GOOD CHEER TO YOU ALL FROM SCALE MODEL NEWS

WE HOPE YOUR CHRISTMAS DAY WAS A GOOD ONE! And here's another photo album for you to while away some post-turkey moments.

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.

ELVIS LIVES! TAMIYA POSTER CAMPAIGN RECKONS SO, ANYWAY

SMN report:

We mostly associate Tamiya with top-line traditional plastic kits - and quite rightly, for they are superb products, as we recently showed with the newly-released 1:32 scale P-51D Mustang. But Tamiya doesn’t stand still, and the company recently paid the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Vietnam to create an ad campaign based around the catchline, ‘Tamiya Put It Together’. 

STEALTHY STARS AND STRIPES - ITALERI’S COLOURFUL F-117A

By Mat Irvine
It’s 26 years today since the Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk went into service with US forces, though it was another five years before the ‘stealth fighter’ was revealed to the public.

At first the F-117A seemed rather like a Model T Ford - you could have it in any colour as long as it was black. Since then however, the aircraft has been painted in various shades, including this colourful version with stars and stripes adorning the underside.

The kit comes from Italeri, last major bastion of the Italian model kit industry, (though it has acquired one of the others, Protar), and is a version of Italeri’s existing 1:72 scale kit. Two schemes are provided - both have the flag, but one has black upper surfaces, the other features low-visibility grey. The stars of the flag are provided as one decal for the nose area; for the stripes you need to paint white first, then apply seven red decal strips when the paint has dried. Otherwise, Italeri’s model assembles easily, with no real difficulties.

I made the diorama above to show the F-117A flying near the vast Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, which houses many secret US aircraft projects. Whether any are based on ‘alien technology’ is a question I’ll leave for now, but all the ‘black’ (secret) projects have likely been tested here, from the U-2 spyplane to the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117A - and probably others still to be revealed.

One place near Nellis, (and I’m talking ‘relatively’ near, as you cannot approach the base closely) is the small town of Rachel, Nevada. Outside Rachel, you will find the ‘white mail box’, infamously thought to be linked to secret UFO goings-on, and my diorama shows this, plus a jeep and its driver, waving to the pilot.

Back to the kit, and one small point: the back of Italeri’s box lists one aircraft as coming from ‘Groom Lake, New Mexico’. In fact, the lake is within Nellis Air Force Base, so it should be Nevada. ‘Groom Lake’ is one of the shorthand names often applied to the whole place – along with ‘Dreamland’ and of course, ‘Area 51’...

The Italeri F-117 is available from stores and online suppliers, including Amazon here.

UFO INVASION GROUP HEADING TO PLANET EARTH?

Now that summer’s nearly here, the UFO spotting season is well underway. And with news that massed groups of mystery lights were spotted over England and Europe this week, perhaps it’s time to wonder again at what goes on at Area 51, in Nevada.

Pegasus Hobbies' nice 1:72 kit envisages one possible answer - maybe the recent UFOs were squadrons of circular flying craft that were built here on terra firma, purportedly reverse-engineered from a mystery UFO that crashed many years ago. One mechanical engineer even claimed to have work on a ‘flying disc simulator’, communicating with an alien being called J-Rod.

Ah well, here at SMN Towers, we’ll just have to stick with the Pegasus kit here.

The London Daily Mail has a good feature on these recent events here.

Book review: Scale Spacecraft Modelling

This chunky paperback provides you with 208 colour pages, packed with useful information. It's the second Mat Irvine model book I've reviewed recently, and it maintains the fascination factor, this time for space modellers.

Mat provides a comment or a picture on just about everything to do with the subject, from the early days of spaceflight up to the present, and (most interesting for me) space-dreams and science-fiction sections, which cover all sorts of subjects from a Doctor Who Dalek to an Area 51 Roswell UFO.

Highly recommended for handy hints and ideas. Published by Crowood at £16.99 GBP or $29.95 USD, and the Amazon store may well offer a deal price on this.