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The Janos People (Mann Family Encounter; 1980)

The whole thing seems to have had a suspiciously literary quality from the start.
 
The whole thing seems to have had a suspiciously literary quality from the start.
Indeed, and with some definite underlying sexual symbolism thrown in. The Janos men are slender with no visible masculine traits such as musculature, beards, chest/body hair and he does not speculate on their genitalia, even when they are wearing what in the 70s would have been quite revealing.'swim trunks". The Janos women, however, are feminine and caring, with slim bodies, small breasts and we are told they look younger than they are.

Make of that what you will...
 
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There are some strange aspects to this.

The description of 'tidal gravitational friction' that disrupts the orbit of the closer moon is quite accurate, and sounds like the result of some relatively successful research by the author (not something that was easy to do before Google); but the idea of a chain reaction involving uranium-powered nuclear power stations is ridiculous, as is the idea of designing these power stations to look like the Eiffel Tower.

Any advanced civilisation worth the name would make these stations 'fail-safe', not liable to a cascade failure. The debris falling down from the sky following the break-up of a moon would be far more damaging than any nuclear disaster, in any case.
 
There are some strange aspects to this.

The description of 'tidal gravitational friction' that disrupts the orbit of the closer moon is quite accurate, and sounds like the result of some relatively successful research by the author (not something that was easy to do before Google); but the idea of a chain reaction involving uranium-powered nuclear power stations is ridiculous, as is the idea of designing these power stations to look like the Eiffel Tower.

Any advanced civilisation worth the name would make these stations 'fail-safe', not liable to a cascade failure. The debris falling down from the sky following the break-up of a moon would be far more damaging than any nuclear disaster, in any case.
It has been suggested that the rather ridiculous idea for the chain reaction explosions of the nuclear power stations was lifted from the plot of either this tv drama or the book it was based upon:

Red Alert -- 1977
American, Drama
Director: William Hale
Cast includes: William Devane, Michael Brandon, Adrienne Barbeau, Ralph Waite, David
Hayward, M. Emmet Walsh
Synopsis: A thriller stemming from an accident at a nuclear power plant. Based on the novel Paradigm Red by Harold King. (Available on videocassette)

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interact/hollywood.html

The whole moon idea sounds plausible until you read that it was their rocket ships repeatedly taking off from its surface that were responsible for the moon fracturing. Hmmm....
 
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I should perhaps mention that the idea of a worldwide nuclear chain reaction was seriously considered before the Trinity bomb test in 1945; it was thought possible that the neutrons from a nuclear explosion might cause radioactive elements in the crust to blow up all over the world.

Luckily this didn't happen, and there was no realistic danger of it happening in any case.
 
I don't know, tall blonde aliens, the idea of settling them in the north of Scandinavia, it all has a slightly dubious air to me before we even get on to the content of the story. Is there any evidence about who Frank Johnson was? I can't seem to see much evidence of an exobiologist of this name beyond references to the book - or to a hyponotist Geoffrey McCartney for that matter. Is there any chance this could all be fiction?
 
It's the naming structure of aliens that puzzles me. We have languages on Earth where syllables are rendered as 'clicks' or other sounds. How come all aliens seem to have names that can easily be rendered in our alphabet? Granted, there's often an awkward juxtaposition of letters, more Z's than are usual, but shouldn't at least some of them have words that are utterly unreproduceable within the limits of Earth language?
 
And they all sound a bit like Greek or Latin without actually being in those languages.
Janos, Saton, Akilias, and so on.
Approximately the same naming conventions as used on Doctor Who.
 
Yes contactees' alien names often seem to mirror either classical languages (as above), vaguely Celtic sounding structures ("Selorik", "Caellsan", and "Traellison" at Warminster) or ordinary earthly names ("Indrid", "Jitro", "Elvana", reported by Woody Derenberger)
 
I don't know, tall blonde aliens, the idea of settling them in the north of Scandinavia, it all has a slightly dubious air to me before we even get on to the content of the story. Is there any evidence about who Frank Johnson was? I can't seem to see much evidence of an exobiologist of this name beyond references to the book - or to a hyponotist Geoffrey McCartney for that matter. Is there any chance this could all be fiction?
Its a good point, and of course it was the year Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released and the official title of the book is "The Janos People: A Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind".

We have the short ATV tv interview with a rather unconvincing/untroubled family we are told are the Manns and during which the book is shown and heavily plugged. Then we have the radio show linked above. Unfortunately, I have been unable to access the actual interview as it requires an academic log-in and mine has expired. It is possible the interview with 'John' and 'Gloria' was a conducted over a telephone link, and of course the two children and the sister are missing. Then we have 'reenactment' of the hypnotic regression being played by named actors, and that is about the sum of it. To the best of my knowledge, he author and the witnesses have stayed silent ever since.

I have not been able to find any information online about hypnotist Geoff McCartney (M'Cartney in some texts) nor Frank Johnson, although his name is too common for a precise search. However, I found the following lurking within the Janos pdf but not in the actual book:

"6. My knowledge of the Janos story comes mainly from
the Johnson book. I have had some contact with Jenny
Randles, UFO author, in regard to Janos. She and a friend
had some association with the author, the hypnotist and
the family. She ended up with a negative reaction and
claimed the hypnotist was somehow responsible for
planting the story in the minds of the family
."

Also:

"The author of the book, Frank Johnson, is now dead."

Apparently there was a website as well the book. I cannot verify if the above information is true, but it has the ring of truth and it would of course be fantastic to her from Jenny herself (she has been on this forum). This does suggest that there was an actual family, hypnotist and author, but how honest were they being with jenny, as she clearly felt unhappy with the case. Poor old Frank, although killing off Frank could be construed as covering up what was a work of fiction. As ever with all things Fortean, it is a bit of a tangled web.

Frank provides us with a list of UFO books at the foot of the open letter to the Janos people and interestingly it includes this book:

HOLROYD, STUART: Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth. W. H. Allen;Corgi 1977

I remember it well from the BUFORA book list and it written as fiction. Has anyone on this forum read it? I feel it may be the inspiration for his book. My feeling at present is that it was either a joint work of fiction and an attempt to get well known Ufologist Jenny Randles to authenticate the story and then go after the big money film deal, or a family who had a strange experience on the road that night but were hopelessly led astray by the hypnotist and the author. As regards the latter theory, there are a good number of cases where people - and indeed whole families - have encountered strange mists and/or lights along roads at night that have had some sort of effect on their memories/sense of time.
 
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"The author of the book, Frank Johnson, is now dead."

This, and the lack of other firm information does lead me to think of the Cedric Allingham case.
 
When I see the name Janos I think of Kodaly's Hary Janos, teller of tall tales. "That his stories are not true is irrelevant, for they are the fruit of a lively imagination, seeking to create, for himself and for others, a beautiful dream world."
 
This, and the lack of other firm information does lead me to think of the Cedric Allingham case.
It is a very blunt statement, not "sadly passed away" or "no longer with us" and leans towards a fictional character killed off rather than a real human being deceased. Yes, definite parallels with the Cedric Allingham case ( a clever and amusing deception by Patrick Moore)

Why would a family adopt pseudonyms and then allow themselves to be photographed for the book (never mind appearing on the tv interview). To my mind someone will have recognised them, especially with school age children, and could have made a tidy sum shopping them to a red top tabloid. But then Jenny Randles apparently met them all, although she clearly wasn't taken in by it all. I feel if the story had any merit then Jenny would have co-authored the book or least provided a forward. Which is another red flag: no mainstream ufologist was attached to the book.

Edit: According to Malcolm Robison the Cedric Allingham book sold over 10.000 hardback copies, so clearly some money to be made from a hoax (UFO Case Files of Scotland 2).
 
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