Monday 17 November 2008

Levittown PA Celebrates Launch of ‘Welcome to Mars’ Ahead of Schedule




A link currently on the Strange Attractor website reveals that the inhabitants of Levittown Pennsylvania have been a little previous in celebrating the publication of ‘Welcome to Mars’, which will actually receive its official launch at the Horse Hospital tomorrow evening (see Google calendar and previous post, dated November 15). According to Linda Moulton Howe of the Earthfiles website, reports have been coming in of a morphing sparkling aerial object seen over this former suburban housing project.

The report begins as follows:

‘November 13, 2008 Levittown, Pennsylvania – On July 13, 2008, I received a phone call from Robert Gardner, MUFON Field Investigator living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bob wanted to know if I knew a scientist who could analyze “glitter” that had fallen from a pink-colored, aerial disc over an apartment complex in Levittown. Bob’s had talked with an eyewitness who first left him with the impression that sparkling, physical material had fallen onto a privet bush growing next to the female eyewitness’s apartment. After I asked questions in order to get physical material to a scientist who helps me with energy dispersive spectroscopy and other laboratory tests, Bob learned that there was no physical material. But the eyewitness wanted to know what might have happened to the privet bush growing next to her apartment door. She was alarmed when she found a dead bird near the privet bush the next day after the April 20, 2008, sighting. Later on, the female eyewitness’s daughter would also see the aerial craft.’

Levittown provides the focal point for the whole 'Welcome to Mars' narrative, linking flying saucers, behavioural modification, social sciences and civil defence strategies. Located on former agricultural land midway between New York City and the munitions plants of Long Island, the first Levittown was opened to the public in 1947, offering affordable housing in the form of small, detached single-family units made from prefabricated sections and standardized components. Suburbia had begun to extend its grand conformity into space.

A planned community of 6,000 households, each situated 60 feet apart on their own patch of ground, it quickly expanded to embrace a further 11,000. Its creator William Levitt, whose benign avuncular features graced the cover of ‘Time’ Magazine, then moved his operation to Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1952, where a carefully zoned development of 17,000 homes, complete with its own paved streets, electric lighting, off-street water, sewerage system, telephone and power lines, was quickly established. Levittown PA also boasted open greens, sites for public schools and recreation areas, together with five Olympic-sized swimming pools. By then, William Levitt’s company was knocking out production-line homesteads at a rate of one every fifteen minutes.

Hey, I only write this stuff - other people have to live it.

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