2) Three-dimensional object forms can present a very large number of shapes depending upon their orientation with respect to the observer and illumination source(s) (see Haines, 1994; Wertheimer, 1968).
3) Eyewitness drawings can be useful for analysis and classification purposes if they are obtained in the proper way (see Haines, Observing UFOS, 1979; Shepard, in UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist, 1979).
4) It must not necessarily be assumed that UFO phenomena have to maintain a fixed (rigid) physical form throughout a given sighting. Many cases are available to document this principle. A corollary to this is that perceived shape does not necessarily have to remain fixed throughout a given sighting (e.g., see case #386 in Vallée’s Passport to Magonia, 1969).
Several useful references are available to the interested reader on the subject of UFO shapes (Haines, “UFO Drawings by Witnesses and Non-witnesses: Is There Something in Common?” in UFO Phenomena, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1977; Hall, The UFO Evidence, 1964; Shepard, “Some psychologically oriented techniques for the scientific investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, U. S. House of Representatives, July 29, 1968; and “Photographs of alleged UFOS,” Takanashi, Worldwide UFO Photos, 1977). There are also thousands of drawings of UFOs in the files of the U. S. Air Force; which are now publicly available, and private UFO study groups in many nations collect eyewitness drawings and photographs. This storehouse of data provides the basis for the above summary of UFO shapes and for further research which investigators may pursue.
Since the first version of this entry appeared in The Encyclopedia of UFOs (1980), an intensive study of how children portray UFOs through drawings has been conducted. (Kerth and Haines, 1992) Among the fascinating discoveries was that older children tended to draw more complex shapes that are increasingly wider than thick. Drawings of entities—particularly aliens—peaked at age 8 to 10 years with a steady decline thereafter. Girls drew more entities and attributed less hostile intent by them than boys. Such findings as these suggest the existence of important sociological and psychological precursors leading to unconscious UFO protosymbols.
—RICHARD F. HAINES
References
Bartley, S. Howard. Principles of Perception (Harper, 1958).
Fowler, O. The Flying Triangle Mystery (Phenomenon Research Association, 1996).
———. “Flying Triangle” UFO’s: The Continuing Story (Phenomenon Research Association, 1997).
Haines, Richard F., ed. UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (The Scarecrow Press, 1979).
Haines, Richard F. Observing UFOs (Nelson-Hall, 1980).
———. Project Delta: A Study of Multiple UFOs (LDA Press, 1994).
Hall, Richard H., ed The UFO Evidence (NICAP, 1964).
Jung, Carl G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Princeton University Press, 1978).
Kerth, Linda, and Haines, Richard F. “How Children Portray UFOs,” Journal of UFO Studies (1992).
Menzel, Donald H. and Lyle G. Boyd. The World of Flying Saucers (Doubleday, 1963).
Shepard, Roger N. “Some Psychologically Oriented Techniques for the Scientific Investigation of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, U.S. House of Representatives, July 29, 1968 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).
Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia (Nelson-Hall, 1980).
Wertheimer, Michael. “Perceptual Problems” in Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, edited by Daniel S. Gillmor (Bantam Books, 1969).
Drawings by Diane Prentice. Copyright © 1980 by Diane Prentice and Ronald D. Story
Copyright © 2001 by Robert Fairfax
Shaver mystery, The Also known as the “Shaver hoax,” this was a publishing phenomenon created in 1945 by Raymond A. Palmer, then editor of Amazing Stories (a science fiction pulp magazine) from letters the magazine received from a paranoid schizophrenic by the name of Richard S. Shaver. The Shaver mystery is significant because it spawned the modern myth of “flying saucers”—two years prior to the first sighting wave, which occurred in June 1947. For this reason, Ray Palmer is considered by those who know their history, as “the man who invented flying saucers.”
Just as other imaginative writers had done before him, Palmer took an idea—a myth or speculation—and turned it into “reality.” For example: North America’s “Bigfoot” was nothing more than an Indian legend until a zoologoist named Ivan T. Sanderson began collecting contemporary sightings of the creature in the early 1950s, publishing the reports in a series of popular magazine articles. He turned the tall, hairy biped into a household word, just as British author Rupert T. Gould rediscoved sea serpents in the 1930s and, through his radio broadcasts, articles, and books, brought Loch Ness to the attention of the world. Another writer named Vincent Gaddis originated the Bermuda Triangle in his 1965 book, Invisible Horizons: Strange Mysteries of the Sea. Sanderson and Charles Berlitz later added to the Triangle lore, and rewriting their books became a cottage industry among hack writers in the United States.
Charles Fort put bread on the table of generations of science fiction writers when, in his 1931 book Lo!, he assembled the many reports of objects and people strangely transposed in time and place, and coined the term “teleportation.” And it took a politician named Ignatius Donnelly to revive lost Atlantis and turn it into a popular subject. (Donnelly’s book, Atlantis, published in 1882, set off a 50-year wave of Atlantean hysteria around the world.)
But the man responsible for the most well-known of all such modern myths—flying saucers—has been largely forgotten. Before the first flying saucer was sighted in 1947, he suggested the idea to the American public. Then he converted UFO reports from what might have been a Silly Season phenomenon into a subject, and kept that subject alive during periods of total public disinterest.
Born in 1911, Ray Palmer suffered severe injuries that left him dwarfed in stature and partially crippled. He had a difficult childhood because of his infirmities and, like many isolated young men in those pre-television days, he sought escape in “dime novels,” cheap magazines printed on coarse paper and filled with lurid stories churned out by writers who were paid a penny a word. He became an avid science fiction fan, and during the Great Depression of the 1930s he was active in the world of fandom—a world of mimeographed fanzines and heavy correspondence. (Science fiction fandom still exists and is very well organized with well-attended annual conventions and lavishly printed fanzines, some of which are even issued weekly.) In 1930, he sold his first science fiction story, and in 1933 he created the Jules Verne Prize Club which gave out annual awards for the best achievements in sci-fi. A facile writer with a robust imagination, Palmer was able to earn many pennies during the dark days of the Depression, undoubtedly buoyed by his mischievous sense of humor, a fortunate development motivated by his unfortunate physical problems. Pain was his constant companion.
In 1938, the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company in Chicago purchased a dying magazine titled Amazing Stories. It had been created in 1929 by the inestimable Hugo Gernsback, who is generally acknowledged as the father of modern science fiction. Gernsback, an electrical engineer, ran a small publishing empire of magazines dealing with radio and technical subjects. (He also founded Sexology, a magazine of softcore pornography disguised as science, which enjoyed great success in a somewhat conservative era.) It was his practice to sell—or even give away—a magazine when its circulation began to slip. Although Amazing Stories was one of the first of its kind, its readership was down to a mere 25,000 when Gernsback unloaded it on Ziff-Davis. Wil liam B. Ziff decided to hand the editorial reins to the young science fiction buff from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the age of 28, Palmer found his life’s work.
Expanding the pulp magazine to 200 pages (and as many as 250 pages in some issues), Palmer deliberately tailored it to the taste
s of teenaged boys. He filled it with nonfiction features and filler items on science and pseudoscience in addition to the usual formula short stories of BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters) and beauteous maidens in distress. Many of the stories were written by Palmer himself under a variety of pseudonyms such as Festus Pragnell and Thorton Ayre, enabling him to supplement his meager salary by paying himself the usual penny-a-word. His old cronies from fandom also contributed stories to the magazine with a zeal that far surpassed their talents. In fact, of the dozen or so science fiction magazines then being sold on the newsstands, Amazing Stories easily ranks as the very worst of the lot. Its competitors, such as Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories and the venerable Astounding (renamed Analog) employed skilled, experienced professional writers like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard (who later created Dianetics and founded Scientology). Amazing Stories was garbage in comparison and hardcore sci-fi fans tended to sneer at it.
The magazine might have limped through the 1940s, largely ignored by everyone, if not for a single incident. Howard Browne, a television writer who served as Palmer’s associate editor in those days, recalls: “Early in the 1940s, a letter came to us from Dick Shaver purporting to reveal the ‘truth’ about a race of freaks called ‘deros,’ living under the surface of the earth. Ray Palmer read it, handed it to me for comment. I read a third of it, and tossed it in the waste basket. Ray, who loved to show his editors a trick or two about the business, fished it out of the basket, ran it in Amazing, and a flood of mail poured in from readers who insisted every word of it was true because they’d been plagued by deros for years.” (Goulart, 1972)
Actually, Palmer had accidently tapped a huge, previously unrecognized audience. Nearly every community has at least one person who complains constantly to the local police that someone—usually a neighbor—is aiming a terrible ray gun at their house or apartment. This ray, they claim, is ruining their health, causing their plants to die, turning their bread moldy, making their hair and teeth fall out, and broadcasting voices into their heads. Psychiatrists are very familiar with these “ray” victims and relate the problem with paranoid schizophrenia. (It is estimated there are about three million paranoid schizophrenics in the United States, representing approximately 1 percent of the population.)
For the most part, these paranoiacs are harmless and usually elderly. Occasionally, however, the voices they hear urge them to perform destructive acts, particularly arson. They are a distrustful lot, loners by nature, and very suspicious of everyone, including the government and all figures of authority. In earlier times, they thought they were hearing the voice of God and/or the Devil. Today they often blame the CIA or space beings for their woes. They naturally gravitate to eccentric causes and organizations which reflect their own fears and insecurities, advocating bizarre political philosophies and reinforcing their peculiar belief systems. Ray Palmer unintentionally gave thousands of these people focus to their lives.
Shaver’s long, rambling letter claimed that while he was welding he heard voices which explained to him how the underground deros were controlling life on the surface of the Earth through the use of fiendish rays. Palmer rewrote the letter, making a novelette out of it, and it was published in the March 1945 issue under the title: “I Remember Lemuria.”
Somehow the news of Shaver’s discovery quickly spread beyond science fiction circles and people who had never before bought a pulp magazine were rushing to their local newsstands. The demand for Amazing Stories far exceeded the supply and Ziff-Davis had to divert paper supplies (there were still wartime shortages) from other magazines so they could increase the press run of AS.
“Palmer traveled to Pennsylvania to talk to Shaver,” Howard Brown later recalled, and “found him sitting on reams of stuff he’d written about the deros, bought every bit of it and con tracted for more. I thought it was the sickest crap I’d run into. Palmer ran it and doubled the circulation of Amazing within four months.”
By the end of 1945, Amazing Stories was selling 250,000 copies per month, an amazing circulation for a science fiction pulp magazine. Palmer sat up late at night rewriting Shaver’s material and writing other short stories about the deros under pseudonyms. Thousands of letters poured into the office. Many of them offered supporting “evidence” for the Shaver stories, describing strange objects they had seen in the sky and strange encounters they had had with alien beings. It seemed that many thousands of people were aware of the existence of some distinctly nonterrestrial group in our midst. Paranoid fantasies were mixed with tales that had the uncomfortable ring of truth. The “Letters-to-the-Editor” section was the most interesting part of the publication. Here is a typical contribution from the issue for June 1946:
Sirs:
I flew my last combat mission on May 26 [1945] when I was shot up over Bassein and ditched my ship in Ramaree Roads off Chedubs Island. I was missing five days. I requested leave at Kashmere [sic]. I and Capt. (deleted by request) left Srinagar and went to Rudok then through the Khese pass to the northern foothills of the Karakoram. We found what we were looking for. We knew what we were searching for.
For heaven’s sake, drop the whole thing! You are playing with dynamite. My companion and I fought our way out of a cave with submachine guns. I have two 9” scars on my left arm that came from wounds given me in the cave when I was 50 feet from a moving object of any kind and in perfect silence. The muscles were nearly ripped out. How? I don’t know. My friend has a hole the size of a dime in his right bicep. It was seared inside. How we don’t know. But we both believe we know more about the Shaver Mystery than any other pair.
You can imagine my fright when I picked up my first copy of Amazing Stories and see you splashing words about on the subject.
The identity of the author of this letter was withheld by request. Later Palmer revealed his name: Fred Lee Crisman. He had inadvertently described the effects of a laser beam—even though the laser wasn’t invented until years later. Apparently Crisman was obsessed with deros and death rays long before Kenneth Arnold sighted the “first” UFO in June 1947.
In September 1946, Amazing Stories published a short article by W.C. Hefferlin, “Circle-Winged Plane,” describing experiments with a circular craft in 1927 in San Francisco. Shaver’s (Palmer’s) contribution to that issue was a 30,000 word novelette, “Earth Slaves to Space,” dealing with spaceships that regularly visited the Earth to kidnap humans and haul them away to some other planet. Other stories described amnesia, an important element in the UFO reports that still lay far in the future, and mysterious men who supposedly served as agents for those unfriendly deros.
A letter from army lieutenant Ellis L. Lyon in the September 1946 issue expressed concern over the psychological impact of the Shaver Mystery:
What I am worried about is that there are a few, and perhaps quite a large number of readers who may accept this Shaver Mystery as being founded on fact, even as Orson Welles put across his invasion from Mars, via radio some years ago. It is, of course, impossible for the reader to sift out in your “Discussions” and “Reader Comment” features, which are actually letters from readers and which are credited to an Amazing Stories staff writer, whipped up to keep alive interest in your fictional theories. However, if the letters are generally the work of the readers, it is distressing to see the reaction you have caused in their muddled brains. I refer to the letters from people who have “seen” the exhaust trails of rocket ships or “felt” the influence of radiations from underground sources.
Palmer assigned artists to make sketches of objects described by readers and disk-shaped flying machines appeared on the covers of his magazine long before June 1947. So we can note that a considerable number of people—millions—were exposed to the flying saucer concept before the national news media was even aware of it. Anyone who glanced at the magazines on a newsstand and caught a glimpse of the saucers-adorned Amazing Stories cover had the image implanted in his subconscious. In the course of the two ye
ars between March 1945 and June 1947, millions of Americans had seen at least one issue of Amazing Stories and were aware of the Shaver Mystery with all of its bewildering implications. Many of these people were out studying the empty skies in the hopes that they, like other Amazing Stories readers, might glimpse something wondrous. World War II was over and some new excitement was needed. Raymond Palmer was supplying it—much to the alarm of Lt. Lyon and Fred Crisman.
Aside from Palmer’s readers, two other groups were ready to serve as cadre for the believers. About 1,500 members of Tiffany Thayer’s Fortean Society knew that weird aerial objects had been sighted throughout history and some of them were convinced that this planet was under surveillance by beings from another world. Tiffany Thayer was rigidly opposed to Franklin Roosevelt and loudly proclaimed that almost everything was a government conspiracy, so his Forteans were fully prepared to find new conspiracies hidden in the forthcoming UFO mystery. They would become instant experts, willing to educate the press and the public when the time came. The second group were spiritualists and students of the occult headed by Dr. Meade Layne, who had been chatting with the space people at seances through trance mediums and Ouija boards. They knew the space ships were coming and were hardly surprised when “ghost rockets” were reported over Europe in 1946. Combined, these three groups represented a formidable segment of the population.
On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold made his famous sighting of a group of “flying saucers” over Mt. Rainier, and in Chicago, Ray Palmer watched in astonishment as the newspaper clippings poured in from every state. The things that he had been fabricating for his magazine were suddenly coming true!
For two weeks, the newspapers were filled with UFO reports. Then they tapered off and the Forteans howled “Censorship!” and “Conspiracy!” But dozens of magazine writers were busy compiling articles on this new subject and their pieces would appear steadily during the next year. One man, who had earned his living writing stories for the pulp magazines in the 1930s, saw the situation as a chance to break into the “slicks” (better quality magazines printed on glossy or “slick” paper). Although he was 44 years old at the time of Pearl Harbor, he served as a captain in the Marines until he was in a plane accident. Discharged as major (it was the practice to promote officers one grade when they retired), he was trying to resume his writing career when Ralph Daigh, an editor at True magazine, assigned him to investigate the flying saucer enigma. Thus, at the age of 50, Donald E. Keyhoe entered Never-Never-Land. His article, “Flying Saucers Are Real,” would cause a sensation, and Keyhoe would become an instant UFO personality.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 97