Yesterday I woke up to a seriously painful backache. I mean, I woke up from the PAIN...

That was something horrible. I pulled myself up and tried sitting still, but the pain was too much.

I didn't know what I was going to do...

Then sitting there next to my computer was a sweet little gift from my friendly UPS driver. Maybe I better not say my UPS driver, let's just say a friend who spends lots of time delivering heavy, back breaking packages all day long.

Anyway, one day I was complaining of some pain or another, and he offered me this horse pill sized Vicadin pill. He said they all carry them around and eat them like candy... Ya know, for the pain.

He's like one of my favorite best friends now, and he really means alot to me after I popped this magical capsule into my mouth.

It didn't take long before my skin and muscles began tingling and going numb.

I still felt my spine throbbing in pain, but it was like my body was all numb around it and and my mind didn't really care that the pain was there... I was listening to some streaming audio of some old time radio dramas to sooth me.

These radio shows were Horror Shows from the 40's and 50's and real good.

I passed out almost instantly and the dreams filtered through the dope and mingled with the dandling synapses's as the stories lead the nightmares on...

Great sleep!

One story from a show called, "X-Minus-One" was by Theodore Sturgeon and that episode was called, "Saucer of Loneliness" about a flying saucer that comes to Earth and gives a private and personal message to a lonely woman.

She is witnessed by numerous people and the Government wants to know the message. She tells them the message was private, but they imprison her on the grounds that she's a threat to Homeland Security.

Cool story! Very much a message in a bottle love story, check it out if you can.

This episode had many of the original commercials in the breaks from that time period. One was for a pancake mix and one local commercial talked about a special radio that you could by that would allow communication with Aliens.

This radio was manufactured in the Los Angeles area and sold in this advertisement. The voice on the spot was the owner and builder of the "Cosmic-Communicator" and he gives his address for orders.

I quickly rolled over... No back pain! And I jotted down the address.

I kinda knew the area, but it wasn't a Post Office Box, this guy actually gave the street address of the business, or his home.

Times have changed.

Imagine the freaks that would show up now!

This was the Fifties, maybe slightly less freakish.

I typed the address into Mapquest and printed out the map. I showered. Dressed. Jumped into the car.

I knew this was wrong and the guy is most likely dead now, but I was just curious where it was... Ya know, for a sense of History.

The area was an industrial part of Pico Boulevard. I drove around the same block several times before I located the boarded up storefront and stairs leading up to a second floor apartment.

It was a split address.

The storefront had old newspaper covering the inside glass, but the mailbox on the wall said in peeling stick on letters... U F L Tronics LTD.

I think some letters were missing.

The doorbell was missing and several wires hung out of the rotting wood hole. The wires were those old clothe insulated wires that would never pass building codes now.

For some reason I touched one wire and the clothe just disintegrated in my fingertips.

I heard an old man ask, "What are you doing?"

Standing there was a very old man wearing jogging sweats and an old robe with holes in it. He was also holding a lawn dart.

I don't know why, but the lawn dart stunned me. It was not only odd seeing one, but seeing someone holding one in a part of the city that has no lawn to throw the dart on to...

I tried to explain this story that brought me here, but he didn't seem to want to hear all of it.

He stepped back up the stairwell and slammed the door between us without saying another word.

I thought it best to head back to my car.

I unlocked my car door when I heard him yell to me from a window on the second floor next to a billboard for a Beeper Company.

"Are you talking about that old UFO Walkie-Talkie?"

I hadn't heard it called that on the radio show.

"Yeah, I think so..."

"Just a minute Then" he yelled back pulling his head back in the window.

The downstairs door opens and another old man stepped out. This one had a huge hearing aid on both ears and one large orthopedic shoe.

"Boy, I want to show you something." He waved me in.

The walk up the stairs was slow for this guy and he said nothing as we walked up.

Stepping inside their apartment I was hit by a bad smell of age, dust, mold, and someone canning beans... I think.

In a back room the old guy had a very messy office filled with filing cabinets and old equipment.

I could hear the other guy in their tiny kitchen banging pots and pans.

This guy pulled out a box of papers from a drawer and motioned me over to a full desk piled high with old magazines and papers.

These papers were old dusty schematics of electronic tube type stuff.

He showed me what he had been selling in magazines and on the radio. Not the actual item, but pictures from old ads and photos of him as a young man selling these at UFO Conventions.

He told me about being arrested and threatened with exposure as a Communist if he continued selling these radios to talk with Aliens.

He told me how he met a man that built the first radio after a flying saucer forced his small plane down in the desert near Imperial Valley.

The Aliens gave him a radio to give to the authorities so they could explain their needs to visit our world.

This man never was able to give it to anyone because he later crashed his plane at the Van Nuys Airport.

The wreckage yielded some broken alien components and with the help of a Naval Radio Operator friend he pieced it back together best as they could at the time.

He sold the plans to this man and he sold his music recording store and started manufacturing and selling the radios until the Government shut him down.

I asked him what they heard listening to the radios and he told me sometimes they spoke in weird strange languages and sometimes they spoke in English trying to let people know where they were going to land next.

The aliens believed the radio must be in the hands of our leaders and waited for some kind of response that never arrived. Except by people that bought the new radios he was selling.

He told me many of his radios were confiscated, but in the late sixties he began working with occultists on a variation in the radio to communicate with the dead.

The first radio he made of that kind was used by him with Sammy Davis Jr and a group of friends at a Hollywood party.

Several dead people began speaking to them through the radio.

He told me the otherside was so excited that there was a way to communicate to us without having to speak to us through dreams. The dead began racing around to find dead relatives of those in the room at the party so they could talk.

He told me the party lasted days as everyone was so moved by the stories the dead told about life in the spirit world.

He explained that the dead know the past and future and one deceased Uncle of his repeatedly told him winning horses to place bets on at Santa Anita.

Then his Uncle begged him to place all his savings on a stock for a company that would build mass transit monorails coast to coast and eliminate cars all together.

He sold everything and bought the stock.

He lost everything and asked his Uncle why...?

The Uncle told him it had been a good tip from the deceased Mother of the man who was embezzling the money from the monorail company.

So even in the spirit world there is trouble.

They also told him we would all be living on Venus in glass cities in the year 1987.

They told him the woman that worked for him would make a fantastic wife, even though he himself was a Homosexual and she later an alcoholic nymphomaniac...

It not only ended in divorce, but in Lawsuit and Prison for her.

The man told me that, "it's fun listening to the dead speak, but if they're as fucked up as we are... What's the point? Might as well watch Jerry Springer and save your money."

As I drove home I watched the skies and listened to the radio for news of space invasion... Nothing happened.

Same as it always is...

I went back to bed and slept for a little while longer.

I dreamed of living in Glass Cities on Venus.

Then the Vicadin wore off...