20th Century Times

History

The 20th Century Times was published from 2931 Glendale Boulevard, Los Angeles 39, California, in newspaper tabloid format at twenty-five cents per copy. Volume 1, Number 1 opened with a headline declaring an "Avalanche in Skies" and recounted the summer 1952 sighting wave: large numbers of people in the last two weeks of August watching objects over Washington D.C. and across the country, the press scrambling for the "greatest harvest of saucer sightings since the objects were first reported by Arnold in 1947."

The publication sat firmly in the contactee wing of Los Angeles saucer culture. An advertisement in FanToSee (Issue 2, page 39) promoted a narrative claiming to be "Saucers' First Real Contact Revealed," promising "the most amazing and INCREDIBLE narration of our time" told "in 8 brief pages of newspaper tabloid size." The ad described a contact lasting three months during which the author was "one of the 'Space Visitors'" and required three additional months to "become 'normal' again." The language was ecstatic, capitalised, and entirely unselfconscious about its claims.

Los Angeles in 1952 to 1953 was the centre of American contactee culture. George Adamski, George Van Tassel, George Hunt Williamson, Orfeo Angelucci, and Daniel Fry were all active in Southern California or the adjacent desert. The 20th Century Times emerged from this milieu. Its Glendale Boulevard address placed it in the same neighbourhood as several metaphysical bookshops and New Age meeting halls that served as infrastructure for the contactee movement.