by Phil Patton
He pulled off to the side of the road. He understood that the green orbs were some sort of transmitting and receiving devices. They moved closer and formed a kind of 3-D film screen between them; two faces, a man’s and a woman’s, appeared on the screen, and Angelucci heard a voice, declaring them “friends from another world,” “etherian” beings who had come to Earth.
They asked him if he remembered seeing a UFO on August 4, 1946. He replied that he did. He was suddenly very thirsty; a crystal cup appeared on the fender of his car and he drank from it. The beverage tasted wonderful.
The voice told him that distant civilizations were concerned with man’s “spiritual progress,” which had not kept pace with its material progress. “Weep, Orfeo,” they said. “For all its apparent beauty, Earth is a purgatorial world among the planets evolving intelligent life. Hate, selfishness, and cruelty rise from many parts of it like a dark mist.”
People on Earth, he was told, did not appreciate each other. But the etherians did. “Every man, woman, and child is recorded in vital statistics by means of our recording crystal disks. Each of you is infinitely more important to us than to your fellow earthlings.” They warned of a great cataclysm that would strike Earth in 1986 if changes were not made.
Angelucci would have more encounters—at the Greyhound bus terminal and in the dry bed of the Los Angeles River. In 1955, he published an account of his adventures with the people from space in a book titled The Secret of the Saucers.
As he recounted it, on July 23, 1953, he again felt unwell and stayed home from work. In the evening he took a walk, and on his way home, in a lonely place, he felt a “dulling of consciousness.” There, in the bed of the Los Angeles River, he saw an “igloo-shaped” spaceship, like a “huge, misty soap bubble.” A door appeared in the bubble craft. He entered and found himself in a vault about eighteen feet high, lined with some “ethereal mother-of-pearl stuff.” He saw a chair of the same mother-of-pearl, and when he sat in it, it seemed to mold itself to his body.
A humming noise puts him into a semi-dream state. He is carried off into space, and sees the earth from a thousand miles away. He passes a UFO a thousand feet long, made of a crystalline substance and emitting music and images of harmoniously evolving planets and galaxies. The UFO is equipped with “vortices of flame” that serve as both propellers and some mode of telepathic contact. He wakes to find a mark on his chest about the size of a quarter: a circle with a dot in the center that he decided was a symbol “of the hydrogen atom.”
In September 1953, he would spend a week in a semiconscious “somnambulistic state.” He awoke and recalled, as if from a dream, that he had been spiritually transported to another planetoid and met Orion and his spacewoman friend Lyra. He learned that he had himself been a spaceman in an earlier life, named Neptune.
One avid reader of Angelucci’s book was Carl Jung, who had been paying attention to flying saucers since 1949. He saw them as an example of a modern myth being born before his very eyes, and nowhere was the process clearer than in the accounts of contactees, people like Angelucci who claimed not only to have seen flying saucers but to have spoken with their crews and even flown on them.
Angelucci’s dreamy account fascinated Jung. Perhaps it was the naïve, almost old-fashioned quality of the experience, as shown even in the design of the saucer’s crystal walls and mother-of-pearl interior, or the mythological and archetypal overtones of the author’s name. Orfeo: Orpheus, the poet. Angelucci: angel of light.
To Jung, Angelucci’s story offered a clear example of the process of a UFO sighting emerging from a disturbed spirit. He saw Angelucci’s visions, as he understood all saucer sightings, as the expression of a wider cultural unease and disturbance. Orfeo was reaching a solution to a problem by something like the workings of a dream.
“As our time is characterized by fragmentation, confusion, and perplexity,” Jung declared, “this fact is also expressed in the psychology of the individual, appearing in spontaneous fantasy images, dreams, and the products of active imagination.”
In 1958 Jung published his own quite strange book about UFOs called Ein moderner Mythus: Von Dingen, die am Himmel gesehen werden, or, as translated literally, A Modern Myth: Of Things That Are Seen in the Sky. The English publishers offered instead a more marketable title: Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.
In the introduction Jung refers to himself as an “alienist”—the nineteenth-century term for a doctor who treats the insane, from the French alieniste. For Jung, who analyzed UFOs in their relationship to fantasy and interprets a number of UFO dreams, the saucers spring from the cultural state of affairs of the fifties—of the bomb, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the resultant fear and confusion. He attributed much of the UFO phenomenon to a wide sense of unease in the culture, and there was, he believed, a tendency for underlying emotions to “manifest” themselves in observations of real or imagined things. “Universal spiritual distress” causes us to see archetypal circles in the sky.
Jung did not attempt to decide whether flying saucers were real or not. He treated them as “symbolical rumors.” For him the saucer was an archetype in the making, an icon “weightless as thought.” He wrote, “The round shape, the saucer, is the shape of the center, located deep in the collective unconscious. Such an object provokes, like nothing else, conscious and unconscious fantasies.”
There was no question for Jung that something had been seen, that observers had seen something, but whether reality or illusion he was not sure—nor did he think it very important to distinguish them as such.
“One often did not know and could not discover where a primary perception was followed by a phantasm,” he wrote, “or whether, conversely, a primary fantasy originating in the unconscious invaded the conscious mind with illusion and visions.” In essence, Jung was saying, they might be real and they might not. But he saw the archetypes living in a kind of unconscious symbol language we all possessed, and he turned to ancient mythology, religious tracts, astrology, astronomy, and alchemy for his primary comparisons.
Jung had not discussed the fact that the lore had moved beyond the old oral and written sources, beyond the campfire, the village square, the learned tome or tract—and to the modern news media. Increasingly, the mass media had become the medium where his beloved archetypes now lived and mutated, like organisms in a lab vial.
Jung was baffled when his first statement on UFOs was picked up by the popular press as a sign that he believed in flying saucers. He released a clarifying statement to U.P.I., and was surprised when it was given far less distribution than the earlier statements.
Had Jung looked more closely at the history of the flying saucer sightings in his book, he might have noted how vital the role of the press had been from the very beginning. Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 ur-sighting would never have set off the saucer obsession had not reporter Nolan Skiff seized on the image of the skipped saucer; from it was coined the catchy flying saucer—a phrase Arnold had never uttered—sent out on wire services all over the world.
Jung concluded only that “something is seen but it isn’t known what,” admitting that this “leaves the question of seeing open.”
He was more interested in what caused the “seeing.” The round shape, such as that of the saucer, is located deep in the collective unconscious, he declared. It is the mandala, the rotundum, age-old, deep, and powerful as the lenticular shapes of galaxies. God is often described as round, a circle with no edge and no center, or as a watching eyeball. “The center is frequently symbolized by an eye,” as in the all-seeing eye of the conscience.
When the common center cannot hold, the round shape appears as a wish, a response to “the fears created by an apparently insoluble poetical situation which might at any moment lead to a universal catastrophe,” Jung wrote. “At such times men’s eyes turn to heaven for help, and marvelous signs appear from on high.” A rationalistic world grounded in science and technology, a world of “statistical or
average truths,” perhaps unable to deal with these things, creates “an insatiable hunger for anything extraordinary.”
And if there really were aliens here? Then, Jung states, we would be in the position of a primitive tribe dominated by white Western power. The reins of power would be wrenched from our hands. “As an old witch doctor once told me with tears in his eyes, we would have ‘no dreams anymore.’ The lofty flights of our spirit would have been checked and crippled forever, and the first thing to be consigned to the rubbish heap would be our science and technology.” In such a situation, we would just roll up the Iron Curtain and get rid of our weapons. Jung prefigured Ronald Reagan’s oft-cited declaration to Mikhail Gorbachev that should alien invaders appear, our two countries would learn to get along soon enough.
Of course the question of the reality of the saucers remained. Jung left a big hole of possibility, a portal for the New Agers who would grab onto his ideas years later. The notion of one thing causing another was a narrow, rationalistic view, Jung argued, rejecting it in favor of the explanation that things happen in synchronistic “acausal, meaningful coincidence.”
Ultimately, Jung insisted on interpreting the world as a set of symbols, not of realities, of seeing rather than knowing, of “symbolical rumors,” of lore—dreams of the collective unconscious. But where did the collective unconscious reside? In the absorbed zeitgeist of strange characters like Orfeo? In the newspapers, the tabloids, the magazines; on the wire services; in the movies? Hadn’t The Day the Earth Stood Still, a popular and now classic film from 1951, brought essentially the same message as Orfeo’s “etherian” visitors? And could not print or film have also brought that message directly to Orfeo, a couple of years before he saw the orbs pulsating?
Besides Orfeo Angelucci, the best-known contactee at the first Saucerian convention was George Adamski. He had fought with the cavalry down on the border during the Pancho Villa unpleasantness. In the early thirties, he established a Tibetan temple in Laguna Beach, one of whose virtues was that its status as a religious institution meant dispensation from the rigors of Prohibition. If repeal had never come, Adamski would later say in an unguarded moment, he might never have gotten into “this saucer crap.” He moved to the slopes of Mount Palomar and began trying to photograph the saucers. In his 1955 book, Inside the Space Ships, he told of being taken on board flying saucers by aliens with mythological names, and he reported that he spoke frequently to his “Space Brothers.”
Truman Bethurum, author of the 1954 book Aboard the Flying Saucers, reported that while laying asphalt in the desert in July 1952 he saw eight or ten small spacemen. They took him aboard their spaceship, where he met its captain, Aura Rhanes, a female he described as “tops in beauty,” from the planet Clarion. Again, the burden of the message was a warning against nuclear weapons and of the need for love.
Daniel Fry’s 1954 book, The White Sands Incident, prefigures elements of the Roswell and Area 51 stories but with a wholly different tone. Fry worked for Aerojet General at the White Sands rocket test site. On a remote corner of the base, on July 4, 1950, he said, he saw a flying saucer land. From inside, a voice belonging to a visitor called A-lan invited him for a ride to New York and back. In 1955, Fry published A-lan’s Message to Men of Earth, this time based not on a direct encounter but on “a voice inside my head.” Like many of the contactees, he veered toward mysticism, and he tied the saucer tales to classic prewar obsessions with the ancient continents of Lemuria and Atlantis. After a great conflict between the two, Fry suggested, the survivors had fled to Mars.
There was a pattern to the lives of these contactees: Almost all had come from the Los Angeles area—and had worked on the edge of the aeronautic industry. Their accounts share a tone and a language. They have been taken aboard saucers, not with the menacing experimental intent described by later abductees, but in a naïve, friendly way. The aliens are friends, “Space Brothers,” who address the contactee as “pal.” Unlike the abductees who would dominate the youfer lore of the 1980s and 1990s, the mood is not one of manipulation but of wonder, even enlightenment. The ruling spirit is Klaatu, the alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still, who has come to warn us of our own folly, specifically nuclear folly. In some of the accounts there is an old-fashioned, almost nineteenth-century feel, as in Van Tassel’s assertion that human beings were the result of beautiful Venusians mating with ugly Earth apes.
Fashions in ufology apparently offer a shadow version of the wider culture. For some the aliens are saviors, for others, invaders.
The first mystery “airships” in the 1890s arrived when the fascination with flying machines and balloons was at its height, a time of urbanization, immigration, and economic depression. While the first “foo fighters” of the 1940s, lights spotted by fighter pilots, were discounted as mere oddities, like the false bogeys on crude early radar, the ghost rockets of the immediate postwar years suggested a fear of attack from the Soviet Union.
The flying saucer craze of the late forties and early fifties—culminating perhaps in June and July of 1952, when Washington, D.C., was “buzzed” by multiple saucers, recorded by ground observers, radar watchers, and airline pilots—marched along in neat parallel to McCarthyism and the Red Scare. (To the Japanese, sociologists argued, Godzilla stood for the assault of the B-29s, their incendiary and atomic bombs.) During the hottest period of the Cold War, the aliens brought contactees a message of peace. But already a darker theme of cover-up was emerging, in the charges of leading UFO propagandist Donald Keyhoe that “silencers” were at work and the government was keeping the truth a secret.
Race sometimes emerged as a theme of UFO stories in the sixties, and the theme of government cover-up—a shadow of the assassinations, Vietnam, and the Pentagon Papers—grew stronger in that decade. The national humiliations of Watergate and Iran coincided with the cattle mutilation stories of the seventies.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind featured François Truffaut playing a thinking man’s UFO expert, based on the UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, who echoed Jung’s arguments about considering sightings on their own terms and skirted the issue of real existence. But in the end of the movie, real saucers do appear.
Fashions in ufology changed in the eighties, when E.T. (1982) was understood as a fable for childhood. Children, like aliens, are new to the planet, with innocent assumptions and virtually no knowledge about how life is lived here on Earth.
The eighties craze for abduction stories was in keeping with the cultural trends of the rest of the decade. Its sexual and personal obsessions—I was taken because I was special, I was abused—tied in with talk-show psychology, itself an emblem of the times.
In the eighties, too, Stealth created its own shadow culture in the Bob Lazar story. The F-117 looked like a flying saucer when viewed head on—and for sound technical reasons. Ben Rich would write of the design of the fighter, “Several of our aerodynamics experts, including Dick Cantrell, seriously thought that maybe we would do better trying to build an actual flying saucer. The shape itself was the ultimate in low observability. The problem was finding a way to make a saucer fly. Unlike our plane, it would have to be rotated and spun.” This statement was widely cited by both those merely curious about flying saucers and those firmly convinced of their existence.
The secrecy around Stealth helped nurture rumors that it had been created with the assistance of alien technology; one saucer organization noted that when a still secret Stealth fighter crashed in the summer of 1986, the whole area was cordoned off and cleaned up just as the Roswell crash and other “recoveries” had been.
The eras of changing fascinations in the UFO culture suggest periods in fashion or movements in art. And many of the contactee visions reminded me of what is called outsider or visionary art. In the paintings of these socially marginal and untrained artists—“kooks” or “loons,” in the later parlance of the Interceptors—flying saucers appeared as frequently and naturally as angels or Jesus, or 727s and locomotives. T
hese artists often actually paint UFOs. Like many of the contactees, they not only see visions but hear voices, inspiring them to paint landscapes from other planets or construct saucer shrines, even landing pads.
Many of these images possess a dreamy, otherworldly quality, like Angelucci’s prose, in which Tiny’s Cafe in Twenty-nine Palms turns into a magic chamber where he sips amber. Others share the intrigue in detailed alternative engineering and dissident cosmology with the saucer buffs, who look to Nikola Tesla and Townsend Brown as alternate-world heroes of the technology of conspiracy.
Van Tassel’s Giant Rock “spaceport,” it turns out, was merely one of many smaller offshoots. I came across a book that documented a world of such people who built UFO detectors and landing sites for saucers. These were believed to be the vehicles of angels or aliens, or both. Douglas Curran, the book’s author and photographer, recounts that the title, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, had come to him in a dream. Curran, like Jung, found that when he tried to approach the saucer sighters and cultists as a folklorist, there were those who still pulled him aside and earnestly asked, But do you believe? This suggested just how close such folk cultures were to religious sects, which helps explain the shrinelike nature of the places Curran photographed.
Sightings and imaginings, theories and conspiracies—the cultures of Dreamland made up a folklore of its own. Did it matter whether the Aurora airplane or the “alien replicated aircraft” actually existed, any more than whether Hermes actually had wings on his feet? Folklore and superstition begin where science and knowledge end. And knowing stopped at the perimeter around Dreamland.