The truth is not only out there, but, back in the mid-1970s in Olney, Philadelphia, it also went unchecked by The Olney Times.
Mike “Meak” Carlin and his buddies – dubbed “The Olney Boys” – grew up in a brick rowhome in a working-class Irish- and Italian-American neighborhood in the North Philly area of North Fifth Street and Nedro Avenue, directly across the street from Lowell Elementary School and a block or so away from St. Helena Catholic Church.
To pass the time, the clique pulled pranks on one another – disappearing ink, cigarette loads, and all that; things one would find as ads for $2.95 in the back of comic books next to the sea monkeys and Melba Toast. One time, Carlin sprayed red disappearing ink on the white Sunday’s best church dress of a little girl, and then had to wait 10 minutes with her angry parents to prove it disappeared. They also did “tummy warmers,” where they would walk by and randomly punch one another in the stomach.
You know, fun stuff.
Occasionally, they would drop in at The Olney Times’ headquarters and talk to the receptionists and reporters, or write in to the newspaper, retelling far-fetched tales that they passed off as true.
Then one day, with nothing better to do and a shared love for sci-fi, they decided to up the ante and pull the biggest prank they could and fool their whole neighborhood – aliens had come to Olney.
Their UFO sighting made front-page news weeks later, and Carlin, now 61, had pulled the biggest prank for his busy town.
Carlin took these memories from 1974 to 1977 – and many more experiences from adolescence – and compiled them in a book during the pandemic via extended writing sessions at Backyard Beans in Lansdale. The 370-page memoir, “Olney Boys See UFOs,” taking its title from the headline of the infamous Olney Times issue, is now available on Amazon.
“It’s exactly a memoir. I had a bunch of really crazy friends. We were all into pranks,” Carlin said. “Olney was almost like a small town: It was self-contained, we had our own parades, our own shopping district, all the schools were nearby. You didn’t go outside of Olney for anything.”
As days grew into months, the pranks escalated and escalated. Most of them are retold in his book, for instance, convincing The Olney Times that his friend won a fly-catching contest.
“They didn’t seem to be checking anything,” Carlin said. “We were goofing on them.”
Then, he planted a story about UFOs over the Olney skies.
“My friend, Carl Meistering, he was really into UFOs, so I made up a story basically that me, Carl and Mike Owens, we were in the local schoolyard (at Lowell Elementary) where we hung out, and saw UFOs in formation, then sped off, and we watched in amazement,” he said. “It was a big load of crap, and it was on the front page of The Olney Times a few weeks later.”
The editor was Tom Reilly, a nice guy who, Carlin surmised, was starved for content in his little newspaper.
“We told them stories and made them believe it,” he said. “I told them, ‘Just in case you forget any of this, I have it written down on this yellow legal tablet.’ And they kept it.”
It did not end there, as the Olney Boys got the newspaper a second time. This time, the UFOs were flying over railroad tracks and sucking energy out of electric wires.
“It’s unbelievable – they printed that too,” Carlin said. “It became legend: people thought UFOs were flying around our town. It was a grand prank, and I don’t think we could ever top it. We stopped after that, but nobody beat this.”
Eventually, the Olney Boys got caught.
“They wrote something in the news about me, ‘Mike Carlin Having Fun Writing Letters.’ The mystery of who told on me to The Olney Times,” he said, “ultimately, was figured out during the writing of this book.”
Carlin, whose Irish-German dad was a retail worker at Lit Brothers at Eighth and Market in Philadelphia and Italian mom was a homemaker, interviewed 37 friends for the book, all of whom had stories to tell about how they were involved in what transpired for four years in the 1970s.
“All the parents that bought a house across from the schoolyard thought it was great, because they live across from a schoolyard and it’s idyllic. An older group of kids at night were raising hell, and all the parents on the block had issues with a few kids, but these guys were funny. Some of that is in the book,” he said. “My mom would go to the window and yell out, ‘Hey, shut the hell up out there!’”
Carlin, a drummer who has played cover songs locally as Rick & MC, said the neighborhood was close knit, filled with kids from the Baby Boomer generation.
“There were so many unique experiences to be had because there were so many kids around,” he said.
Carlin’s book is filled with these tales and more, like when streaking hit the town, thanks to the Flyers 1974 Stanley Cup win, and the anecdotes and adages he learned from his maternal grandfather, who hailed from Gesualdo, Italy and had a funny way of cursing.
Carlin, a father of four and grandparent of five, who moved his family from Olney to Yorktown Street in Lansdale Borough 23 years ago, is currently on a book signing tour across the region.
“I was in Lansdale all the time,” said Carlin, whose career selling real estate data landed Montgomery County as his sales territory, “and so I got to know Lansdale. When we decided to move – I lived in Olney in the same area where I grew up – I knew some folks here, and I grew to love it. I love that it’s a train town.”
Carlin is holding a book signing Saturday from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at Tannery Run Brew Works in Ambler. Another event is being scheduled for June outdoors at Backyard Beans in Lansdale.
“I wrote a lot of my book at that place, and I got to know (owners) Matt and Laura Adams,” he said. “They told me it was great to have me there and when the book was finally finished, I had ideas for book signings. And they said let’s do one here.”
Follow Olney Boys See UFOs on Facebook for future updates and details on Carlin’s book.
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