The Menger Backyard Visitors

The guests at Howard Menger's saucer gathering in April 1957 are said to have included four spacemen passing as ordinary people. The one our telling names is Val, the alleged Venusian known as Valiant Thor. With him came three crew members called Don, Jill and Tanya. All four wore Earth clothing. The gathering was held on Menger's property in High Bridge, Hunterdon County, New Jersey. The photographer August C. Roberts is said to have taken pictures of them.

What is on the record

The two claimants are Menger, the host, and Roberts, the photographer, and both come from one telling on one channel. Neither is an independent witness in the usual sense. Menger was the contactee at the centre of the story, and Roberts' photographs are the evidence offered for it. That telling gives no detail of the day beyond the guests, their clothes and the camera, and it does not say how many other people were present.

Menger's contactee activity at High Bridge in 1956 and 1957 is documented in the general record. Valiant Thor's attendance is not. That claim goes back only to Frank Stranges and to Roberts' photographs, and the standard catalogues do not mention the gathering at all. No official body ever looked at it. The usual reading is a contactee claim that was never confirmed, and the archive holds nothing that changes that. Nor does it hold the photographs. No picture of guests in Earth clothes could show where they came from.

Why it sits where it does

The L3 grade counts a host and his photographer as two claimants, which flatters the file. Both belonged to the contactee circle that made the claim and carried it. An account of the day from any other guest would change that. Who stood in Menger's garden that April is not resolved here.