The UFO Community Experiences, Activities, and Agendas
Eyes Only: Some Notable UFOlogists of the Past (Part 3)
Ray Palmer (1910–77)
Astute American magazine editor-writer who had equal, enormous influence on UFOlogy, science fiction and SF fandom, hollow- Earth speculation, and the conspiracy-theory subculture.
Hunched and startlingly diminutive—results of a road accident suffered at age seven—Palmer had antic eyes, an expansive smile, and a good brain sharpened by spending many of his early years in bed surrounded by books. By 1938, Palmer landed the editor’s job at Ziff-Davis’s Amazing Stories, a directionless SF pulp in need of a firm hand and consistent vision. Palmer—or “Rap,” as he came to be known to readers—removed the “Every Story Scientifically Accurate” banner from the Amazing covers, while soliciting stories with strong character development and human interest. And mindful of reader demographics, Palmer commissioned sexy cover art for Amazing, and replaced back-cover advertisements with more art. Palmer soon inaugurated a new, “weird” title called Fantastic Adventures. Eventually, Ziff-Davis put him in charge of the company’s western, adventure, and detective pulps.
Happily married by 1943 and earning a hefty $10,000 a year, Palmer took a shine to a Richard S. Shaver, a Pennsylvania steelworker who claimed to have deciphered a lost language Shaver called Mantong. As Palmer saw it, Shaver’s turn of mind jibed well with Amazing’s turn from traditional SF and Palmer’s eagerness to reposition the magazine as a mystical-SF publication. Shaver began to pepper Palmer with stories and story ideas about a malevolent race—the Deros (detrimental robots)—that inhabited Earth’s hollow core and traveled the outside world via flying discs. Worse, the Deros schemed to rob humanity of its sanity and kidnap men and women for cultivation as food. How did Shaver come by this hollow-Earth information? As he informed Palmer, the Deros stories were relayed to him telepathically—that is, he heard voices.
Ray Palmer, though a lover of the fantastic, also had the commercial instincts of a good editor, and jumped into the Shaver mythology, massaging and heavily rewriting Shaver’s stories, switching out Atlantis for Lemuria (aka Mu), and coyly suggesting that the “Shaver Mystery” tales just might be factual.
Amazing ran the Shaver stories during 1945–48, but from the moment in the summer of 1947 when Palmer read of the Kenneth Arnold flying saucer sightings over Washington State, Amazing’s editor prepared himself to move on.
He had milked the Shaver mythos dry, and although he had boosted sales and stimulated discussion and debate among SF fans, a lot of the discussion carried a negative, sometimes angry tone. Readers were fed up with the unasked-for conflation of SF with the paranormal. Palmer resigned from Ziff-Davis and Amazing in 1949.
Inspired equally by the new flying saucer phenomenon and public interest in the occult, Palmer and former Ziff-Davis aviation editor Chris Fuller founded Fate, a brisk, digest-sized magazine devoted to ostensibly true accounts of flying saucers, poltergeists, lost cities, angels, clairvoyance, faith healing, telekinesis, Lemuria, dowsing, astrology (Jeron King Criswell, future costar of Plan 9 from Outer Space, contributed an astrology column)—even “The Curse of the Hope Diamond.” Issue number one (Spring 1948) set the tone with a dramatic, fictionalized cover illustration of the Kenneth Arnold “Flying Disks” (sic).
Arnold himself wrote the cover story, “The Truth About Flying Saucers” (with copious rewrite help from Palmer).
Palmer’s tenure at Fate was undone late in 1953, when Chris Fuller’s unhappiness with Palmer’s mystical bent moved Palmer to sell his share of the magazine to Fuller. Palmer went on to edit Mystic (later called Search), which trafficked heavily in tales of séances, witchcraft, quack cancer cures, first-person accounts of meetings with friendly aliens (Mystic’s first issue published Orfeo Angelucci’s “I Traveled in a Flying Saucer”), and, drearily, story after story about Richard Shaver.
In 1957, Palmer founded another magazine, Flying Saucers from Other Worlds, which became Flying Saucers a year later.
Palmer returned to Milwaukee. During 1960–61, he published a sixteen- volume, subscriber-supported paperback-book series called Hidden World. The books chronicled the preoccupations of—who else?—Richard Shaver, including a new one: mystical messages hidden in ancient rocks.
Palmer continued to edit Search and Flying Saucers (which perpetuated hollow-Earth theory), and introduced a monthly newsletter called Ray Palmer’s Forum. Although Palmer assumed the guise of an angry reactionary in Search, he offered a milder persona in the newsletter, a subscriber-supported publication with a pleasingly upbeat, proto-New Age feel (Richard Shaver was by this time dead, and thus out of Palmer’s life). Palmer became fond of the naïve activism of the hippie movement, and cultivated an intense opposition to America’s mischief in Vietnam. Gradually, his mind filled with dark conspiracies; as a physically small man, and one who made war with a typewriter rather than a gun, he felt personally vulnerable to the predations of the CIA and Nixon (who bombed Cambodia, Palmer wrote, partly to destroy evidence of a secret UFO observation base).
Palmer slipped into fear of a worldwide “Zionist World Government,” and became an ardent supporter of race-baiting Alabama governor, and presidential candidate, George Wallace—ostensibly because Wallace vowed to get the U.S “out” of Vietnam.
Palmer’s last great crusades caused him to take a hard look at what he dubbed “the hole in the pole,” secret egress for flying saucers based beneath the North Pole. Palmer died of natural causes. No conspiracy, no perfidy, no saucer ride to the upper atmosphere—just the aftereffects of a blocked artery.
Palmer is still sometimes referred to as “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers,” an honorarium that isn’t as hyperbolic as it may sound. He helmed professional, nationally distributed magazines that allowed saucer news to expand beyond the pages of mimeographed newsletters and after-hours discussions in hotel rooms at saucer conventions. Who wouldn’t gamble thirty- five or fifty cents for a magazine peek at the saucer phenomenon? In that regard, then, Palmer brought flying saucers into America’s homes, barbershops, and beauty parlors. Palmer made UFOs “big.”
Notable book: The Coming of the Saucers: A Documentary Report on Sky Objects That Have Mystified the World (with Kenneth Arnold).
Hector Quintanilla Jr. (1923–98)
USAF major (later lieutenant colonel) with a physics background who headed Project Blue Book during 1963–70, the group’s final seven years of existence. Quintanilla may be best recalled today for his “Unidentified” judgment of the famed Lonnie Zamora UFO sighting of 1964 (see chapter ten)—an evidence-based judgment that Quintanilla felt was misinterpreted by many UFOlogists to mean an acknowledgment of the account’s credibility. In fact, Quintanilla sensed that patrolman Zamora misinterpreted what he had seen or, possibly, perpetrated a hoax. But Quintanilla felt that the available evidence did not allow him to make either of those opinions official. (The CIA, in its own summary, characterized the Zamora case as “Unsolved.”) Major Quintanilla also is recalled for criticism levied against him, and against Blue Book, by Blue Book civilian consultant J. Allen Hynek, who said that during Quintanilla’s tenure, “the flag of the utter nonsense school was flying at its highest on the mast.” The basis of Hynek’s complaint is his belief that Quintanilla lacked the scientific qualifications to head the government’s UFO-study group. Hynek further complained that Quintanilla simply ignored any evidence that ran counter to the major’s own preconceived opinions. James E. McDonald—like Hynek, a distinguished scientist—flatly stated that Quintanilla was “not competent”— although McDonald added (fairly enough) that the major had not lobbied for the Blue Book position, but had been appointed.
The January 1966 issue of Popular Mechanics displayed a kinder, and more reasonable, attitude toward Quintanilla, regarding him as a professional interested in hard evidence. “We’re certainly not trying to hold anything back,” the major told the unnamed PM interviewer. “We accept every report as valid, unless there is evidence to substantiate a report as a hoax.” In Quintanilla’s 1974 book proposal—to which he gave two suggested titles, UFOs: An Air Force Dilemma and UFOs: A $20,000,000 Fiasco—Quintanilla expressed his long-abandoned hope for a “non-partisan scientific committee,” sponsored by “a reputable university,” to “objectively evaluate UFOs and thus clear Blue Book of ‘whitewash’ accusations by McDonald, Hynek, and the UFO hobby clubs.” Edward J. Ruppelt (1923–60): United States Air Force officer who headed America’s official UFO investigatory body, Project Blue Book (previously Project Grudge) during 1951–53. Ruppelt is credited with coining “unidentified flying object” and “UFO” as replacements for “flying saucer.” In his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects Ruppelt recounted numerous UFO sightings, including many given by experienced military pilots.
Although he believed that “good UFO reports cannot be written off” as weather balloons, mass hysteria, and other easily summoned explanations, he concluded that “[t]here have been no reports in which the speed or altitude of a UFO has been measured, there have been no reliable photographs that show any details of a UFO, and there is no hardware. There is still no real proof.” Ruppelt went on to acknowledge that while the USAF never denied the existence of interplanetary craft, “UFO reports offer absolutely no authentic evidence that such interplanetary spacecraft do exist.” Some conspiracy buffs in the UFO community struggle to come to grips with Ruppelt’s death, at thirty-seven, from a heart attack, as if young men never fall over dead with bad tickers. One blogger, posting on ufocon.blogspot.com in 2013, wondered, “Does it make sense[?]” For more about Captain Ruppelt and Blue Book, see chapter nine.
Notable book: The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.
Harley Rutledge (1926–2006)
American physicist and academic recalled for his 1973 endeavor Project Identification, a real-time sky-scan study involving hundreds of nights of fieldwork by 620 scientists, students, and motivated amateurs, armed with binoculars, telescopes, cameras, and spectrographs, all watching for and charting anomalous objects. Although a UFO skeptic, Rutledge had been impressed by some five hundred UFO sightings reported from near Piedmont, Missouri, during February–April 1973. As head of the Physics Department at Southeast Missouri State University, Rutledge was uniquely positioned to investigate. During 1973–77, he and his volunteers used video and time-lapse photography to capture about seven hundred objects, charting size, velocity, and distance.
As the team compiled data, Rutledge investigated such ancillary issues as coincidence, chance, subliminal thinking, and premonition.
Rutledge, who claimed to have seen 140 UFOs himself during the study, finally concluded that so many of the objects appeared to be “intelligently controlled” that no responsible scientist could dismiss them.
Unlike some other scientists/academics that came to similar conclusions, Rutledge enjoyed general acceptance of his data, and carried on thanks to grants from Southeast Missouri State and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
Notable book: Project Identification: The First Scientific Study of UFO Phenomena.
Carl Sagan (1934–96)
Leading American astronomer, academic, author, popularizer of science, and longtime consultant to the U.S. space program. The citation for his 1991 Masursky Award from the American Astronomical Society lauds his “extraordinary contributions” to study of planetary atmospheres and surfaces, the history of Earth, and exobiology.
Sagan’s 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is a reasonable and decisive indictment of what Sagan regarded as the worrisome general acceptance of magic, demons, the devil, faith healing, channeling—and UFOs. Devoted to the tenets of serious science, Sagan argued, generally speaking, for an acceptance of simple explanations rather than the complex. He acknowledged the excitement that comes from interpreting a mysterious flying object as something from another world (a complex assumption), but he more enthusiastically noted the logic of the prosaic, such as a weather balloon (a simple conclusion).
Sagan expressed his disappointment with a question often put to him: “Do you believe in UFOs?” “I’m always struck by how the question is phrased,” he wrote, “the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, ‘How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?’” Sagan felt that many people claiming to be open-minded about the UFO phenomenon actually entered into the discussion with “highly predetermined” attitudes. They ignored scientific facts that seemed dull, assumed that every eyewitness account is accurate, and neglected to consider the human propensity to spoof and hoax.
Sagan developed a mild interest in crop circles, and frequently mentioned Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, British hoaxers who admitted to having created and executed complex “alien” crop circles across Britain.
Sagan conceded that the government may have covered up facts about UFOs of American or foreign (Soviet) origin—a tactic that, given issues of national security, struck Sagan as sensible, particularly in light of complex technical issues of avionics and propulsion associated with rapidly advancing missile technology in the late 1950s–early 1960s.
Despite being dubious about hard-core conspiracies, Sagan remained loath to dismiss the extraterrestrial hypothesis out of hand. He encouraged, and even facilitated, informed scientific debate about the matter. (Particularly sober-sided scientists criticized Sagan for his flexibility of mind.) For some UFOlogists, Carl Sagan is a difficult figure to counter. Few scientists of the 20th century have been as lauded and honored, and few contributed as much practical knowledge to our understanding of Earth and the planets. (A heavenly body, Asteroid 2709, is named for him.) Sagan achieved widespread popular acceptance as a researcher, teacher, author, and television personality (estimates place total viewership of his Cosmos TV series of 1980 at one billion). The difficulty faced by detractors is compounded because Sagan’s professional confidence and ingratiating personal manner captivated viewers and readers, who appreciated Sagan’s willingness to give UFOs serious thought.
Notable books: Cosmos; The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark; Dragons of Eden: Speculations of the Evolution of Human Intelligence (Pulitzer Prize); Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
Frank Scully (1892–1964)
American show business journalist and author of novelty humor books who struck gold in 1950 with Behind the Flying Saucers, a “ripped from the headlines” exposé that revealed details of saucer crashes in the American Southwest that left some three dozen alien corpses behind. The meat of the narrative is a purported 1948 saucer crash near Aztec, New Mexico, which by itself accounted for anywhere from a dozen to nineteen tiny bodies. Although clumsily overwritten, the book has the dramatic appeal of a colorful story, plus Scully’s claims of a government cover-up of the truth (a theme that still resonates today). In his foreword, Scully positioned himself as a fearless truth- teller willing to defy the “faceless spokesmen” that misled the public. Scully added that he “never participated in a hoax on flying saucers.” But he had. He just didn’t know it yet.
The Aztec, New Mexico, account had been fabricated by a pair of longtime con men, and when the scam was exposed in 1952, Scully publicly expressed disinterest in the whole thing, saying he had moved on. (And indeed he had, with such tomes as The Blessed Mother Goose and The Best of Fun in Bed.) Behind the Flying Saucers sold more than sixty thousand copies in hardcover, and at least one million more when issued as a mass market paperback in 1951.
Sales numbers alone place it among the most important of early UFO books. For details of Scully’s involvement with the Aztec hoax, see chapter fifteen.
Notable book: Behind the Flying Saucers.
Wilbert Smith (1910–62)
Government-employed Canadian radio engineer who envisioned Earth’s magnetic field as an important future source of the planet’s energy needs. Smith became interested in flying saucers in the late 1940s, and eventually surmised that saucers harnessed magnetic energy for propulsion.
Smith had partial responsibility for the technical integrity of Canadian radio broadcasting, and enjoyed friendships with members of Parliament. Late in 1950, after Smith reminded officials that the USA was outstripping Canada in magnetic-field research, the Defence Research Board granted approval of funds and laboratory space for a geomagnetism study dubbed Project Magnet. Later, Smith was one of a few key government workers brought into a new program, Project Theta (shortly renamed Project Second Storey), to index and analyze Canadian UFO sightings.
By the summer of 1953, when Smith earned permission to install UFO- detection equipment near Ottawa, Canada’s intelligence community had assumed a dominant role in Project Second Storey. After Smith claimed to have established contact with UFOs, the Canadian government took him less seriously. Still, after his death, Smith was lionized as a leading light of Canadian science.
More than one thousand pages of Smith’s government documents are gathered in a 2008 book edited by David Crawford, 38 Messages from Space.
Pedro Ferriz Santa Cruz (1921–2013)
Mexican history teacher, general broadcaster, newsreader, quiz-show host, and author who got into radio in 1939 and made his mark with Un mundo nos vigila (A World Is Watching Us), an XEW-AM program that explored extraterrestrial life. A chronicle of Mexican UFO activity and a resource for accounts from other countries, A World Is Watching Us had an outsize influence because XEW was a “border blaster”—a 250,000-watt powerhouse that also broadcast on shortwave. Although based in Mexico City, XEW maintained relay transmitters in Guadalajara, San Luis, Veracruz, and Monterrey, providing programming to forty-three other Mexican stations. Santa Cruz’s audience, then, came from the length and breadth of Mexico, and from much of the American Southwest, as well. In this, Santa Cruz stands as a significant figure in the popularization of UFO study.
Notable book: Un mundo nos vigila (A World Is Watching Us).
Leonard H. Stringfield (1920–94)
American public relations and marketing executive who published the Orbit newsletter; founded Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO); and advised NICAP during 1957–72.
Stringfield, who had seen a UFO while an Army intelligence officer in Occupied Japan, sharpened his focus in the 1970s, when he devoted himself to careful collation of eyewitness accounts of crashed UFOs. He had special interest in incidents involving deceased aliens.
Although Stringfield claimed a partnership with Air Defense Command (including a dedicated phone line into his house), the Air Force denied the relationship.
In 2012, MUFON announced that it had taken possession of sixty volumes of Stringfield’s papers and research, containing details of U.S. presidential interest in UFOs and intimidation of UFO investigators.
Notable book: Situation Red: The UFO Siege. In addition, Stringfield self- published seven volumes of UFO Crash/Retrievals: Status Report; and Inside Saucer Post . . . 3-0 Blue, a pamphlet.
Brinsley Le Poer Trench (Earl of Clancarty) (1911–95)
British-Irish flying saucer enthusiast who established a pair of UFO organizations during the 1950s and ’60s (International UFO Observer Corps and Contact International), and edited Flying Saucer Review. Trench’s theories about the origin of humankind combined notions about ancient astronauts and hollow Earth; he claimed to have traced his own lineage back to extraterrestrials that arrived on Earth around 63,000 BC.
A portion of Trench’s thoughts about ancient astronauts ran along familiar lines (long-ago alien visitation from outer space and subsequent emergence of the human race); he expressed the connection to hollow Earth more dramatically, claiming that some branches of humanity sprang from creatures inhabiting areas of the Earth’s crust, and who tunneled to the surface to interact with humans. (Trench borrowed the tunnel idea from the most visible ancient astronaut proponent, Erich von Däniken.) Trench identified the main points of egress as the North and South poles. In time, Trench suggested that secret bases at the poles hid flying saucers.
Pondering the origins of tales recounted in the Bible, Trench concluded that Adam and Eve lived on Mars, and that their descendants traveled to Earth when the Martian polar ice cap began to melt.
More prosaically, Trench offered secondhand, anecdotal evidence of a secret meeting of President Eisenhower and aliens at Edwards AFB in April 1954. After succeeding to his earldom in 1975, Trench became a Minister of Parliament, and agitated for government investigation of flying saucers.
Notable books: The Flying Saucer Story; The Sky People; Secrets of the Ages: UFOs from Inside the Earth.
George Van Tassel (1910–78)
American flight engineer, religious existentialist, and self-described channeler of benign extraterrestrial philosophy.
Having met friendly, suntanned aliens, Van Tassel organized the first Giant Rock, California, UFO convention in 1954, which became an annual event attracting hundreds into the Mojave Desert for lectures, displays, and books and other wares offered by dealers.
Van Tassel established the College of Universal Wisdom, spoke vaguely about Lucifer, and collected funds to construct an Integratron, an alien-engineered geomagnetic device designed to rejuvenate human cells and function as a time machine.
Van Tassel’s work on the Integratron remained incomplete at his death, but the structure is extant, well maintained, and a popular destination for UFOlogists,
tourists, and the curious.
For details of Van Tassel’s activities, see chapter fourteen.
Notable books: I Rode a Flying Saucer: The Mystery of the Flying Saucers Revealed; Into This World and Out Again.
Colin Wilson (1931–2013)
Celebrated British autodidact of working-class origin who pursued a long and successful career as a novelist and nonfiction author. Wilson rocketed to fame in the UK, quite out of nowhere, with his first book, The Outsider (1956), a nonfiction existential rumination on vapid societies’ need of critic-prophets. Wilson later moved toward commercial novels, and found popularity with The Mind Parasites, The Space Vampires (filmed as Lifeforce), and the multivolume Spider World saga.
He returned frequently to the theme of social alienation, and also became a stimulating chronicler of the history and psychology of crime; poltergeists, telepathy and other facets of the paranormal; Atlantis and other ancient civilizations; the heroic tradition; sex and love; and analytic psychology. Wilson wrote biographies of people as diverse as Aleister Crowley and Mozart; Uri Geller and Hermann Hesse.
Although UFOs did not engage Wilson as fully as other subjects, he wrote enthusiastically about documented sightings and abductions, arriving at an interpretation similar to Carl Jung’s—UFO events as manifestations of a long- established collective consciousness. However, Wilson freely connected UFOs to out-of-body experiences, mysticism, ghosts, and other familiar subsets of parapsychology and the paranormal.
Notable books: The Unexplained Mysteries of the Universe; Alien Dawn: An Investigation into the Contact Experience; World Famous UFOs.
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