Interplanetary U.F.O.

Back in my modeling days, when I was a young lad. I came across a strange model that glowed in the dark and seemed for all intents and purposes to belong to the Star Trek line of space ship models making the rounds back in the day. My model was rather sloppily built and unpainted, see even then I new the value of glow in the dark plastic, it was best to leave its surface untouched so you could get the maximum glow effect, but it had glorious battles with the crew of the Starship Enterprise, and the lesser known Starship Lexington. My first encounter with this ship ended with its ultimate destruction in a summer of swimming and taking it in the water. It eventually lost it nose cone and wings, and the little ship that could be placed inside the working shuttle bay.

A few years later I made a friend named Randy who owned a copy of the very same ship. I was probably now on my 100th model Enterprise, another Lexington to be exact, that I would use whenever the group of us would play Starships. I was never that good at keeping them together long, but I feel I kept AMT model company in the black for a few summers buying starships, so they kept releasing the model which was good for me. Randy would use his Interplanetary U.F.O. Now Randy was fanatical about taking care not damage his model, and I will go on record as saying it was the finest example of a U.F.O. as ever was seen. We had a whole back story for this ship, it was a friend of the Federation, but no ship could get too close to it because it would melt right through the wandering ships haul. I had a horrible clump of pant on the bottom of the saucer section of the Lexington due to my inexperience with spray paint, so it was common knowledge that in a fierce battle with the Klingons, the Lexington and the Interplanetary U.F.O. outnumbered three to one, tried a flanking maneuver where that resulted in close proximity passing of the two ships. In case you are wondering three decks were lost that day on the Lexington, but the two ships were victorious in the battle known as Lemonwood Lane 324.

We spent a summer of recreating all these wonderful Starfleet engagements when the unspeakably happened, the little U.F.O. shuttle craft was lost, in my back yard. We spent two days and a night combing the area where it was lost before we gave up. Randy never seemed that much into Starship battles ever again after that. You see the kit was discontinued and had been out of circulation. I believe he even crafted a new little shuttle craft out of extra bits from other models, but it wasn't the same. I often thought about finding it on Ebay now, but it is one of the more rarer kits out there so it goes for a chunk of change if they even get posted at all. I've heard of this ship also being issued non glowing as the Lief Ericson, an exploration ship, but I refuse to see it as anything else but the Interplanetary U.F.O. Also I recently learned that Matt Jefferies was asked to designed the model for the AMT corporation, having designed the ships of Star Trek back in the day. What a great link to Trek!


click image to check out Round 2's U.F.O.

So where am I going with all this? Well, when I saw that my favorite Mr. Spock Kit was being re released, I started to wish for a few more kits, now I know the Interplanetary U.F.O. does not belong to the official Star Trek universe, but it was one that I was secretly wishing to make a come back. I'm not sure how I missed this the first time, but having read the article and posting about Mr. Spock, I thought a few days later I would see where I could maybe pre order the Mr. Spock Kit. I went back to the article source and followed the link they gave to a model store and there in front of me was none other than the Interplanetary U.F.O. just as I remembered it. Holy Crap! I quickly found Round 2's website to see if this was true, and low and behold it's going to be re released as well. First Spock and now this ship, how freaking good do I have to be this year now that the toy gods have smiled upon me. So now I'm looking at this a thinking I have to tell Randy, I ran into him about a year ago and we exchanged email addresses, he forwards jokes to me on occasion, but we really never email back and forth much. I knew that I have to send him the link, oh and look how convenient a "mail to a friend" link on the Round 2 page. So I'll have to keep you posted as I'm gathering up the images for this post and to email to a past friend, hoping he's still a geek at heart like me.