The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters

by Story, Ronald

  That same year, Palmer decided to put out an all-flying saucer issue of Amazing Stories. Instead, the publisher demanded that he drop the whole subject after, according to Palmer, two men in Air Force uniforms visited him. Palmer decided to publish a magazine of his own. Enlisting the aid of Curtis Fuller, editor of a flying magazine, and a few other friends, he put out the first issue of Fate in the spring of 1948. A digest-sized magazine printed on the cheapest paper, Fate was as poorly edited as Amazing Stories and had no impact on the reading public. But it was the only newsstand periodical that carried UFO reports in every issue. The Amazing Stories readership supported the early issues wholeheartedly.

  In the fall of 1948, the first flying saucer convention was held at the Labor Temple on 14th Street in New York City. Attended by about thirty people, most of whom were clutching the latest issue of Fate, the meeting quickly dissolved into a shouting match. Although the flying saucer mystery was only a year old, the side issues of government conspiracy and censorship already dominated the situation because of their strong emotional appeal. The U.S. Air Force had been sullenly silent throughout 1948 while, unbeknownst to the UFO advocates, the boys at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio were making a sincere effort to untangle the mystery.

  When the Air Force investigation failed to turn up any tangible evidence (even though the investigators accepted the extraterrestrial theory) General Hoyt Vandenburg, Chief of the Air Force and former head of the CIA, ordered a negative report to release to the public. The result was Project Grudge, hundreds of pages of irrelevant nonsense that was unveiled around the time True magazine printed Keyhoe’s pro-UFO article. Keyhoe took this personally, even though his article was largely a rehash of Fort’s books, and Ralph Daigh had decided to go with the extraterrestrial hypothesis because it seemed to be the most commercially acceptable theory (that is, it would sell magazines).

  Palmer’s relationship with Ziff-Davis was strained now that he was publishing his own magazine. “When I took over from Palmer in 1949,” Howard Browne said, “I put an abrupt end to the Shaver Mystery —writing off over 7,000 dollars worth of scripts.”

  Moving to Amherst, Wisconsin, Palmer set up his own printing plant and eventually he printed many of those Shaver stories in his Hidden World series. As it turned out, postwar inflation and the advent of television was killing the pulp magazine market anyway. In the fall of 1949, hundreds of pulps suddenly ceased publication, putting thousands of writers and editors out of work. Amazing Stories has often changed hands since but is still being published, and is still paying its writers a penny a word. For some reason known only to himself, Palmer chose not to use his name in Fate. Instead, a fictitious “Robert N. Webster” was listed as editor for many years. Palmer established another magazine, Search, to compete with Fate. Search became a catch-all for inane letters and occult articles that failed to meet Fate’s low standards.

  The September 1948 Fantastic Stories included this illustration for a “factual” article about a Russian peasant who had been “burned by a ray from a ship from another world.”

  Although there was a brief revival of public and press interest in flying saucers following the great wave of the summer of 1952, the subject largely remained in the hands of cultists, cranks, teenagers, and housewives who reproduced newspaper clippings in little mimeographed journals and looked up to Palmer as their fearless leader.

  In June, 1956, a major four-day symposium on UFOs was held in Washington, D.C. It was unquestionably the most important UFO affair of the 1950s and was attended by leading military men, government officials and industrialists. Men like William Lear, inventor of the Lear Jet, and assorted generals, admirals and former CIA heads freely discussed the UFO “problem” with the press. Notably absent were Ray Palmer and Donald Keyhoe. One of the results of the meetings was the founding of the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) by a physicist named Townsend Brown. Although the symposium received extensive press coverage at the time, it was subsequently censored out of UFO history by the UFO cultists themselves—primarily because they had not participated in it.

  The American public was aware of only two flying saucer personalities, contactee George Adamski, a lovable rogue with a talent for obtaining publicity, and Donald Keyhoe, a zealot who howled “Coverup!” and was locked in mortal combat with Adamski for newspaper coverage. Since Adamski was the more colorful (he had ridden a saucer to the moon), he was usually awarded more attention. The press gave him the title of “astronomer” (he lived in a house on Mount Palomar where a great telescope was in operation), while Keyhoe attacked him as “the operator of a hamburger stand.” Ray Palmer tried to remain aloof of the warring factions, so, naturally, some of them turned against him.

  The year 1957 was marked by several significant developments. There was another major flying saucer wave. Townsend Brown’s NICAP floundered and Keyhoe took it over. And Ray Palmer launched a new newsstand publication called Flying Saucers From Other Worlds. In the early issues he hinted that he knew some important “secret.” After tantalizing his readers for months, he finally revealed that UFOs came from the center of the Earth and the phrase From Other Worlds was dropped from the title. His readers were variously enthralled, appalled, and galled by the revelation.

  For seven years, from 1957 to 1964, UFOlogy in the United States was in total limbo. This was the Dark Age. Keyhoe and NICAP were buried in Washington, vainly tilting at windmills and trying to initiate a congressional investigation into the UFO situation.

  A few hundred UFO believers clustered around Coral Lorenzen’s Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). And about 2,000 teenagers bought Flying Saucers from newsstands each month. Palmer devoted much space to UFO clubs, information exchanges, and letters-to-the-editor. So it was Palmer, and Palmer alone, who kept the subject alive during the Dark Age and lured new youngsters into UFOlogy. He published his strange books about deros, and ran a mail-order business selling the UFO books that had been published after the various waves of the 1950s. His partners in the Fate venture bought him out, so he was able to devote his full time to his UFO enterprises.

  Palmer had set up a system similar to sci-fi fandom, but with himself as the nucleus. He had come a long way since his early days and the Jules Verne Prize Club. He had been instrumental in inventing a whole system of belief, a frame of reference—the magical world of Shaverism and flying saucers—and he had set himself up as the king of that world. Once the belief system had been set up, it became self-perpetuating. The people beleaguered by mysterious rays were joined by the wishful thinkers who hoped that living, compassionate beings existed out there beyond the stars. They didn’t need any real evidence. The belief itself was enough to sustain them.

  When a massive new UFO wave —the biggest one in U.S. history—struck in 1964 and continued unabated until 1968, APRO and NICAP were caught unawares and unprepared to deal with renewed public interest. Palmer increased the press run of Flying Saucers and reached out to a new audience. Then, in the 1970s, a new Dark Age began. October 1973 produced a flurry of well-publicized reports and then the doldrums set in. NICAP strangled in its own confusion and dissolved in a puddle of apathy, along with scores of lesser UFO organizations. Donald Keyhoe went into seclusion before he died in 1988. Most of the hopeful contactees and UFO investigators of the 1940s and 50s have also passed away. Palmer’s Flying Saucers quietly self-destructed in 1975, but he continued with Search until his death in the summer of 1977. Richard Shaver is gone but the Shaver Mystery still has a few adherents. Yet the sad truth is that none of this might have come about if Howard Browne hadn’t scoffed at that letter in that dingy editorial office in that faraway city so long ago.

  —JOHN A. KEEL

  References

  Goulart, Ron. Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (Arlington House, 1972).

  Keel, John A. “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers,” Fortean Times ( 1983)

  Wentworth, Jim. Giants in t
he Earth: The Amazing Story of Ray Palmer, Oahspe and the Shaver Mystery (Palmer Publications, 1973).

  Sheaffer, Robert M. (b. 1949). Robert Sheaffer is a leading skeptical investigator of UFOs with a lifelong interest in astronomy, UFOs, and the question of life on other worlds. He is a founding member of the Bay Area Skeptics in California and the UFO Subcommittee of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), which publishes The Skeptical Inquirer. Since 1977 he has written the “Psychic Vibrations” column for that publication.

  Mr. Sheaffer is the author of The UFO Verdict (1981), UFO Sightings (1998), and has appeared on many radio and TV programs. His writings and reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as Omni, Scientific American, Spaceflight, Astronomy, The Humanist, Free Inquiry, Reason, and others. He is a contributor to the book Extraterrestrials —Where Are They? (Hart and Zuckerman, editors) and to The UFO Invasio, (Frazier, Karr, and Nickell, editors). He authored the article on UFOs for Prometheus Book’s Encyclopedia of the Paranormal, as well as for the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia.

  Sheaffer has been an invited speaker at the Smithsonian UFO Symposium in Washington, D.C., at the National UFO Conferences held in New York City and in Phoenix, as well as at the First World Skeptics’ Congress in Buffalo, New York. He works as a data communications software engineer in California’s Silicon Valley, and sings tenor in professional opera productions.

  Address:

  P. O. Box 10441

  San Jose, CA 95157

  U.S.A.

  E-mail:

  robert@denunker.com

  Web site:

  www.debunker.com

  POSITION STATEMENT: Judging from the writings of well-known, supposedly serious UFO researchers, the UFO phenomenon would appear to be truly massive in scope. Polls show that millions of individuals believe that they have sighted UFOs. More than a thousand supposed “UFO landings” have been catalogued, indicated by effects such as markings on the ground, or broken sticks. There are thousands if not millions of cases in which individuals say that they have had actual encounters with UFO occupants, the famed “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” In many of these cases the individuals report having been taken aboard the UFO against their will, where they were subjected to various unpleasant medical “examinations” or “procedures.”

  Yet where is all of the evidence that would be left behind by an unquestionably genuine phenomenon that was as widespread as UFOs supposedly are? Where are the clear and unambiguous UFO photographs, taken by independent photographers who had never met, and whose authenticity is beyond question? Where are the supposed “physical traces” of UFO landings that cannot also readily be attributed to terrestrial causes, such as ordinary metal objects on the ground, or rings of fungus growth? Why do we never see clear, distinct photos of alleged UFO landings, or UFO occupants? Why do we not have countless thousands of instances of unambiguous radar trackings of UFOs crisscrossing the country, the objects being followed from place to place like so many migrating geese? FAA radar routinely tracks the positions of airliners as they travel between cities; why are UFOs not tracked in the same way? This persistent lack of tangible evidence strikes one as highly perplexing, since UFOs reportedly are occasionally tracked on radar, and supposedly are photographed on occasion. But in every single UFO incident on record, the UFO has always managed to slip away before the evidence of its existence became fully convincing. What remarkably secretive behavior! And it is even more astonishing that UFOs have apparently been able to avoid any indisputable encounters with recording instruments, with 100% infallibility, while reportedly permitting themselves to be seen by many millions of observers worldwide, over a period of more than fifty years. There is only one satisfactory explanation for this paradox: UFOs, as a phenomenon separate and distinct from all phenomena, simply do not exist.

  While there are many proponents of UFOs who choose to portray the current status of the UFO field as that of a fledgling protoscience, soon to become a recognized scientific field, such a view is naively optimistic. The chief obstacle to scientific recognition of UFO studies is that UFOlogists do not behave like real scientists. Instead of cooperating in UFO research and investigation, UFOlogy remains largely divided into many small rival factions. Each is convinced that it alone is qualified to conduct “scientific” UFO investigations, regarding other groups as either “crackpots,” or else as too unimaginative and timid. Instead of encouraging the presentation of dissenting views, UFO buffs will go to almost any lengths to keep unwelcome views under wraps. Skeptical views are largely excluded from the major UFO publications, except in cartoon-parody form. Even UFO proponents who present findings critical of some particular “classic” UFO case typically find themselves reviled or ignored. In some cases researchers have even been ejected from the organization in which they have long labored for the “crime” of discovering major flaws in a case that that organization’s leadership has privately decided must be defended in order to keep up interest among the membership. These organizations then claim that they are building the “new science” of UFOs!

  Of course, if UFOlogy were actually a scientific movement, it would welcome any and all critics who can successfully sweep aside bogus “evidence,” to better enable its “genuine” evidence, if any, to shine forth. Apparently the UFO proponents themselves realize that their “evidence” is so shallow that it cannot stand up to critical scrutiny.

  Hence, despite the lofty pronouncements of those who claim that they are building a “science” of UFOlogy, all we find are tightly-knit little sects wrapping themselves in the mantle of science. In genuine science, research tending to promote opposing views is actively encouraged, not systematically excluded, as is done by today’s UFO groups. There will be no “science” of UFOlogy until the UFO proponents start to behave like scientists, until they learn to face up to disconfirming facts instead of pretending that they don’t exist. Scientists understand that they must always spell out how the theories that they promote might, in principle, be falsified, which UFOlogists are never willing to do. Einstein clearly stated the observational results that, if obtained, would suffice to falsify his Theory of Relativity. But no UFOlogist is willing to state how we could ever establish, at least in principle, that UFOs are not extraterrestrial visitors (or something even more bizzare).

  In short, the current status of the UFO problem is that no progress has been made in more than fifty years toward anything that can be called a science, and nothing promising is on the horizon. In fact, the quality of research in the UFO field is clearly moving backwards, in the direction of greater gullibility: a credulity explosion has been going on for decades. At any given time, mainstream UFOlogists are willing to accept claims and stories that just a few years earlier would have been dismissed as outlandish. UFOlogy will remain in the shadow-world of pseudoscience until its practitioners begin to act like real scientists. But I suspect that will never happen, because the leading UFOlogists appear to instinctively understand that if they were to begin to live up to the standards and practices of true science, their treasured “UFO evidence” would slowly melt away like a snowman in the sun.

  UFOs are what I term a jealous phenomenon, always managing to slip away before the evidence becomes too convincing. (For a detailed explanation of what a jealous phenomenon is, see my book UFO Sightings.) Because of the UFOs’ amazing success—if they are real - at evading unambiguous detection, the conclusion seems inevitable that the UFO phenomenon consists of nothing more than misperceptions, hoaxes, and hysteria. While there are many objects in the sky that can be and often are misperceived as UFOs, the extraterrestrial spacecraft of modern folklore exist only in the overheated imaginations of the UFO sighters and investigators. UFOs will continue to play peek-a-boo with the universe of objective reality for decades on end, for as long as there is anyone willing to show them proper attention. When its supporters finally tire of it and move on to something else, as did the believers in al
chemy and spirit-rapping, the UFO phenomenon will fall into oblivion. But for the foreseeable future, the steady stream of movies and TV pseudo-documentaries will serve to keep the public’s interest in extraterrestrial visitors at a fever pitch.

  —ROBERT SHEAFFER

  Shostak, G. Seth (b. 1943). A radio astronomer who has worked for the SETI Institute since 1991, Seth Shostak is well known for his public lectures and writings on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He received his B.A. in physics (1965) from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in astrophysics (1972) from the California Institute of Technology. His doctoral dissertation concerned the dynamics of nearby spiral nebulae as inferred from radio mapping of the 21 cm line, and this was among the first investigations to show the excess rotation—and implied dark matter—in the outer regions of galaxies.

  Seth Shostak

  Dr. Shostak worked for more than a decade at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, in The Netherlands, and in 1982—together with Jill Tarter—conducted one of the few SETI experiments to be undertaken on the continent. At the SETI Institute, Shostak has participated in Project Phoenix, a highly sensitive scrutiny of nearby star systems for microwave transmissions, and has led the Institute’s efforts to bring the excitement of SETI research to the public. He has edited several confererence proceedings on SETI, contributed to a half-dozen popular books, and penned the popular science volume Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life (1998). He is the author of approximately 200 published articles on astronomy and SETI.