I wrote this puzzle in December completely unaware that Gerry Anderson was dying. I finished the puzzle a few weeks before Christmas and was going to let it simmer for a few months before asking Lato would he be so kind to test solve and give me his comments. After doing a bit of research on Wikipedia, I realised that Thuderbirds will be 50 years old in 2014 so I thought it could get published then. Anyway, I found out that Gerry Anderson had passed away over the Christmas break and so sent the puzzle for checking and text Hugh to see if he could use the puzzle quite soon, which he agreed to.
I got the SCOTT PARKER idea ages ago and decided to keep it back for a future Thunderbirds puzzle. My original idea was to somehow put OWL+TIT+TH, or something similar (TH under “birds”), in a column of unchecked letters and then to define Thunderbirds as “show in fifth column?” or something. I spent ages trying to get this to work but had to give up as few, if any, Guardian grids have eight unchecked cells in a column. When I looked up Gerry Anderson on Wikipedia, I spotted SUPERMARIONATION and thought that might be a better idea. I managed to shoehorn in the pilots Alan, Gordon, Virgil, John, Scott; Brains and Parker and I also got in Scarlet (as in Capt) and Fireball (as in XL5). I tried for ages to get Joe 90 in but it was beyond my ability.
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