Williamson and his circle eventually contacted dozens of aliens, among them the first known paranoid extraterrestrial. “Affa” of Uranus expressed fear of the work going on at Lowell University: “The big eyes were looking at us,” he complained. (Williamson, 1963)
Three months later, an acquaintance of Williamson would do him one better and meet a human being from another world fact-to-face. The name of that acquaintance was George Adamski. In the initial encounter, Adamski communicated with the alien by signs and gestures, and telepathy. Among the things he learned was that the little disks which were often reported served as eyes for the larger motherships. If the disks were in trouble, a crosscurrent would detonate them in order to prevent capture. (Leslie and Adamski, 1953) This innovation could have been gleaned from Keyhoe’s writings.
Though Keyhoe personally rejected the rumors, he reported in The Flying Saucers Are Real that some individuals believed the disks would disintegrate with an explosive charge if they ever got out of control. (Keyhoe, 1960) The idea began with Dr. Lincoln La Paz, who thought the green fireballs were made of beryllium copper, so they would burn up with no debris. Spectra indicated, however, that the green fireballs contained magnesium, and so were probably of natural origin.
In a later encounter, the aliens took Adamski on a tour of their ship. Inside, he was shown a central magnetic pillar that doubled as both a propulsion unit and a powerful telescope, which allowed them to inspect the land below. He is shown a TV set on which is registered everything seen by remote-control disks ranging in size from 10 inches to 12 feet in diameter. These disks registered every vibration taking place in the area under observation. They even allow aliens to know what we are thinking. Adamski saw over a dozen of these registering disks. (Adamski, 1955)
Howard Menger, in time, saw one of these registering disks explode. The aliens shortly thereafter affirmed to Menger that it had been out of control. He elaborated on the fact that these disks recorded all emotions, thoughts, and possible intents. (Menger, 1959)
The Mitchell sisters added a novel wrinkle to this portrait. An alien named “Alna” demonstrated for them a spy scope that could see through roofs by subtracting their vibrations from other vibrations of a building. (Mitchell, 1973)
Orfeo Angelucci’s aliens spoke of our planet having been under observation for centuries, but only recently it had been resurveyed. Every point of progress in our society is registered. (Angelucci, 1955)
Dan Martin corroborated the spy paradigm in titling the account of his contact The Watcher. Decades later, another alien named “Khyla” would also be known as “The Watcher.” (Valerian, 1988) Contacts with names like “Asmiz,” “Quamquat,” and “Mister Zno” likewise affirmed that we were being watched. The seventies contactee Claude Vorlihon (a.k.a. “Rael”) was told by his alien mentors that they had come to see what we were up to, and to watch over them. (Vorlihon, 1978)
Abductee literature also lends support to the picture of aliens spying on humanity. Herb Shirmer, from his 1967 encounter, received testimony that his aliens were engaged in surveillance. (Smith, 1976) Like Adamski, Schirmer was shown a baby saucer inside the ship that could be launched to check out an area and send pictures to a vision screen in the mothership.
In the 1975 abduction of Charles L. Moody, aliens refer to the craft they are on as an observation craft. It was distinctly smaller than the main craft and was said to be vulnerable to interference by radar. (Lorenzen, 1978)
Raymond Shearer, an abductee of 1978, broke out in a cold sweat fearful he had become a possible agent or spy for the aliens. (Smith, 1979)
During a May 1979 encounter, William Herrmann, while aboard a saucer, witnessed rendezvous with what the aliens termed an “observance vehicle.” (Stevens, 1989)
Virginia Horton’s aliens included one wanting to be a bioanthropologist. They collected a blood sample for later examination and research. The aliens’ research had led to us being considered a “precious species.” (Hopkins, 1981)
One could regard all this face-to-face testimony as corroboration of the validity of Keyhoe’s thesis. The pedigrees of these experiencers, however, are of mixed value. Mediums and Ouija boards are suspect to say the least. Adamski is largely dismissed as a charlatan by UFOlogists who want to be taken seriously. Menger confessed his experiences more or less were not real. The other contactees also tend to be rejected as promulgators of fantasy. Abductees come late to the game and long after Keyhoe’s ideas had suffused the UFO mythos.
If these are fantasies, why do all of these people have their aliens say, in essence, “I spy”? The first possibility is camouflage. The contactees try to blend their fantasies with contemporary beliefs to give them credibility. An allied possibility is that they sense this is something people want to believe and, following an ancient credo, “Tell them what they want to hear.” The other basic possibility is that contactees want to believe it themselves.
UFOlogists, until the advent of the abductees, never used the testimony of UFO contacts to buttress the reconnaissance thesis. But both groups affirm it explicitly and implicitly. It is harder to discount the need to believe as fuel for the advancement of the idea in the case of the contactees. Untainted rationality can hardly account for the motif’s presence there. If need accounts for one, it many unconsciously account for both groups believing aliens are watching us. Yet why would anyone want to believe anything like that?
The sensation of being watched is a common psychological experience. It can be termed an archetypal phenomenon, for it is founded on a universal feature of human life. All of us are watched when we are children. Parents must constantly keep an eye on us to keep us out of danger or prevent us from causing trouble. As the child grows up he learns that certain behaviors have undesirable consequences and will become wary of doing things that might provoke an unwanted response from his parents. A glance at the parents for a look of approval or disapproval can cue him whether he’s doing the right or wrong thing. These parental responses are sought and anticipated. Over time they are internalized, as a separate agency develops within the mind that oversees and supervises behavior even when the parent is absent. This agency has been variously termed the conscience or superego. Poets have called it the “watchman of the soul.”
The conscience constantly compares our behavior to the ideals instilled in us by our parents. The ideals are added to by authority figures such as teachers, religious figures, cops, media pundits, friends, and public opinion as time goes by. When we fall short of the ideals we set for ourselves, become insecure, or find ourselves apart or isolated from the rest of society, the conscience makes itself felt. Sensations imprinted from childhood of being spied upon by distrusting parents or parents giving “that look” can surface to make us stop what we’re doing and think over our actions. Though such actions on the part of our conscience may make us anxious and may even cause us to be wracked with guild, they develop from the need to feel pride about ourselves and warn us there are consequences in our misbehaving.
Parenting and socialization are unfortunately not always gracefully managed. Ambitious parents can instill ideals impossible to live up to in a child. Cruel parents can assault the child with criticisms and punishments that are impossible to live down. Parents may teach distrust by unfairly spying on the child with insufficient cause. Under these circumstances the superego can take on severe qualities that hang on as fixed aspects of the adult’s character. When these superego functions are split off and distort an individual’s perception of reality, the situation can be termed pathological and the condition acquires the description of paranoia.(Frosch, 1983)
Generally speaking, paranoia is defined by the idea that one is being persecuted. Among the striking commonalities of this idea is the motif of being watched by others. Such erroneous beliefs have been categorized by psychiatrists under the phrase “delusions of observation.” (Eidelberg, 1968) As Freud saw it, there is ultimately a grain of historical truth behind such delusions. The individu
al had been watched before, but as a child. Pride forces the individual to deny feelings of internal narcissistic mortification, but accepts external control by imaginary others or others in imaginary relationships. It is a compromise solution to a moralistic dilemma. Without it, the individual falls into unbearable depression and self-loathing. Distorting one’s perceptions of reality exacts costs over time, however. Whether the cost is worth it is a deeply problematic issue.
Many paranoids function at superior levels of performance in their work and may bother no one with their quirky ideas. Others may act on their delusions and make false accusations that destroy human relationships and injure the innocent. While paranoia can be treated by analysis, it is a difficult and emotionally painful process for both the individual and the therapist. Therapists, if nobody else, wonder if it is worth it.
It is fairly natural to assume that the beliefs encountered earlier in this essay are collective equivalents of the delusions of observation seen in individual cases of paranoia. We are looking for the eyes of our parents in some sense. Rather than dwell on our inadequacies, which we know we would find, we anxiously look skyward for signs of attention and supervision. In the case of the contactees nothing could be clearer, given the beliefs of aliens being able to read our thoughts, something parents give every appearance of doing at times.
It is tempting to lay the growth of the UFO mythos to collective shame over Hiroshima and the development of nuclear weapons in the fifties. Outwardly we were proud of the Yankee ingenuity we showed in constructing this superweapon, but the gruesome effects of it were undeniable in the photos brought back and displayed in Life magazine and elsewhere.
Oppenheimer, in his oft-quoted lecture before MIT in December 1947, spoke his conscience: “In some crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.” One could easily deny the physicists had sinned and many did. The knowledge, however, returned in projected form—the delusion of aliens watching us. The concern reflected in Lipp’s researching whether or not aliens could have seen our nuclear blasts gives some credence to the notion, as does the frequency of talk about A-bombs by both contactees and UFOlogists in the fifties.
The possibility of narcissistic mortification over Hiroshima is most relevant in the context of the cluster of UFO reports around Los Alamos noted by Keyhoe and the Robertson Panel. Interest in flying saucers appears to have been considerable there. Ruppelt of Blue Book singles out the Atomic Energy Commission’s Los Alamos lab as a place where so many people turned up for his briefings that the lecture theater wouldn’t hold them all.
Whether nuclear shame has a wider role in fueling the UFO mythos is open to considerable doubt. Why didn’t the paranoiac reaction set in immediately in 1945? UFO flaps don’t correlate well with atomic tests. Blue Book set up a UFO reporting net in the Eniwetok H-bomb test region, but got nothing for the effort. Not only has there been a notable absence of bomb-project physicists among UFOlogists, but two are renowned for their disbelief. Enrico Fermi, the mastermind of the first chain reaction in 1942, is also known for the famous Fermi Paradox against the prevalence of ETI civilizations. Edward Condon was a member of the committee that established the U.S. atomic bomb program and later served as advisor to later atom-related study groups of the government. A recent tribute to Hermann Oberth reminds us that while here is a figure who believed in saucer reconnaissance, his claim to immortality lies not with the atom, but with the creation of the V2 rocket.
Clearly nuclear shame has limitations as a source for UFO paranoia. This is more fully rendered inadequate by the larger consideration that paranoid delusions are a constant element in our culture’s fantasies. Paranoia may have been rampant in the forties and fifties, but even then it was nothing new. Collective paranoia existed before there was a Hiroshima.
C.R. Badcock points out that beliefs in shepherding sky-gods begin, historically, with the formation of nomadic pastoral economies and the domestication of animals. Before that, man’s beliefs tended to be animistic and polytheistic because of the nature of cultivation and agriculture. The practices of pastoralism obliged a special psychology formed of independence, an obsessional nature, and the feeling of guilt-shame. The formation of such personalities favors the creation of paranoiac reaction states of mind and the spread of paranoid beliefs. From the inception of these new practices we start to see the spread of myths about all-seeing gods and secret races of watchers of mankind. (Badcock, 1980)
There survives from ancient Babylon, for example, a prayer to the first-begotten of Marduk who is addressed as “You watch over all men.” (Saggs, 1962) Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, besieged Jerusalem in early Biblical times and exiled its people. Among them was the prophet Ezekiel. He believed God had passed judgment that his people were sinful. While in exile he came to see a vision of wheels in the air with “eyes round about,” and from then on prophesied doom and destruction. (Ezekiel 1:20)
A rendering of Ezekiel’s vision with eyes everywhere
Also in the Bible we encounter practices like Joshua’s placing seven eyes on every stone of the Temple to convey the special watchfulness of God. It is commonly believed that the eyes of the Lord can range through the whole Earth. (Eichrodt, 1967) As he lay in bed, Daniel had a vision of a watcher that came down from heaven. (Daniel 4:13) Watchers are also spoken of in 2 Enoch XVIII as a group of angels banished to a dungeon along with Samael, a planetary power and prince in heaven. (Patai, 1983)
Christianity, with its end-of-the-world fantasies and fears of eternal damnation for trivial infractions, has been termed paranoid by some psychiatrists. (Badcock, 1980) It is an interesting question whether or not the decay of the Roman empire provided the fuel for its diffusion. Regardless, there is little dispute it lent a distinctly paranoid tone to the Dark Ages. People lived in a double-spy cosmology, as angels and devils scrutinized the minute day-to-day behavior of everybody for the slightest blasphemy or offense. (Keen, 1989)
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, fantasies of flying witches and secret meetings of Devil worshippers led to the Great Witch Hunt, one of the deadlier paranoid delusions to have gripped masses of people. (Cohn, 1975)
Mass paranoia does not confine itself to religious realms. Conspiracy theories constantly interweave with reality-based political thought and often dominate it. The American Revolution, some historians now argue, was rooted in a pandemic of persecutory delusions.
Paranoiac fantasies suffuse American history: the Illuminati conspiracy and anti-Masonry, anti-Catholicism, “the Gallic peril,” slaveholders’ conspiracies, baby-killing and dismemberment by Indians, the Yellow peril, reefer madness, the fluoridation-poisoning fear, the Red Nightmare and McCarthyism in the fifties, JFK assassination theories, the TriLateralists, the Gemstone file, cattle mutilations, the Satanist conspiracy, etc. (DeMause, 1982)
Anyone in doubt of the influence and industry of the paranoid is directed to Murray Levin’s dissection of the Great Red Scare of 1919-20. It led to lynchings, the crushing of unions, and the abandoning of civil liberties. The belief in a nonexistent Bolshevik conspiracy to foment a revolution that would destroy the American way of life was supported by an “irrefutable” 4465-page document called the Lusk Report. Psychotic ravings are reprinted without evaluation and bits and pieces of reality are force-fitted to prove what amounted to a vague assumption. (Levin, 1971)
This writer suspects that our culture has a constant reservoir of paranoids ready to adopt and give flight to any fear that finds a coterie of advocates. It isn’t any particular instance of collective shame that accounts for the origin or diffusion of paranoid beliefs in our culture. Thus the spread of Keyhoe’s reconnaissance theory probably wasn’t dependent on Hiroshima.
Elements of the UFO mythos are clearly evident long before the forties and fifties. There was, for example, a significant market for stories about extraterrestrials visiting Earth or being visited by Earthli
ngs as early as the 1890s. Nearly 60 such “interplanetaries” appeared in that decade. (Locke, 1975)
Among the late comers was H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in 1898. It may be a small surprise to the reader that more extraterrestrials were reported during the airship waves of 1896 and 1897 than during the flying saucer flap of 1947. (Neeley, 1988)
Most of the 19 reports involve little more than extraterrestrial picnics and camp-outs or excursions. A pair speak of negotiating trade agreements. One airship is here to pick up ice. Two involve spirits or angels making surveys for future colonization. Only one case involves Martians scrutinizing humans for the apparent purpose of securing an inhabitant. There is also one case of unearthly beings hurling balls of fire, brimstone, and molten lava from an airship at witnesses—the only other one fully suggestive of paranoid fear. Overall, the airship waves look like nine-day wonders unrelated to paranoia-fueled UFO fantasies of our times.
It is actually easier to trace the development of the UFO mythos to the British airship scare of 1912-13. These flaps were clearly paranoid in character, involving the belief that German Zeppelin airships were secretly visiting Britain for spying out the land in preparation for war. (Watson, 1988) There seems to be no compelling reason to doubt that these events inspired John N. Raphael to pen “Up Above: The Story of the Sky Folk” for Pearson’s Magazine.
The plot begins with a rash of disappearances that include the Prime Minister, an elm tree pulled up by the roots, an invalid in bed from a collapsing house, the town pump, a weathercock, a ewe, and a ram. One man survives to describe being picked up by some force and later dropped. A professor arrives to investigate and speculates that a race of sky folk may have the same curiosity about us as we have about creatures at the bottom of the sea.
“Isn’t it plausible that having this curiosity, and having at their disposal scientific methods, of which for the present, we can know little or nothing, they should endeavor to discover more about us? How would they try to obtain information?”
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 84