Colouring Book Theatre: UFO Seeing is Believing
UFO: Seeing is Believing Coloring Book
By Whitman 1978
Another colouring book I found rummaging through Planet of the Stuff a couple of weeks ago. Not to be confused with the Gerry Anderson UFO coloring book we covered a few months back.
Whitman had quite the little cottage industry capitalizing on the UFO craze in the late 60s/early 70s. A quick scan of Ebay reveals comics and puzzles bearing that beautiful art like this cover.
I’m assuming this book is made up of abridged comic stories, the majority of them don’t make a lot of sense, due to the format.
Let’s take a look at this after the jump…
This story struck me as the most interesting, maybe I’ll do another one next week. Officer Herb Schirmer investigates a disturbance and encounters a UFO!
Like a lot of these stories, it’s told in a lengthy flash back. I’ll spare you the many pages of Herb in a therapists office (what a joy to colour!) and go to the story.
That’s probably Rum.
Note the alien’s uniforms, they bugged me but i figured out why.
The aliens have bases under the water and plan to invade?
Nope it’s a friendly invasion? So like the British Invasion, lucky for me this isn’t resolved. The aliens show Herb around then make him leave, I’m pretty sure Herb is leaving out the hours of probing.
And like all of the stories in here, the Aliens are mysterious, largely malevolent and often a force for good. Nobody gets killed and it’s really low on the death ray quotient. Probably why I never read these as a kid but something bugged me about this story and i realized why.
Look familiar? It’s a scene from Canada’s incredible sci fi opus “Starship Invasions“. The lead bad guys have underwater bases and wear Winged Serpents on their shirts. Invasions came out a year before this book, so I’m assuming that it influenced it somewhat. Frankly, the colouring book wins…..
UPDATE: I’ve been told that the Winged Serpent stories are based on eye witness accounts from the 1960s and Starship Invasions based the designs on that. The fact that this movie did research seems less plausible than the UFO accounts but I digress as I know nothing of UFO culture.
I can't be 100% certain, but the artwork looks like that of Tony Tallarico. He did the artwork for the Dell comics Superhero versions of Dracula and other classic monsters.
As I said; can't be 100% certain, but the hands, eyes and lines look like his style.
Im sorrow but my 10 year old self cant stop looking at that ladies butt . its a mystery in itself thar bears closer inspection.The Winged serpent is none other than the Aztec Queztaquatl .