In this episode, we’re going to look at “Flying Saucers and the Father’s Plan” by Laura Munro. This is an interesting book; it’s part Contactee tale and part commentary on other Contactees (which was more rare than one might expect). It was published by Gray Barker’s Saucerian Press and, thanks to Barker’s record keeping, we have some interesting insights into the book’s development as well.
We previous covered Laura Munro in our episode on FBI investigations into flying saucer clubs in Detroit, so check out that episode if you haven’t!
The Saucer Life 
While her statement about Orthon semi-encouraging homosexual conversion therapy certainly hasn’t aged well, and her increasing paranoia about people acting against her is troubling, I’m absolutely FASCINATED by her interpretation of Orthon as a genderfluid individual.
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Ms Mundo was a fascinating, if not misguided, individual. Her goal of being viewed as intelligent and scholarly is evident right from the start in her introduction of Ms. Falzone. She spoke of Ms Falzone as I imagine anthropologists of yore spoke of lost tribes, tinged with judgment and an inflated sense of enlightenment and self. As I think you alluded to as well, I suspect Mundo hoped the lack of editing would convey how even “Falzone, of low culture, so simple of mind and altogether unworldly, still understood the Plan. “
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Perhaps Mundo’s weird ideas regarding the link between reincarnation and fingerprints is somewhat related to Frank Stranges’s allusion to Valiant Thor, and how he described his hands to be perfectly smooth; thus connecting fingerprints as being a record of one’s ‘sins’, or something like that.
As for Orthon showing a duck tailed pompadour and dressing in the zoot suit fashion, that is a mental image I will never be able to get rid of from now on.
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