June 24, Brian Keith, Hollywoodland, and Charles Fort

While researching the individual stories of those who have died on past June 24ths, I ran across the following series of syncs that gave me a Fortean surprise.

PART ONE

Brian Keith played the role of Mullibok in the 

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Episode 1:15 episode, "Progress," May 9, 1993,

On June 24, 1997 (exactly 50 years after the birth of the Age of Flying Saucers), Brian Keith, American actor (Family Affair, Loneliest Runner, The Parent Trap), died by suicide at 75.

From 1927 to 1929, Keith's stepmother was Peg Entwistle, a well-known Broadway actress who leapt to her death by jumping from the "H" of the famous Hollywood(land) Sign on September 16, 1932, at 24. The Hollywoodland Sign (installed in 1923), and the restored Hollywood Sign, is located on the southern side of Mount Lee in Griffith Park, north of the Mulholland Highway, and to the south of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) cemetery.

Entwistle appeared in only one film, Thirteen Women, which was released posthumously. Entwistle had won her first and only credited film role with Radio Pictures (later RKO).  Entwistle played a small supporting role as Hazel Cousins. It premiered on October 14, 1932, a month after her death, at the Roxy Theatre in New York City, and was released in Los Angeles on November 11, 1932, to neither critical nor commercial success. By the time it was re-released in 1935, 14 minutes had been cut from the film's original 73 minute running length. In 2008, Variety magazine cited Thirteen Women as one of the earliest "female ensemble" films.

Thirteen Women also starred Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne in the pre-Hays code, high-budget thriller produced by David O. Selznick and drawn from the novel by Tiffany Thayer. Tiffany Thayer? Whoa.

Born in Freeport, Illinois, Tiffany Thayer (picture above right with Cary Grant) quit school at age 15 and worked as an actor, reporter, and used-book clerk in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. When he was 16, he toured as the teenaged hero in the Civil War drama The Coward. Thayer first contacted American author Charles Fort in 1924. In 1926, Thayer moved to New York City to act, but soon spent more time writing.

In 1931 Thayer co-founded the Fortean Society in New York City to promote Fort's ideas. Primarily based in New York City, the Society was headed by first president Theodore Dreiser, an old friend of Fort who had helped to get his work published. 

Early members of the original Society in NYC included such luminaries as Dorothy Parker, Booth Tarkington, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woollcott, and H. L. Mencken. Other members included Vincent Gaddis, Ivan T. Sanderson, A. Merritt, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. 

The first 6 issues of Doubt, the Fortean Society's newsletter, were each edited by a different member, starting with Dreiser. Thayer thereafter took over editorship of subsequent issues. Thayer began to assert extreme control over the society, largely filling the newsletter with articles written by himself. He also excommunicated the entire San Francisco chapter (including Miriam Allen deFord who never considered herself a nonmember, in spite of Thayer's action), reportedly their largest and most active, after disagreements over the society's direction, and forbidding them to use the name Fortean. 

During World War II, Thayer used every issue of Doubt to espouse his politics. In contrast to the spirit of Charles Fort, he dismissed not only flying saucers as nonsense but also the atomic bomb as a hoax by the US government.

Thayer also wrote several novels, including the bestseller Thirteen Women which was filmed in 1932 and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Many of his novels contained elements of science fiction or fantasy, including Dr. Arnoldi about a world where no-one can die.

On June 24, 1997, Brian Keith, who lived in Hawaii for a few years beginning in 1970, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his home in Malibu, California, two months after his daughter Daisy died by suicide.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (USA)

1-800-273-8255

+++

PART TWO

June 24th Deaths

Kenneth Arnold began the "Age of Flying Saucers" on June 24, 1947. The list of strange ufo-aligned deaths starts with that date of note.

Here is a quick overview of the notable ufo-related deaths on or near June 24:

June 24 or 23, 1964, Frank Scully, 72, author of one of the first crashed-saucer books, Behind the Flying Saucers (1950), dies.

June 24, 1967, two British UFO contactees, Arthur Bryant, a contactee, and Richard Church, an author and chairman of CIGIUFO, die.

June 23, 1967, Frank Edwards, 55, popular UFO author and radio personality in the 1950s, dies a few hours before Arthur Bryant. James Moseley stunned the delegates assembled for the 1967 Congress of Scientific Ufologists at New York City’s Hotel Commodore on June 24th, with the news of the sudden death of Frank Edwards.

June 24, 1969, Willy Ley, 62, a rocket scientist and Fortean author, dies. Willy Ley was one of the first respected modern scientist to attempt to answer the question of what is a flying saucer. In 1952, he was one of the first, if not the first person, to say that 85% of UFO sightings are misidentified craft, leaving the other 15% open to notions of "interplanetary travel," that he began writing about in 1926.

New Addition:

How did flying saucers' occupants and creatures become enculturated with 1950s' Americans? Drive-in theater movies employed make-up artist Bud Westmore's reinforcing imagery of ufo aliens and giant monsters as the template for society's view of how these things might appear. The Age of Flying Saucers had dawned. No wonder Westmore died on the date of June 24.

June 24, 1973, Bud Westmore, 55, dies of a heart attack. 

Bud was a renowned Hollywood make-up artist of the famed Westmore family, and has been credited with doing make-up for 592 films, including It Came From Outer Space (1953), This Island Earth (1955), Tarantula (1955), The Deadly Mantis (1957), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955), The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), and scores of mainstream films, like Spartacus (1960).

The Westmore family has dominated make-up departments in Hollywood since Bud's father George created the business in 1917. They have kept visible in recent years due to McKenzie Westmore, who since 2011, has served as the host of the Syfy original series Face Off, a reality competition featuring makeup artists. Bud was the uncle to Michael Westmore, famed for his Star Trek work and the father of McKenzie.

June 24, 1978, Robert Charroux, 69, the best-known pen-name of Robert Joseph Grugeau dies. Charroux was a French author known for his ancient astronaut theories and writings on other Fortean subjects, in such books as Masters Of The World: Groundbreaking New Revelations About The Ancient Astronauts (1979).

June 24, 1987, Jackie Gleason, 71, the actor, who was an early advocate of flying saucer research, dies. Gleason's known interest in UFOs allegedly prompted President Richard Nixon to share some information with him and to disclose some UFO data publicly.

June 24, 1997, Brian Keith (see above), who starred in Meteor (1979; with Sean Connery and Natalie Wood), dies by suicide. 

June 24, 2006, Lyle Stuart, 83, the renegade publisher who published anomalist writer Frank Edwards’ Fortean book, in 1959, Stranger than Science, a paperbook full of information on ufology and other unexplained accounts, dies.

June 24, 2013, James Martin, 79, a former rocket scientist, computer scientist, and author of After the Internet: Alien Intelligence (2000), is found floating dead in the waters off Agar's Island. Dr. Martin bought Agar’s Island in 1977 and made his home in Bermuda. The multi-millionaire kept a relatively low profile in Bermuda.

June 24, 2013, Alan Myers, 58, the most prominent drummer (1976-1987) of the band Devo, dies of stomach cancer in Los Angeles. Devo played punk, art rock, post-punk and new wave music, and performed stage shows that mingled kitsch science fiction themes, deadpan surrealist humor, and mordantly satirical social commentary. Devo recorded at their own self-named "UFO Studios." More.

June 24, 2015, Mario Biaggi, 97, dies. The former Bronx congressman was involved in the "UFO disclosure" movement, and was once pictured on the cover of Ideal's UFO Magazine, December 1978, Number 4. Within the periodical, there appears the article, "Interview: Mario Biaggi 'There Is A UFO Cover-Up By The Government.'" On the cover, an image of Biaggi is shown with President Jimmy Carter. More.

June 24, 2018, Roswell, X-Files, and The Shining television guest star Stanley Anderson dies.

June 24, 2018, the Voice of New York radio during the Great Northeast Blackout (caused by UFOs?), Dan Ingram dies.

See further information on Anderson, Ingram, and others who died in 2018, here.

June 24, 2019, news reporter Sean Dunleavy, dies. The journalist was a witness to and a participant in the famed Linda Cortile UFO abduction case of November 30, 1989, Manhattan, New York. Read more.

June 24, 2020. ???

The Anarchy of Toppling Lincoln, Abolitionists, Black, and Jesus Statues

Will President Lincoln and Mr. Alexander Be Toppled on June 25, 2020?

On June 23, 2020, DC delegate Eleanor Norton announced plans to introduce legislation to remove the memorial. That same day, protesters on site vowed to dismantle the statue on Thursday, June 25, 2020, at 7:00 p.m. local time.

The call is now out to a crowd to show up at 7:00 p.m., in Washington D.C., to take down the Emancipation Monument. The statue shows President Abraham Lincoln and a soon-to-be freed slave. There is a claim that the motive to tear this statue down is because it shows a white man subjugating a black man. But the reality is different.

President Trump has said he will "send in the troops" to protect the statue. Stay tuned.

The Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedman's Memorial or the Emancipation Group, and sometimes referred to as the "Lincoln Memorial" before the more prominent so-named memorial was dedicated in 1922, is a monument in Lincoln Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Designed and sculpted by Thomas Ball and erected in 1876, the monument depicts Abraham Lincoln holding a copy of his Emancipation Proclamation freeing a male African American slave modeled on Archer Alexander. The ex-slave is depicted on one knee, with one fist clenched, shirtless and shackled at the president's feet.

Archer Alexander (c. 1810 or 1815 – December 8, 1880) was a former slave who served as the model for the emancipated slave in the Emancipation Memorial (1876) located in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. He was the subject of an 1885 biography, The Story of Archer Alexander, written by William Greenleaf Eliot.

In 1869, the author Eliot was working with a group to build a statue of Lincoln. Thomas Ball had an acceptable model made, but Eliot's group wanted to have a real freedman pose for it. Eliot gave Ball a photo of Alexander, and he was chosen as the model.

In 1876, the statue was unveiled, with a number of notable people in attendance, including President Ulysses S. Grant, members of his cabinet, Supreme Court justices, other government figures, and Frederick Douglass, another former slave. However, neither Alexander nor Eliot was present.

Confederate Statues Reflect The Defeated

Edward Luce states it simply, on June 25, 2020, in Financial Times' article "Confederate Ghosts Still Haunt America": 

More than a century and a half after the south’s defeat, a Yankee president is sticking up for defeated Confederates. Those wishing to tear down their statues “hate our history, they hate our values and they hate everything we prize as Americans”, Mr Trump said this week. Not since Woodrow Wilson has a US president been quite so praiseworthy of America’s defeated enemy. The fact that Mr Trump can do so this boldly is a measure of the US civil war’s unfinished business.

The point has been made often during the George Floyd protests that have brought down many Confederate statues across America. When Germany was defeated in World War II, symbols of Adolph Hitler were torn down without any soul-searching. When Iraq's Saddam Hussein was defeated in the US invasion, the statue of Hussein was ceremonially toppled. 

Yet in the USA, the symbols of the Confederacy are found throughout the country. Only in recent weeks, not in 1865, have the flags, names, and statues been removed in great numbers - or considered for removal. 

As Luce concluded:

This month [President Trump] rejected calls to rename military bases that commemorate civil war enemies, such as Fort Hood, Fort Bragg and Fort Benning. All 10 such bases are in former slave-owning states.

Mr Trump’s dismissal of a proposal backed by US military figures gives even optimists pause. The fact that the US still honours men who fought against the stars and stripes in a war that killed more Americans than in the two world wars combined is a reminder of what is at stake. Yet it works both ways. By making the stakes so explicit, Mr Trump is unwittingly offering America a once-in-a-generation chance to end its myopia on the Confederacy. “We de-Nazified Germany,” said Ms Anderson. “We never de-Confederalised the south.” 

Anarchy on the Horizon

What is cautionary and troubling is the over-reaction of the crowd, and the mindlessness zealous wave of statue toppling that seems unconnected to the people symbolized in the statues. The forthcoming confrontation over the Lincoln-Alexander statue in Lincoln Park appears a prime example.

Overturning statues for the stake of the power to be able to topple memorials is overtaking the demonstrations.

I started to notice this during the Albert Pike toppling, which occurred on Juneteenth. While, yes, Pike was a failed and fired Confederate general, the Lafayette Park statue and his "fame" was about his central role as the head of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. It seems the first of the "gray zone" statues.

Shomari Stone reporting for Channel4NBC stated on the video of the toppling the Pike statue that it was being done by an organized group different that the peaceful assembly he had witnessed earlier in the evening. He felt it was a planned removal of the Pike statue.

The defacing on June 22, 2020, of Lafayette Square's President Andrew Jackson statue seems similar. More symbolic than thoughtful. In office from 1829 to 1837, Jackson owned more than 500 slaves during his lifetime and was a key figure in the forced relocation of nearly 100,000 Native Americans.

Other examples are cropping up:

Several monuments depicting US president Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), have also been vandalized. He drew up the US Declaration of Independence but owned more than 600 slaves.

The bronze sculpture of Theodore Roosevelt, which has been at the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for 80 years, depicts the former leader on horseback towering over a black man and a Native American man -- who are both on foot.

In Prague, a statue to Britain’s World War II leader Winston Churchill was covered in graffiti daubed with the words "Black Lives Matter" in solidarity with the anti-racist movement in the United States.

On June 23, 2020, demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin toppled two statues. They tore down the "Forward" statue and dragged it away from its base at the steps of the Wisconsin State Capitol. The bronze allegorical statue, which is more than 100 years old, depicts a female figure standing on the prow of a boat, with her right hand stretched out while her left clasps the American flag. A short time later, the same group pulled down a statue of Col. Hans Christian Heg from the Capitol grounds and threw it into a nearby lake, according to WKOW. Heg was a Norwegian immigrant and abolitionist who served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He led the predominately-Scandinavian 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment into battle against the Confederate Army until his death at Chickamauga in 1863.

On June 14, 2020, in Whittier, California, a statue of John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet, abolitionist and Quaker the city was named after, was vandalized over the weekend. The still-unidentified vandal wrote “BLM” as well as an ”(expletive) Slave Owners” on the seated statue which is located at Central Park, 6532 Friends Ave. The suspect or suspects used different colors and spray painted the statue’s face, chest, bow tie, book and chair.

Mayor Joe Vinatieri said “He stood against slavery and racism...Many are upset about this including me because the city of Whittier is his namesake.”

“John Greenleaf Whittier did not enslave people, and indeed, was a leading anti-slavery activist in his time, in addition to being a renowned poet,” Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, archivist at the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, wrote the Whittier Daily News.

Whittier was a delegate to the first meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Convention, edited anti-slavery newspapers, helped to establish the Liberty Party, wrote numerous poems supporting the abolitionist cause as well as an 1833 tract in favor of immediate and unconditional emancipation of enslaved people, according to Caust-Ellenbogen.

Some time before June 10, 2020, protesters have defaced a statue of Philadelphia abolitionist Matthias Baldwin, dousing it with paint and spray-painting the word “colonizer” on the pedestal. The statue stands outside Philadelphia City Hall.

Born in 1795, Baldwin moved to Philadelphia from New Jersey at the age of 16 and rose from an apprenticeship at a local jeweler to establish a successful business manufacturing train locomotives. Baldwin argued for the right of Blacks to vote in Pennsylvania during the state’s 1837 Constitutional Convention, and helped establish a school for Black children where he paid teachers’ salaries for years.

Protesters also defaced Philadelphia’s Civil War Soldiers and Sailors monument with graffiti reading “BLM.” That monument’s inscription reads, “All who have labored today in behalf of the Union have wrought for the best interests of the country and the world not only for the present but for all future ages.”

“The irony of vandalizing a monument to those who died to end slavery is lost on the morons who don’t know their history,” Joe Walsh, a member of the Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park said.

54th Massachusetts Regiment Memorial Vandalized

A monument recognizing the first all-volunteer black regiment of the Union Army during the Civil War was defaced in Boston during May 31, 2020 protests, with BLM and other tags.

"A thousand men signed up just after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, just think about that," said Liz Vizza, executive director of Friends of the Public Garden. "These are men who, if they were captured in the south, would be enslaved or murdered. But this cause was so important to them, they signed up to go fight for their freedom."

The Shaw Memorial captures the likenesses of the first African American volunteer infantry unit – the 54th Massachusetts Regiment – that fought after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Their colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, advocated for the men to join the war because they desperately wanted to fight for freedom. If the soldiers had been captured in battle they could have been enslaved or killed. Their heroic story was recounted in the 1989 Hollywood film Glory.

The regiment gained widespread acclaim on July 18, 1863, when it spearheaded an assault on Fort Wagner, a key position overlooking the water approach to Charleston Harbor. The 54th Massachusetts numbered 600 men at the time of the assault. Of these, 270 were killed, wounded, or captured during the engagement. Col. Shaw was killed, along with 29 of his men; 24 more later died of wounds, 15 were captured, 52 were missing in action and never accounted for, and 149 were wounded. These casualties represented the highest in the history of the regiment during a single engagement.

One of the soldiers, Sgt. William Harvey Carney carried the American flag throughout the battle, never dropping it despite being shot 7 times. Carney was the first black American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor for action.

The purposes of the demonstrations have derailed if the memorials of Black Union soldiers, abolitionists, and Lincoln are being vandalized and toppled.

And what of the shout out to bring down...

Jesus Statues

On June 24, 2020, Snopes.com investigated the claim that the statues of Jesus were a target of toppling. They discovered that "racial justice activist Shaun King" had tweeted about this, and thus it was a "Correct Attribution."

President Donald Trump meets with Polish President Andrzej Duda in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, June 24, in Washington. He is saying, "Now they are looking at Jesus Christ, they are looking at George Washington, Thomas Jefferson ... Not going to happen, not going to happen.”

Stay tuned...