Magonia 40, August 1999
Do people want to believe aliens are spying on us? Surely it’s a trick question. Nobody would want to believe anything like that. The reconnaissance theory was an exasperated effort to make sense of a phenomenon that refused to be made sense of in any other terms. Want had nothing to do with it. What a galling sentiment!
Yes, it is embarrassingly cynical and debunkerish to put forth such a question. I probably wouldn’t even have asked it if ufologists were the sole defenders of this belief. The problem is they aren’t alone. The aliens believe it themselves.
Generally speaking, paranoia is defined by the idea one is being persecuted. Among the striking commonalities of this idea is the motif of being watched by others. Such erroneous beliefs have been categorised by psychiatrists under the phrase “delusions of observation”. (85) As Freud saw it, there is ultimately a grain of historical truth behind such delusions. The individual had been watched before, but as a child. Pride forces the individual to deny feelings of internal narcissistic mortification, but accepts external control by imaginary others or others in imaginary relationships. It is a compromise solution to a moralistic dilemma. Without it the individual falls into unbearable depression and self-loathing. Distorting one’s perceptions of reality exacts costs over time, however. Whether the cost is worth it is a deeply problematic issue. Many paranoids function at superior levels of performance in their work and may bother no one with their quirky ideas. Others may act on their delusions and make false accusations that destroy human relationships and injure the innocent. While paranoia can be treated by analysis, it is a difficult and emotionally painful process for both the individual and the therapist, Therapists, if nobody else, wonder if it is worth it.
The answer it seems is by using an immense pincer to take up samples by winch to their space ship. Blood subsequently falls from the sky. Then, a decapitated gorilla’s head. Finally, the body of a man, partly skinned, is discovered with a diary confirming the worst. The man describes being placed in a transparent cubicle and seeing animals, humans, quantities of dirt, rocks, and seawater on display as though the ship were a combination of museum and zoo. He observes dissection experiments and, realising his fate, straps his diary to his body in expectation of his remains being tossed overboard. The ship subsequently develops power trouble and settles into Trafalgar Square. The aliens are regrettably killed when rescuers cause air to rush inside the craft after making a hole in it. The hope is expressed that the aliens won’t be sending down another expedition. (103)
Continue to Part Three
References:
67. Layne, Meade; “The Coming of the Guardians”, Borderland Sciences research Foundation, 1972, 12-13
68. Ibid., 41
69. Williamson, George Hunt; “The Saucers Speak”, Neville Spearman, 1963, 46-47, 58
70. Leslie, Desmond and Adamski, George; “Flying Saucers Have Landed”, British Book Centre, 1953, 200-201
71. Keyhoe; op. cit., 169-170
72. Adamski, George; “Inside the Space Ships”, Abelard-Schuman, 1955, 40-41, 60, 75, 91, 109-112
73. Menger, Howard; From Outer Space”, Pyramid, 1967, 58, 69
74. Mitchell, Helen and Betty; “We Met The Space People”, Galaxy, 1973
75. Angelucci, Orfeo M.; “The Secret of the Saucers”, Amherst, 1955, 6, 9
76. Valerian, Valdamar; “The Matrix”, Arcturus Book Service, 1988, 76-78
77. “Rael”, Claude Vorlihon; “Space Aliens took me to their Planet”, Canadian Raelian Movement, 1978, 24-25
78. Smith, Warren; “UFO Trek”, Zebra, 1976, 101-102
79. Lorenzen, Coral and Jim; “An extraterrestrial encounter”, UFO Report, 6, 5, (November 1978), 20-23, 58-61
80. Smith, Warren; “Contact with a UFO crew”, UFO Report, 7, 1, (January 1979), 32-35, 58-62
81. Stevens, Wendelle C.; “UFO Contact from Reticulum Update”, Wendelle C. Stevens, 1989, 33
82. Hopkins; op. cit., 203-206
83. Freud, Sigmund; “On Narcissism: An Introduction”, in Strachey, James; “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud – Volume 14″, The Hogarth Press, 1953, 92-98
84. Frosch, John; “The Psychotic Process”, International University Press, 1983
85. Eidelberg, Ludwig; “Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis”, Free Press, 1968, 101
86. Keyhoe; op. cit., 133-134
87. Badcock, C.R.; “The Psychoanalysis of Culture”, 1980, 240
88. Saggs, H.W.F.; “The Greatness that was Babylon”, 1962, 312
89. Ezekiel; 1:20
90. Eichrodt, Walter; “Theology of the Old Testament, Volume 2″, SCM Press Ltd, 1967, 199
91. Daniel; 4:13
92. Patai, Raphael; “Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis”, Greenwich, 1983, 83-84
93. Hastings, James; “Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics”, V, XI, Charles Scribner’s, 553
94. Badcock; op. cit., 145-210
95. Keen, Maurice; “A Master of the Middle Ages”, New York Review of Books, 36, 8, 18 May 1989, 47-49
96. Cohn, Norman; “Europe’s Inner Demons”, Meridian Books, 1975. Kennedy, John G.; “Psychosocial dynamics of witchcraft systems”, International Journal of Social Psychology, 15, 1969, 165-178
97. Demause, Lloyd; “Foundations of Psychohistory”, Creative Roots, 1982, 231-235
98. Ibid.
99. Levin, Murray B.; “Political Hysteria in America”, Basic, 1971
100. Locke, George; “Voyages in Space: A Bibliography of Interplanetary Fiction, 1801-1914″, Ferret Fantasy, 1975, 67-69
101. Neeley, Robert G.; “UFOs of 1896/1897: The Airship Wave”, Fund for UFO Research, 1988, 46-49
102. Watson, Nigel; Oldroyd, Granville and Clarke, David; “The 1912-1913 British Phantom Airship Scare”, FFUFOR, 1988
103. Moskowitz, Sam; “Strange Horizons: The Spectrum of Science Fiction”, Charles Scribner’s, 1976, 228-232
104. Ibid. Fort, Charles; “The Book of the Damned”, Ace, no date, 158
105. Keyhoe; “Flying Saucers Are Real”
106. Heard; op. cit., 150. Scully, Frank; “Behind the Flying Saucers”, Holt, 1950, ch. 8
107. Sachs, Margaret; “UFO Encyclopaedia”, 1980, 238
108. Ruhl, Dick; “A History of APRO”, Official UFO, 1, 5, 24-26
109. Jessup; op. cit.
110. Demause, Lloyd; “Reagan’s America”, 1984, 79
111. Ibid., 77
The closest thing to a contactee in the earliest days of the flying saucer era was a medium named Mark Probert who was in the service of the Borderland Sciences Research Foundation. The group learned through persons on the “other side of life” having access to the etheric worlds that the saucers were appearing in order to demonstrate the possibility that there are ways to travel faster and eliminate friction. The sensation was all meant to compel our attention and wake us up. There is actually something to be said in favour of that view. It was much easier to believe that flying objects passing by Mount Rainier were meant to be seen than to be secret hardware being tested by the government as Arnold believed. (67)
In 1948 the medium got the word that we were being observed so a final record of our civilisation can be made for future history. This is reiterated in a 1950 communication which says notes are being taken on our advancement before our fall. With 1952 there is an apparent intrusion of Keyhoe’s ideas into messages received by the BSRF group. There is talk of reconnaissance craft and small remote-control craft used to make visual observations without drawing attention to themselves. Note the inversion – they no longer want to wake us up. (68)
Employing a glass tumbler on a Ouija board, George Hunt Williamson eliminated one of the middlemen in extraterrestrial communications. On 2 August 1952 he made direct contact with a being from Mars named Nah-9. He revealed that our world had been observed for 75,000 years and was under a survey. Williamson and his circle eventually contacted dozens of aliens, among them the first known paranoid extraterrestrial. Affa of Uranus expressed fear of the work going on at Lowell University: “The “big eyes” were looking at us”, he complained. (69) An acquaintance of Williamson would, three months later, do him one better and meet a human being from another world face to face. The name of that acquaintance was George Adamski.
In the initial encounter he communicated with the alien by signs and gestures and telepathy. Among the things he learnt was that the little discs which were often reported served as eyes for the larger motherships. If the discs were in trouble a crosscurrent would detonate them in order to prevent capture. (70) This innovation could have been gleaned from Keyhoe’s writings. Though Keyhoe personally rejected the rumours, he reported in The Flying Saucers Are Real that some individuals believed the discs would disintegrate with an explosive charge if they ever got out of control. (71) The idea began with Dr Lincoln La Paz who thought green fireballs were made of beryllium copper so as to burn up with no debris. Spectra indicated, however, that green fireballs contained magnesium and thus probably were of natural origin.
In a later encounter, the aliens took Adamski on a tour of their ship. Inside he was shown a central magnetic pillar which doubled as both propulsion unit and a power telescope which allowed them to inspect the land below. He is shown a TV set on which is registered everything seen by remote-control discs ranging in size from 10 inches to 12 feet in diameter. These discs registered every vibration taking place in the area under observation. They even allow aliens to know what we are thinking. Adamski saw over a dozen of these registering discs. (72)
Howard Menger, in time, saw one of these registering discs explode. The aliens shortly thereafter affirmed to Menger that it had been out of control. He elaborated on the fact that these discs recorded all emotions, thoughts and possible intents. (73)
The Mitchell sisters added a novel wrinkle to this portrait. An alien named Alna demonstrated for them a spy scope which could see though roofs by subtracting their vibrations from other vibrations of a building. There is no escape. (74)
Contacts with names like Asmiz, Quamquat, and Mister Zno likewise have affirmed the fact that we are being watched
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Orfeo Angelucci’s aliens spoke of our planet having been under observation for centuries, but only recently it had been resurveyed. Every point of progress in our society is registered. (75)
Dan Martin corroborated the spy paradigm in titling his account of his contact 'The Watcher'. Decades later, another alien named Khyla would also be known as the Watcher. (76) Contacts with names like Asmiz, Quamquat, and Mister Zno likewise have affirmed the fact that we are being watched. The seventies contactee Claude Vorlihon 'Rael' was told by his alien mentors that they had come to see what men were up to and to watch over them. (77)
Abductee literature also lends support to the picture of aliens spying on humanity. Herb Schirmer, from his 1967 encounter, received testimony his aliens were engaged in surveillance. (78) Like Adamski, Schirmer was shown a baby saucer inside the ship which could be launched to check out an area and send pictures to a vision screen in the mother ship. In the 1975 abduction of Charles L. Moody, aliens refer to the craft they are on as an observation craft. It was distinctly smaller than the main craft and was said to be vulnerable to interference by radar. (79) Raymond Shearer, and abductee of 1978, broke out in a cold sweat fearful he had become a possible agent or spy for the aliens. (80) During a May 1979 encounter, William Herrmann, while aboard a saucer, witnessed rendezvous with what the aliens termed an “observance vehicle”. (81)
Virginia Horton’s aliens included one wanting to be a bioanthropologist. They collected a blood sample for later examination and research. The aliens’ research had led to us being considered a “precious species”. (82) One could regard all this face-to-face testimony as corroboration of the validity of Keyhoe’s thesis. The pedigrees of these experiences, however, are of mixed value. Mediums and Ouija boards are suspect to say the least. Adamski is largely dismissed as a charlatan by ufologists who want to be taken seriously. Menger confessed his experiences more or less were not real. The other contactees also tend to be rejected as promulgators of fantasy. Abductees come late to the game and long after Keyhoe’s ideas had suffused the UFO mythos.
If these are fantasies, why do all these people have their aliens say, in essence, “I spy”? The first possibility is camouflage. The contactees try to blend their fantasies with contemporary beliefs to give them credibility. An allied possibility is that they sense this is something people want to believe and, following the ancient credo, Tell them what they want to hear, they tell them. The other basic possibility is that contactees want to believe it themselves.
Ufologists, until the advent of the abductees, never used the testimony of UFO contacts to buttress the reconnaissance thesis. But both groups affirm it explicitly and implicitly. It is harder to discount the need to believe as fuel for the advancement of the idea in the case of the contactees. Untainted rationality can hardly account for the motif’s presence there. If need accounts for one, it may unconsciously account for both groups believing aliens are watching us. Yet why would anyone want to believe anything like that?
The sensation of being watched is a common psychological experience. It can be termed an archetypal phenomenon for it is founded on a universal feature of human life. All of us are watched when we are children. Parents must constantly keep an eye on us to keep us out of danger or prevent us from causing trouble. As the child grows up he learns that certain behaviours have undesirable consequences and will become wary of doing things that might provoke an unwanted response from his parents. A glance at the parents for a look of approval or disapproval can cue him on whether he’s doing the right or wrong thing. These parental responses are sought and anticipated. Over time they are internalised as a separate agency develops within the mind which oversees and supervises behaviour even when the parent is absent. This agency has been variously termed the conscience or superego. Poets have called it the watchman of the soul. (83)
There is a charming story which illustrates the beginnings of this phenomenon. A little child who formed the habit of stealing pies and secretly eating them in the attic was terrified one day when a ray of light fell on the picture of an eye. Wishing to be free of the intrusion he cut the eye out of the portrait. The next day, however, he still sensed there was a hidden eye ceaselessly watching him from the hole in the portrait. Guilt.
The conscience constantly compares our behaviour to the ideals which are instilled by our parents. The ideals are added to by authority figures such as teachers, religious figures, cops, media pundits, friends, and public opinion as time goes by. When we fall short of the ideals we set for ourselves, become insecure, or find ourselves apart or isolated from the rest of society, the conscience makes itself felt. Sensations imprinted from childhood of being spied upon by distrusting parents or parents giving “that look” can surface to make us stop what we’re doing and think over our actions. Though such actions on the part of our conscience may make us anxious and may even cause us to be wracked with guilt, they develop from the need to feel pride about ourselves and warn us there are consequences in our misbehaving.
Parenting and socialisation are unfortunately not always gracefully managed. Ambitious parents can instill ideals impossible to live up to in a child. Cruel parents can assault the child with criticisms and punishments that are impossible to live down. Parents may teach distrust by unfairly spying on the child with insufficient cause. Under these circumstances the superego can take on severe qualities which hang on as fixed aspects of the adult’s character. When these superego functions are split off and distort an individual’s perception of reality the situation can be termed pathological and the condition acquires the description of paranoia. (84)
Generally speaking, paranoia is defined by the idea one is being persecuted. Among the striking commonalities of this idea is the motif of being watched by others. Such erroneous beliefs have been categorised by psychiatrists under the phrase “delusions of observation”. (85) As Freud saw it, there is ultimately a grain of historical truth behind such delusions. The individual had been watched before, but as a child. Pride forces the individual to deny feelings of internal narcissistic mortification, but accepts external control by imaginary others or others in imaginary relationships. It is a compromise solution to a moralistic dilemma. Without it the individual falls into unbearable depression and self-loathing. Distorting one’s perceptions of reality exacts costs over time, however. Whether the cost is worth it is a deeply problematic issue. Many paranoids function at superior levels of performance in their work and may bother no one with their quirky ideas. Others may act on their delusions and make false accusations that destroy human relationships and injure the innocent. While paranoia can be treated by analysis, it is a difficult and emotionally painful process for both the individual and the therapist, Therapists, if nobody else, wonder if it is worth it.
It is fairly natural to assume that the beliefs encountered earlier in this paper are collective equivalents of the delusions of observation seen in individual cases of paranoia. We are looking for the eyes of our parents in some sense. Rather than dwell on soul-searching our inadequacies which we know we would find, we anxiously look skyward for signs of attention and supervision. In the case of the contactees nothing could be clearer given the beliefs of aliens being able to read our thoughts, something parents give every appearance of doing at times (as pointed out in Silvano Arieti, Interpretation of Schizophrenia, Basic, 1974, p. 93). The paternal warnings to not fool around with A-bombs or you’ll knock the Earth out of its orbit or upset the balance of the universe have that distinct aroma of exaggerated warnings of parents not to play with that toy or you’ll knock somebody’s eye out. Oh, sure, Mom. Ufologists are subtler than that, but remember even Keyhoe warned that A-bombs could knock huge chunks out of the Earth or propel the Earth out of orbit. (86)
It is tempting to lay the growth of the UFO mythos to collective shame over Hiroshima and the development of nuclear weapons in the fifties. Outwardly we were proud of the Yankee ingenuity we showed in constructing this superweapon, but the gruesome effects of it were undeniable in the photos brought back and displayed in Life magazine and elsewhere. Oppenheimer, in his oft-quoted lecture before MIT in December 1947, spoke his conscience: “In some crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin and this is a knowledge they cannot lose”. One could easily deny the physicists had sinned and many did. The knowledge, however, returned in projected form – the delusion of aliens watching us. The concern reflected in Lipp’s researching whether or not aliens could have seen our nuclear blasts gives some credence to the notion as does the frequency of talk about A-bombs by both contactees and ufologists in the fifties.
The possibility of narcissistic mortification over Hiroshima is most relevant in the context of the cluster of UFO reports around Los Alamos noted by Keyhoe and the Robertson Panel. Interest in flying saucers appears to have been considerable there. Ruppelt of Blue Book singles out the Atomic Energy Commission’s Los Alamos lab as a place where so many people turned up for his briefings that the lecture theatre wouldn’t hold all the people who tried to get in. His briefing was recorded and played many times. Some even banded together to form a “mineral club” which was a cover to set up radiation detectors which they hoped might detect UFOs.
(The fact that Roswell was home to the world’s only combat-trained atomic bomb group may have some relevance to the rumour complex that has grown up around the balloon crash, but nothing has surfaced to date to build an argument on.)
Whether nuclear shame has a wider, more totalistic role in fuelling the UFO mythos is open to considerable doubt. Why didn’t the paranoiac reaction set in immediately in 1945? UFO flaps don’t correlate with atomic tests. Blue Book set up a UFO reporting net in the Eniwetok H-bomb test region, but got nothing for the effort. Not only has there been a notable absence of of bomb-project physicists among ufologists, but two are renowned for their disbelief. Enrico Fermi, the mastermind of the first chain reaction in 1942, had the famous Fermi Paradox against the prevalence of ETI civilisations credited to him. Edward Condon was a member of the committee which established the US atomic bomb programme and he served as adviser to later atom-related study groups of the government. A recent tribute to Hermann Oberth reminds us that while here is a figure who believed in saucer reconnaissance, his claim to immortality lies not with the atom, but with the creation of the V-2 rocket.
Clearly nuclear shame has limitations as a source for UFO paranoia. This is more fully rendered inadequate by the larger consideration that paranoid delusions are a constant element in our culture’s fantasies. Paranoia may have been rampant in the fifties, but it was by no means new. Collective paranoia existed before there was a Hiroshima.
C.R. Badcock points out that beliefs in shepherding sky-gods begin, historically, with the formation of nomadic pastoral economies and the domestication of animals. Before that period, man’s beliefs tended to be animistic and polytheistic because of the nature of cultivation and agriculture. The practices of pastoralism obliged a special psychology formed of independence, an obsessional nature, and the feeling of guilt-shame. The formation of such personalities favours the creation of paranoiac reaction states of mind and the spread of paranoid beliefs. From the inception of these new practices we start to see the spread of myths about all-seeing gods and secret races of watchers of mankind. (87)
There survives from ancient Babylon, for example, a prayer to the first-begotten of Marduk who is addressed as “You watch over all men”. (88) Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, besieged Jerusalem in early Biblical times and exiled its people. Among them was the prophet Ezekiel. He believed God had passed judgement that his people were sinful. While in exile he came to see a vision of a wheel in the air with eyes on it and thenceforward prophesied doom and destruction. (89)
Also in the Bible we encounter practices like Joshua’s placing seven eyes on every stone of the Temple to convey the special watchfulness of God. It is believed the eyes of the Lord can range through the whole Earth. (90) As he lay in bed, Daniel had a vision of a watcher that came down from heaven. (91) Watchers are also spoken of in 2 Enoch XVIII as a group of angels banished to a dungeon along with Samael, a planetary power and prince in heaven. (92)
Hesiod, among the early Greeks, also speaks of “watchers”, thrice ten thousand immortals who, clad in mist, fare everywhere over the Earth and watch over judgements and forward works. (93)
Christianity, with its end-of-the-world fantasies and fears of eternal damnation for trivial infractions, has been termed paranoid by some psychiatrists. (94) It is an interesting question whether or not the decay of the Roman empire provided the fuel for its diffusion. Irregardless, there is little dispute it lent a distinctly paranoid tone to the Dark Ages. People lived in a double spy cosmology as angels and devils scrutinised the minute day-to-day behaviour of everybody for the slightest blasphemy or offence. (95) Towards the end of the Middle Ages fantasies of flying witches and secret meetings of Devil-worshippers led to the Great Witch Hunt, one of the deadlier paranoid delusions to have gripped masses of people. (96)
Mass paranoia does not confine itself to religious realms. Conspiracy theories constantly interweave with reality-based political thought and often dominate it. The American revolution, some historians now argue, was rooted in a pandemic of persecutory delusions. (97) Paranoid fantasies suffuse American history: the Illuminati conspiracy and anti-Masonry, anti-Catholicism, “the Gallic peril”, slaveholders’ conspiracies, baby-killing and dismemberment by Indians, the Yellow Peril, the Great Red Scare of 1919-20, reefer madness, the fluoridation poisoning fear, the Red Nightmare and McCarthyism in the fifties, JFK assassination theories, the TriLateralists, the Gemstone File, cattle mutilation, the Satanist conspiracy, etc. (98).
The impression I receive is that our culture has a
constant reservoir of paranoids ready to adopt and give flight to any fear that finds a coterie of advocates
............................................................................................
Anyone in doubt of the influence and industry of the paranoid is directed to Murray Levin’s dissection of the Great Red Scare. It led to lynchings, the crushing of unions, and the abandoning of civil liberties. The belief in a nonexistent Bolshevik conspiracy to foment a revolution that would destroy the American way of life was supported by an “irrefutable” 4465-page document called the Lusk Report. Psychotic ravings are reprinted without evaluation and bits and pieces of reality are force-fitted to prove what amounted to a vague assumption. (99)
The impression I receive is that our culture has a constant reservoir of paranoids ready to adopt and give flight to any fear that finds a coterie of advocates. One doesn’t really need to point to any particular instance of collective shame to account for the origin or diffusion of paranoid beliefs in our culture. Thus the spread of Keyhoe’s reconnaissance theory probably wasn’t dependent on Hiroshima. The paranoid character of the fifties may have some sociological explanation I have missed and I thus won’t rule out the possibility there was some psychological undercurrent of the era that favoured the growth of the UFO mythos. For the nonce, I think it was just a fantasy that could have emerged and spread decades earlier or later if the right persons had or hadn’t come along to vigorously advocate it.
Elements of the UFO mythos are clearly evident long before the fifties. There was, for example, a significant market for stories about extraterrestrials visiting Earth or being visited by Earthlings as early as the 1890s. Nearly 60 such “interplanetaries” appeared in that decade. (100) Among the latecomers was H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds in 1898. It is of small surprise to note that more extraterrestrials were reported during the Airship Waves of 1896 and 1897 than during the Flying Saucer Flap of 1947. (101) Most of the nineteen reports involve little more than extraterrestrial picnics and camp-outs or excursions. A pair speak of negotiating trade agreements. One airship is here to pick up ice. Two involve spirits or angels making surveys for future colonisation. Only one case involves Martians scrutinising humans for the apparent purpose of securing an inhabitant. There is also one case of unearthly beings hurling balls of fire, brimstone, and molten lava from an airship at witnesses – the only other one fully suggestive of paranoid fear. Overall, the Airship Waves look like nine-day wonders unrelated to paranoia-fuelled UFO fantasies of our times.
It is actually easier to trace the development of the UFO mythos to the British airship scare of 1912-13. These flaps were clearly paranoid in character, involving as the did the belief that German Zeppelin airships were secretly visiting Britain for spying out the land in preparation for war. (102) There seems to be no compelling reason to doubt it inspired John N. Raphael to pen “Up above: The story of the sky folk” for the British Pearson’s Magazine. The plot begins with a rash of disappearances that include the Prime Minister, an elm tree pulled up by the roots, an invalid in bed from a collapsing house, the town pump, a weathercock, a ewe and a ram. One man survives to describe being picked up by some force and later dropped. A professor arrives to investigate and speculates that a race of sky folk may have the same curiosity about us as we have about creatures at the bottom of the sea.
“Isn’t it plausible that having this curiosity, and having at their disposal scientific methods, of which, for the present, we can know little or nothing, they should endeavour to discover more about us? How would they try to obtain information?”
The answer it seems is by using an immense pincer to take up samples by winch to their space ship. Blood subsequently falls from the sky. Then, a decapitated gorilla’s head. Finally, the body of a man, partly skinned, is discovered with a diary confirming the worst. The man describes being placed in a transparent cubicle and seeing animals, humans, quantities of dirt, rocks, and seawater on display as though the ship were a combination of museum and zoo. He observes dissection experiments and, realising his fate, straps his diary to his body in expectation of his remains being tossed overboard. The ship subsequently develops power trouble and settles into Trafalgar Square. The aliens are regrettably killed when rescuers cause air to rush inside the craft after making a hole in it. The hope is expressed that the aliens won’t be sending down another expedition. (103)
This is probably the first major story to adopt the premise of furtive extraterrestrials flying about our atmosphere engaged in abduction for scientific research. Sam Moscowitz argues it is unlikely Fort could have missed this story in his extensive reading. Pearson’s was one of the most widely read magazines in its day and was certainly in the New York Public Library haunted by Fort. The corollary that it played a role in Fort’s ruminations about extraterrestrial visitors which found us mysteriously useful and caused various disappearances and sky falls follows naturally.
Though the propriety of calling Fort the first ufologist has been called into question there is plentiful evidence that the first post-Arnold generation was indebted to his work. Keyhoe quotes a memo from DuBarry who cites Fort’s opinion on a report from 1762. (105) Gerald Heard and Frank Scully acknowledge Fort’s work. (106) Palmer in a 1946 issue of Amazing Stories was already calling attention to the files of Charles Fort as proof that extraterrestrials visited Earth. (107) In 1936 Coral Lorenzen had already read the books of Charles Fort at the tender age of 12. (108) Morris Jessup’s interest in disappearances and his suggestions that falls of flesh and blood result from disgorged materials from experiments and captured specimens curiously echo not only Fort, but Raphael’s story. (109) Whether Fort also inspired the intelligence community in some direct or indirect fashion to formulate the alien reconnaissance theory is necessarily unknown, but is nether impossible nor implausible.
All the elements seem to be there in 1913: belief in extraterrestrials, belief in furtive airships, the idea of examination, paranoia. The only thing that seems to be missing is a Keyhoe and a Mantell case to lend his idea seriousness. Fort was too much the class clown to phrase his ideas in arguments that tried to convince. It also might be that the public needed the sensation of Arnold’s supersonic saucers to redirect their attention to aerial mysteries. Teasing out all the relevant factors and possibilities may keep historians guessing for years.
Though no single episode of collective shame can be pointed to as establishing the UFO mythos, the idea may provide a key to several mass manifestations of the UFO phenomenon. The major UFO flaps subsequent to 1947 appear in concert with major historical episodes of national shame or humiliation. The 1952 wave coincides with an emotionally charged steel strike which caused allegations of treason, that steelworkers were undermining the war in Korea. The 1957 wave emerged in the wake of Russia’s launch of Sputnik and the realisation that Yankee technical superiority had been called into question. It was easily the pivotal identity crisis of the fifties generation. The 1965 wave began within days of the first US ground combat operations in Vietnam. It was quickly termed a “futile assault” and in the weeks that followed the situation visibly deteriorated. After the initial pulse of the wave passed, the famous Watts riots kicked up a secondary peak in mid-August. The notorious Swamp-Gas flap of 1966 played against the backdrop of the first anti-US demonstrations in Hue and Danang, then Saigon and elsewhere. Spectacular fiery suicides by religious figures were particularly agonising to behold. Lastly, the 1973 wave blossomed in the heat of Watergate.
Psychohistorian Lloyd deMause has asserted that staring eyes can be found during times of crisis in every country and every age from ancient Egypt’s “Eye of Horus” to the “hypnotic eyes” of Adolf Hitler. (110) Though they can be attached to foreign enemies they are often pictured as simply floating above us, strange, unidentified staring eyes. (111) Unidentified flying objects with their connotations of aliens-are-watching-us seem to be a variation of the paranoid delusions of observation prompted by ego crises seen both with individuals and groups.
Continue to Part Three
References:
67. Layne, Meade; “The Coming of the Guardians”, Borderland Sciences research Foundation, 1972, 12-13
68. Ibid., 41
69. Williamson, George Hunt; “The Saucers Speak”, Neville Spearman, 1963, 46-47, 58
70. Leslie, Desmond and Adamski, George; “Flying Saucers Have Landed”, British Book Centre, 1953, 200-201
71. Keyhoe; op. cit., 169-170
72. Adamski, George; “Inside the Space Ships”, Abelard-Schuman, 1955, 40-41, 60, 75, 91, 109-112
73. Menger, Howard; From Outer Space”, Pyramid, 1967, 58, 69
74. Mitchell, Helen and Betty; “We Met The Space People”, Galaxy, 1973
75. Angelucci, Orfeo M.; “The Secret of the Saucers”, Amherst, 1955, 6, 9
76. Valerian, Valdamar; “The Matrix”, Arcturus Book Service, 1988, 76-78
77. “Rael”, Claude Vorlihon; “Space Aliens took me to their Planet”, Canadian Raelian Movement, 1978, 24-25
78. Smith, Warren; “UFO Trek”, Zebra, 1976, 101-102
79. Lorenzen, Coral and Jim; “An extraterrestrial encounter”, UFO Report, 6, 5, (November 1978), 20-23, 58-61
80. Smith, Warren; “Contact with a UFO crew”, UFO Report, 7, 1, (January 1979), 32-35, 58-62
81. Stevens, Wendelle C.; “UFO Contact from Reticulum Update”, Wendelle C. Stevens, 1989, 33
82. Hopkins; op. cit., 203-206
83. Freud, Sigmund; “On Narcissism: An Introduction”, in Strachey, James; “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud – Volume 14″, The Hogarth Press, 1953, 92-98
84. Frosch, John; “The Psychotic Process”, International University Press, 1983
85. Eidelberg, Ludwig; “Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis”, Free Press, 1968, 101
86. Keyhoe; op. cit., 133-134
87. Badcock, C.R.; “The Psychoanalysis of Culture”, 1980, 240
88. Saggs, H.W.F.; “The Greatness that was Babylon”, 1962, 312
89. Ezekiel; 1:20
90. Eichrodt, Walter; “Theology of the Old Testament, Volume 2″, SCM Press Ltd, 1967, 199
91. Daniel; 4:13
92. Patai, Raphael; “Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis”, Greenwich, 1983, 83-84
93. Hastings, James; “Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics”, V, XI, Charles Scribner’s, 553
94. Badcock; op. cit., 145-210
95. Keen, Maurice; “A Master of the Middle Ages”, New York Review of Books, 36, 8, 18 May 1989, 47-49
96. Cohn, Norman; “Europe’s Inner Demons”, Meridian Books, 1975. Kennedy, John G.; “Psychosocial dynamics of witchcraft systems”, International Journal of Social Psychology, 15, 1969, 165-178
97. Demause, Lloyd; “Foundations of Psychohistory”, Creative Roots, 1982, 231-235
98. Ibid.
99. Levin, Murray B.; “Political Hysteria in America”, Basic, 1971
100. Locke, George; “Voyages in Space: A Bibliography of Interplanetary Fiction, 1801-1914″, Ferret Fantasy, 1975, 67-69
101. Neeley, Robert G.; “UFOs of 1896/1897: The Airship Wave”, Fund for UFO Research, 1988, 46-49
102. Watson, Nigel; Oldroyd, Granville and Clarke, David; “The 1912-1913 British Phantom Airship Scare”, FFUFOR, 1988
103. Moskowitz, Sam; “Strange Horizons: The Spectrum of Science Fiction”, Charles Scribner’s, 1976, 228-232
104. Ibid. Fort, Charles; “The Book of the Damned”, Ace, no date, 158
105. Keyhoe; “Flying Saucers Are Real”
106. Heard; op. cit., 150. Scully, Frank; “Behind the Flying Saucers”, Holt, 1950, ch. 8
107. Sachs, Margaret; “UFO Encyclopaedia”, 1980, 238
108. Ruhl, Dick; “A History of APRO”, Official UFO, 1, 5, 24-26
109. Jessup; op. cit.
110. Demause, Lloyd; “Reagan’s America”, 1984, 79
111. Ibid., 77
