chamber in the United States Capitol.

The nationalists, identified as Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores Rodríguez, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and began shooting at Representatives in the 83rd Congress, who were debating an immigration bill. Five Representatives were wounded, one seriously, but all recovered. The assailants were arrested, tried and convicted in federal court, and given long sentences, effectively life imprisonment. In 1978 and 1979, their sentences were commuted by President Jimmy Carter. All four returned to Puerto Rico. Learn more @ US House History

Calvin Parker

On the evening of October 11, 1973, 42-year-old Charles Hickson and 19-year-old Calvin Parker ( born in 1954) told the Jackson County, Mississippi Sheriff’s office they were fishing off a pier on the west bank of the Pascagoula River in Mississippi when they heard a whirring/whizzing sound, saw two flashing blue lights, and observed an oval shaped object 30–40 feet across and 8–10 feet high. Parker and Hickson claimed they were “conscious but paralyzed” while three “creatures” with “robotic slit-mouths” and “crab-like pincers” took them aboard the object and subjected them to an examination. This was known as the Pascagoula UFO Abduction.

Father Brown and Obi-Wan Kenobi

G. K. Chesterton.’s Father Brown  in The Detective  (1954) staring Alec Guinness (Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi) is released.  It was his role as  the crime solving Fr. Brown that started his path to Rome. 
Learn more @ Homeschool Connections

Mark ‘Luke Skywalker’ Hamill is born on September 25, 1951)
Liam ‘Qui-Gon Jinn  Neeson was born June 7, 1952.
Carrie ‘Princess Lea” Fisher (October 21, 1956 – December 27, 2016) is born in the 50s’.

Half-Magic

Half Magic, a 1954 novel by Edward Eager. Reflections on Edward’s books at Book Riot

Kaspar Hauser

Kaspar Hauser (April 30, 1812 – December 17, 1833) was a German youth who claimed to have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell. Hauser’s claims, and his subsequent death by stabbing, sparked much debate and controversy. Theories propounded at the time identified him as the grand ducal House of Baden, hidden away because of royal intrigue. These opinions may or may not have been documented by later investigations. Other theories proposed that Hauser had been a fraud. Learn More @ The Most Mysterious Boy In History

In Henry Kuttner‘s 1954 “The Portal in the Picture”, the author suggests Hauser is from Malesco, a parallel world where science is treated as a religion and its secrets are hidden from the ordinary citizen.

LOTR

The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of three volumes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy novel, The Lord of the Rings, is published. Did anyone ever realise just how similar Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are?

Most Boring Day

April 11, 1954: This day is denoted as the most boring day in the 20th century by True Knowledge, an answer engine developed by William Tunstall-Pedoe. No significant newsworthy events, births, or deaths are known to have happened on this day. Learn More @ Known Unknowns

Mysterious Multi-Dimensional Murder

In 1954, out of a group of six strangers and a butler at a New England mansion on a dark and stormy night,  somebody commits a series of murders. There seems to have been 3 different outcomes to who done it, possibly due to a time traveler constantly changing the time line. Possibly the Cowboy in white? I haven’t got a clue.

Our Lady of Akita and All Nations

Our Lady of Akita is the Catholic title of the Blessed Virgin Mary associated with a wooden statue venerated by faithful Japanese who hold it to be miraculous. The image is known due to the Marian apparitions reported in 1973 by Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa in the remote area of Yuzawadai, an outskirt of Akita, Japan. The messages emphasize prayer (especially recitation of the Holy Rosary) and penance in combination with cryptic visions prophesying sacerdotal persecution and heresy within the Catholic Church. The apparitions were unusual in that the weeping statue of the Virgin Mary was broadcast on Japanese national television, and gained further notice with the sudden healing of hearing impairment experienced by Sasagawa after the apparitions. The image also became affiliated with The Lady of All Nations movement, with which the message shares some similarities. Those apparitions occupied from 1945-1959.

In 1956, the Bishop of Haarlem “found no evidence of the supernatural nature of the apparitions,” a judgment which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) confirmed in 1974.

Padre Pio’s Stigmata

For over fifty years, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina reported stigmata which were studied by several 20th-century physicians, whose independence from the Church is not known. The observations were reportedly inexplicable and the wounds never became infected. His wounds healed once, but reappeared. The surgeon Giorgio Festa, a private practitioner noted that “at the edges of the lesions, the skin is perfectly normal and does not show any sign of edema, of penetration, or of redness, even when examined with a good magnifying glass”. Dr. Alberto Caserta took X-rays of the hands in 1954 and found no abnormality in the bone structure. Learn more @ Why and How | St. Padre Pio’s mysterious stigmata

Pope Joan (Patrons)

The Greek author Emmanuel Rhoides‘ 1866 novel, The Papess Joanne, was admired by Mark Twain and Alfred Jarry and freely translated by Lawrence Durrell as The Curious History of Pope Joan (1954).

Remote Viewing

Russell Targ (born April 11, 1934) is an American physicist, parapsychologist and author who is best known for his work on remote viewing.

Targ received a B.S. in physics from Queens College in 1954. From 1954 to 1956, he completed two years of graduate work in physics at Columbia University without taking a degree.

Science Fiction Standouts 1954

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, (1954) starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason

The Atomic Kid is a 1954 American black-and-white science fiction comedy film directed by Leslie H. Martinson and starring Mickey Rooney and Robert Strauss.

The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)

Godzilla (1954)

Them! (1954)

I Am Legend is a 1954 post-apocalyptic horror novel by American writer Richard Matheson that was influential in the modern development of zombie and vampire literature and in popularizing the concept of a worldwide apocalypse due to disease. The novel was a success and was adapted into the films The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007). It was also an inspiration behind Night of the Living Dead (1968). This book will help inspire Catholic related questions about Zombies including – Can zombies be saved? Are zombies biblical? Learn More about Zombies @ History of Zombies

Silver Chalice

The Silver Chalice is a 1954 American historical epic film directed and produced by Victor Saville, based on Thomas B. Costain’s 1952 novel of the same name. It was Saville’s last film and marked the acting debut of Paul Newman; despite being nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his performance, Newman later called it “the worst motion picture produced during the 1950s”. The film is sometimes referred to as Paul Newman and the Holy Grail

Vampires in Scotland

Is it morally acceptable to destroy vampires? Some 14 years old’s in Scotland thought so. And they hunted the Gorbals Vampire.

The year was 1954. The location: Glasgow, Scotland’s Southern Necropolis, a massive graveyard harboring over 250,000 sets of mortal remains. Over a span of three nights that September hundreds of children under the age of 14 reportedly assembled there with makeshift weapons, ready to take on a vampire they had conjured from their own collective imagination. That would be bizarre enough, but then adults blamed the unusual behavior on their own particular bogeyman: American horror comics. How Comics Were Blamed for the Vampire Panic in 1950s Scotland by Maren Williams ( October 30, 2018)  cbldf.org Learn more about the Gorbals Vampire @ DukeOfAvalon

 

Young Earth?

Does the Bible teach that we’re living on a young earth? George McCready Price (26 August 1870 – 24 January 1963) thought so. He was a Canadian creationist. He produced several anti-evolution and creationist works, particularly on the subject of flood geology. His views did not become common among creationists until after his death, particularly with the modern creation science movement starting in the 1960s.

In the 1950s, George MacCready Price’s work came under severe criticism, particularly by Bernard Ramm in his book The Christian View of Science and Scripture.

Bernard L. Ramm (1916-1992) was a Baptist theologian who was professor of Systematic Theology at California Baptist Seminary. He has written important and influential books such as  Varieties Of Christian Apologetics , Protestant Christian Evidences , and  Protestant Biblical Interpretation: A Textbook of Hermeneutics .He wrote in the Preface to this 1954 book,

“In research for this book I discovered that there are two traditions in Bible and science both stemming from the developments of the nineteenth century. There is the ignoble tradition which has … used arguments and procedures not in the better traditions of established scholarship. There has been and is a noble tradition in Bible and science, and this is the tradition of the great and learned evangelical Christians who have been patient, genuine, and kind and who have taken great care to learn the facts of science and Scripture… Unfortunately the noble tradition … has not been the major tradition in evangelicalism in the twentieth century… It is our wish to call evangelicalism back to the noble tradition…”Published December 1st 1954 by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (first published June 1954)

 

Additional 1954  Trivia

• January 20– The US-based National Negro Network is established, with 46 member radio stations.
• January 21– The first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, is launched in Groton, Connecticut, by First Lady of the United States Mamie Eisenhower.
• March 1-S. Capitol shooting incident: Four Puerto Rican nationalistsopen fire in the United States House of Representatives chamber and wound 5; they are apprehended by security guards.
• April 22-The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees comes into force, defining the status of refugees and setting out the basis for granting right of asylum.
• May 17 -The U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483, . Tied to the 14th Amendment, the decision declared all laws establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional, and it called for the desegregation of all schools throughout the nation.  The Civil Rights Movement has begun. 1954 -1968
• Pope Pius X is canonized on May 29, 1954 and Dominic Savio is cannoized on June 12,1954
  September 11– The Miss America Pageant is broadcast on television for the first time.
• December 1– The first Hyatt Hotel, The Hyatt House Los Angeles, opens on the grounds of Los Angeles International Airport. It is the first hotel in the world built on an airport property.
• December 4– The first Burger King opens in Miami, Florida.
• The TV dinner is introduced, by American entrepreneur Gerry Thomas.

Some more notable births and deaths

Births
Bill Mumy (Lost In Space)  born on February 1, 1954
John Travolta born on February 18, 1954)
Ron Howard born on March 1, 1954
Louis Sachar born on  March 20, 1954. He is author of the book Holes
Jackie Chan  born on April 7, 1954
Jerry Seinfeld born on April 29, 1954.
Roddy Piper, Canadian wrestler (April 17, 1954 – July 30, 2015) Starred in They Live.
Ray Parker Jr. born on May 1, 1954 grew up to compose the Ghostbusters theme song.
Lt. Tuck Pendleton born on April 9, 1954. He would grow up to be part of a a secret miniaturization experiment. He would be injected into civilian Jack Putter and travel around his innerspace.
Denzel Washington born on  December 28, 1954.

Deaths
Lionel Barrymore (April 28, 1878 – November 15, 1954)  He is best known to modern audiences for the role of villainous Mr. Potter in Frank Capra‘s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life.

 

WHEW! Were half way there.

We will explore 1955 -1959 and beyond in

Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious 50’s Part 2