UFO song #2

 

Image by Bing AI

The album pictured above doesn't exist yet (and probably never will), but at least I've now got a second song for it. It's basically an electronic arrangement of Gilbert & Sullivan's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" from The Pirates of Penzance, with reworded lyrics covering all the clichés of modern ufology that I could think of. The synthesized vocals aren't always clear, so you need to see the words on the screen to follow them, but apart from that I'm really quite proud of this one. So do please have a listen to it before reading any further!

A typical song has 8 syllables per line, with pairs of lines rhyming on the last syllable. But this one has 16 syllables per line (which isn't a problem) and rhymes on the last three syllables - which is a problem, at least for me. In the original by W. S. Gilbert, he makes it look easy, with rhymes like "lot o' news ...  hypotenuse" and "Sir Caradoc's ... paradox". In my version, I was quite pleased with "Zeta Reticuli ... particu'ly" and "there was a clash ... saucer crash", but a lot of the others are distinctly strained (such as "correct approach ... rectal probe" and "disastrous course ... astronauts"). Then again, I think there's a sense in which these almost-but-not-quite rhymes add to the humour!

As I often do with these musical experiments, I beta-tested it on five friends - and this was the first one that's ever come back with five "yeses". One person (who liked it enough to share it on Twitter/X, despite describing an earlier song of mine as "tuneless wibbling") raised the interesting question of what a "ufologist" should be called, now that the US government has deprecated UFO in favour of UAP. I suspect the answer is that UAP will very soon (if not already) come to be associated with "debunkers" who seek to explain sightings in non-extraterrestrial terms, leaving UFO for the true believers - who will thus always be ufologists.

Also on the subject of feedback, I can't resist including this nice comment from my cousin - I never knew such specialized emojis existed!

The singing synthesizer I use is a Japanese one called Sinsy, which is actually a deep neural network (i.e. AI) that gets better the more it's exposed to training data. It's been updated a couple of times since I started using it in 2020, and has improved noticeably in that time. For example, the synthesized voice doesn't sound nearly as good in my previous UFO-themed song, which I did in 2022 for my book The Science of Music.

One of the topics in that book is "algorithmic composition" -  specifically the use of Markov chains. If that's something you've never heard of, it simply means analysing a piece of music to work out its "transition matrix" - the probability that any given note will be followed by any other particular note - and then getting a computer to generate a new piece of music using the same transition probabilities.

Since the editors wanted a focus on well-known music, the transition matrix I used came from Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You". This was something of an in-joke, since he was busy extricating himself from a plagiarism accusation at the time, so I thought he wouldn't mind if I borrowed his transition probabilities (the fact that his song only uses five different notes made the maths easier, too). For the lyrics, I dug out some UFO-themed limericks I wrote ages ago, and called the result "Mark of (Markov - get it?) the UFO". Apart from the rather strange synthesized vocals, I think it sounds quite good. Here it is:

Charles Fort, UFO pioneer?

 

Charles Fort is most commonly associated with the more offbeat end of the anomalous spectrum - things like frogs falling from the sky - and for his many surreal/poetic/philosophical quotes such as the one in the graphic above (which is a screenshot from an arty video of mine, Charles Fort on Frogs). Oddly, however, his ahead-of-their-time speculations on UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation, going all the way back to The Book of the Damned (1919), aren't as well known as they might be.

So I was pleased to see Fort getting a mention in this context in a 2021 episode of Ancient Aliens called "The UFO Pioneers". There's a short clip from this episode on the IMDB website, in which one of the show's contributors, Mitch Horowitz, says the following about him:

People had written about strange lights in the sky before, but Fort was probably the first person in modern life who assembled the stories into his books in a systematic way.

As well as cataloguing UFO sightings, Fort's theoretical speculations on the subject are also of interest. I'll focus on some of the more intelligent among these - though I have to admit they're interspersed with a lot of highly dubious concepts too (such as his assertion, easily disproved by any schoolchild with a rudimentary understanding of parallax, that "the stars are not trillions nor even millions of miles away").

I'll start with a "speculation" that is now so widespread that most people don't even see it as a speculation, even though it wasn't at all common prior to the end of the 1940s. This is the "extraterrestrial hypothesis", that unusual objects seen in the sky are craft piloted by intelligent beings from other planets. Here's what Fort says in chapter 1 of New Lands, first published in 1923 (all the quotes in this post are taken from the version of Fort's work on the Sacred Texts website):

Ships from other worlds ... have been seen by millions of the inhabitants of this Earth, exploring, night after night, in the sky of France, England, New England and Canada.

As for the many UFO-related quotes from The Book of the Damned, I used some of them in the comic strip "Charles Fort in Space" that I did for Fortean Times last year (FT 433, pp 54-5 - also reprinted in a guest post of mine on Kid Robson's blog). The most interesting of these quotes relate to the possibility of artificial "megastructures" in space created by highly advanced aliens - a topic of genuine scientific study these days, as recounted in my own Astrobiology book. Here's what Fort had to say on the subject more than a hundred years ago:

Data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in hordes; tremendous worlds and tiny worlds; some of them made of material like the material of this Earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions made of iron and steel.

That's from chapter 12 of The Book of the Damned. In the same chapter, Fort makes the observation that, for reasons of their own, alien visitors have a general tendency to covertness:

Nothing in our own times ... has ever appeared upon this Earth from somewhere else, so openly as Columbus landed upon San Salvador... But as to surreptitious visits to this Earth in recent times, or as to emissaries, perhaps, from other worlds, or voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to evade and avoid, we shall have data as convincing as our data of oil or coal-burning aerial super-constructions.

This begs the question of why the aliens should always be so careful to hide their presence. Fort's favoured answer is embodied in his famous phrase "I think we're property". His assertion seems to be (in this chapter of The Book of the Damned, anyway - he was never very good at maintaining consistency of ideas across all his writings) that, of all the many alien species that visited Earth in the distant past, one group took "ownership" for special reasons of their own. Since then, all visits to our planet have been carefully stage-managed.

Another of the standard tropes of modern ufology that Fort anticipated is the idea of a special relationship between the aliens and certain members of Earth's human population. Today, the group in question is normally assumed to be the United States government, but for Fort it was some even more shadowy organization. Here's what he says in chapter 10 of The Book of the Damned:

Some other world ... has been, for centuries, in communication with a sect, perhaps, or a secret society, or certain esoteric ones of this Earth's inhabitants.

By this point, it probably won't come as much of a surprise to find that Fort was also something of a pioneer of "ancient astronaut" theory. Here's a quote taken from chapter 18 of New Lands:

Many appearances upon this Earth that were once upon a time interpreted by theologians and demonologists, but are now supposed to be the subject-matter of psychic research, were beings and objects that visited this Earth, not from a spiritual existence, but from outer space.

He also entertained the idea that humans were created, or at least helped along in their evolution, by extraterrestrial visitors. In the following extract, coming from chapter 7 of The Book of the Damned, he gives the name "Genesistrine" to the home planet of these particular ancient aliens:

That the first unicellular organisms may have come here from Genesistrine - or that men or anthropomorphic beings may have come here before amoebae... That evolution upon this Earth has been induced by external influences; that evolution, as a whole, upon this Earth, has been a process of population by immigration or by bombardment.

A point I've made in the past is that, unlike modern ultra-literal UFO theorists, Fort tended to think and write more like an avant-garde poet than the pseudo-scientist he's usually portrayed as. This comes across in a few of the quotes I've already given, and even more so in others - such as the following from Chapter 36 of New Lands:

We have conceived of intenser times and furies of differences of potential between this Earth and other worlds: torrents of dinosaurs, in broad volumes that were streaked with lesser animals, pouring from the sky, with a foam of tusks and fangs, enveloped in a bloody vapour that was falsely dramatized by the Sun, with rainbow-mockery.

I found this difficult to visualize, so I copied and pasted it as a prompt into Bing's AI image creator. I didn't add any other words of my own, but for some reason the AI has chosen to render the picture in the style of Rubens (something that's particularly obvious if you look at the human figures at the bottom). Anyway, I think the result is pretty good, for a machine:

(courtesy of Bing Image Creator)

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 few rare (non-existent, actually) Fortean comics

 

With a little help from Bing's AI image creator, here's a selection of retro-fortean comics of the "never really existed but should have" variety. To start with, pictured above are two issues of The Fortean Four, in their original 1970s incarnation on the left, and the 1990s reboot on the right.

I thought the AI understood "1990s comic-book style" much better than "1970s", so I stuck with 1990s for subsequent attempts. After all, 1990s is still pretty "retro" to most people, even though it doesn't always seem like it to me!

Next up, a couple of issues of another non-existent super-team, The Ufologists. To me, the word "ufologist" conjures up a particular image that isn't terribly flattering (not quite a synonym of "ineffectual fantasist", but somewhere along those lines). So rather than using my own mental image, I went for something closer to the way I imagine ufologists picture themselves. Here's the result:

The AI tool I use has the great advantage of being free, but it does have a number of limitations compared to its more expensive rivals. For one thing it only produces square images, so they have to be stretched or cropped to fit the space available. Another problem is that it has no memory from one image to another, so you can't ask it to draw the same group of characters a second time. So I was pleasantly surprised that the two Ufologists covers could almost portray the same trio of protagonists (allowing for a change of cover artist).

Perhaps the biggest problem (mental health wise) with having a free tool that can produce any picture you ask for, all in a matter of seconds, is forcing yourself to stop playing with it! With a major effort of self-discipline, though, I limited myself to just one more experiment - The Bigfoot Hunters, pictured below. Again, there's a kind of consistency between the two images, particularly in the way Bigfoot himself is portrayed (and, at a pinch, you could say the solitary human character in the second image is the same as the central figure from the first one).

Fortean shelfies

 

Following on from last week's instalment What does fortean mean? I thought I'd post a couple of "shelfies" featuring books that fit my wider definition of the word. The one above contains newer books (what I think of as "newer" anyway, i.e. post-1990), while the one below shows books I've acquired second-hand - some of them genuine "retro-forteana" dating back to the 1950s or even earlier.

Although these are what I think of as my "fortean" books, they don't include everything I own that might fit the definition. For example, I've amassed a vast collection of fiction, much of which (as pointed out in the previous post) could easily be considered fortean. I also have numerous science books (many of them acquired as review copies for Fortean Times, or as research for my own writing) which are "fringy" enough to class as borderline forteana. But just two of them managed to squeeze into the picture above, both by my colleague Brian Clegg: How to Build a Time Machine and Extra-Sensory.

Another near-fortean topic that I have a whole shelf of books about is Buddhism (again many of them review copies, having spent 10 years as a book reviewer for the Buddhist Society). But I tend not to think of Buddhism as a fortean subject - unlike "alternative" religions, New Age beliefs and holistic therapies, all of which are quite well represented above. Amongst the latter is Scent Therapy by Raje Airey - who of the 10 or so authors featured here that I know personally, is the one I've known longest - since I went to school with her!

Looking at the picture above, I was surprised to see how biased my book-buying habits seem to be towards British authors. I honestly hadn't been aware of that until now. But certainly on subjects like UFOs, I do prefer the more methodical, less sensational approach of researchers like Jenny Randles, Nigel Watson, David Clarke and Mark Pilkington - with How UFOs Conquered the World and Mirage Men (book and DVD) by the latter two probably being my all-time favourite takes on the subject.

Turning to the older books pictured below, you'll spot quite a few classic UFO titles there - plus one oddity I was particularly pleased to find in a second-hand bookshop: The House of Lords UFO Debate (1979). Another rarity, which I've written about previously on this blog, is The Riddle of the Flying Saucers by Gerald Heard. Dating from 1950, it's the oldest of my UFO books - though not the oldest on this shelf, that honour going to Paranormal Cognition from 1944.

Another book I was pleased to get hold of was Damon Knight's biography of Charles Fort (with the brilliant subtitle "Prophet of the Unexplained", which sadly isn't shown on the spine). I bought this from a UK bookseller, but it's actually stamped "Miami Public Library" inside, so I'm not sure how and when it crossed the Atlantic. Another ex-library book - and a particularly battered and much-read copy it is too - is Three Men Seeking Monsters by Nick Redfern. In this case the library in question is much closer to home, on the Isle of Portland - specifically, the library of Portland Prison. The inmates there obviously include some very discerning readers!

Space-Gods and Venusians

Glastonbury is one of the few towns in this part of the world that still has a healthy number of second-hand bookstores. Even better, all these shops have sizeable sections devoted to Fortean subjects. On a visit there last week I bought ten books from three different shops, including these two classic “skeptical” works from the 1970s: The Space-Gods Revealed (1976) by Ronald Story and Can You Speak Venusian? (second edition, 1977) by Patrick Moore.

As I’ve probably said before, the striking thing about Fortean books of this vintage is how much less aggressive and bad-tempered they are compared with the situation today. Believers were content to get their ideas across in a calm voice, without gratuitous ad-hominem attacks on their opponents. And the same was true of skeptical authors, as these two books show.

On the face of it, Can You Speak Venusian? isn’t a skeptical book at all. Its subtitle is “A Guide to Independent Thinkers”, and the views of these Independent Thinkers (on subjects ranging from the Flat Earth, the Hollow Earth and Atlantis to Creationism, Flying Saucers and Astrology) are presented in an objective way with hardly any explicit criticism. Instead, the author relies on the old adage “If you give someone enough rope they’ll hang themselves”. The identity of the author is a clue, too. Until his death three years ago, Patrick Moore was the presenter of the longest-running science series on British TV, The Sky at Night.

Patrick Moore was famous for being an eccentric as well as a scientist. As a result, he seems to have had considerable respect for other eccentrics, even if their views were the opposite of his own. As he puts it: “The Independent Thinker is a genuine, well-meaning person, who is not hidebound by convention, and who is always ready to strike out on a line of his own – frequently, though not always, in the face of all the evidence.”

The book’s title is a reference to the last of the Independent Thinkers described in it, one Mr Bernard Byron of Romford. He claimed to be fluent, by means of interplanetary telepathy, in not just Venusian but also Plutonian and Krugerian (the language spoken on one of the planets of Kruger 60, a red dwarf binary star). The book includes an example of written Venusian (part of Mr Byron’s translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet), while a sample of the spoken language can be heard in this YouTube clip.

Mixed in with Moore’s deadpan account of crackpot theories, there’s a hint of active mischief-making. In 1957 a UFO magazine called Cosmic Voice printed a series of pseudo-academic articles which included such dubious-sounding names as R. T. Fischall (artificial), E. Ratic (erratic), Hotère (hot air) and Huizenaas (who’s an ass?). Initially the editor – George King, the founder of the Aetherius Society – was happy to print these, but he later “came to the conclusion that some of his contributors were not quite so serious or so scientific as he had been led to expect”. King’s prime suspect was Moore himself – who of course denied the whole thing (the book also refers to the Adamski-style contactee Cedric Allingham, who is widely believed to have been another of Patrick Moore’s mischievous alter egos).

Can You Speak Venusian? contains only a couple of relatively brief references to Erich von Däniken, but he’s the central target of Ronald Story’s The Space-Gods Revealed, which also dates from the mid-seventies. I’ve written about the “ancient astronaut” hypothesis several times before (see for example this article and this blog post). I don’t think it’s the “stupid idea” many people believe it to be – on the contrary, it would be stupid NOT to consider extraterrestrial visitation as a potential explanation for certain ancient legends, images or artifacts. Where the ancient alien enthusiasts go astray (and lose the sympathy of most ordinary people) is in always preferring an extraterrestrial explanation to a terrestrial one.

But on top of that, there’s another annoyance about von Däniken in particular – the way he gets all the credit for ideas (sometimes quite clever ideas) that were expressed much more carefully and precisely long before he wrote Chariots of the Gods (see numerous books by Desmond Leslie, Morris K. Jessup, Pauwels and Bergier, Robert Charroux, Brinsley LePoer Trench and W. R. Drake, to name just a few). So I was pleased to see that The Space-Gods Revealed isn’t so much a debunking of ancient aliens per se, as an exposé of von Däniken’s slapdash style. Here are a couple of good examples:

• In support of his ancient astronaut hypothesis, von Däniken makes an astonishing claim: that “ancient Egypt appears suddenly and without transition with a fantastic ready-made civilization,” and that it is “without recognizable prehistory!” Is he serious? If he had looked at almost any one of the approximately twenty thousand volumes of books and periodicals that have been written on the subject, he would have realized the absurdity of such a statement.
• 
  
• The “evidence” claimed by von Däniken to represent the science and technology of the ancient gods falls far short of what might be expected from an advanced race of beings capable of interstellar space travel […] Von Däniken refers to the Baghdad batteries as if they were indeed the products of an advanced alien technology […] If they are really batteries, then they would be the most primitive form of simple cell possible.

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:

The Museum of the Future

The Museum of the Future is a new collection of 20 short stories, published by Jon Downes at CFZ Press under the “Fortean Fiction” imprint. I included the blurb in my Books, plural post last month, but here it is again:

Twenty tales of High Strangeness featuring conspiracy theorists, mad scientists, hippies, geeks and miscellaneous weirdos: A group of Cambridge academics investigate a crashed UFO... An outcast scientist discovers the secret of anti-gravity... A paranormal author finds himself prime suspect in the Case of the Purloined Poe... A student has a bewildering vision of the future... Four New Agers are regressed back to their past lives... An engineer invents a new way to spy on the competition... A viewer gets too deeply involved in a TV cop show... A young woman battles the spies, aliens and perverts that only she can see... and a dozen more stories!

Most of the stories were written because I was looking for an entertaining way of getting a particular idea across. As a result there’s quite a mix of styles and genres. There’s some science fiction, some adventure, some mystery and some horror. At least half the stories have a humorous element to them, and several are parodies of a specific style. I guess if I had to stick a label on the collection it would be “Fortean satire”.

There’s an account of the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery in the style of an M. R. James ghost story, and of the Rendlesham UFO incident in the style of a pulp adventure. There’s Roswell-style paranoia, transplanted backward in time from the Cold War to the period just before the First World War. There’s H. P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” retold in the style of Philip K. Dick. And there’s a murder mystery featuring homeopathy, Tesla coils and other internet-age wackiness.

The title story, “Museum of the Future”, is very short – but it’s retold five times. It’s a vision of the British Museum in the year 2012, as envisaged in 1912, 1932, 1952, 1972 and 1992. The basic plot is pretty much the same, but the background details are different every time. Not surprisingly, these reflect the political preoccupations of the time the story was written!

The Museum of the Future is published as a paperback (ISBN 978-1-909488-23-6), which I believe can be ordered from “all good bookshops” or via any of the Amazon sites. It’s also available as an ebook, but only in Kindle format (so my apologies to regular reader Colin and anyone else who may buy their ebooks elsewhere). Here are a few links:

• Amazon US – paperback
• Amazon UK – paperback
• Amazon US – Kindle
• Amazon UK – Kindle

Retro-Fortean Answers

Here are the answers to last week’s Retro-Fortean Crossword. Wherever possible the clues were based on previous blog posts – in which case I’ve included a link to the relevant post.

ACROSS

1. AMBROSE Bierce, who vanished without a trace in December 1913 (See The Ambrose Collector)

5. Generic term for a mystery animal: CRYPTID (As in the Cryptid Casebook series – see The Science of Bigfoot for my contribution to the series)

9. Nickname of Raymond A. Palmer, pulp magazine editor who popularized the Shaver Mystery: RAP (My copy of the special “Shaver Mystery” issue of Amazing Stories, dated June 1947, can be seen in the photograph above)

10. “The EERIEST Ruined Dawn World”, short story by Fritz Leiber

11. Secretive organization that Edward Snowden used to work for: NSA (As featured in Satire and the Internet)

12. Fictional country which is the source of Doc Savage’s wealth: HIDALGO (The Doc Savage trade paperback pictured above includes a comic-book adaptation of Doc’s origin story, set in Hidalgo)

13. “POST HOC ergo propter hoc”, a logical fallacy popular with some conspiracy theorists

14. A short 16 mm film clip from 1967 purportedly showing Bigfoot: PATTERSON-GIMLIN (See Patterson-Gimlin Film Fake or Fact)

19. Village in the South of France reputedly associated with a great mystical secret: RENNES-LE-CHATEAU (See The Devil of Rennes-le-Chateau)

21. Ankh, cross and pentagram, for example: SYMBOLS

24. A Runic alphabet: FUTHARK

27. LEN Wein, creator of Wolverine and Swamp Thing (My copy of Wolverine’s first appearance was featured in The Marvel Age of Comics)

28. Hard to pin down, like many Fortean phenomena: ELUSIVE

29. Like a UFO, but not unidentified: IFO

30. An unexplained event: ANOMALY

31. SHANNON McMahon, X-Files super-soldier played by Lucy Lawless

DOWN

1. Early type of UFO widely reported across America during the 1890s: AIRSHIP

2. Bigfoot, for example: BIPED

3. Denny O’NEIL, author of The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer (See Hitler’s Astrologer)

4. If the Gunpowder Plot was a False Flag operation, this person may have engineered it: EARL OF SALISBURY (As described in my Conspiracy History book)

5. A famous Fortean mystery from Barbados: CREEPING COFFINS (See Creeping Coffins)

6. Himalayan giant apes (real or imaginary): YETIS

7. Enigmatic alien creature in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death: TENCH (My copy, which I originally read in 1980, is pictured above)

8. A type of scientific analysis applied to Bigfoot and Richard III: DNA SCAN (See Bigfoot, Richard III and Outsider Science)

15. The TEN Lost Tribes of Israel

16. The Third EYE, by T. Lobsang Rampa

17. IRA Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives

18. First name of JFK’s alleged assassin: LEE

19. A water nymph in Slavic mythology RUSALKA (As mentioned in my novelette The Mechanical Gorilla)

20. Pulp magazine which featured Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier in its first issue: UNKNOWN (See Sinister Barrier: the first Fortean novel and Pulp Forteana)

22. Planet ruled by Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon’s universe: MONGO

23. The Magic Flute or The Flying Dutchman, for example: OPERA (See Fortean Opera)

25. Huge volcanic eruption which may have been responsible for the Atlantis legend: THERA

26. Entity from another planet: ALIEN

Retro-Fortean Crossword

I thought I’d do another crossword puzzle this Christmas, since last year’s seemed to go down well. I assume it went down well, anyway, because it got an above-average number of page-views... but then the annotated list of answers the following week got below-average views, so maybe people just took one look at the puzzle and decided not to bother with it!

As before it’s an old-fashioned non-interactive crossword, so you’ll have to print it out or do it in your head. I originally wanted all the clues to refer to something I’ve written about on this blog in the last 12 months, but once I started filling letters in I realized that wasn’t going to be possible. Still, I’ve tried to stay on-topic as far as possible. I’ll print the answers (together with an explanation of the Retro-Fortean connections) next week.

ACROSS

1. ------- Bierce, who vanished without a trace in December 1913 [7]
5. Generic term for a mystery animal [7]
9. Nickname of Raymond A. Palmer, pulp magazine editor who popularized the Shaver Mystery [3]
10. “The ------- Ruined Dawn World”, short story by Fritz Leiber [7]
11. Secretive organization that Edward Snowden used to work for [3]
12. Fictional country which is the source of Doc Savage’s wealth [7]
13. “---- --- ergo propter hoc”, a logical fallacy popular with some conspiracy theorists [4, 3]
14. A short 16 mm film clip from 1967 purportedly showing Bigfoot [9-6]
19. Village in the South of France reputedly associated with a great mystical secret [6-2-7]
21. Ankh, cross and pentagram, for example [7]
24. A Runic alphabet [7]
27. --- Wein, creator of Wolverine and Swamp Thing [3]
28. Hard to pin down, like many Fortean phenomena [7]
29. Like a UFO, but not unidentified [3]
30. An unexplained event [7]
31. ------- McMahon, X-Files super-soldier played by Lucy Lawless [7]

DOWN

1. Early type of UFO widely reported across America during the 1890s [7]
2. Bigfoot, for example [5]
3. Denny -----, author of The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer [5]
4. If the Gunpowder Plot was a False Flag operation, this person may have engineered it [4, 2, 9]
5. A famous Fortean mystery from Barbados [8, 7]
6. Himalayan giant apes (real or imaginary) [5]
7. Enigmatic alien creature in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death [5]
8. A type of scientific analysis applied to Bigfoot and Richard III [3, 4]
15. The --- Lost Tribes of Israel [3]
16. The Third ---, by T. Lobsang Rampa [3]
17. --- Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives [3]
18. First name of JFK’s alleged assassin [3]
19. A water nymph in Slavic mythology [7]
20. Pulp magazine which featured Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier in its first issue [7]
22. Planet ruled by Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon’s universe [5]
23. The Magic Flute or The Flying Dutchman, for example [5]
25. Huge volcanic eruption which may have been responsible for the Atlantis legend [5]
26. Entity from another planet [5]

Fortean Trends

Since I renamed this blog Retro-Forteana, I thought it would be interesting to look at changing trends in Fortean topics over the years. At one time, Fortean Times used to produce an annual Weirdness Index based on the number of press reports in different subgenres of Forteana. This strikes me as being in the true spirit of Charles Fort, and it’s a pity they don’t seem to do it any more.

In lieu of that, I decided to turn to Google’s N-gram viewer. I’ve already mentioned this addictive online utility once, in my post about Spooky Action at a Distance. Basically it allows you to see how the popularity of a specified word or phrase has changed over time. After searching through millions of digitized books it returns, for each year in a specified range, the percentage of all the books published in that year that include the given word or phrase.

You can waste hours playing with the N-gram viewer, but here are a few charts I thought were particularly interesting (you may need to click to enlarge them in order to see what is going on).

Chart 1: Fortean specialisms

This chart plots three words that are only ever going to appear in Fortean specialist literature. “Fortean” itself first makes an appearance in the 1930s, around the time of Fort’s death. It rises steadily until the 1950s, at which point it suddenly shoots up. I’m not sure why this is, or why it drops back down again equally suddenly in the early sixties, After that it starts to climb steadily again, reaching a peak around 1999 (remember pre-millennial tension?). It plummets down in the 21st century almost as fast as it was rising at the end of the 20th century.

The word “ufology” seems to emerge circa 1960, after which it follows a similar pattern to “fortean”. The post-millennial dip – which appears to confirm the widespread view that ufology is in decline – is almost certainly real, and not just a statistical artifact (you might think, for example, that it just means there are fewer books from recent years in Google’s database – but remember that what’s shown is not the number of books containing the word ufology but the percentage).

“Cryptozoology” is a newer word than either Fortean or ufology, only dating from circa 1970 – but it’s in a healthier state, displaying a steady increase which continues to the present day.

Chart 2: Sasquatch versus the Loch Ness Monster

In a head-to-head between the world’s two best known cryptids, the Loch Ness Monster got off to an early start in the early 1930s, then received a boost during the 1970s – but apart from that shows no strong trends either upwards or downwards. In contrast, Sasquatch got off to a slow start in the 1950s, before suddenly shooting up (and overtaking its Scottish rival) between the mid-60s and mid 70s. Then after a fairly static period, Sasquatch received another huge boost in the 90s.

Neither Sasquatch nor the Loch Ness Monster appear to suffer from the post-millennial let-down that UFO-related subjects do (more on which later).

Chart 3: Paranormal versus Parapsychology

I stumbled across this one more or less by accident, but I thought it was very interesting. The two “para” subjects make their appearance around the same time in the 1940s, and follow virtually the same pattern until 1980. But at that point there is a sudden divergence – “parapsychology” goes into a steady decline, while “paranormal” continues its upward trend.

Chart 4: UFO versus flying saucer

Not surprisingly, “flying saucer” makes its first appearance in the late 40s (following the Kenneth Arnold sighting) and rises through the early 50s. After that it’s more or less constant right up to the present day.

“UFO” starts a few years after “flying saucer”, but overtakes it by the early 60s. It then climbs at an impressive rate for two decades, remains more or less static through the eighties, and then shoots up again in the 90s. Then it hits that millennium barrier and starts to plummet back down again. There’s no getting away from it – UFOs just aren’t as popular as they used to be.

Chart 5: UFO topics

For this last chart, I typed in a few two-word phrases that are only going to appear in specialist UFO literature. As you can see, they all appear to suffer from that post-millennium crash. In the case of “Zeta Reticuli” and “Roswell incident”, the peak of interest is pretty much bang on the year 2000. With “Area 51” it’s a couple of years later. And with “crop circle” (maybe not strictly a UFO topic, but closely related) it’s 2005. But the decline after that point is unmistakable, even though Google’s database stops at 2008.

Crossword Exegesis

I don’t really know what an exegesis is, but people expect a crossword compiler to have a big vocabulary. What I mean is, on the other side of the following image are the answers to last week’s crossword and/or trivia quiz, together with an explanation of the various Fortean connections.

If you want to do the puzzle but haven’t done so yet, reading beyond this point will take you into spoiler territory. But if you’ve done the puzzle, or just want to see the answers, scroll on...

ACROSS

1. Author of Chariots of the Gods: ERICH VON DANIKEN. An easy one to start with! But EvD’s ideas weren’t as original as many people imagine – see Reinventing Ezekiel's Wheel.

9. First of the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation: EPHESUS. A Turkish town and a major centre of early Christianity. It was also the site of one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Temple of Artemis.

10. “Their weapons were no match for the Bossonian LONGBOW" (Robert E. Howard). This comes from the only full-length Conan novel that Howard wrote, The Hour of the Dragon (also sometimes published as Conan the Conqueror). Not a particularly Fortean story, although some of Howard’s other fiction is. I think I’ll make that the subject of my next blog post.

11. "Voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to EVADE " (Charles Fort). This comes from The Book of the Damned, a few paragraphs after the oft quoted “I think we're property” – the voyagers in question being extraterrestrial ones.

12. Yggdrasil, for example: ASH. Yggdrasil is the World Ash Tree in Norse mythology.

13. The world ends without this, according to T.S. Eliot: A BANG. From The Hollow Men (1925): “This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.” Another Eliot poem from the same period, The Waste Land, is packed with Fortean themes – I’ll have to add that to my list of future posts as well.

14. Site of the Crucifixion: CALVARY. From the Latin Calvariæ Locus = “place of the skull”. The Hebrew equivalent is Golgotha.

16. "I had long hoped for a personal CONTACT with a man from a flying saucer" (George Adamski). A quote from Flying Saucers have Landed, co-authored with the far more interesting Desmond Leslie.

18. The queen of the fairies, according to Shakespeare: TITANIA. From A Midsummer Might’s Dream, of course. The picture (fourth image on top row) shows a detail from The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847) by Sir Joseph Noel Paton.

21. Sayings of Jesus that are not found in the Gospels: AGRAPHA. This is an obscure one, but anyone who’s tried compiling a crossword will know that the more words you fill in, the harder it gets to find unobscure words to fit the remaining spaces! But Agrapha isn’t so obscure that it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page.

23. Max ERNST, German surrealist. Perhaps the most Fortean connection here is Ernst’s bird-man creation called Loplop, which was adopted as a kind of mascot by Jon Downes and the Centre for Fortean Zoology (see picture – third image on the top row).

25. URI Geller, Israeli-born psychic. Geller’s 1973 appearance on the Dimbleby Talk-In was one of my Fortean Events that Shook the World.

26. "Thus SPAKE Zarathustra", by Friedrich Nietzsche. Written in the 1880s, this philosophical work focused on two concepts more often associated with the 20th century: “The Superman” and “God is Dead”.

27. Lenape people living in New Jersey when the Europeans arrived: RARITAN. This is one of two grid entries where I just couldn’t find anything Fortean that would fit. There’s a modern-day city in New Jersey named Raritan, as well as Raritan Bay between New Jersey and New York.

28. "IMMORAL Tales" (1974), featuring Paloma Picasso as Countess Erzsébet Báthory. The Báthory segment focuses on the historical countess, not the later legends that associate her with vampirism. So she doesn’t slaughter large quantities of female virgins and bathe in their blood in order to restore her youth. She just slaughters large quantities of female virgins and bathes in their blood because she enjoys it (see picture – first image on bottom row).

29. Britain's best-known cryptid: LOCH NESS MONSTER. In light of the upcoming Scottish independence vote, perhaps I should have worded this as “Scotland's best-known cryptid” to stay on the safe side.

DOWN

1. The building pictured [in last week’s post]: EXETER CATHEDRAL. Another non-Fortean one – I needed a 15-letter word or phrase beginning with E and ending with L, and this was the best I could do. The answer was actually written on the image, if you can read Latin: Exoniensis Ecclesiae Cathedralis.

2. Eldest son of Abraham, according to the Book of Genesis: ISHMAEL. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Ishmael is less important than his younger half-brother Isaac. In Islam, however, Ishmael is the more important of the two, being a direct ancestor of Muhammad.

3. Herman HESSE, author of Siddhartha. According to Wikipedia, this 1922 novel “deals with the spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautama Buddha.... It was published in the U.S. in 1951 and became influential during the 1960s.”

4. The James OSSUARY is inscribed "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus". If the inscription is genuine, it might constitute archaeological evidence for the Biblical Jesus... but quoting Wikipedia again, “most scholars hold the last part of the inscription to be a forgery”.

5. The DELPHIC Sibyl, prophetess of Apollo. The illustration (second image on top row) is from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

6. Professional assassin in feudal Japan: NINJA. I’m not sure if this is an easy one or not – everyone uses the word “ninja”, but do they really know what it means?

7. An esoteric branch of Judaism: KABBALA. When I compiled the crossword a few years ago, I convinced myself this was a valid spelling – although “Kabbalah”, “Cabala” and “Qabbala” are more common.

8. A type of hippie found in 1980s Britain: NEW AGE TRAVELLER. Again the spelling may look wrong to some people, but that’s how it’s spelled here in Britain. And hey, spelling rules are just another fascist conspiracy anyhow. If you catch my drift, man.

15. ANN Greenslit Pudeator, hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692. It was tragic, of course, that so many innocent women were accused of witchcraft in the 17th century... but really, with a name like Ann Greenslit Pudeator, what do you expect? She probably had a pierced nasal septum and wore black lipstick, too.

17. "Alles Vergangliche ist NUR ein Gleichnis" (Everything transient is only a symbol - Goethe). These words are sung by the Chorus Mysticus at the end of Mahler’s 8th Symphony (see The Curse of the Ninth).

19. "The Serpent Power: Secrets of TANTRIC and Shaktic Yoga" by Arthur Avalon. The author’s real name was Sir John Woodroffe, who derived his pseudonym from Arthurian mythology. Oddly, though, the book isn’t about Arthurian mythology but about Indian mysticism. Woodroffe was one of the first proponents of the New Age formula “if it’s old, and it doesn’t come from the Judaeo-Christian or Graeco-Roman tradition, then it must be good.”

20. Thomas AQUINAS, author of "Summa Theologica". Aquinas was a 13th century scholar who specialized in interpreting the works of Aristotle (that’s what scholars used to do in those days, in lieu of thinking for themselves). He was often depicted trampling on a rival Aristotle-interpreter named Averroës, as seen in the painting by Gozzoli in the rightmost image above.

21. Belief that all living and non-living things have a spiritual essence: ANIMISM. Closely related to paranoia: the belief that all living and non-living things are out to get you.

22. Generic term for Indian languages related to Sanskrit: PRAKRIT. Most mystical and religious Indian writings are in Sanskrit, although the earliest Buddhist scriptures are in a Prakrit language called Pali. “Karma” and “Nirvana” are Sanskrit – the Pali equivalents are “Kamma” and “Nibbana”.

24. The largest moon of Saturn: TITAN. One of the few bodies in the Solar System that astrobiologists believe may support alien life – thought probably not as advanced as the alien life envisaged by Philip K. Dick in The Game-Players of Titan.

26. SIMON Magus, a sorcerer mentioned in the Book of Acts. All the Bible says about Simon is that he became a Christian, but not a very good one. However, later writers describe him as one of the founders of Gnosticism, and presumably for that reason he’s one of the many highbrow figures namedropped by Philip K. Dick in VALIS.

Fortean Crossword

Apparently the crossword puzzle marks its centenary this month. A few years ago I put together a Fortean-themed crossword which I thought would be worth repeating here. You can either print it out or do it in your head... or just ignore the grid and treat the questions as a trivia quiz.

Answers next week – together with an exegesis of all the Fortean connections.

ACROSS

1. Author of Chariots of the Gods [5, 3, 7]
9. First of the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation [7]
10. “Their weapons were no match for the Bossonian -------“ (Robert E. Howard) [7]
11. "Voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to -----" (Charles Fort) [5]
12. Yggdrasil, for example [3]
13. The world ends without this, according to T.S. Eliot [1, 4]
14. Site of the Crucifixion [7]
16. "I had long hoped for a personal ------- with a man from a flying saucer" (George Adamski) [7]
18. The queen of the fairies, according to Shakespeare [7]
21. Sayings of Jesus that are not found in the Gospels [7]
23. Max -----, German surrealist [5]
25. --- Geller, Israeli-born psychic [3]
26. "Thus ----- Zarathustra", by Friedrich Nietzsche [5]
27. Lenape people living in New Jersey when the Europeans arrived [7]
28. "------- Tales" (1974), featuring Paloma Picasso as Countess Erzsébet Báthory [7]
29. Britain's best-known cryptid [4, 4, 7]

DOWN

1. The building pictured below [6, 9]
2. Eldest son of Abraham, according to the Book of Genesis [7]
3. Herman -----, author of Siddhartha [5]
4.The James ------- is inscribed "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" [7]
5. The ------- Sibyl, prophetess of Apollo [7]
6. Professional assassin in feudal Japan [5]
7. An esoteric branch of Judaism [7]
8. A type of hippie found in 1980s Britain [3, 3, 9]
15. --- Greenslit Pudeator, hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692 [3]
17. "Alles Vergangliche ist --- ein Gleichnis" (Everything transient is only a symbol - Goethe) [3]
19. "The Serpent Power: Secrets of ------- and Shaktic Yoga" by Arthur Avalon [7]
20. Thomas -------, author of Summa Theologica [7]
21. Belief that all living and non-living things have a spiritual essence [7]
22. Generic term for Indian languages related to Sanskrit [7]
24. The largest moon of Saturn [5]
26. ----- Magus, a sorcerer mentioned in the Book of Acts [5]

The Rendlesham Magi

Here is a seasonal short story, loosely based on the Rendlesham UFO incident, that I wrote for the Christmas issue of a newsletter back in 2008:

Christmas 1980: a day I will always remember. St Dunstan’s College was almost deserted. The students were on vacation, of course, and the married fellows were at home with their families. That left just four of us in the Senior Common Room that evening: the three wise men and myself. At that time I was the youngest ‘don’ at the college, having been appointed to the post of Teaching Fellow in Asiatic History the previous summer. The next in age was more than a decade my senior—Don Hunter, a lecturer in Astronomy, with whom I was engaged in a game of Fortean supercheckers.

The other two sat by the open log fire, smoking cigars and talking earnestly to each other: Arthur Dodson, the ancient and venerable professor of Theology, and Otto Ziegler, a German professor who was visiting Cambridge for a couple of semesters during a sabbatical from his own university. I had never quite made out what Ziegler’s specialism was—some kind of abstract mathematics or higher physics. He was small and round, with a bald head and goatee beard—pretty much what you imagine when you hear the term ‘mad scientist’.

“Oh do hurry up, Justin!” Don Hunter ran a hand through his long, prematurely grey hair. “If you don’t make a move soon we shall be here all night.” He looked impatiently at his watch—the third or fourth time he had done so that evening. He said a few other things, muttering under his breath, that I didn’t catch. I got the general impression he wanted to get away and do something he considered Very Important.

It was true that I was having difficulty concentrating on the game. Part of the reason was the sheer effort (not made any easier by the imbibing of several festive brandies) of focusing my mind on a board with 1600 squares and hundreds of pieces. By this stage, if I remember correctly, I was down to less than 200 men while Don still had most of his original 360.

I shrugged and moved a piece at random. Don grunted in disgust and proceeded to take another fifty or so of my men.

There was another reason for my lack of interest in the game. I was listening with more than half my mind to the animated conversation over by the fireplace. They were talking, of all the hackneyed subjects, about the Star of Bethlehem.

“It’s all nonsense, of course,” old Dodson was saying. “The Star in the East is purely symbolic. A theological necessity, to demonstrate fulfilment of God’s prophecy in the Book of Numbers. To a good Christian, that is all that is needed. But materialists like yourself—and countless others going back to Johannes Kepler in the sixteenth century—refuse to be satisfied with the beauty of religious symbolism. You insist on looking for comets and supernovas and planetary conjunctions. But these theories are all discredited—totally discredited.”

“Nein—nicht so.” Ziegler puffed excitedly on his cigar. “Not my comet—nobody discredits him.”

Dodson looked amused. “And what’s so special about YOUR comet, Herr Professor?”

“Ah, my comet—he travels backwards in time. Backwards! It is sehr unheimlich—it is very strange—but it is what the equations tell me. And equations, they never lie.”

“A comet travelling backwards in time? Where from? And why?” Dodson seemed mildly intrigued in spite of himself.

“These things the equations tell me. My comet, he is one of a pair—a time-symmetric pair created by a Fanthorpe singularity in the year 988 AD. One comet travels backwards in time, the other forwards. The two orbits are like mirror images, with aphelion in the Kuiper Belt and perihelion here, on Earth. For the backward travelling comet, perihelion was 4 BC...”

“4 BC?” Dodson looked up. “The year that Herod the Great died—generally accepted as the year of the Nativity. Well, that fits your theory, I suppose. What about the forward-travelling comet?”

“From 4 BC to 988 AD it is 992 years,” Ziegler said slowly. It was clear that he was building to something in the nature of a climax. “And from 988 AD another 992 years is... 1980! Christmas Day, 1980! Today!” He beamed triumphantly.

Whatever response Dodson was about to make was cut off by a cry from Don Hunter. I had made another disastrous move and he had promptly taken all my remaining pieces.

“Finished at last!” Don looked at his watch and jumped to his feet. “Sorry, gents—I’ve got to go now. Must keep my appointment with that new star in the East, you know.”

We all gaped at him.

“New star in the East?” Dodson and Ziegler spoke almost simultaneously.

“Yes—I’ll have to leave young Justin here to tell you about it. I’ve been chattering away to him all evening. First saw it through the telescope a couple of days ago—much brighter yesterday—should be visible to the naked eye by now. Rises just before midnight. I’ll have to rush off to the Observatory if I’m going to catch it.”

I have to admit this was news to me as much as to the others. Now I came to think of it, Don had been mumbling about something or other, but I hadn’t been paying much attention.

“We know all about your new star,” Dodson said. “Or rather, the Herr Professor here knows all about it. It’s a backwards travelling comet, previously known as the star of Bethlehem. If you can believe a word he says, that is.”

“Nein, nein—this is the forward-travelling one,” Ziegler said. “But the rest—ja, it is essentially correct.” He turned to address the astronomer. “You have a physics background—you know the theoretical possibility of a Fanthorpe singularity. I say it is more than a theory—it is a reality that occurred in 988 AD. Your so-called new star is nothing but the inevitable mathematical consequence of this.”

Don shook his head uncertainly. “A Fanthorpe singularity? But that’s impossible—such a thing could only be produced artificially, using an immensely powerful nuclear reactor. It’s not possible today, and it certainly wasn’t possible in 988 AD.”

A sudden thought flashed into my head. “Maybe it was,” I said.

Now it was my turn to be gaped at.

“988 AD,” I stated flatly, “was the year that Zhang Tsu disappeared.”

There was a long pause in which they continued to gape at me.

“Let me explain,” I went on. “Zhang Tsu was the original rocket scientist. The Chinese had just invented what they called ‘fire arrows’—simple rockets they used in warfare. But Zhang Tsu tried a series of experiments in which he replaced the black powder in the rocket with red mercury. Many scholars believe this resulted in a primitive form of nuclear propulsion. The first few experiments seem to have been successful, but then there was a huge explosion and Zhang Tsu was never seen again.”

This time the pause was so short as to be imperceptible.

“For what do we wait?” Ziegler demanded. “To the observatory, schnell!”

Don Hunter needed no further encouragement—he had been itching to leave for several minutes. And I was all for it—it sounded like a great adventure. Only Dodson seemed reluctant to forego his place by the fire, but I managed to persuade him by pandering to his ego: “After all, we’re just an astronomer, a mathematician and a historian. We have our limitations. There are some situations that only a theologian can rise to.”

So the four of us were in it together. We rushed downstairs and piled into Don’s battered old Austin Mini. We decided he should drive because... I was about to say “because he was the least drunk”, but what I mean, of course, is “because he was completely sober”. He’d barely had a drop of liquor all evening. Which was a good thing, because if none of us had been fit to drive we would have missed the adventure of a lifetime.

* * * *

We pulled up at the observatory just on the stroke of midnight. Don let us into the deserted building and opened up the huge dome. The bright yellow star on the Eastern horizon was clearly visible.

“It’s altered significantly in the last twenty-four hours,” Don said, frowning as he adjusted the giant reflecting telescope. “There’s been a significant course change—there’s no doubt now that it’s headed for Earth. Let’s see if George can compute an impact point for us.”

‘George’ turned out to be the observatory’s state-of-the-art VAX-11/780 mainframe. It chugged and clicked as Don fed it the data.

“Impact point, eh?” Arthur Dodson chuckled to himself. “My money’s on Bethlehem, if history is anything to go by.” It was clear that he thought the whole thing was a load of hooey.

“Bethlehem? Nein—I think not.” Otto Ziegler, in contrast to Dodson, was taking the matter very seriously indeed. He bent over a globe and studied it carefully. “Theory predicts impact point is one hundred-eighty degrees from starting point. Starting point was somewhere in China, I believe?” He looked at me expectantly.

“Um, yes—I see what you mean,” I said. “Let’s see—Zhang Tzu’s experiments took place near the town of Huangshi in Hubei province, I believe.”

“You show me.” Ziegler indicated the globe.

With a bit of difficulty I located the place and pointed it out to the earnest-looking mathematician.

“Ach, ja—approximately thirty degrees North, hundred-fifteen degrees East. So we subtract hundred-eighty degrees to get...” He rotated the globe carefully. “Thirty degrees North, five-and-sixty degrees West. Jawohl! Right in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. It surprises me not at all.”

“Bermuda Triangle, my foot!” Dodson scoffed. “You mark my words—this comet is heading for Bethlehem.”

A heated argument ensued, and might have gone on all night if it hadn’t been interrupted after a few minutes by a cough from Don Hunter.

“Sorry to disappoint you fellows, but George disagrees with you.” Don was standing at the computer, a slip of paper in his hand. “The impact point isn’t Bethlehem and it isn’t the Bermuda Triangle. It’s much closer. Just on the coast about sixty miles east of here. A place called Rendlesham.”

“And the time of impact?” Ziegler looked anxiously at his watch.

Don glanced at the paper. “0140 hours—just over an hour from now.”

“Can we make it in time?”

“We can if we’re lucky. Let’s go!”

Cramming ourselves back into Don’s little car, we tore off eastwards along the A14. All the time the yellow star grew brighter and brighter ahead of us.

“Follow that star!” I shouted.

The new star in the East!” Dodson added, chuckling.

“We’re just like the three wise men following the star,” Don observed.

Ziegler, the great mathematician, grunted. “Except that there are four of us,” he pointed out.

“Ah, but only three of us are wise men,” Don said. “Justin doesn’t count—he’s only 28. You can’t be a wise man at 28. It would be a contradiction in terms.”

I ignored the insult. “Maybe we’ll witness the Second Coming,” I speculated.

“Poppycock,” Dodson snorted. “The Second Coming is a purely symbolic concept, just like the Star of Bethlehem. Theology is about the world of the Spirit, not the world of superstitious nonsense.”

We drove at hair-raising speeds past Newmarket, Bury St Edmunds and the sprawling lights of Ipswich. Just as we were passing through the village of Woodbridge we saw a huge, silent burst of brilliant yellow light ahead of us.

“The star’s gone!”

“It came down in the woods over there!”

We drove a bit further and came to a gate into the woods. A sign informed us that the place was called Rendlesham Forest, that it was the property of Her Majesty’s Forestry Commission, and that we were welcome to enter so long as we didn’t light any fires.

We left the car by the gate and went into the woods.

“I should have brought a flashlight,” Don muttered. “So much for foresight.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “There’s a light over there in the forest. Let’s head towards it.”

The light turned out to be an eerie yellow glow with no obvious source. We crept towards it and came to an unnatural looking clearing.

“I think this is where it came down.” Dodson was looking upwards, and our eyes followed his. There was an gap in the canopy of trees that was open to the sky. The ground beneath was littered with freshly broken pine branches.

“Some of the wood looks scorched,” I observed.

“You’re right,” Don agreed. “There must have been intense heat here.”

Ziegler was standing at the edge of the clearing, looking thoughtful. “Intense heat, ja—or intense radiation.”

Our thoughts were interrupted by the clamour of voices approaching. With a start we realized we were not the only ones in the woods that night.

“What the blazes?” Dodson looked around. “They sound like Americans. A large number of them! What are they doing here?”

Don snapped his fingers. “Americans—of course! We’re right next to a US Air Force Base. Woodbridge, I think it’s called. Top Secret atomic stuff—we don’t want to be caught snooping around here!”

The voices were getting closer.

“There’s someone out there, Sir!” one of the voices shouted. “What should I do? Finding that thing out here has made me mighty nervous.”

“Take no risks, man!” another voice barked. “Shoot the commie rascals!”

Actually the word he used may not have been ‘rascals’, but we weren’t paying much attention by that point. We were running as fast as we could back to the car.

* * * *

Well, that’s more or less the end of the story as far as my involvement is concerned. The ‘Rendlesham Forest Incident’, as it’s now known, has become quite notorious among conspiracy theorists. Many people are convinced that a UFO crash-landed in the East of England that Christmas Day more than thirty years ago—despite consistent denials by the UK and US governments. Another theory is that it was a Soviet nuclear powered satellite that came down. But an artificial comet created by a tenth century Chinese rocket scientist... a time-travelling twin of the Star of Bethlehem? Who knows? I may be the only one left who’s in possession of the full facts. Old Dodson died years ago, and Don Hunter is in a retirement home. I’ve no idea what happened to Otto Ziegler—he must be either dead or a very old man by now.

There is one curious postscript to the story. It appears that the remains of the reactor core—or whatever it was the US airmen recovered—was transported back to the States on board an aircraft carrier. It was then ferried by helicopter, slung underneath a giant Chinook, to NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas. And late at night, a few miles outside Houston on the 29th of December 1980, this strange phenomenon was witnessed by two local women returning from an evening out. The women—Vicky and Betty—were both devout Christians, and when confronted with this huge glowing apparition in the sky they could only draw one conclusion. To them, it was the Second Coming... and maybe, in a sense, they were right.