1:48 SCALE FUEL TANKER FROM ATLANTIS MODELS: A NEW TAKE ON THE REVELL ORIGINAL

THIS EXCELLENT LITTLE RETRO MODEL will make a useful accessory for dioramas based on US 0-gauge railroads, and aircraft kits to 1:48 scale.

NEW KITS FROM ATLANTIS - ANIMALS, PIRATES, GLADIATORS AND MORE

From Mat Irvine:

One of the newest of the ‘new companies’ with connections to the original Aurora company is Atlantis, the model-kit arm of Megahobby, an online hobby distributor with the declared aim of bringing plastic modelling: “back to the level of popularity it once enjoyed.”

Atlantis is run by Pete Vetri and Rick Delfavero, who have cemented the Aurora connection by using as consultant long-time Aurora Project Manager, Andy Yanchus.

50 YEARS OF ALIEN ABDUCTIONS

David Jefferis on close encounters:

On the night of September 19-20, 1961, the US couple Betty and Barney Hill reckoned they experienced a close encounter with a UFO. During the incident they ‘lost’ two hours, but survived intact, to file a report to US Air Force investigators the very next day. They claimed to have seen a silent, cigar-shaped craft, crewed by up to 11 humanoid aliens.

LAST LANDING - SPACE SHUTTLE ATLANTIS RETURNS TO EARTH

It’s the end of the space trucking era, says David Jefferis:

Forty two years after Armstrong and Aldrin stepped onto the Moon’s surface, it was touchdown for the Space Shuttle Atlantis, and the last-ever mission for the most complex spacecraft system ever built. There’s moaning and groaning by the bucketload, with headlines claiming the end of the US space program, but the reality is that the Shuttle, whatever its merits, represented a retreat from the Moon and true space exploration. For the Shuttle was a space truck to Earth orbit, and no further. Let’s hope that privateer companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, fulfill their ambitions and take humans onward and outward, to explore the High Frontier.