Two sites I regularly visit are the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) and the ISFDB (Internet Science Fiction Database). One might reasonably assume the IFSB is a similar construct. It isn’t.
The International Flying Saucer Bureau was founded in 1952 by a man named Alfred K. Bender. It was the world’s first club devoted to unidentified flying objects, and it was very successful until Bender suddenly ended it a little more than a year later. His reason was simple: he’d been visited by three men in black.
And what he was doing was attempting to contact UFOs via telepathy. It wasn’t just Bender trying to do this; it was most of the IFSB membership and many others they’d convinced to join. The effort consisted of a message that everyone was supposed to think and try to project outward on March 15, 1953 at 6 PM.
No record exists of aliens responding (at least, no OFFICIAL record… dun dun dunnnn) but Bender believed that the three men who reportedly visited him were aliens in disguise and that they’d made him ill as a warning to back off from his telepathic messages.
And what WAS that message? Well, if you were alive in the 1970s, you might have heard a mild variant on the 1950s broadcast, using the first line of the message as the title. A band named Klaatu wrote the song, and the Carpenters cover made it a minor hit:
Question of the night: What’s one of your favorite “light” or otherwise mellow songs?
