One can find the idea in the UFO literature as early as the first saucerzine from 1953, Al Bender’s Space Review. Bender called upon people to send in their theories on what flying saucers were all about and he made up a list of the responses. As part of Theory No. 11 Harold F. Emridh of Kansas wrote, “I think the saucers are to keep us imprisoned on Earth until we civilize ourselves to the point where we no longer pose a threat to them.”
In a book written with Ouija board contactee George Hunt Williamson, UFOs Confidential (1958), John McCoy offered his opinion that Earth is a “prison world” or a “great lunatic asylum.” Man has lost awareness of reality and has been given the illusion of freedom. Our desires are controlled by our system of economics and the inculcation of materialistic goals. This enslavement is accomplished by the trick of putting children in physical education classes. Its regimentation and excitation of savage instincts levels delicate and creative genius. This Earth is controlled by a great force from the deceptive aliens of Orion.
Donald Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers—Top Secret (1960) briefly puts forward the notion that aliens are here to keep tabs on a colony that was deliberately abandoned. It was a means of getting rid of undesirables. With Earth acting as a Devil’s Island, these exiles would serve as examples for others at home to stay in line. This would serve to explain the human appearance of many UFOnauts, particularly in that period.
Ray Palmer, in the January 1959 issue of Search, relayed the probably facetious contact tale of Art LaVove that appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The InterGalactic Empire banished rebels who destroyed a base beyond Mars. They were lobotomised and consigned to a life of savagery on Earth. Ever since, the Empire has sent its lobotomised prisoners here on a daily basis. “All of the aberrated of the Cosmos are dispatched here, where they can be watched. To put it bluntly, this planet is an IGE nut-house.” Palmer granted it was likely that this was only a cleverly conceived fiction, but that it nevertheless matched his personal beliefs. He thought LaVove “may have uttered the prize truth of all time.”
Jan Hudson in Those Sexy Saucer People (1967) admits arriving independently at a similar theory. Believing UFOs showed up after we sent off H-bombs or took off for space travel, she offered this thought, “I think the earth is a giant institution in which the human race has been incarcerated for its own good. And every time we start rattling the bars, the keeps come hurrying down to take a look.” Hudson relates that when she offered this idea before a group of contactees, none seemed to care for it much. It’s hard to know why, but maybe it had something to do with the fact that George Adamski and Orfeo Angelucci had both testified to the truth of the Prison Earth theory well before, in the middle of the fifties.
A Saturnian named Ramu told George Adamski during a conversation in a café that Earth had been selected centuries ago as the system to which they would exile their troublemakers. “They were gathered in ships from the many planets and transported to Earth, without equipment or implements of any kind.” Here they were forced to work and draw on their talents to earn their place in the Creator’s fold. The extraterrestrials watch and send messiahs from time to time to help out, but man wars against man and his achievements are lost to his penchant for destruction.
Orfeo Angelucci’s astral contacts revealed that vast numbers of earthlings are former inhabitants of the world of Lucifer that once existed between Mars and Jupiter. Those responsible for the destruction of Lucifer were deep-drowned in time and matter to live in the “underworld of illusion” that makes up the Earth. Flying saucers still visit “our prison world” to liberate us spiritually.
The theory makes an odd brief return in abduction history. During a 1974 visit to another world, Carl Higdon recalled seeing a gray-haired man among some younger people that aliens had picked up. He seemed familiar as a guy he saw on a TV show called The Unknown. During the show, this man said of the UFO people, “They put us down here for punishment. They’re going to come and take us back.” Leo Sprinkle, who performed the regression, realizes he knows who Higdon is talking about, “I have a copy of the book that the man is talking about, saying that the Earth was like a prison.” (Haines, 1979) Later, it comes to him: Lawrence W. Foreman’s Passport to Eternity (1970). Foreman was a southern Californian who had gone out into the desert on several occasions and talked with people from flying saucers. There is no indication if the investigators tried to contact Foreman about Higdon’s corroboration of his relationship with UFOnauts or if Sprinkle simply discounted the claim out of disinterest in helping prove the Prison Earth theory.
The theory was toyed with in science fiction culture well before it showed up in UFO literature. Frank Belknap Long Jr.’s “Exiles of the Stratosphere” involved an advanced race with lighter-than-air vessels dwelling in the upper atmosphere that only sent outcasts to the surface. In A.E. van Vogt’s Asylum (1942) the Earth is a sort of Botany Bay or dumping ground for the vicious elements of the galaxy. And before science fiction there was religion. George Berkeley’s Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732) contains the opinion “the Earth is, after all, the prison house in God’s Kingdom.”
Palmer warned the Prison Earth theory was a dangerous idea and so it is. It explains the problem of suffering all too well. The world should be a good place. Life should be fair. So why isn’t it? Any answer is going to be mythological in character, if not in form. The venerable orthodox choices are original sin and karma. We are cursed by the actions of our ancestors or our forgotten selves. Prison Earth did not change this. Adamski blamed ancestors. Angelucci blamed our forgotten selves. The clarification is one of setting. Prisons are supposed to be cruel, so no wonder there is so much insanity and suffering in the world.
So far so good, yet it also explains the problem of noncontact all too well. Aliens avoid us because we are useless misfits, the scum of the galaxy. We are ultimately beyond reasoning with and do not deserve to be free. Take that message to heart and you are asking for an inferiority complex of cosmic dimensions. You are free to believe it if you wish, just don’t forget that any bars to this prison are metaphorical and not metallic.
—MARTIN S. KOTTMEYER
References
Haines, Richard, ed., UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (Scarecrow Press, 1979).
Problem of Noncontact Of all the arguments against the presence of extraterrestrial visitors, the Problem of Noncontact has been the most frequently advanced and most respected among disbelievers. Charles Fort posed the issue in counterpoint to his own speculations about extraterrestrials decades before people started arguing about the source of flying saucers. This version from a 1926 letter to The New York Times would still be acceptable to most skeptics: “Then why have they not landed, say in Central Park, and had a big time of it—monstrous parade down Broadway, historic turn out, eruptions of confetti.” (Fort, 1926)
Later writers play around with landing spots in other places like the White House lawn, M.I.T., or Hollywood, but the basic sensibility retained is that they should be open about their activities rather than behave in a furtive and secretive manner. A roster of critics who have accepted the compelling nature of the Problem of Noncontact includes James Lipp of Project Sign, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Donald Menzel, Peter Kor, Robert Plank, John Keel, William Markowitz, and Robert Sheaffer.
UFOlogists tend to be dismissive of the problem, characterizing it in such terms as “a homocentric fallacy of the most obvious nature” embodying “more whimsy than good reasoning” (McCampbell); “an arbitrary desire” intended to demean UFOs as imaginary (Hendry) or “irrelevant” (Hopkins). Another considers the idea as being “on extremely thin ice” since nobody has done a concerted study forecasting the social characteristics of advanced civilizations (Baker).
Stanton Friedman engages the argument in a more elite manner. He felt the intent of the aliens is “not to seek out lunch with loonies of earth but rather to get data at their leisure without much risk.” He doubts that “the Margaret Meads of Zeta R
eticuli” would care to live with a people who have “made such a mess of a nice planet.” Such remarks would ring truer had UFOnauts repeatedly shown a lack of social discernment.
Though the class of people abducted by aliens are generally not the sort seen on the Jerry Springer Show, high-status or highbrow folks are not much in evidence. The aliens clearly favor those who entertain New Age concepts, such as alternate realities, telepathy, and cosmic consciousness. The reckless driving habits of UFOnauts and their evident problems with clunky vessels that spit smoke and flame, and often need repair, raises doubts that they truly operate by the motto, “Safety First.”
Advanced medical technology should assuage anxieties over the violent tendencies of humans and their planet-wrecking ten dencies. Even if it would not, is safety truly enhanced by not openly declaring that their intentions are anthropological or otherwise innocuous? Secretive and furtive behavior normally elicits suspicion and taunts of having something to hide.
In the years since Friedman’s remarks, developments in abduction lore have given force to the presumption that aliens are in fact evil. Thus, we could account for Noncontact by fears of reprisal in some form, or perhaps even shame. The huge investment of resources required to construct and propel interstellar crafts, however, renders all motives of alien self-interest paradoxical. Few things on Earth are worth going light years and expending energy sufficient to power a civilization for years. It is scarcely conceivable that any genetic or medical problem supposedly motivating the Hybrid Program wouldn’t be more quickly and efficiently solved by diverting space program funds directly into medical and genetic research in situ. Even if we could puzzle out the motive for such evil, this explanation would apply to only a fraction of cases. Do we assume those aliens who collect rocks and pick flowers are also evil?
Such dilemmas apply to other explanations of extraterrestrial behavior. Stanton Friedman was able to think of some twenty-six reasons why aliens might decide to visit Earth. When you ponder them at length however, only two of them have any potential of accounting for the furtive nature of the UFO phenomenon: Aliens scouting Earth for future invasion is one. Using Earth as a honeymoon hideaway is the other. Extrapolating human modesty to extraterrestrials seems questionable, but let’s allow it. The immediate dilemma facing these motives is that the behaviors of UFO entities en masse do not really seem to be guided by such motives.
What sort of invasion scout does medical exams? Abductees rarely seem to come from positions of status or have jobs privy to important information. Infiltrating libraries and publishing houses would efficiently get you most of what abductees know. Worse, saucers have been around over fifty years, which would seem to be procrastination on a rather unlikely scale. Information gathered during the 1950s would be obsolete and of no use for any invasion now.
Villas Boas-type affairs are not the rule in UFO stories. One may well wonder if sex under Saturn’s rings might be more romantic than Earth’s mosquito-infested tropics, but tastes are such an individual matter we should not assume universality. More troubling, though, should be the absence of hints that aliens savor the chosen environment after the trysts are over—no hand in hand walks on a beach, skipping stones, playful chases around the trees, taking pictures. How about taking souvenirs or teleporting tourist knik-knaks? Given the distance they must have traveled, why don’t they show more interest in where they have come?
The most common argument made in response to the Problem of Noncontact is to point out that superhuman thought and the effects of an independent evolutionary and cultural history would inevitably render aliens, in part or wholly, incomprehensible. This is perfectly true. Consider, as proof, one of the great unsolved mysteries of human evolution—our love for music. There is no widely accepted theory to explain the emotional effect music has on man. Certainly there are no grounds to assume the music sense has a universal survival value that would cause it to arise on alien worlds. It would be miraculous if aliens could fathom the meaning music holds for humans and trying to work out music’s logic would be nonsensical even in principle for it plays on emotions rather than reason. Yet we put music on the Voyager probes for distant interstellar civilizations to find and puzzle over. Given our own behavior, one cannot disagree aliens will be capable of mystifying behavior.
To say this however is not the same thing as explaining away noncontact. While we can nonimagine reasons for noncontact, one is equally justified in nonimagining reasons aliens would make contact. The issue then turns on deciding the likelihood that all aliens would adhere to philosophies, however inscrutable, mandating noncontact to the exclusion of pro-contact philosophies. Charles Fort demonstrated his reflective nature by seeing this broader and deadlier version of the Problem of Noncontact: “The greatest of mysteries: Why don’t they ever come here or send here openly? Of course there is nothing to this mystery if we don’t take seriously the notion that we must be interesting. It’s probably for moral reasons they stay away—but even so there must be some degraded ones among them.”
As he states elsewhere, there must be “many different kinds of visitors to this earth as there are visitors to New York, to a jail, to a church—some persons go to church to pick pockets for instance.”
So where are the degraded aliens? It violates what we see every day about life, society, culture, and intellectual discourse to expect radical uniformity among extraterrestrials.
Just within the sphere of the scrutable, there seems to be no reason to avoid contact that could gain likely universal assent. Take the oft-cited example of Star Trek’s Prime Directive—aliens refrain from interfering in the affairs of other cultures to prevent culture shock or contaminating the natural development of the subject culture. It is a romantic notion charged with allusions to clashes of culture within human history. Many had horrid consequences—disease, butchery, slavery, erasure of cultural history. Yet not all contacts were disastrous. One has only to think of the legacy of immigration in New York City. Sure there were conflicts, yet the resulting hybrid has been a jewel of American culture. It is hardly certain alien worlds would all have brutal histories, nor that brutality would lead to the lesson of the Prime Directive. An imperial-minded culture might opt for a let-the-dice-roll-and-see-who-wins philosophy that takes any result of interaction as, metaphysically, all the best in the long run.
It should be remembered that the heroes of the Star Trek universe repeatedly void the Prime Directive in favor of saving lives, subverting tyranny, and allaying suffering. They even dismantle utopias for notions about the need for people to achieve and struggle to be human.
Noninterference is not nearly as elementary an ethical dictate as others like cooperation or love. One can imagine precepts of cooperative tolerance that would mandate interaction between alien worlds to learn from each other to increase their mutual survival and well-being and pleasure. A sharing of the best of all worlds is an aim even an advocate of self-interest could justify.
One could equally see how extraterrestrials might be guided by love and thus seek to alleviate suffering and cultivate joy on other worlds. To put things in their starkest terms, one can procure from theodicy, religion’s biggest headache—The Problem of Suffering—and transplant it to the question of the existence of godlike extraterrestrial civilizations: If extraterrestrials exist, why do humans suffer needlessly?
Scrutable reasons for contact or nonfurtiveness can take many forms besides love. Some possibilities that present themselves: hunting and fishing, art trade and instruction, antique-hunting, attention-seeking, power-seeking, entertainment, lawsuits against humans, sports, the offering of services (interstellar taxi), impartial police protection (The Day the Earth Stood Still), famine relief, exile of undesirables, erotic adventure, eccentric obsession with alien life, playfulness, tourism, territorial displays.
We dare not forget Charles Fort’s awful thought: “Why not missionaries sent here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and to prepare
the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and superwhiskies…” Add to this the set of motives that aliens might have for contact beyond our comprehension and you have a conception of the magnitude the Problem of Noncontact presents to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The odds that all possible visiting extraterrestrials would be philosophically opposed to contact seems thoroughly remote.
Parenthetically, it must be observed that if one believes the evidence for an extraterrestrial presence is too extraordinary to reject even in the face of innate implausibility, there are implications that the ETH advocate is obliged to come to terms with. If UFOs are real, the cosmos is barren. There is no diversity. The cosmos is home to entities with only a narrow range of behaviors.
Similarly, there are no aliens in any reasonable sense analogous to humanity. The startling corollary stares back: Only Humans Love. Does that sound arrogant? Yet consider, aliens capable of deep empathy would not fly around indifferent to the troubles of humanity. They would make contact and help. If you wish to affirm the ETH is valid, understand that the heavens are sending only creeps our way. We either have incredibly bad luck or there is no variety of lifeforms blooming in the vast depths of space. The universe does not know how to throw a good party.
In fairness, Charles Fort did proffer a way around the paradoxical absence of degraded aliens. “We are property,” he wrote. The degraded ones are warned off. This reduces some of the problems posed by the expectation of diversity, but hardly eliminates it. Unless we can reduce the number of owners to one individual being or a small family, the problem still hangs on in the dynamics of groups. The range of forms suggested by the UFO phenomenon doesn’t really support such an idea as a single owner. There is also a problem that philosophies usually evolve or degrade over time. People change their minds once in a while. Thus, even evidence for a single owner would raise issues of how noncontact should last over the whole of UFO history.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 78