Unidentified Doesn't Always Mean Anomalous

How It Works magazine, November 2021

Just over ten years ago, in a post called Anomalous Progress, I bemoaned the fact that "there’s been no perceptible progress in understanding anomalous phenomena in the last 20 years". Having closely followed ufology during those 20 years, this lack of meaningful progress was something I found genuinely depressing. As I said in that earlier post, I wasn't talking about superficial "progress" in terms of the evolving sophistication of the UFO sightings themselves (which undeniably did occur), but tangible progress in understanding what was behind them.

So it's heartening to see how the situation has improved in the decade since I wrote that post. First there were the so-called "Pentagon UFO videos" released from 2020 onwards, as summarised in the text box above (extracted from a longer cover feature I did for How It Works #157 back in 2021 - you can still buy an electronic copy of it for just £3.99). Soon after that came the setting up of the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, followed by NASA's Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team. As regards the kind of "genuine progress" I was hoping for, the latter is particularly significant because (despite what some people believe) NASA is a purely scientific organization, not a military one. An added bonus for me is the fact that the NASA team was chaired by David Spergel, who I used to know (I'll come back to that later) - so I know he's a first-class scientist and not a mere bureaucrat.

With the renewed interest in UFOs - or UAPs as they're often known in official circles - I've been seeing more about the subject in the media, and something has just dawned on me which (in all the decades I've been interested in UFOs) had never occurred to me before. An assertion you often see, made equally by UFO believers and open-minded investigators, goes something like this:

The great majority of UFO reports, when subjected to thorough examination, turn out to be natural phenomena, human-made technology or hoaxes. But there's always a small number of cases that can't be ascribed to these categories, and so remain unidentified.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that statement as it stands. But many people saying or hearing it (including myself, until recently) understand it to mean that those few remaining cases have been proven not to be natural phenomena, human-made technology or hoaxes. By definition, therefore, they must be anomalous - i.e. either alien spacecraft or some exotic or paranormal phenomenon. But is this really true?

The answer depends on the quality of the data. If you have high-definition video, together with multiple independent eyewitness reports, a precise record of the time and location, and maybe radar data as well, then yes - if it still defies explanation it probably is a genuine anomaly. But most UFO sightings aren't like that. If you can't ascribe an obvious explanation to them, it's most likely a consequence of poor quality data. It's true they remain "unidentified", but that's not the same as saying they're anomalous. To give an extreme example, if you see a single black pixel in a single video frame of the daytime sky, then it may well be "unidentified" but it's highly unlikely to be "anomalous". It's more likely to be an insect or an instrument glitch.

When the military first started using the term UAP, it stood for "Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon", which - as a purely descriptive term - is a definite improvement on UFO for "Unidentified Flying Object". If you see something in the sky that you can't identify, how do you know it's a "flying object"?  That's a form of implicit identification in itself, since it rules out misidentified astronomical objects or unusual meteorological phenomena. But now UAP seems to have morphed into "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon", which - in light of what I've just said - is a backward step, because it misses the point that "unidentified" may simply result from poor quality data.

If you think about it, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon" is a pretty sloppy term. I mean, it implies you could have an "Identified Anomalous Phenomenon", which is a contradiction in terms. I hope it wasn't my former colleague, David Spergel, who came up with it! If you look at his Wikipedia page, you'll see that he "went to the University of Oxford as a visiting scholar in 1983, where he studied with James Binney." A little later, in 1984-86, I worked for James as a postdoctoral research assistant, and saw David on several occasions when he came over from the States during that period (the work I did at Oxford was an extension of Spergel's). As proof that I'm just one degree of separation away from NASA's top UFO expert, here's an excerpt from James Binney's bibliography that has my name at the top and Spergel's at the bottom:

 

A Low Budget Flying Saucer

 Here are some pictures of an odd little vehicle I saw at the Helicopter Museum in Weston-Super-Mare last week. It struck me as looking like the kind of cartoony flying saucer the Jetsons or Marvin the Martian might be see in. My previous visit to the museum was 12 or 13 years ago, and while most of the displays were just the same as last time, I don’t remember seeing this one. Either it was in storage, or else I blinked and missed it. That’s possible, since it’s half-hidden behind a screen in the far corner (possibly out of embarrassment – it’s like the airborne equivalent of a Sinclair C5).

According to the display placard, the Westland WG33 was a proposed short-range, two-seat helicopter that could be flown by inexperienced personnel and would cost less than £30,000 per unit. It was considered for use as an aerial observation platform by both the British and U.S. army in the late 1970s, but never got to the stage of a flying prototype. This full-scale mock-up was donated to the museum when the project was declassified in 1980.

A Few Fortean Novels by Ian Watson

UFOs and the Men in Black – Temporal anomalies and the Tunguska event – Tantric Sex and the Tibetan Book of the Dead – Alchemy and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch – Space Gods and a Martian Inca… The novels that Ian Watson wrote in the 1970s and 80s certainly aren’t short of Fortean ideas. I don’t always remember to make a distinction on this blog between fictional works that are “good” (i.e. enjoyable to read) and ones that are “interesting” (i.e. thought-provoking). So I’ll say right away that Ian Watson is very much a master of the second category, without always finding his way into the first. I’ve read six of his novels in three short bursts – three in 1997, two in 2004 and one just last week. Some are definitely better than others, but here’s a quick rundown in the chronological order that I read them:

Miracle Visitors (1978) is one of the books on my Charles Fort in Fiction list. I bought my copy in 1997, from Watkins esoteric bookshop in London. They’d shelved it among the non-fiction UFO books, which is quite appropriate really. Although the story has “characters” and a “plot”, they’re primarily vehicles for the author to get his ideas across. I’m not averse to novels of this type, as long as the ideas are good ones – which they are in this case. There are countless science fiction stories about UFOs, but almost all of them are based on some variant of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH). What’s unusual about Miracle Visitors is that Watson opts for a Psycho-Social Hypothesis (PSH), in which the whole UFO Phenomenon (with a capital P) is a manifestation of a higher state of consciousness. Still more unusual, he actually manages to make the PSH sound interesting – he even works the Men in Black into the Phenomenon as well as the different kinds of Close Encounter.

I was sufficiently impressed with Miracle Visitors that I went out and bought two more Watson novels. The first of these was Chekhov’s Journey (1983). This has nothing to do with Star Trek – the title character is the playwright Anton Chekhov, who really did go on a long and somewhat mysterious journey in 1890. The novel is set a century later in 1990, when a documentary film is being made about Chekhov’s journey. Since so few facts are known about it, they use a form of “past-life regression” hypnosis to fill in some of the details. This brings all sorts of wacky weirdness to light, including a connection to the Tunguska explosion (which occurred in 1908) and a spacecraft from the future which is hurtling backwards in time. Of all the Watson novels I’ve read, this is probably my favourite – certainly in terms of being exciting and enjoyable to read.

The other Watson novel I read in 1997 was Alien Embassy (1977). This is set in a strange future society based on Tibetan Buddhism, in which the space program ostensibly uses Tantric sex rituals as a mystical means of travelling to the stars. Now I may be wrong, but this strikes me as the single most brilliant idea for a science fiction novel that anyone has ever come up with. Unfortunately the execution doesn’t live up to the concept, and Watson heads off on a deeply undesirable tangent. Ignoring all the potentialities of sex, mysticism and space travel, the novel is almost exclusively about (wait for it) … politics. Aaarghh! It’s not surprising that it was another seven years before I picked up another Watson novel.

When I did, it was another really good one. The Gardens of Delight (1980) is based on the intriguing concept of a planet modelled on The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. This extraordinary triptych can be seen in the Prado Museum in Madrid, which I’ve visited a couple of times (that’s my souvenir postcard at the bottom of this post). It’s arguably the strangest, most baffling artwork of the Renaissance period, and there are innumerable theories and speculations as to its meaning. According to one school of thought, it depicts an allegory of the alchemical process… and that’s the interpretation Watson opts for here. The result is a really fascinating and original novel, which ought to be read by anyone who’s a fan of Bosch’s painting.

The other Watson book I read in 2004 was God’s World (1979). I have to be honest and say I don’t have a clear recollection of this one. The back cover blurb sounds promising enough: “Earth has been alerted by messengers of God and summoned to the planet of angels, 82 Eridani. Powered by a mysterious space drive found in the Gobi desert, a crusading space ship is launched through High Space to explore this heavenly world.” Beyond that, all I can remember is a bunch of rather dull people on a spaceship talking to each other. As with Alien Embassy, I suspect that if the reader took the blurb and wrote their own novel around it, they’d have a lot more fun.

Much the same is true of the novel I’ve just read – The Martian Inca (1977). I bought this one several years ago, but it kept slipping down the pile before I got round to reading it. As with all Watson’s novels, the basic premise is fascinating. An unmanned sample-return mission is sent to Mars, and on its return it crash-lands in a remote part of Bolivia. The soil sample contains a psychoactive substance which causes one of the villagers to have a revelatory vision (or a pseudo-revelatory one – it isn’t clear which), after which he claims to be a reincarnated Inca with special powers (again, it’s ambiguous as to whether these powers are real or self-delusion) – and promptly sets off to lead a populist revolution. At the same time, a crewed mission lands on Mars and is exposed to the same substance, with equally strange results. I imagine that’s pretty much how Watson pitched the novel to his publishers, in which case it’s not surprising that they jumped at it. Unfortunately, however, the end-product doesn’t live up to the pitch. In particular, the details of the flight to Mars and the Bolivian revolution are too sketchy for the reader to engage with, or believe in, to any great extent.

I don’t want to end on a negative note, though. There is so much trite, unchallenging, formulaic science fiction around that novels like these are a much-needed antidote to all that.

Jill Trent and the Flying Saucer Mystery

Jill Trent, Science Sleuth was a golden-age comic book heroine who appeared as a back-up feature in Wonder Comics #8-14 between October 1946 and 1947. Those comics are now all in the public domain, and can be read online (the Jill Trent stories start around page 16 in each issue). The character herself is also in the public domain, and last year I saw an online competition to write a 5-page script featuring the character. The winners (of which there were several) had their stories drawn by artists and published. Sadly my entry didn’t make the cut – presumably because it won’t make sense to anyone who isn’t an aficionado of Retro-Forteana.

I couldn’t help noticing that Jill’s career overlapped with the Kenneth Arnold sighting and the start of the Flying Saucer mystery, so I took that as my cue. To make the story visually attractive I set it amid the science fiction fandom of the time (Yes, they did have cosplay in the 1940s – see Anthony Boucher’s description of the 1941 Denver Worldcon in Rocket to the Morgue: “They had a costume party on the last night. Come as your favourite SF character. Berni wanted to go as Dale Arden, but I’m afraid it was an overambitious project.”).

I thought the script came out OK, but unfortunately it’s way beyond my artistic abilities to take it any further (the cover above is a paste-up job using public domain images). So I decided I might as well post the whole thing here...

PAGE 1

PANEL 1
Full page splash. A bustling street scene with people converging on a large big-city hotel, possibly Art Deco style. Vehicle designs indicate this is the late 1940s. There is a large banner on the hotel: “SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION”. On the sidewalk, there is a newsstand with the headline: “FLYING SAUCERS SEEN OVER CITY”. Most people are in 1940s cosplay – think Buck Rogers, Startling Stories etc. Lots of brass brassieres and impractically skimpy spacesuits. JILL and DAISY, however, are in regular clothes of 1947... and getting a few strange looks as a result.

TITLE: JILL TRENT, SCIENCE SLEUTH in “THE FLYING SAUCER MYSTERY”

DAISY: They all look like loonies! What on Earth made you agree to demonstrate your latest invention at a convention full of wackos?

JILL: Take it easy, Daisy, everything will be fine!

JILL (continued): I do feel a little overdressed, though...

PAGE 2

PANEL 1
JILL is at a stall inside the convention, looking at a dealer’s display – “SPACESUITS $2.95”. The spacesuits look more like metallic bikinis and fetish gear (some of the kinkier accessories may only become apparent in later panels).

CAPTION: A few minutes later...

PANEL 2
DAISY is looking at something a little more flattering for her fuller figure – e.g. a nylon see-through Space Princess gown.

PANEL 3
JILL and DAISY head to the Ladies’ Restroom with their purchases.

DAISY: And you’re sure this is a good idea, right?

JILL: When in Rome...

PANEL 4
They change into their costumes, looking like something straight off the cover of a 1940s science fiction magazine.

PANEL 5
On stage in an empty lecture theater. DAISY poses in front of a big old-fashioned TV camera. JILL tinkers inside a large retro-futuristic TV receiver.

CAPTION: Before the audience arrive, Jill and Daisy give their equipment a final test...

DAISY: This new color television of yours will really impress those freaks!

PANEL 6
JILL holds up a small, blackened vacuum tube (a kind of fancy light-bulb). She looks pissed off.

JILL: Darn it! The 3K55 triode has blown! We need to get a replacement – and quick!

PAGE 3

PANEL 1
A street with a storefront labeled “GOVERNMENT SURPLUS”. JILL and DAISY are running toward it (still in their sci-fi getup). There are various 1940s-era gadgets in the window.

PANEL 2
Inside the store, JILL rummages through a box of vacuum tubes.

JILL: 3K55... Got it! I’ll pay for it and we can get back to the hotel!

PANEL 3
Silent close-up of the vacuum tube. The reader sees it is actually marked 3K55X, and has “EXPERIMENTAL” stamped on it.

PANEL 4
Wide view of the street outside the Surplus store. Clearly a sleazy part of town – adult theaters and massage parlors etc. A pair of provocatively dressed hookers stare at our cosplay-clad heroines as if they are unwelcome competition (nothing too explicit – just enough to raise the blood pressure of any budding Fredric Werthams out there).

PANEL 5
Close up of one or both of the hookers suddenly looking up at the sky in alarm. A strange sound is coming from there.

SFX: ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ

PANEL 6
Close up of JILL and DAISY also looking up in amazement.

SFX: ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ

JILL: Look – a flying saucer!

PAGE 4

PANEL 1
Full page-width image of flying saucer hovering over the street, projecting a bright beam of light downward. It looks really sinister, but doesn’t actually do any noticeable damage.

SFX: ZZZZZZZZZZAPP!!

PANEL 2
JILL and DAISY pull their weapons from their holsters and aim them at the UFO. They may not realize it in the heat of the moment, but the reader can see they are only toy ray-guns that came with their sci-fi costumes.

PANEL 3
They pull their triggers to no great effect.

SFX: Klik! Klik!

JILL: Darn it, these are just the toys that came with our costumes!

DAISY: We left our real guns back at the hotel!

PANEL 4
They gaze back up at the sky. There are no sounds coming from there now.

DAISY: The flying saucer is gone!

JILL: Never mind that now! We need to get back to the convention or we’ll miss our time slot!

PAGE 5

PANEL 1
Wide view of the lecture theater, showing the audience of 1940s-era sci-fi geeks. JILL and DAISY are on stage with the TV camera and receiver.

CAPTION: Back at the hotel, Jill and Daisy are just in time for the start of their demonstration...

PANEL 2
Closer view of JILL speaking on stage, with the TV receiver next to her. DAISY is off to one side, looking into the TV camera.

JILL: The black-and-white television you’re all familiar with will soon be a thing of the past!

JILL (continued): Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future... welcome to color TV!

PANEL 3
The image on the TV is in color all right, but it shows the flight deck of the flying saucer with two men in 1940s-era flying suits. JILL and DAISY look gobsmacked.

VOICE FROM TV: ...Mission accomplished! Flying Saucer #1 returning to base...

DAISY: That’s not me! The TV is supposed to show me!

PANEL 4
Same angle, closer view of JILL.

JILL: It’s because we used the government surplus tube! It’s picking up a government frequency!

JILL (continued): So the government was behind the flying saucers all along! They won’t get away with it now we’ve blown their secret!

PANEL 5
Full page-width image. Wide angle view showing the audience – everyone is laughing and applauding. They think it’s all a big joke – just the thing for a sci-fi convention! Daisy sweeps her arm toward them.

DAISY: So why do I get the feeling no-one believes us?

THE END

How UFOs Conquered the World

 As you can see from the photograph, the latest addition to my collection of UFO books is How UFOs Conquered the World by David Clarke. Despite having a picture of a child on the cover, it’s one of the most grown-up books on the subject I’ve ever come across. My review of it appeared on Brian Clegg’s Popular Science site last weekend. At that time I hadn’t read any other reviews of the book, so I was pleased to see on David’s own blog the next day that both the Sunday Times and Magonia described it in very similar terms to myself.

The clever thing about this book is that it’s not about UFOs per se, but about how people think and talk about UFOs, and the way this has become inextricably interwoven with popular culture over the last 70 years. As David Clarke demonstrates, this is a subject that can be analysed methodically, intelligently and – most important of all – constructively. That’s what I was getting at when I described the book as “grown up”. It’s a refreshing antidote to the childish to-ing and fro-ing between uncritical speculation on the one hand and destructive debunking on the other.

The book’s subtitle is “The History of a Modern Myth”. This uses myth, not in its colloquial sense of “popular misconception”, but its original sense of “pre-scientific world-view”. As the author says: “To qualify as a myth a story does not have to be true or false, but it must express a conviction held tenaciously by its adherents. It is a defining characteristic of myths that, like the extraterrestrial hypothesis, they are immune to scientific scrutiny.”

I don’t want to repeat large chunks of what I said in the review, but I will quote one bit which highlights just how “immune to scientific scrutiny” modern ufology has become:

The X-Files went on to provide one of the most powerful tools in the cognitive dissonance arsenal, by popularising the idea that ‘They’ (the government, NASA et al) are actively concealing the truth about UFOs. This hypothesis – which Clarke points out is unfalsifiable – allows any awkward counter-evidence to be dismissed as ‘disinformation’.

One striking thing occurred to me while I was reading the book which I didn’t have space to mention in the review. As far as the extraterrestrial hypothesis is concerned, there is simply too much evidence for it, not too little. I’m not referring to evidence that would convince a court of law or a peer-reviewed scientific journal (neither of which has ever been convinced, of course), but evidence of the type commonly cited by UFO believers. There are too many UFO sightings (750 in the UK alone the year that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released). There are too many Roswell-style “crashed saucer” incidents (more than 200, according to one website). And too many people claim to have been abducted by aliens (2.5 million British citizens, extrapolating from a survey carried out in 2014). Those figures are simply too big to make sense in the context of extraterrestrial visitation. On the other hand, they make perfect sense in the context of a social and/or psychological phenomenon.

Of course, some UFO reports may still be “true” (i.e. real extraterrestrial spacecraft) even if the majority are not. But the extraterrestrial hypothesis remains nothing more than speculation. On the other hand, it's an indisputable fact that there is a fascinating psychosocial phenomenon at play, independent of the truth or otherwise of the ETH. That’s what I meant when I said David Clarke’s book is constructive, not destructive.

You can read my full review here. I gave the book four stars, which in the context of the Popular Science site where it was posted means “Excellent book that any popular science fan would want to read”. From a Fortean perspective, however, the rating would be a resounding five stars – definitely as good as they come. You can get your copy by clicking on the following links:

• Get How UFOs Conquered the World from Amazon.com
• Get How UFOs Conquered the World from Amazon UK

Fortean Aspects of the Flying Disks

Here’s a historical oddity I found by accident last week. It’s an article from the June 1948 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories entitled “Fortean Aspects of the Flying Disks”. It appeared just a year after the term “flying saucer” was coined, in the wake of the Kenneth Arnold sighting (at the time this was the defining event in ufology, rather than Roswell – which as I’ve discussed elsewhere was strangely ignored despite being in the public domain).

The Amazing article must have been one of the first to link the UFO phenomenon with the word “Fortean”. Interestingly, this seems to have been a minority view at the time. Today, the idea that UFOs are “Fortean” (in the sense of extraterrestrial, or at any rate beyond the understanding of science) is probably the first thing that springs to most people’s minds. But in those days, the prevailing view seems to have been that they were some sort of military technology produced here on Earth. The author refutes this explanation by pointing out that, as recorded in the writings of Charles Fort, similar things were seen in the skies long before they could possibly have been produced by human technology.

The author, by the way, was one “Marx Kaye” – which according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database was the pseudonym of a little-known science fiction author named S. J. Byrne. You can read the article online at the Internet Archive (it starts on page 154 of the magazine). In fact that’s where I read it. I do own a few issues of Amazing Stories from the late 1940s, because of my interest in the Shaver Mystery, but not this particular one.

There is, of course, a close connection between the Shaver Mystery and the early days of ufology, in the person of Amazing’s editor Ray Palmer. As I wrote in The Mystery of Flight 19 : “... Palmer wasn’t completely satisfied with the Shaver paradigm and was ready to abandon it if something better came along. And in 1948, that's exactly what happened, when Palmer became one of the first to jump on the Flying Saucer bandwagon!”

You can see the transition starting to take place before your eyes, if you read Palmer’s editorial at the start of the issue containing the Marx Kaye article. In fact, I found Palmer’s take on the subject far more interesting - from a historical perspective – than Kaye’s. Again, you can read it for yourself (page 6 of the magazine), but here are a few quotes:

• Now that science has proved in so sensational a manner at least two phases of the Shaver Mystery, we have a prediction to make. We predict, based on evidence now in this editor’s possession, that it will be definitely proved that space ships are visiting the earth right now.
• The question arises, if space ships do visit the Earth, is it a matter of “national security” and may we talk about it? [...] Perhaps in wartime, our military would clamp down on all talk concerning military matters. But right now we aren’t at war with anybody, and we, in America, have the right of free speech and can talk about anything we please.
• For the benefit of those readers who are under the impression that there was a censorship on the now famous flying saucers, that’s just plain poppycock. There never was any censorship (other than that of individual newspaper editors who “laid off” of a subject that was beginning to look ridiculous).
• For more than twenty years we [i.e. science fiction magazines] have been talking about space ships, and maybe we’re right at last! But “authorities” who will get the first reports of the mysterious craft, when they appear, will think there is a “leak” if they read any old issue of Amazing Stories at all! Moral: More “authorities” ought to read science fiction – they won’t be so surprised by logical developments as they develop.

Unfortunately there aren’t any UFO-related pictures in this issue of Amazing, but here is a Fortean image of a different kind from the back cover – the apparition of an exotic city in the sky that was seen over Alaska in 1887:

Subversive Aliens

I went to two exhibitions of “subversive art” in London last week. The first was Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK at the British Library, which I mentioned briefly in my post about Fortean Comics a few weeks ago. As I said on that occasion, I’ve never been very interested in the subversive side of comics – but I was still disappointed at how little there was in the exhibition that I could relate to. All the comics on show seemed to date either from before I was born, or from after I’d passed the peak of my comic-reading phase.

There was, however, one artist on display whose name is well known to people of my generation – even non-comic-reading ones. That’s Bob Monkhouse, who was a high-profile game-show host in the 1960s and 70s. Before he went into TV, however, he worked in the comics industry for a few years. The “subversive” work on display consisted of a story he produced for a comic called Oh Boy in 1949. This features a superhero named the Tornado battling a villainous race of aliens, whose subversiveness consists not so much of their politics as their physical appearance – which, as you can see from the picture above, is distinctly penis-like (for other monstrous dicks on this blog, see Phallic Satire).

I had to use a picture I found on the internet, because there were signs all over the place saying that photography was forbidden. That struck me as a little ironic for an exhibition that claimed to be subversive. Even more ironic was the fact that visitors had to pay the blatantly capitalist sum of ten pounds to get in!

The other exhibition I went to was much better – Banksy, the unauthorised retrospective at Sotheby’s S2 gallery. This one was free entry and you could take whatever photos you wanted to. And for added subversiveness, just as the title suggests, the exhibit was unauthorised. In fact the artist not only didn’t authorise it, but he was reportedly disgusted that an event of this type was put on at all. Now that’s what I call a subversive exhibition!

You can find good quality images of all the works on show by clicking the link above. My favourite picture was Lenin on Roller Skates, but the most Fortean had to be the one with the flying saucers. Here is my own photo of the picture in situ:

The First UFO Hoaxers?

According to a quote I came across a few days ago, Sir Isaac Newton “caused one of the earliest recorded UFO scares by flying a kite at night with a paper lantern attached to it”. That’s really one of the archetypal UFO hoaxes (although people nowadays would probably use a balloon rather than a kite)... but Newton was doing it way back in the 17th century!

And he wasn’t the only one. Athanasius Kircher was a German scholar who was born about 40 years before Newton. According to the same source as the previous quote “he launched little hot air balloons with Flee the Wrath of God written underneath”. So Kircher was another 17th century UFO hoaxer!

Of course, it’s unlikely that Kircher and Newton wanted people to think the Earth was being visited by extraterrestrials, since the idea barely existed in the 17th century. But there’s no doubt they were trying to alarm people by perpetrating a deception. There’s a tendency to think of hoaxing as a modern phenomenon, so that any unusual object seen in the sky in past centuries must have been the real thing. But why couldn’t it have been some joker flying a balloon or a kite?

The book those quotes come from is The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince (technically the Newton quote is itself a quote from another book by John Gribbin). The quotes don’t have much to do with the main theme of the book, though, which is the significant role (usually glossed over by historians of science) played by the Hermetic tradition during the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.

I find this period of history fascinating, because of the dramatic changes that were taking place in the prevailing worldview. One thing that interests me in particular (since my original specialism was stellar dynamics) is the way the universe suddenly grew from very small (with the Solar System embedded in a hollow sphere of fixed stars) to very large (with the stars spread throughout infinite space).

Contrary to popular opinion, the change didn’t come with Copernicus. He put the Sun instead of the Earth at the centre of the Solar System, but he still believed there was a rigid sphere of fixed stars – just tiny points of light – somewhere beyond the orbit of Saturn. It’s a huge leap from that to the idea of an infinite universe, in which the stars are of equal importance to the Sun, possibly with their own planets orbiting around them. In an earlier post (The man who invented aliens) I attributed this idea to Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600). According to Picknett and Prince, however, the same idea seems to have occurred to other people independently. One of them was an English near-contemporary of Bruno’s named Thomas Digges (1546 – 1595).

You may never have heard of Thomas Digges, but you’ve probably heard of a young man who lodged with him for a time in Bishopsgate – William Shakespeare. The latter worked at the same theatre, The Globe, as Digges’s son. So Shakespeare almost certainly heard the revolutionary new theory of “infinite space” direct from the horse’s mouth. One phrase Digges used in refuting the old worldview was to say the universe was not enclosed within the stellar sphere “as in a nutshell”.

“Hang on a second,” you say. “In a Nutshell is a well-known cliché. I thought Shakespeare was the only Elizabethan with a license to coin clichés. Didn’t Shakespeare say something about In a Nutshell?”

Well yes, he did. It comes from Act 2 Scene 2 of Hamlet: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

Probably the first reference to “infinite space” in English literature!

Cult TV and Autoerotic Asphyxiation

I bought this lot of three Man from U.N.C.L.E books on eBay last week (I’ll explain why later). It was a very popular TV series in the 1960s – I’m fairly sure it was the first show I ever watched, back when I was 8 or 9, that wasn’t aimed specifically at children. The plots were over my head, but the U.N.C.L.E agents had some really cool guns and gadgets (which I also had, in toy form).

These tie-in novels were all written by different authors. The Doomsday Affair, by Harry Whittington, is by far the best. It’s about a plot deep within the U.S. government to drop an H-bomb on Washington D.C. as a ruse to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. That’s really quite a Fortean idea – or at least, it’s the sort of thing Conspiracy Theorists are always going on about.

The other two novels have Fortean elements, too. The Copenhagen Affair by John Oram is about man-made flying saucers being constructed in an underground Nazi factory in Denmark. That sounds promising, but the novel is appallingly badly plotted. The Vampire Affair by David McDaniel is somewhat better, and contains a number of science-fictional in-jokes – including a cameo appearance by Forrest J Ackerman (the man who invented the term “sci-fi”, and never showed any remorse for doing so).

The Vampire Affair was the reason I bought the books in the first place – because I wanted to sample David McDaniel’s writing. I first came across his name when I was researching my recent post about The Geek by Alice Louise Ramirez. In her Amazon review, she mentions that McDaniel was one of the weed-smoking hippies who helped her come up with the concept for The Geek in the first place. She doesn’t refer to him by name, but she mentions a Man from U.N.C.L.E author who “died after slipping in the bathtub”.

After a bit of research, I realized the person she was talking about was David McDaniel. Not because David McDaniel died after slipping in the bathtub, but because that’s how his family said he died at the time. Actually he was found hanging in his bedroom, in circumstances suggestive of autoerotic asphyxiation.

You can understand why his family didn’t want this to become public knowledge. Any death is a tragedy, but it’s even more of a tragedy if people roll on the floor laughing when they hear about it.

“There are worse ways to go, but I can't think of a more undignified way than autoerotic asphyxiation.” That quote comes from “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose”, the fourth episode of the third season of The X-Files, first aired in 1995. The words are spoken by the title character, Clyde Bruckman, to UFO-obsessed FBI agent Fox Mulder. In the story, Bruckman is supposed to be able to foresee people’s deaths, so this may be his way of telling Mulder that’s how he’s going to die. Or maybe he’s just trying to freak him out.

It’s true there are more dignified ways to die than autoerotic asphyxiation. Being felled by the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, for example – which is how David Carradine’s character dies at the end of [spoiler deleted]. In real life, however... well, some people think Carradine was murdered – but if so, the perpetrators made it look just like autoerotic asphyxiation.

For people in my age group, David Carradine’s most famous role was as Kwai Chang Caine in the TV series Kung Fu. That was just as much of a cult phenomenon in the 1970s as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was in the 1960s or The X-Files in the 1990s.

Reinventing Ezekiel's Wheel

Ezekiel was a priest who was exiled to Babylon along with King Jehoiachin of Judah in the sixth century BC. Ezekiel experienced a number of visions, and his account of these form one of the main prophetic books of the Hebrew scriptures. The best known of Ezekiel’s visions is the first, involving an encounter with a heavenly figure seated on a throne borne by four strange creatures, each of which has four faces and is supported by a “wheel within a wheel”.

This is one of the most striking images to be found in any of the Hebrew prophetic books, and as such has appealed to artists throughout the centuries. This depiction by William Blake (who had mystical visions of his own) emphasizes the mystical and symbolic nature of Ezekiel’s vision.

To many people, however, Ezekiel’s vision is nothing less than an extraterrestrial flying machine. As with other “ancient astronaut” theories, you often hear people says things like “Of course, that idea originated in 1968 with Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods”. Well, no it didn’t. All von Däniken did was to pitch the idea in populist, uncomplicated language that was capable of appealing to a huge mass-market audience. But the idea was by no means a new one.

I’ve already mentioned how ancient astronaut theories were pushed by Desmond Leslie as long ago as 1953, in one of the most famous of the early UFO books – Flying Saucers Have Landed, coauthored with George Adamski. Sadly the book is remembered solely for Adamski’s contribution, even though Leslie’s chapters are a lot more sophisticated and intelligent. British readers of my generation may also remember the work of W. Raymond Drake – the first of whose “Gods and Spacemen” books was published in 1964, four years before Chariots of the Gods. To my mind, Drake’s books were more insightful than von Däniken’s, and better researched. But writers like Drake and Leslie never achieved the mass appeal of von Däniken, and people forget (or were never aware) that they predated him by several years.

Although it’s frustrating that people give all the credit to the wrong person, if you look at it another way then von Däniken’s achievement is really quite impressive. He took an idea that had previously been confined to a small niche audience, and brought it to the attention of the whole world. In Fortean circles, however, everything he had to say was old hat. In his book Great World Mysteries, published in 1962, the British Fortean writer Eric Frank Russell wrote “...anything strange seen soaring above the clouds automatically became a fiery chariot. Some imaginative writers have seized on this fact and turned out stories depicting biblical characters as enlightened visitors from another world.”

To someone brought up in a technological, materialistic culture, it may seem obvious that ancient accounts of supposedly mystical experiences are garbled descriptions of extraterrestrial hardware. But the opposite is equally true – a modern-day account of extraterrestrial hardware may be a garbled description of a mystical experience. This is the line taken by the psychologist C.G. Jung in his 1959 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Jung uses Ezekiel’s vision as an example of what UFOs might be, not the other way around!

Perhaps the most mainstream reference to a “nuts and bolts” interpretation of Ezekiel’s vision is this short choral work composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1956. By that time Vaughan Williams was 84 years old, and very much the grand old man of English classical music. The piece is a setting of the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, and the only unusual thing about it is the title the composer chose to give it: A Vision of Aeroplanes (the word “aeroplane” literally refers to an aircraft with a fixed horizontal lifting surface, but in the mid-20th century it was used loosely to mean any form of flying machine).

In an article about Vaughan Williams in issue 241 of Fortean Times (October 2008), David Sutton describes A Vision of Aeroplanes as “a cataclysmic sounding piece of musical prophecy – aeronauts from the future – for choir and organ”. But it’s odd that this particular composer should have chosen such a materialistic interpretation of the text, since the same FT article also describes Vaughan Williams as “a visionary in the tradition of Blake” (and for Blake’s distinctly non-materialistic interpretation, see above).

While most of the “nuts and bolts” proponents have been content to say “Ezekiel’s description sounds a bit like a flying machine”, some writers have gone further. In 1974, for example, an aeronautical engineer named J.F. Blumrich produced a full-length book called The Spaceships of Ezekiel. According to the author’s Foreword, this started out as an attempt to debunk the spaceship theory popularized by Eric von Däniken, but ended up supporting it – together with a fairly specific engineering design based on a line-by-line analysis of the Biblical text.

Although Blumrich’s book was the first detailed analysis to draw widespread attention, it wasn’t the first of its kind. Something very similar was attempted by Arthur W. Orton in 1961, in a 14-page article entitled “The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel”. This appeared in Analog Science Fiction magazine, cover-dated March 1961 in the US and July 1961 in the UK. Again, Orton employed a line-by-line analysis of Ezekiel’s text to come up with a specific engineering design (although Orton’s design looks nothing like Blumrich’s).

The main point I wanted to make was that, contrary to popular opinion, Erich von Däniken wasn’t the first person to suggest a nuts-and-bolts interpretation of the Book of Ezekiel. Numerous lesser known authors put forward similar ideas throughout the 1950s and 60s – but on closer examination even they were merely “reinventing the wheel”. As long ago as 1902, a Baptist minister from Texas named Burrell Cannon was granted a patent for his Ezekiel Airship, which was supposedly based on the description provided in the first chapter of the Biblical account!

The Flying Submarine

This week’s post was going to be on a completely different subject. It was a rather dry subject (Victorian science) so I thought I’d try to find a picture to liven it up. To that end I dug out an old book I’ve got called One hundred years of science fiction illustration, 1840-1940. I couldn’t find anything suitable for the post I was thinking about, but I did find the rather intriguing picture shown here. At first glance it appears to depict a formation of Victorian-era flying saucers! On closer inspection, however, they’re actually meant to be submarines seen in profile. But the submarines are flying through the air.

The picture is the work of Albert Robida (1848 – 1926), who I mentioned previously in The End of Books. It comes from an illustrated novel published in 1890 called La Vie Électrique, of which the complete text and illustrations can be found at Project Gutenberg.

The story is set in the mid-twentieth century, so you might think the submarines depicted are purely products of Robida’s futuristic imagination – like the flying machines in his best known work, La Sortie de l'opéra en l'an 2000. But in fact Robida’s submarine is closely modelled on a real one, designed by Claude Goubet and launched in 1887. As you can see from this diagram (taken from the December 1900 issue of Popular Science Monthly) Goubet’s submarine, seen in profile, does have an uncanny resemblance to a classic 1950s flying saucer.

Of course, Goubet’s submarine wasn’t a flying one like Robida’s. But the idea of a flying submarine appears to have been something of a recurring motif in early science fiction. Here is a children’s novel dating from 1912 (just 22 years after Robida’s book) that I found in a second-hand shop a few years ago – The Flying Submarine by Percy F. Westerman:

UFO architecture

I thought I’d used up all the blogworthy photos from my recent trip to Poland, and then I remembered these pictures of the Spodek arena in Katowice. Unlike the Wieliczka salt mine (More Underground Art) and Wawel Castle (From Dragon bones to Chakra stones), Katowice is well off the normal tourist trail... so not that many people from outside the area will be aware of Spodek. It was opened in 1971 as a sports, entertainment and conference venue, and the name Spodek is simply the Polish word for “saucer”.

It’s tempting to say the Spodek building “looks like a UFO”, and few people would disagree with the statement. But the term UFO, when used by official organizations like the US Air Force and the UK Ministry of Defence, simply means “unidentified flying object” – with no reference to its shape or appearance. And hardened UFO enthusiasts frequently talk about craft that are spheroidal, cigar-shaped, triangular or V-shaped. But to the public at large, “UFO” means just one thing – a flying saucer.

In this popular-culture sense of the term, Spodek is the first UFO-shaped building I’ve ever seen. The closest thing I’d come across previously was Paul Jackson’s photo of the “Big Blue” sculpture in Canada Square, as mentioned in my blog post Crashed UFO in London (see also Paul’s own post Canada Square UFO). However, a Google search quickly turned up a list of ufo-shaped-buildings and another one of 8-unique-ufo-shaped-buildings... and then buildings-that-look-like-UFOs-in-pics and 8-far-out-buildings-that-look-like-spaceships, not to mention Starship-Buildings-on-Earth-Mothership-UFOs-Across-the-Planet-Pics.

Some of the buildings featured in these lists are simply eccentric private homes, or futuristic designs with only a passing resemblance to a flying saucer. But even after filtering these out, there are a surprising number of large public buildings that, like Spodek, appear to have been directly inspired by the popular image of a UFO. The montage below shows four examples that are important enough to have their own Wikipedia entries. From top to bottom, these are: the University of Illinois State Farm Center (1963); the Evoluon conference centre in Eindhoven (1966), the Universum Science Centre in Bremen (2000) and the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai (2010).

Unusual Atmospheric Phenomena

This picture was taken in 2008 by my cousin Ewa Babarowski, from the balcony of her apartment in Montreal. She sent it off to Astronomy magazine, saying “As the Sun set one evening, I observed a sword-like column of light pointing straight up from the horizon. What was it?” This appeared in the December 2008 issue, with the reply that “What you saw is called a Sun pillar. This vertical shaft of light extends upward from the Sun. It's usually observed at sunrise or sunset. Sun pillars form when sunlight reflects off the surfaces of falling ice crystals...”

Sun pillars are also mentioned in the first book I reviewed for Fortean Times, back in the January 2012 issue – Fireballs, Skyquakes and Hums by Anthony Milne. I found the book’s technical explanations rather erratic, which is why I only gave it a rating of 7 out of 10, but it’s a useful source of data on unusual aerial phenomena – or at least, it is for those of us who don’t think an unusual aerial phenomenon has to be an extraterrestrial space vehicle in order for it to be interesting.

Of course, you can never underestimate the devout UFO believer’s ability to see extraterrestrial space vehicles in any unusual aerial phenomena... even ones that don’t look anything like space vehicles. I was surprised, though I probably shouldn’t have been, to see in the Wikipedia article about sun pillars that “light pillars have also been known to produce false UFO reports”.

Another naturally occurring phenomenon that really does look quite UFO-like is the saucer-shaped lenticular cloud. Ewa sent me a rather impressive example of one of those too. She took this photograph during a hiking trip in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in July 2011:

A couple of months earlier, a smaller (and therefore even more UFO-like) lenticular cloud appeared over Weymouth Bay. This photograph of it was kindly supplied by my Weymouth-based friend Peter Harriman:

That picture is dated 16 May 2011. Ten days earlier, on 6 May 2011, Weymouth experienced an even stranger-looking cloud – an Arcus Roll Cloud. This was unusual enough that it even made the local newspaper (the Dorset Echo): “Concerned residents in Portland and Weymouth thought they were being hit by a tornado during a dramatic thunderstorm...” Here is one of Peter’s own photographs of the roll cloud, taken from almost the same vantage point as the lenticular cloud above (although with a wider field of view):

Many thanks to Ewa and Peter for allowing me to use their photographs. I hope neither of them imagines that appearing on this blog will bring them internet fame, though – last week’s post only got 63 views!

Satire and the Internet

Ed Snowden is one of the great heroes of our time. Or maybe he’s one of the great villains. But despite the range of views on the subject, few people doubt that the government secrets he’s released are indeed true. That’s if, like me, you get your facts from old-fashioned “reputable sources” like the BBC and the Guardian. But there’s a whole generation now who get their news from Facebook shares and similar social media. And for them, Ed Snowden is one of the great clowns of our time.

On 5 July, Snowden revealed the truth about UFOs: “There is a species more intelligent than homo sapiens living in the mantle of the Earth. It makes sense, if you think about it, because that is the only place where conditions have been more or less stable for billions of years... The president receives daily briefings about their activities. Analysts believe their technology to be so far advanced that we stand little chance of survival in any potential war. The general sentiment is that we are but ants from their perspective.”

On 10 July, Snowden “released documents... proving that the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, is definitively engaged in a program of assassination and mind control.” The following day, 11 July, Snowden uncovered “the shocking truth behind Chemtrails” (HAARP and Chemtrails have been mainstays of hardcore conspiracy theory for the last two decades, although they’re not particularly well known to the public at large).

On 16 July Snowden revealed the existence of “a fleet of undercover prototype cars equipped with long-range neuroimaging sensors” that “carve carefully planned routes through urban and suburban centers, collecting detailed brain scans of sleeping citizens” in order to “determine whether your dreams indicate a subversive mindset”. This may sound like something out of a novel by Philip K. Dick, but it’s pretty mild compared with “Snowden’s greatest leak” that came a few days earlier (12 July): “God, according to documents released by Snowden, is a mechanic living in Cuthbert Georgia who goes by the name of Wilbur Mercer... Snowden quickly determined that our universe exists inside of a video game system which is owned and used by Mr. Mercer.”

Wilbur Mercer, of course, is the name of a character in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the image of “Wilbur Mercer” accompanying the article is in fact a photograph of Dick himself. Although many people will have encountered these Ed Snowden stories via second or third order Facebook shares, they are all ultimately derived (as you can see from my links) from the Internet Chronicle – which is one of a number of popular websites devoted to satire.

Satire has been around since ancient times, and for most of its history people never had much trouble recognizing it for what it is. Partly this is a self-selection effect. The only people who would have been exposed to satire—which after all is essentially a branch of literature—would have been relatively sophisticated, educated individuals who knew what they were letting themselves in for. But the rise of the internet and social media has seen a sudden democratization of the written word. I suspect that many Facebook users don’t even have the word “satire” in their vocabulary, any more than other literary terms like “semicolon” or “metaphor”. Everyone understands what humour and fiction are, so there’s no problem with works of satire that obviously fall in one or both these categories. The trouble starts when you get on to the kind of deadpan satire in which the humorous content is subtle and the fiction is presented as fact.

The phenomenon actually goes back to before the days of the internet. Last year I did a post about Ronald Knox’s First Radio Hoax, way back in 1926. It seems clear to me that Knox never thought of his broadcast as a hoax at all, but as a piece of outrageous satire. He simply overestimated the intellectual sophistication of certain segments of the listening public (not to mention the media).

One of the newsfeeds I follow avidly is “New Urban Legends” from snopes.com. As they repeatedly emphasize, “no satire can be so obvious that someone won’t take it literally”. Scarcely a week goes by without some pretty far-fetched story being debunked with the information that (a) it originated on a website that specializes in satirical content, and (b) it was subsequently “circulated via social media, with many of those who encountered the item mistaking it for a genuine news article”.

The great majority of the satirical pieces that go viral on social media revolve around the perennially dull subject (for us non-Americans) of U.S. politics. That’s even true of the Ed Snowden stories mentioned above, despite their superficial veneer of coolness (e.g. UFOs). But I came across one notable exception a few days ago: “Bow Valley flooding exposes rotting carcass of a Sasquatch. Legendary Cryptid believed to be a surviving Gigantopithecus”. The article comes complete with a photograph and some quotes by credible-sounding experts. One of these is named as “Coren Lowman” – a play on “Loren Coleman” that will sound warning bells for cryptozoological insiders, but probably won’t register with the casual reader.

Sadly, the whole thing is spoiled by the disclaimer at the bottom of the piece: “The above article is SATIRE. This article is provided as humour and any article, image or photograph held out as news is satirical and faux in nature and does not reflect the actions, statements or event of real persons.” Even so, I saw the item linked as “real news” a couple of times on Facebook. Perhaps the most worrying thing about the article is that it actually sounds more credible—with a better understanding of zoology and natural history—than most of the Bigfoot-related news items I’ve seen on the web this year!

Space, Gravity and the Flying Saucer

Last year, in UFOs: the forgotten book, I talked about Gerald Heard's The Riddle of the Flying Saucers, which was published way back in 1950. I mentioned in passing that I bought my copy in a second-hand bookstore in Sherborne, and I recently acquired another obscure 1950s UFO book from the same shop: Space, Gravity and the Flying Saucer by Leonard G. Cramp (1954).

Cramp’s book is quite different from Heard’s (in my opinion it’s a lot better – or at least, a lot less bad). Whereas Heard approached the subject from the viewpoint of a philosopher, Cramp approaches it from the viewpoint of an engineer. What the two authors have in common, however, is an astonishing self-confidence in making bold assertions about the nature of flying saucers: as seen for example in Cramp’s “Author’s impression of a sectional view of a Scout Ship”.

Actually, Cramp is less interested in UFOs per se than in his own pet theory of interstellar propulsion. Apparently this “was originally conceived prior to the Second World War, and certainly long before the term Flying Saucer came into general use”. But he quickly latched on to the saucer phenomenon as evidence that extraterrestrial civilizations were already using his hypothetical technique.

Although the details of Cramp’s theory look naïve to modern eyes—with terms like “Ether” and “Rays”, which were old-fashioned even in the 1950s—the basic principle is one I wholeheartedly agree with. This is that, if UFOs really are extraterrestrial spacecraft, then they probably use a propulsion system which involves manipulation of gravity – and the intimately related phenomenon of inertia. Although commonly referred to as “antigravity”, the neutralization of gravity is actually far less important for interstellar travel than the neutralization of inertia – which is the thing that makes it uncomfortable to accelerate rapidly or change direction suddenly. This is something that comes across very clearly in Cramp’s account – as is the fact that a craft powered in such a way would appear to “defy the laws of physics”.

Jon Downes, who recently took over as editor of UFO Matrix magazine, has been generous enough to allow me a “Science Behind UFOs” column. The idea of “antigravity” propulsion—being a hobby-horse of mine just as it was with Leonard G. Cramp—is mentioned in my very first article (in the current issue), and I'm intending to return to it in more detail in subsequent installments.

I came across a striking example of prescience in Cramp’s book. One chapter, on the “Unity of Creation Theory”, was written not by Cramp but by a colleague of his named Antony Avenel. Of this theory, Avenel wrote “I do not pretend that there is sufficient data available at present to prove the theory fully, but there are many indications that it is an anticipation of what will be proved by, let us say, the year A.D. 2000. The theory which I put forward is that the ether and space are the same, and that space is formed out of nothing by a grid of extremely high frequency rays (probably having a wavelength of less than 10^–13 cm). Space must be distinguished from ‘nothing’. Space—even if it is empty—possesses the qualities of length, breadth, thickness and time. ‘Nothing’ has no qualities whatsoever, and cannot support any material or ray.”

Now “the year A.D. 2000” was quite some time ago, so has Mr Avenel’s theory been proved? Well, no it hasn’t—certainly not in any of its details—but in broad terms it does have some striking similarities to contemporary theorizing about the nature of reality. I recently read a new book (Gravity by Brian Clegg), in order to review it for Fortean Times. Among other things the book contains brief summaries of the various competing theories of Quantum Gravity. With regard to Loop Quantum Gravity, Clegg writes “From the loop quantum gravity viewpoint, the loops—the atoms of space-time—create the geometry with which space is built. [...] The loops aren’t in space-time, they form space-time... If you had a region with no loops there would be no space and time in it. It would be truly empty in a way that the vacuum of space isn’t. Without loops nothing can exist, no light can travel – a loop-free region is true nothingness.”

Of course, the loops of Loop Quantum Gravity are of the order of 10^–33 cm, which is a lot smaller than Mr Avenel’s 10^–13 cm... but it's a striking coincidence nevertheless!

Buddhism and UFOs

“Buddhism and UFOs” is the title of one of the chapters in a book I bought recently called Freeing the Buddha, by Brian Ruhe. Before getting on to the author’s unique take on the subject of UFOs, it’s worth saying a few words about the book as a whole. It was originally published in 1999, but the second-hand copy I bought was printed in India in 2005. Brian Ruhe himself was born in Canada, but he is a formally trained Buddhist teacher who knows more about the history, beliefs and practices of Buddhism than most English-speaking writers on the subject. On top of that, he has a very readable and engaging writing style. All of this suggests that Freeing the Buddha is a book worth getting hold of – which of course is why I bought it. But having read it, the author’s interpretation of Buddhist teaching is unusual and highly individualistic, and – in my opinion – quite “un-Buddhist” in places.

“Buddhism” is a broad term that encompasses many different cultural traditions, which differ widely in their superficial trappings but share a common core of ethical and psychological teachings. My understanding (although I may be wrong, since I’m not an expert) is that the “superficial trappings” are intended to be symbolic only, and tailored to the cultural beliefs of the particular audience they were aimed at. An analogy that is often used is that of a raft. If you want to get from one side of a river to the other, you will make a raft of whatever material is available, but once the raft has got you safely to the other side you will discard it – not carry it around with you for the rest of your life. Clinging too strongly to the mythological, metaphysical or cosmological trappings of Buddhism is discouraged, because ultimately they are irrelevant to the deep psychological and moral truths that the teaching is trying to drive you towards.

But more than any other Buddhist writer I’ve come across, Brian Ruhe does have a deep and literal belief in the mythological, metaphysical and cosmological trappings of the particular form of Buddhism that he subscribes to. In his case, this is Theravada Buddhism – the earliest form of Buddhist teaching, which originated in India 2500 years ago. At that time the dominant culture of India was Brahmanism – a precursor of modern Hinduism – so not surprisingly most of the Theravada writings are steeped in Brahmanical mythology and cosmology (though not all of them – when the Buddha preaches to sun-worshippers or fire-worshippers or ancestor-worshippers or atheists he talks to these groups in their own terms, not those of Brahmanism). But Brian Ruhe, unless he’s indulging in a level of deadpan irony which is over my head, believes in the literal truth of the various heavenly realms and supernatural beings that are spoken of in the Theravada canon.

Hopefully you can see where this is leading, and that I’m finally getting around to the subject of this post. Based on the popular mythological beliefs current in India when they were first written down, the Theravada scriptures talk a lot about “devas” – a term that is often translated as “gods” (and probably comes from the same root as our word “deity”), but is closer in concept to the Western idea of “angels”. These are supernatural beings that are superior in many ways to human beings, but far from being omnipotent, who normally reside on higher planes of existence but can descend down to the mundane world and appear to mortals when they want to. Ergo, in Brian Ruhe’s world-view, devas are UFOs and UFOs are devas. It’s as simple as that.

On the face of it, Ruhe’s theory is simply saying that “Unexplained speculative phenomenon A can be explained in terms of unexplained speculative phenomenon B”... which is a perfectly valid statement but not a particularly helpful one. But at another level, there may be a lot of truth in what he says. Practitioners of Theravada Buddhism sometimes claim to experience contact with devas and deva-worlds while they are in a trance-like state during meditation. Objectively, this can be dismissed as a form of lucid dreaming or self-hypnosis, but there may well be an underlying mystical experience – that has nothing to do with devas or UFOs – that the meditators are interpreting in terms of the cultural beliefs and expectations that are most familiar to them. Many westerners having exactly the same subjective experience might well objectivize it in terms of a UFO or alien abduction.

Fifty Years of British UFO Research

As a sweeping generalization, British UFO researchers are less single-mindedly fixated on the extraterrestrial hypothesis (and concomitant beliefs such as alien abductions and government conspiracies) than their American counterparts. Of course there are exceptions on both sides, but British ufologists do tend to adopt a “more things in Heaven and Earth” approach to the subject. This was certainly the message that came across during the first day of the BUFORA (British UFO Research Association) 50th Anniversary Conference that I attended yesterday.

The first speaker was Lionel Beer, who (although he doesn’t look old enough) was a founder member of BUFORA back in 1962, before I had even started school. He talked mainly about the development of British ufology in the 60s and 70s, when it’s probably fair to say the focus was still on the extraterrestrial hypothesis here as in America. But I was really interested in what Lionel had to say about government involvement in the subject. He brought out a subtlety that hadn’t occurred to me before, but makes perfect sense based on what I know of that period in British history.

There is no doubt that during the 1970s the police Special Branch (whose responsibility was national security and counter-insurgency) took a strong and active interest in UFO groups. That’s a well-documented fact. But it’s not the same thing as saying that they took an interest in the subject of ufology. The British authorities in the 1970s weren’t all that paranoid about an alien invasion, but they were paranoid about far-right anti-government extremists. The authorities believed that certain far-right political activists were infiltrating UFO groups in order to recruit new members. That sounds very unlikely to me, because I’ve never met a far-right UFO enthusiast in my life (although I’ve met many far-left ones)... but the fact is that it’s what the authorities believed. And it’s certainly true that if you’re looking for people with a deep-seated hatred of the establishment, a UFO group is as good a place as any to start.

The second talk was by Heather Dixon, whose subject was “Developing an understanding of the Reality behind the Myths”. Essentially this was a very lucid exposition of the statement, often made by people in BUFORA, that “98 per cent of UFO cases turn out to have a perfectly rational explanation”. In some cases the explanation is physical—for example an astronomical object or atmospheric phenomenon—and in others it is physiological, for example sleep paralysis. Almost by definition, a UFO sighting is something that is novel and inexplicable to the witness, and outside their previous experience. If they have an interest in UFOs, or have been immersed in sci-fi popular culture, they may interpret what they see in ufological terms even if it is something completely different that is outside their experience, such as a rare conjunction of two astronomical objects.

Many people will dismiss this sort of talk as “scepticism”, but it’s really the only way to go about serious ufological investigation. In the real world, it’s inevitable that some UFO reports will turn out to have perfectly mundane explanations. At the same time, other cases—the ones Heather calls “High Strangeness” cases—defy rational explanation. Something is going on that science can’t explain. But that still doesn’t mean it’s extraterrestrials. Many people in the Western world, seeing something they’ve never seen before, will mentally pigeonhole it as a UFO because that’s the way they’ve been brought up. You sometimes hear patronizing statements about primitive peoples along the lines “of course, if they encountered extraterrestrial aliens, they would interpret them as gods or angels or spirits”. But why not the other way around? If a sci-fi geek encountered a god/angel/spirit he or she would interpret them as a space alien!

The next talk was by John Spencer, on the subject of “Political, Cultural and Social Influences of UFOs”. This was a strong contender to be the single best talk I’ve ever seen on the UFO subject... and I’ve seen a lot. Essentially it was about the “cultural tracking” aspect of the UFO phenomenon—the way UFO experiences reflect the technology, political issues and popular culture of the time in which they occur. Again, some people will dismiss this as scepticism, but it’s a real effect that has to be faced up to. This became particularly clear as John went through the history of the subject from the 1940s to the present day. In many UFO cases something undeniably extraordinary—and maybe even extraterrestrial—occurred, but the way it was described by witnesses is shaped by the concerns and obsessions of the time.

An interesting point John made is that the contactees of the early 1950s—people like George Adamski—recounted long conversations with the Space Brothers, in which the latter warned the people of Earth in dire terms about the dangers of nuclear weapons. But in those days, every thinking human being on the planet was worried spitless about the threat of nuclear weapons. The Space Brothers never thought to warn the people of the 1950s about something they weren’t already obsessing about, such as ozone depletion, greenhouse gases or global warming.

John’s take on the Roswell incident was also interesting. This took place in 1947, of course, but when I started reading about UFOs in the late 60s and early 70s it was never mentioned. Books of that time never bothered to mention the biggest UFO case of all time, even though it had occurred more than 20 years earlier. In order to believe in Roswell, you have to believe that the United States government is capable of lying, scheming and deception on an industrial scale. Cultural tracking wasn’t ready for that yet. So there was a long pause from 1947 to 1974, when the Watergate scandal proved beyond doubt that the United States government was indeed capable of lying, scheming and deception on an industrial scale. It was only in the post-Watergate world that people were culturally primed and ready to believe in Roswell.

The next talk was by the legendary Jenny Randles, via a live video link from her home in North Wales. Despite her lower public profile of recent years, Jenny was as lively and entertaining a speaker as when I first saw her almost 20 years ago. The subject of her talk was “solved” UFO cases—cases that have been definitively explained as non-extraterrestrial in origin. Who wants to hear about such things? Well I do, because I think such cases can tell you a lot about people’s perceptions and motivations, but apparently most people don’t—Jenny said her book on the subject ended up being sold for a fraction of the cover price in remainder bookshops!

One striking example came from the 1960s, when a glowing orange ball was filmed hovering over an English primary school, as well as being witnessed by dozens of 10 and 11 year old children at the school. Despite having all the hallmarks of a UFO, the cameraman thought it might have something to do with the fact that a US Air Force F-111 fighter-bomber crashed nearby on the same day (in those days, the USAF was allowed to maintain a small number of air bases in the UK, as a goodwill gesture from the British government—and by inference, the British people). But when the USAF saw the photo of the orange ball hovering over the English school, their response was along the lines “Nothing to do with us. The picture was taken 14 minutes before the crash-landing of the F-111, which at no point caught fire. So it’s nothing to do with us. No, sir. If you ask us, it looks like one of them there extraterrestrial spacecraft people are always talking about.” So contrary to popular belief, this was a case of the US authorities actually encouraging an extraterrestrial interpretation of a UFO sighting.

Many years later the truth emerged in a way that leaves no room for any doubt. When the F-111 first got into trouble, 14 minutes before the eventual crash-landing, the crew went through a standard procedure to reduce the risk of an explosion on landing. They ejected all the aircraft’s fuel, and used the afterburner to ignite it, causing a massive fireball. The US aircrew chose to do this immediately over an English primary school. Had it become known at the time that they had effectively placed their own safety over that of British schoolchildren, the goodwill of the British people would have evaporated... and the USAF would have been kicked out of the country. That’s the kind of cover-up and conspiracy I find easier to believe than the extraterrestrial kind.

The last talk I attended was by another living legend: Lionel Fanthorpe. Lionel is now 77, although he looks ten years younger. His talk was on the subject of six alternative theories as to what UFOs (the kind that don’t have mundane explanations) might be. Only one of the six involved extraterrestrials -- the others ranged from ancient Atlantis and Lemuria to the paranormal. There’s no use pretending the talk was anything but an excuse for Lionel to hold forth about the subjects he’s always been fascinated by: timeslips, werewolves, poltergeists etc. But needless to say it was the most entertaining talk of the day, and it did reinforce what I saw as the whole theme of the conference: that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of by the average ETH-believer.