Mystery Tales #52

In "Mystery of the Silent Fog!" from Mystery Tales #52 (1957), a small American town wakes to find itself adrift in space—unexplainably lifted from Earth and suspended in the void. With no warning and no escape, the mayor devises a desperate plan: have everyone dress wildly and act absurdly in the streets, hoping their sheer strangeness will make them uninteresting to whatever alien observers might be watching.

In "The Fish Men!" from Mystery Tales #52 (1957), a submerged race of amphibious beings schemes to conquer the world above—only to discover that the surface, with its endless sky and blinding sun, is a realm of alien dread. Shattered by the vastness and scorched by daylight, they retreat back to the deep, where they belong.

In "The Betrayer," a war veteran haunted by amnesia tracks down the man responsible for his squad’s ambush, confronting the town’s mayor with a gun in hand. The mayor pleads for peace, but the soldier refuses to relent—until the shocking truth is revealed: the man he’s accused is the very one who betrayed them, and his own lost memory has shielded him from the guilt all along.

In "The Too-Perfect Crime!" from Mystery Tales #52 (1957), a clever car thief builds a camera that can shrink vehicles—only to find his own genius backfires when the police start questioning him after several photographed cars vanish. After using the device on himself, he’s trapped at miniature size, realizing too late he can’t reverse it.

In "The City That Died!" from Mystery Tales #52 (1957), a man stumbles upon a fleeting, luminous vision of an ancient Aztec city—long vanished—only to see it vanish moments later, leaving him disoriented and his treasure lost in the process. The story unfolds with a quiet unease, as the line between past and present blurs in a moment that changes everything.