Fake News Stories

Forteans who scour news media for unusual-sounding stories have always had to contend with deliberate fabrications. One of the earliest, now known as “The Balloon Hoax” (pictured above), was perpetrated by the great writer Edgar Allan Poe in 1844. It claimed that one Monck Mason had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a flying machine – a feat that was not accomplished in reality for another 75 years.

Since the advent of social media, however, fake news stories have become a real plague. Dozens of new ones are created every day by websites which exist solely for that purpose (World News Daily Report, Empire News, National Report and The Daily Currant are among the worst offenders). Ostensibly these sites describe themselves as “satire”, but their techniques (and their motivations, I suspect) are significantly different from those of traditional satirists. Take a story that did the rounds a few weeks ago about a Catholic Priest’s near-death experience in which he came face-to-face with God – only to find that the deity in question was female! That’s a timeless joke, which could easily have featured on a classic satire show such as That Was The Week That Was in the 1960s, or Not the Nine O’Clock News in the 1980s.

But there’s a difference. TV satires had laughter tracks, so the audience knew from the context that it was just a joke. TV shows make most of their money from advertising revenue on first airing, and people are far more likely to tune into a comedy show than a straight news program. But that business model simply won’t work with internet satire. Very few people knowingly visit satire sites just to check out the stories and click on the ads. They are more likely to be lured in unwittingly by an eyecatching link they saw on their Facebook feed – and that’s going to work far more effectively if they don’t realize it’s satire.

I wrote about the tendency for Facebook users to mistake satire for real news before, in Satire and the Internet. At the time I assumed this was because they were stupid, but now I think there are other factors at play as well. I found an article on Wikipedia recently about Poe’s Law, which isn’t named after the aforementioned great writer but some nobody named Nathan Poe. What he said is highly relevant, though: “Without a blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.” The same is true of any satire: without that laughter track, how can you tell whether it’s meant to be taken seriously or not?

“Because satire is funny,” you might reply. But that brings us to the other really important new trend in internet satire – most of it isn’t funny at all. It’s cynically tailored to make people click on it because it sounds like it’s true. Often it concerns the sudden death of a popular celebrity, or an arrogant right-wing politician making an arrogant right-wing statement – things that might be true, but just happen not to be. It doesn’t have to be true, though, and it doesn’t have to be funny, when the sole aim is to make the story go viral on Facebook so the hosting site gets plenty of advertising clicks.

Since the whole purpose of fake news stories is to get as many people as possible to social-share them, they don’t often deal with Fortean subjects which usually only have a minority appeal. But there was an exception a few months ago, when a story went viral about Buzz Aldrin finally admitting that the Moon landings were a hoax (“I am ashamed to say this but I cannot hide it any more... we decided to fake the moon landings of Apollo 11 to say we were greater than the Soviets”). That story came from a site called Huzlers, which even has a convenient “submit” form so that anyone in the world can create their own fake news story!

Cosmic Relics

There’s something very appealing about “ancient aliens” – the idea that it might be possible to find archaeological evidence on Earth (or elsewhere in the Solar System) of alien visitation in the distant past. In the popular mind, of course, the subject is associated with the fringe theories of people like Erich von Daniken, David Hatcher Childress and Giorgio Tsoukalos... but there is a more serious side to the subject as well. From an a-priori point of view, the probability that aliens visited the Earth at some random time in the last 4.5 billion years is a lot higher than the probability that they should suddenly arrive on the scene in the last 65 years, just when human civilization got to grips with the idea that interstellar travel might be possible.

I’ve already mentioned a scientific paper with the intriguing title “On the likelihood of non-terrestrial artifacts in the Solar System”, in my post on Searching for alien artifacts. There is even a scientific name for the subject – xenoarchaeology. But when scientists say they’re looking for alien artifacts, they mean real technological hardware. A chunk of limestone bearing a vague resemblance to a Soyuz re-entry capsule doesn’t count.

Sadly, “alien relics” that are unambiguous enough to convince hardnosed scientists are yet to be found in the real world. But in science fiction it’s a different matter. The discovery of an obviously artificial construct on the Moon is the starting point for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was developed from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 short story “The Sentinel”. Another film from the same period, Quatermass And The Pit (1967), deals with the unearthing of an ancient spacecraft, deep beneath the streets of London, in the same archaeological strata as five-million-year-old fossil hominids. Again, that film had its origins in the previous decade (a TV serial that aired in 1958/9).

Overlapping to some extent with the ancient astronaut theories is the idea of ancient high-tech civilizations here on Earth – often associated with the “lost continents” of Atlantis and Lemuria. Like ancient aliens, lost continents are very much a fringe topic. Hard archaeological evidence for a high-tech “lost continent” is—like unequivocal evidence for ancient aliens—easier to find in the pages of science fiction than in the real world. And sometimes evidence for one turns out to be evidence for both! In my recent article in Fortean Times about Lionel Fanthorpe’s Badger Books, one of the titles I referred to was Space No Barrier (1964), which was published under the pseudonym of Pel Torro. All I said about the story in the article was that it “starts with an alien artifact being unearthed at an archaeological dig in Iraq”. In fact the artifact turns out to be a buried spaceship, inside which there is a robot-like alien in suspended animation. It turns out he’s been stuck there since the days of Atlantis!

An interesting inversion of this idea can be found in Eric Frank Russell’s short story “The Cosmic Relic”. This was originally published in 1947, and reprinted in the June 1961 issue of Fantastic Stories (from which the illustration at the top of this post is taken). The “relic” featured in the story isn’t an archaeological find, but a battered-looking spacecraft that lands on the Isle of Man one day. After much consternation among the locals, and lengthy investigation by scientists, the spacecraft eventually yields its secret. It isn’t extraterrestrial at all, but a product of Earth! The spaceship was built and launched by the lost civilization of Lemuria, thousands of years ago. The “Cosmic Relic” finally returned home after travelling all the way round the Galaxy! For an even longer-term version of the same idea, see my Dinosaur Orbit post from two years ago.

Fortean Opera

I recently came across this gothically surreal image, which illustrates an early 19th century opera called Der Freischütz. Reading up about this, it turns out to be quite a Fortean opera, which started me thinking. A Google search for “Fortean opera” turns up nothing of relevance, so I decided it was time to rectify the situation. Two or three titles sprang to mind, in addition to Der Freischütz, and some further research turned up a few others. In the end I came up with the following list (in chronological order of composition):

Il Mondo della Luna (The World of the Moon) by Haydn (1777). As the title suggests, this opera features a trip to the Moon and an encounter with its inhabitants. That wouldn’t be particularly Fortean... except that the “aliens” are fakes and the journey to the Moon is all a big hoax. As such, Il Mondo della Luna is probably the first opera ever written about a fake Moon landing – all the way back in 1777! It isn’t a well-known work (Haydn is more famous for his symphonies than his operas), but I found this clip on YouTube from a recent performance in New York. It looks quite jolly!

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart (1791). This is a famously nutty opera that turns fairy tale conventions on their head. It begins with the hero, Prince Tamino, running away from a giant snake and fainting with fright. He is saved by three young women, followers of the Queen of the Night, who give him a magic flute and a mission to rescue the Queen’s daughter Pamina from a man named Sarastro. And why is this Fortean? Because it’s all a lie! When Tamino eventually catches up with Sarastro, it turns out he isn’t a villain at all, but a wise priest of Isis and Osiris (I should have mentioned this takes place in ancient Egypt). It’s true that Sarastro abducted Pamina, but only to free her from her mother’s clutches. He was keeping her safe so she could marry Tamino... but only after the latter has proved himself worthy by undergoing an arcane, Masonic-style initiation ritual. Strange as it may seem, he is assisted in this task by his magic flute, which was given to him by the evil Queen of the Night... who incidentally also steals the show.

Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter) by Weber (1821). This is a Pact with the Devil story.... the specific pact in this instance relating to the manufacture of magic bullets which always hit their target. The catch is that the seventh and last bullet does what the Devil—or rather the demon Samiel—wants it to... after which he takes your soul as per the standard agreement. The picture above illustrates the Wolf’s Glen scene, in which the magic bullets are forged while various spirits and demons look on. The whole scene is viewable on YouTube in two parts, here and here.

Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) by Wagner (1843). The tale of the Flying Dutchman is a distinctly Fortean piece of folklore, about an old, ghostly ship that is occasionally glimpsed by sailors, its captain having been cursed to sail the seas forever. The original legend dates from the 17th century, but the opera turns it into a characteristically 19th century gothic romance. This is very early Wagner, and he went on to bigger and better things. It’s always struck me that, if the only thing that was known about Wagner was his operatic subject-matter, he would be considered an archetypal New Ager! You’ve got Celtic legends in Tristan und Isolde, the Holy Grail in Parsifal and paganism in the Ring – including this awesome invocation of the Earth Goddess!

La Nonne Sanglante (The Bleeding Nun) by Gounod (1854). Writing about Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796), H. P. Lovecraft wrote “In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes; notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and the cabalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor.” This sounds like a great idea for an opera, but unfortunately Gounod’s attempt at it was a complete flop. Interestingly, the libretto was also offered to Gounod’s great contemporary Verdi, but he turned it down. If he hadn’t, The Bleeding Nun might have been up there with Rigoletto, Aida and La Traviata!

The Makropulos Case by Janáček (1926). I watched a production of this on a portable black and white TV when I was a student more than 30 years ago, and even then it occurred to me that it’s one of the few operas where the plot actually makes sense. The central character is a young woman named Emilia Marty, who takes an interest in a legal case that has been running for a century – and who talks about events of the 1820s as if she had been there. It gradually emerges that she’s lived for hundreds of years, using various different names all having the initials EM. But there’s an explanation for this which makes perfect sense. Anyone who is familiar with the story of John Dee and Edward Kelley will know that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552 – 1612) was obsessed with alchemy and the search for eternal life. Rudolf was based in Prague, which is where The Makropulos Case is set (Janáček was a Czech composer). When an alchemist named Hieronymus Makropulos offered Rudolf a life-extending potion, the Emperor asked him to test it on the alchemist’s daughter, Elina Makropulos, first. This caused her to fall into a coma, and the Emperor changed his mind about using the potion... but when Elina woke up a week later she discovered she had stopped aging! Hence her survival into the 20th century.

Wagner Dream by Jonathan Harvey (2007). Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in February 1883, at the age of 69. But, according to this opera, he didn’t give up without a Tibetan Book of the Dead style struggle. He was just embarking on his last opera, Die Sieger, and he argues with his spirit guide Vairochana that he ought to be allowed to go back and finish it. Wagner Dream is an opera within an opera (Wagner’s opera Die Sieger, as imagined by Harvey, framed inside Harvey’s own opera about Wagner’s battle against death). Die Sieger is set in ancient India, where the Buddha is busy setting up his community of monks. The hero is a young monk named Ananda who is trying to persuade the Buddha to allow women to join the monastic order. But isn’t that a bit far-fetched? Wagner may have been into a few New Age beliefs like Paganism and Celtic mythology, but surely not Buddhism? And feminist Buddhism at that? But it’s all true. Back in the 1850s, Wagner really did write a synopsis of Die Sieger along exactly these lines, and he really did return to the idea shortly before his death. I was aware of that (it’s mentioned by Philip K. Dick in VALIS, and in turn I referred to it in my Worldcon talk about Parsifal as Proto-SF)... but I’ve only just found out about Wagner Dream. Now I’m kicking myself that I missed its London performance last year – although there is a short clip of an earlier Dutch production on YouTube.

Blowing up the Moon (again)

A few days ago, the Daily Telegraph ran a piece under the sensational heading “US planned to blow up a nuclear bomb on the Moon”. The strapline included the phrase “according to reports”, giving the reader the impression this was News when in fact it was nothing of the kind.

Exactly the same story, in greater detail, appeared in the January 2003 issue of UFO Magazine. Despite the cover date, this would have been on the newsstands in late November 2002 – exactly ten years before the Telegraph piece. It isn’t just that it was a similar story – it was exactly the same story. The Project designation (A119) and the name of the informant (Leonard Reiffel) are identical in both accounts. And the one in UFO Magazine is honest enough to admit it was old news even in 2002 – it ascribes Reiffel’s public revelation of the project to “14 May 2000”. The events themselves, of course, happened way back in 1958.

The reason I remember this is because I had a letter on the subject printed in the following issue of UFO Magazine. In retrospect, I’m not sure I got my facts right – but it’s still worth reproducing (see scanned image), if only for the editorial reply from the late and very much missed Graham Birdsall. “A respected physicist” is the nicest thing I’ve ever been called by someone who wasn’t after money!

The point I was trying to make was that Reiffel’s reference to a “mushroom cloud” suggested there was an atmosphere on the Moon. I don’t think this is necessarily true. While the classic image of the broad, flat-topped mushroom cloud requires interaction with an atmosphere, you would probably get something that could loosely be described as a “mushroom shape” even on an airless world like the Moon.

In any case, the letter was tongue-in-cheek – jumping on the bandwagon of saying “Look at all the things NASA is lying to us about”, which was the mainstay of UFO Magazine in those days. In reality, I firmly believe that any erroneous or contradictory statements made by NASA (or any other government organization) are far more likely to be due to the bungling incompetence of low-level officials than a coordinated top-level conspiracy.

The wacky world of A.E. van Vogt

There was a time when the name of A.E. van Vogt would have been instantly recognizable to anyone remotely interested in science fiction. This was in the days before anyone called it sci-fi, and when “science fiction” meant fiction -- not movies or video games or Japanese comics. Van Vogt’s best work was published in the pages of Astounding magazine in the 1940s (as illustrated on the right). Even as late as November 1966, Astounding’s successor Analog magazine published a Reader’s Poll of favourite writers in which van Vogt’s name appeared fourth on the list -- after Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, but ahead of Poul Anderson and H.G. Wells. But since that time, van Vogt’s reputation has plummeted, and if his name is known to SF fans today, it is more likely to be as an example of a “bad” writer than a good one.

One reason for the decline in van Vogt’s reputation is common to many once-popular writers of fiction: his stories focused on plot and ideas, at the expense of the character development and literary style demanded by modern readers. But there is another factor, which is unique to van Vogt and entirely his own doing. When he came to revise his early magazine stories for book publication in the 1950s and 60s, he didn’t just give them a quick polish like other writers. He stitched them together into longer novels, which he referred to as “fix-ups”. In some cases this involved taking two or three completely unrelated stories—unrelated in theme, setting and characters—which worked perfectly in their original form, but are bewilderingly complex and self-contradictory after van Vogt had finished with them.

A few years ago I made a concerted effort to unravel all of van Vogt’s fix-up novels, and this has just been published on the Sevagram site: Unravelling van Vogt's Fix-Up Novels. There’s no doubt that the stories van Vogt produced for Astounding in the 1940s were by far the most imaginative and way-out science fiction of that period... but the problem with being “ahead of your time” is that once the rest of the world has caught up with you, your ideas simply look glib and hackneyed.

Take the well-known (and distinctly Fortean) notion of “Nazis on the Moon”. Nowadays if you type “Nazis” into a Google search, the second suggestion in the auto-complete list is “Nazis on the Moon”... the idea is that hackneyed. But in November 1943, when van Vogt’s story “The Beast” appeared in the pages of Astounding magazine, the idea was brand new. In those days, Nazis weren’t a bizarre joke -- they were breaking news. World War 2 was in full swing, and the Nazi war machine was attempting to take over the civilized world. In 1943 Hitler hadn’t even started firing rockets at London, let alone the Moon.

“The Beast” may qualify as van Vogt’s wackiest story ever. Besides the aforementioned Nazis, the Moon also harbours cowboys from the American West, a sabre-tooth cat, and a sex-mad Neanderthal with a harem of female slaves. Sadly, the story has never been reprinted in its proper form. In 1963 Van Vogt produced a novel called The Beast, which includes a much watered-down version of the original story (minus Nazis), interwoven with another excellent but completely different work from the 1940s called “The Changeling”. For full details of how the stories originally looked and how they were altered, see the full article on the Sevagram site.

Moon Aliens

A few years ago I bought a second-hand copy of a book called Secrets of our Spaceship Moon by Don Wilson. This was first published in the USA in 1979, but the copy I bought was the British Sphere paperback from 1980. Inside it I found a newspaper clipping from the Sunday Mirror (a downmarket tabloid here in the UK) dated 9 September 1979. Headed "Moon Aliens: Riddle of two UFOs in crater as Apollo made historic landing", it cites various dubious pieces of evidence suggesting that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin encountered extraterrestrials while they were on the surface of the Moon in 1969 (see scan below -- click on the image for a larger version).

The alleged Apollo 11 encounter is discussed in Secrets of our Spaceship Moon (it's even mentioned in the teaser paragraph on the first page), but it's pretty tame compared with some of the book's other "revelations". One of the later Apollo missions found a discarded glass bottle on the Moon, while another produced metal shavings while drilling into its crust. Early reconnaissance photographs revealed huge monuments, pyramids and other structures on the surface. As far back as the 1920s, coded radio signals were received from an alien satellite in lunar orbit. In 1968, a male-female pair of Soviet cosmonauts landed on the Moon a year before Apollo 11, but the man was killed by a "mechanical monster" and the woman was forced to return to Earth alone. To top everything, as the title of the book suggests, the Moon itself is a hollowed out artificial megastructure of alien origin. NASA knows this, but insists on concealing the truth for nefarious reasons of its own.

You might think that all this comes from the author's imagination, but actually all the claims in the book are carefully referenced to third-party sources. It's just that the sources aren't especially reliable. The information about the metal shavings, for example, comes from an unnamed "high school student". Now call me an old cynic, but I don't find that overwhelmingly conclusive. And one of the sources for the Apollo 11 UFO sightings is Otto Binder, described by Don Wilson as a "former NASA researcher and writer". I'm not sure about the "former NASA researcher" part, but Otto Binder certainly was a prolific writer. Most of his output was science fiction, written under the pseudonym of Eando Binder (originally shared with his brother Earl: "E and O Binder").

In 1969, Binder wrote a novel called Menace of the Saucers (left) and its sequel Night of the Saucers. These are interesting because they're among the very few adult science fiction novels which buy wholeheartedly and uncritically into the UFO paradigm. The two books are full of references to "real" ufological cases and associated anomalies -- including lunar ones. At one point in Night of the Saucers, the hero (a skeptical journalist turned believer) says to his alien wife (a member of the Galactic Vigilantes) "By the way, Lunar Orbiter Two, in 1966, photographed perfectly shaped domes on the Moon, and also strange spires. The domes had moved, when next photographed. Anything of yours?" -- to which she answers "Yes, they are our mobile Moon bases, plus antennas, with which we keep a long-range check on Earth".

The Great Moon Hoax

Here is the very first letter I ever sent to Fortean Times, way back in December 1996. It was in response to an article by David S. Percy in the ever-popular "NASA faked the Moon Landings" genre. There are many variations on this theme, and this particular article majored on the fact that the NASA photographs show evidence of multiple light sources (as you would find in a studio) rather than a single light source from the Sun. The following letter was intended as a subtle satire, but it was obviously too subtle for FT because they didn't print it.

Your recent article on the fake "Moon landings" reminded me of something a NASA whistle-blower once told me. I think this is worth relating because it may assist in understanding the motives behind such a bizarre deception. The Moon, if we are to believe the so-called "authorities", is nothing but an inert lump of rock which produces no light of its own. What a preposterous notion! If it were true, then a night with a full Moon would be just as dark as a night with no Moon at all. This is patently not the case, which proves that the Moon does indeed generate its own light. The Moon is not an inert lump of rock, but an artificial construct placed in Earth orbit for who knows what sinister government purpose. For hundreds of years we have been fed a glib cover story based on "non-zero reflectivity of the lunar surface" and such like meaningless technobabble. NASA faked the so-called "Apollo" pictures in a bungled attempt to create supporting evidence for the Moon's alleged surface reflectivity. Fortunately, one of the early NASA whistle-blowers invented the term "moonshine" as a synonym of "nonsense" to draw attention to this deception.