James Easton's recent re-examination of the Arnold case, which suggests that the objects were probably pelicans, continues to arouse the wrath of American ETH ufologists, who see their favourite UFO reports gradually being disposed of, as none of them seem able to stand up to critical examination. Jerome Clark reacted to this new study by referring to ufologists who prefer natural explanations as "pelicanists", even though he quotes Arnold in one of his encyclopedias as saying that the objects flew in the manner of geese. Apart from the predictable whingeing of the UFO believers, the argument mainly hinges on the question of whether or not Arnold correctly estimated the distance of the objects from his plane. This one will run for some time and it seems likely that the pelicanists will emerge as the winners.
IN SUPPORT of the psychosocial hypothesis, a number of writers, notably
Martin Kottmeyer, have shown how many of the motifs found in UFO reports,
particularly abductions, have been derived from science fiction books and
films. Even some of the believers have had to concede that science fiction
has coloured the accounts given by many witnesses.
However, this leads to the question of how the science fiction writers got
their ideas. In a recent book, Bruce Rux developed the idea that the
process is really the other way around; science fiction writers get their
ideas from genuine UFO reports. (1) Perhaps it would be more reasonable to
consider the possibility of a two-way traffic between ufology and science
fiction.
An interesting example of this can be found in Star of Ill-Omen, by Dennis
Wheatley, a tale of alien abduction first published in 1952. (2) Wheatley
(1897-1977), author of 75 books, was a writer of occult thrillers, perhaps
the best known being The Devil Rides Out. He was noted for the research he
conducted to give his fantastic stories authentic backgrounds, so that
they often featured real people and real events. Star of Ill-Omen is
rather different from his other works.
In this book, Wheatley not only makes use of his reading on UFOs, but he
summarises it at tedious length. The story can briefly be summarised as
follows:
Our hero, Kem Lincoln (a James Bond sort of character), a
scientist Escobar and his wife Carmen - with whom Lincoln is having an
affair - are captured by giant humanoid Martians and taken back to Mars in
a flying saucer. It turns out that the humanoids are the not-very-bright
slaves of a race of intelligent insects, which are referred to as
"bee-beetles". As Mars is drying up, they plan to take over Earth, having
blasted its population using atom bombs. Despite their technical
sophistication, they have no idea how to manufacture these, so they hope
to get nuclear physicist Escobar to show them. Eventually the abductees
manage to destroy the Martian civilisation by discovering that the
bee-beetles have no sting and conveying this information to the humanoids,
who rebel and start killing them off. Our heroes manage to escape in a
saucer and return to Earth.
This is surely one of Wheatley's less readable
works. There are many pages where nothing much happens, especially on the
tedious outward voyage to Mars, which takes about 50 days. One thus sees
that the device of Lincoln having an affair with Escobar's wife is
necessary to provide a little dramatic tension, although this only serves
to make the voyage seem even more tedious than it would otherwise be.
There was not much UFO literature available when Wheatley wrote this book,
so it should be possible to trace most of the details which he has
borrowed from it. The bee-beetles obviously derive from the speculations
of Gerald Heard, author of one of the first UFO books. (3) Having noted
the high speeds and rapid changes of direction described in many UFO
reports, he hypothesised that they were piloted by intelligent insects,
and that they probably came from Mars.
Another interesting detail is the idea that saucers are destroyed by
bursting into flames if anything goes wrong, or in Wheatley's story,
simply as a precaution against biological contamination. When the
abductees reach Mars, they are sealed up in bags and ejected, and the
saucer burns up. They are then subjected to a decontamination procedure.
The idea of things being ejected from saucers comes from the Maury Island
story. The burning saucer reminds one of the alleged Ubatuba magnesium
incident, but that occurred in 1957, about 5 years after the book was
first published.
In common with most modern abduction stories, the interior of the saucer
has no ornamentation of any kind and everything in it is strictly
functional. Another similarity is the vagueness about the saucer's
propulsion system. Escobar speculates that it makes use of "magnetic lines
of force".
The bee-beetles apparently have no art or culture, and they have great
difficulty in communicating with other species. They use telepathy to some
extent, particularly to control their humanoid slaves. They show their
captives films, which seem to be a potted history of Earth civilisation,
and include many scenes of wars and weapons. Our heroes eventually realise
that they want to be shown how to make atom bombs. This reminds one of
similar presentations given to abductees by the Greys (presumably with
different motives), but in the early 1950s the Greys had yet to be
invented.
When Wheatley and Heard wrote their books, it was still possible to
consider Mars as a possible abode of intelligent life, with a reasonable
amount of water and a possibly breathable atmosphere and this had an
obvious influence on the speculations of UFO writers of the early 1950s.
The following paragraph from Heard's book shows how wrong theories about
Mars could be before the era of space exploration:
The surface of Mars seems innocent of scars when we think of our own surface and that of the pockmarked moon, our satellite. Mars seems to have cooled before volcanic eruptions took place. Lowell thought that it had only one low range of mountains reaching the very moderate height of 3,000 feet, the Mountains of Mitchell near its southern pole. Had Mars been often hit - as many of the vast craters on the moon are now thought to be "bullet marks" made by meteorites that have struck full force on the moon-surface (unscreened by an atmosphere) - then on the Martian landscape we should have seen these great rampart rings - some on the moon are thirty miles across and throw most striking shadows. But not a trace of such has been detected on Mars.
The story ends with Lincoln and Carmen returning to Earth in a saucer, where they are ejected in a capsule which falls into the Thames. The saucer explodes in flames. They are recovered and revived, as described in a document marked Top Secret. The Earth is saved but the public never get to hear about all this as it remains secret. Just like the crashed saucers and dead aliens at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base!
References
1. Rux, Bruce. Hollywood Vs. the Aliens: The Motion Picture Industry's
Participation in UFO Disinformation, Frog Ltd, Berkeley, California, 1997
2. Wheatley, Dennis. Star of Ill-Omen, The Lymington Edition, Hutchinson,
London, 1966 (first published 1952)
3. Heard, Gerald. The Riddle of the Flying Saucers: Is Another World
Watching? Carroll & Nicholson, London, 1950
Tony Thorne.
Children of the Night: Of Vampires and Vampirism,
Victor Gollancz, 1999. £18.99
Broadcaster and academic Tony Thorne takes a look at the history of, and
contemporary fascination with, the figure of the vampire, from roots in
the classical world and medieval and early modern eastern Europe to
today's Vampire sub culture. In his study of the latter he points out that
they model themselves not on the fairly squalid folkloric original, but on
the romantic, aristocratic vampire of literature and film. Some of these
people claim a number of odd physical conditions. It is unclear whether
these are essentially psychosomatic, or whether some people suffering from
real physical complaints such as photosensitivity latch on to the vampire
identity to give a positive, romantic gloss to their problems.
Thorne
notes the appearance of new vampiric figures such as the Hispano-American
chupacabras, and comments on the role of the alien abductor as the new
monster of the liminal zone between sleep and waking. Each age has its own
monsters. Ours merges traditional themes with elements of pseudo-science
and science fiction.
Stuart Clark.
Life on Other Worlds and How to Find It,
Praxis/Springer Verlag, 2000. £16.95
This shortish (c. 150 pages of text) book by the director of public
astronomy education at the University of Hertfordshire gives a general
overview of the search for life on other planets, and follows most of the
main ingredients of the recent brews. Clark also introduces many of the
speciesist and ethno-historical chauvinist arguments which run through
this sort of literature. He appears to understand that much of the appeal
of the SETI project is religious, but himself introduces such metaphysical
notions as the principle of plenitude, which he renders as meaning "What
can happen will happen". If this is anything more than a tautology, it is
obviously nonsensical. There is nothing in the laws of physics and
mathematics to prevent John Rimmer from becoming prime minister or Dennis
Stacy from becoming President, but that does not mean that either event
will happen!
David Tame.
Real Fairies: True Accounts of Meetings with Nature Spirits,
Capall Bann, 1999. £9.95
While, despite the subtitle, much of this book is given over to occultist
and new age speculation (30 of its 130 pages being devoted to the
"teachings" of Mark Prophet), there are some interesting accounts of
"fairy sightings". Reinforcing David Sivier's point, several of these show
clear cultural tracking, in that what are described are the winged
gossamer creatures of 19th-century fairy illustration.
One account in
here, of mysterious vehicle stoppages and accidents, along with sightings
of "little men", withered crops and the like at Broxted in Sussex, has
more than a few echoes of the Stocksbridge affair reported by David Clarke
in Magonia 33.
David Koerner and Simon LeVay.
Here Be Dragons: The Scientific Quest for Extraterrestrial Life,
Oxford University Press, 2000. £19.99
An astronomer and a biologist provide an overview of the current debate
about ET life, and interview various key players on all sides of the
various arguments going on in the field. Unlike some similar works, they
keep their own personal views largely in the background, allowing the
various factions to have their say.
This also means that this book does not simply repeat what half a dozen
earlier ones have said in slightly different prose, but does give a
fresher approach.
Allowing different people to have their say does, of
course, reveal just how little is known about the many factors involved,
and just how much speculation is little more than guesswork. There is no
consensus as to how life on Earth began, the role of contingency in
evolution, the range of conditions in which life might develop, how alien
life might get, etc.
There is consensus, however, that UFO reports do not represent evidence
for alien visitation, and, in a chapter devoted to ufology as a belief
system, the authors talk to one of the members of the Sturrock Commision,
and guess what his position is? UFOs of course have nothing to do with
aliens, but it might be worth studying reports because among the dross
might be reports of interesting natural phenomena. Far cry from the what
the American Internet rumours were saying isn't it?
There isn't much joy
for Michael Swords either, as there is a pretty good consensus that even
if intelligent aliens exist, they wouldn't closely resemble us. Even David
Conway Morris who rejects Stephen J. Gould's emphasis on the role of
contingency, for much the same religious reasons as Swords, holds out no
hope for human-looking aliens, and indeed doubts that aliens exist at all.
In many ways, though, reading the views of many of the participants in
this field, I was still struck by their lack of imagination, their extreme
difficulty in trying to envision "aliens" who are something other than
people of a different shape, who would share not just our species' but our
own culture's dreams and ambitions. Indeed they are really looking even
more narrowly than that; they are looking, in essence, for themselves out
there, as if their dreams and hopes were the dreams and hopes of the
entire universe, and that if they can't make it, someone, somewhere out
there will. Perhaps that is the ultimate appeal of the SETI project and
belief in alien visitors.
Robert M. Schoch and Robert Aquinas McNally.
Voices of the Rocks: Lost Civilisations and the Catastrophes which
Destroyed Them, Thorsons, 2000. £8.99
This book seems to be on a winner in that it links two very lucrative
contemporary themes, apocalyptic speculation surrounding "killer
asteroids" and heterodox archaeology, centred around our old friend Egypt.
Schoch's main thesis, that the Sphinx is much older than conventional
archaeologists believe, is an example of what might be called a
medium-rank anomaly. If true it would not challenge any fundamental
scientific principle. After all, the people of 10,000 BP were just as
intelligent as ourselves, and Schoch is not evoking any paranormal magical
technology, ancient astronauts and the like; on the other hand it is just
about surprising enough for the scholarly community to demand really good
evidence before they would so drastically revise their chronologies, and
it is not at all clear that he has assembled such overwhelming evidence as
yet.
At times, I got the feeling that Schoch, a geologist, doesn't quite grasp
the passions and furies which drive history. At one point he argues that
the conventional view that the mass burnings of many ancient Mediterranean
cities were the result of war, invasion and rebellion, must be wrong,
because why would rational invaders burn cities that they would want to
use and exploit? Well, because invaders and revolutionaries are not
usually rational; cities were burned and their inhabitants massacred out
of pure ethnic or class hatred, and certainly many peasants did not want
to live in the cities; they saw them as sinks of iniquity and vampiric tax
gatherers, to be wiped off the face of the earth, not occupied.
The belief that destruction comes from the skies, and not from ourselves
is a comforting one, but the other thesis, which challenges the notion of
sustained, fast, single-track progress is less so. The notion that many
times in, say, the last 30,000 years cultures have risen and fallen, most
usually to peasant Jacqueries, of which Kampuchea and Rwanda were but the
most recent, is pretty scary, evoking the possibility that ours might just
go the same way, and the future might not be the Universal Denmark, but
the Universal Somalia.
This year sees a repetition of what we may designate the "Four-yearly UFO
Ritual". It is as regular as the Olympic Games and the World Cup. This is
the process whereby certain vociferous American ufologists seize the
chance of putting to the various presidential candidates a question which
runs something like: "If elected will you ensure the military and the
intelligence agencies release all their secret UFO files to the American
people?"
The surprised candidate probably gives a blanket answer to the effect that
yes, he believes strongly in the public having freedom of access to
official records on such matters, if they exist, and that he or she will
look into it.
Once elected, the new president soon finds that far more
pressing domestic and foreign problems engulf him and his cabinet, and
UFOs are either delegated, perhaps to some lowly disinterested official,
or forgotten altogether.
Any files that are eventually released are inevitably disappointing and
the eternal optimists among the US ETH fraternity suffer another round of
frustration. The "great truth" is still firmly sealed in locked filing
cabinets. The ETH fraternity then prepares to petition Congress for, you
guessed it, public hearings into UFO secrecy, and so on.
This process, following a regular cycle, has been going on since at least
1960 and can be guaranteed to go on for the foreseeable future.
Does
anything similar ever happen in the UK at election time? Does anything
similar happen in any other country? I strongly suspect the answer, to
both questions, is No.
Christopher D. Allan, Stoke-on-Trent