The swamp gas might have been particularly thick around Manhattan that day. Knut Hammarskjoeld, 44, director general of the International Air Transport Association, was conjuring up otherworldly aircraft at a meeting of the Aviation Space Writers Association. "I must make a confession," said Knut, whose Uncle Dag Hammarskjold was rather a mystic before him. "I believe in those Unidentified Flying Objects. Is it really unlikely that there exist civilizations outside our planet which are more developed, both technically and mentally, than we are? Are these space neighbors of ours getting more interested in what we are doing as our own technical abilities develop?"

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Long gone are the days when the Radio Priest called Franklin Delano Roosevelt "the great liar and betrayer," when he joined with Huey Long's third-party movement and loudly boomed his weekly antiwar message across the country from Detroit's Station WJR. On the eve of the 50th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, Father Charles Coughlin, 74, silenced by Edward Cardinal Mooney in 1940 at F.D.R.'s behest, held a press conference at his rectory in Royal Oak, Mich., and allowed: "I understand more about charity than I did 40 years ago. Who am I to throw stones? Now it is to me simply: my President, right or wrong."

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Normally, when someone opens his mouth and throws up his arms in London's Hyde Park, he is cranking up a harangue on Marx, the Scriptures, or the empire's twilight. Comedienne Lucille Ball, 54, could probably have done the crackpot bit as well as anyone, though, as it happened, she was just spreading her wings in the fresh spring air before going back to shooting a TV special called "Lucy Goes to London." The show won't be quite as racy as 1963's "Elizabeth Taylor in London," but Lucy swings well enough herself in such gear locations as Carnaby Street and Belgravia. In one sequence shot on the Thames, she swung so much that she capsized a rowboat and wound up sputtering in the chilly river.

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A very minor poet for Paris' L'Express once raved: "What a lovely face, what carnal splendor, what a future!" Since those anapaests were hatched, the lass from Tunis, Actress Claudia Cardinale, 28, has taken her splendors to Hollywood, where not long ago she finished a farce with Rock Hudson called Blindfold. Everyone's eyes were wide open in Manhattan, when Claudia arrived to flack for the picture and offer learned comments right from the bosom. "It's not the only thing any more," she demurely told Broadway Gossip Earl Wilson. "You used to look only at the bosom. Now you look at the legs, the body, the whole girl!"

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She had come a long way from the snow-covered Hungarian landscape over which she trudged with her parents that December day ten years ago, when they fled in the uprising of her homeland. Now Maria Judith Remenyi, 20, has a new country and a title that emphatically proves it. She is the new Miss U.S.A., a distinction she won more on the strength of baajos charms than on the basis of her cerebral talents--four languages and a major in physics at the University of California. "You may not realize how wonderful it is to be an American unless you have lived behind the Iron Curtain," she said. Then, oppressed by photographers, she went out and romped on the beach.

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For months his wife and personal cook have been trying to get the boss to watch those between-meal snacks. But sometimes, tattled Deputy White House Press Secretary Robert Fleming, 54, Lyndon Johnson gets sneaky about it. Not long ago, Fleming told a group of labor editors, the President tiptoed into the kitchen late one night to raid the icebox. Just as he was digging into some tapioca pudding, the scraping of his metal spoon against the pan aroused Lady Bird, who must have the ears of an Apache scout. She chewed him out. Unrepentant, the President studied the problem for a while and then gave Fleming a short order: "Get me a wooden spoon."

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It sounded like a trip from Sodom to Gomorrah. Before he sailed from the U.S., Evangelist Billy Graham, 47, had ticked off quite a list of sinners inhabiting his native land: "The beatnik, the rebellious youth, the price-rigging executive, the draft-card burner, the pregnant high school girl, the dope addict, the bribed athlete" and a host of others. Behold, things didn't look any purer to Billy when he arrived in London to begin a month-long crusade. "To read the papers and magazines, you would think that we were almost worshiping the female bosom," he said at a news conference. "The danger signals in both America and Britain are flying. We are well on the route to decadence."

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