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Nazi propaganda left downtown

Cards bearing messages written by the American Nazi Party have caught the eye of at least one Mountain View resident who reports seeing the cards posted around downtown repeatedly.

Downtown resident David Smydra, a former Half Moon Bay Review reporter who now works for Google, has seen the cards posted six times since early November near Trinity United Methodist church, St. Joseph's church and at Mercy-Bush park, where the cards have been tacked on a post near the bin for dog-waste bags.

Smydra said he was conflicted about drawing attention to the issue, but decided to go ahead. "The best cure for bad speech is more, better speech," he said in an email.

Nazi views are not what Mountain View is about, he said. The group's racism and anti-Semitism do not reflect "what I've seen in the five years I've lived in Mountain View."

The cards read "Racial Pride & Unity For Blacks = OK. Browns = OK. Whites = Hate?" along with a website address.

The card doesn't mention the group's history of militant racism and Anti-Semitism which is well documented and hard to ignore. Upon his assassination by an expelled ANP member in 1967, the BBC reported that ANP founder George Rockwell believed "all blacks should be deported to Africa and every Jew dispossessed and sterilized." He also believed that "traitors" such as former Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower should be hanged.

Police said they had received no reports about the cards or any other Nazi activity in the area.

—Daniel DeBolt

Talk on search for ET

Frank Drake is giving a free lecture about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) at 7:45 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 9, at Foothill College.

Drake, who has a doctorate from Harvard University in astronomy, is famous for inventing the Drake equation in 1961. The equation estimates the quantity of detectable extraterrestrial life in the Milky Way galaxy.

He and Carl Sagan designed the Pioneer plaque in 1972. The plaque was a pictorial message attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts, the first human-made objects to leave the solar system.

Drake serves on the board of directors of the SETI Institute in Mountain View. The Institute is a nonprofit organization, founded in 1984, dedicated to researching the prevalence of life in the universe.

The talk is a part of the Peninsula Astronomical Society's monthly meetings. It will take place at Foothill College, Room 5015, near parking lot 5. Parking costs $2.

— Anna Li