Take Me to Your Leader

"Interplanetary Ships and Saucers of various material densities can approximate the speed of light. This seems impossible to you only because of a natural principle that has not yet been discovered by your scientists. Also, the Speed of Light is the Speed of Truth. This statement is presently unintelligible to Earth's peoples, but is a basic cosmic axiom."

Thus spake Neptune, a peripatetic philosopher from an advanced civilization in outer space who in 1952 dropped in to swap cosmic axioms with one Orfeo Angelucci, a California aircraft-plant worker. Having explained how his flying saucer arrived here, Neptune told why.

" 'The Great Accident' is nearer than any man dreams," he said. "We [space people] are the Earth's older brothers.... We love the Children of Earth and it is our desire to help them ..."

Angelucci—who says his chronic nervous disorders make him extrareceptive to visits with extraterrestrial visitants—describes four such experiences in his book. The Secret of the Saucers. Three were in California, but in 1953 Orfeo ascended. He spent a week on "one of the larger planetoids of the shattered planet Lucifer," arriving in a saucer whose Muzak played his favorite song, Fools Rush In.

The natives, "generally similar to men and women," were friendly but not to the point of fraternization. Although he was a family man as well as a religious mystic, there was enough of the typical lonesome traveler in Angelucci for him to break up a Luciferian dinner party by venturing a timid pass at the young lady seated next to him. "I had the strong telepathic impression," he recalls, "that sexual desire is merely another of the erroneous manifestations of materiality ... in the higher spiritual worlds it is nonexistent."

But outer space is less than unanimous about this. Recently the Journal of Borderland Research told of "a Brazilian farmer whose tractor was stopped by the nearby landing of a flying saucer. The flabbergasted yokel was dragged aboard by little men, then drugged and forced to have sexual intercourse with a fairly attractive space woman."

Leaving sex aside, the one clear fact is that some people are reporting some sort of intercourse with creatures from other planets. It has become a kind of profession, calling forth the energies of about two dozen "contactees" at last count. Many find it necessary to quit their jobs, and devote themselves full time to spreading the wisdom derived from their interviews with the interplanetary visitants. Each member of the steadily expanding contactee elite has a following, ranging from an indulgent spouse to a nationwide chain of well-organized branches.

Exemplifying the latter are the fifteen-hundred disciples of Daniel W. Fry, who in 1954 recorded the following exchange with A-Lan, a frequent caller from Out There.

A-Lan: Well, Dan ... we have given you information which is both of interest and of value to people. Why do you keep it to yourself?

Dan: If J attempt to make public the information which you have given me, it will only mean that I will be scorned and ridiculed.

A-Lan: Ridicule is the barrier which the ignorant erect between themselves and any truth which frightens or disturbs them.... It is easier to ridicule than to investigate, but it is not as profitable.

Convinced at last, Fry in 1955 launched Understanding, a California-based spiritual movement disseminating the gospel passed along by his own private Space Brother. The thirty-odd Understanding units which meet regularly around the country—a kind of Great Books course without books—are a built-in lecture circuit. Asked what they try to understand, a member recently replied, "Everything." Considering this scope, the annual dues of $4.50 seem reasonable.

The American flying-saucer movement comprises one hundred such groups, with others in England, Australia, Brazil, France, Japan, New Zealand and Switzerland. Most have monthly meetings, a newsletter, and dues running to five dollars a year. Active membership of local clubs averages about seventy-five, while the annual conventions draw thousands—all in all, a fair-sized market for the hundreds of UFO (unidentified flying objects) books and pamphlets in print.

All saucer enthusiasts believe that UFOs are manned spaceships from other planets, and they agree that Government statements to the contrary are lies. Arch-villain is the Air Force, which has looked into 6523 reported UFO sightings since 1947, when saucers first made headlines. In Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force, official spokesman Lt. Col. Lawrence J. Tacker reported: "From its investigations covering the past thirteen-year period, the Air Force contends that when the evidence of these sightings has been sifted through the scientific criteria, it has always led to the conclusions that the objects were not space craft and they did not constitute a threat against the security of this country." Scoffing at such disclaimers, UFO believers pepper the Air Force with mail alleging suppression of the facts and demanding what one called "a return to audience participation."

These common beliefs aside, the flying-saucer movement is split into two camps. Forming a vocal majority are the contactees, who claim direct or telepathic communication and interplanetary hitchhiking with the Space Brothers. The opposition call themselves ufologists, which they translate to mean "sensible saucerites." Ufologists believe in the existence of saucers, but say they are interested only in objective research data, such as who sighted a UFO, where, when, speed, distance, etc. They explicitly deny that anyone has yet contacted a saucer pilot and regard the contactees as misguided or worse; ufologist newsletters make frequent use of the term "Con(tact) men."

The prototypical contactee is silver-haired George Adamski, self-styled "philosopher, student, teacher, saucer researcher" who likes his friends to call him "Professor." He lives with some disciples and two small telescopes (six-inch and fifteen-inch models) in Palomar Gardens, California—not to be confused with nearby Mount Palomar observatory and its somewhat larger equipment. In addition to his long-range viewing, since 1952 Adamski has been meeting with a down-to-earth group of Martians, Venusians and Saturnians who preach Brotherly Love as an antidote to The Bomb. The handsome, long-haired Space Brothers and their "incredibly lovely young women" wore costumes resembling either ski suits or mufti to escape notice by lesser mortals than Adamski. He, of course, knew them by their secret handshake (palm to palm with no grasping, like two hipsters giving each other some skin, man). Adamski has not only sat across a restaurant table from these extraterrestrials (Firkon, a Martian, displayed a weakness for peanut-butter sandwiches on whole-wheat bread, black coffee and apple pie), he has also ridden many times in his friends' spaceships. To prove it all, he has penned countless articles and three books ("dedicated to People, everywhere and in every world"), lectured around the saucer circuit, and sold photographs of objects resembling ceiling light fixtures in condemned apartment houses.

Tension stemming from the saucer movement's doctrinal differences is illustrated by the recent revocation of Adamski's membership in the ufologist-oriented National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. The expulsion order was given by NICAP director Donald E. Keyhoe, a retired Marine Air Force major and one of the earliest and most prolific saucer authors.

It was Major Keyhoe who coined the term "the silence group" to describe nefarious Government officials who refuse to release data which, he says, prove that interplanetary craft exist. It is his claim that historical records clearly demonstrate that the Earth has been "under observation" for over 175 years. For a time Keyhoe was a leading exponent of the theory that the other-worldly creatures who had us under observation were Martians. "Since 1947," he reasoned, "each close approach of Mars—at twenty-six-month intervals—has brought a sudden increase in flying-saucer sightings." During March–April 1950, June–August 1952 and August–November 1954, when the orbits of Earth and Mars were closest to each other, UFO sightings ran thick and heavy, pointing to the possibility of Martian origin. But this supposed periodicity was then doubly shattered: a UFO flurry during the summer of 1955 occurred when Mars was at its maximum distance from Earth; and in the fall of 1956, when Mars came close again, there was only a scattering of sightings in the Dakotas and Minnesota. About this 1956 disappointment, one saucer newsletter commented, "Was this the looked-for biennial Martian expedition to Earth? If it was, its appropriations must have been cut severely by the present Martian administration."

Although the twenty-six-month-cycle theory has had to be abandoned, Keyhoe and NICAP (with four-thousand members at five dollars per year) can still draw satisfaction from the knowledge that their research projects have done much to bring the saucer movement far along the road to respectability. For example, before May 1947, the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature carried no listing at all for flying saucers. In the 1947–1949 volume under "Flying Saucers," it says, "See 'Illusions and Hallucinations.' " The 1949–1951 reference, a slight improvement, is to "Aeronautics: airplanes, jet-propelled; balloons, use in research; illusions and hallucinations." But with the 1951–1953 number, UFOs (continued on page 102)Leader(continued from page 96) come into their own—thirty-eight listings under a separate heading, "Flying Saucers."

If the ufologists are known, as they wish to be, for their sobriety, glamor is the province of the contactees. And as in some other fields, the colorful do somewhat better financially than the plodders. Take the Tristan and Isolde of the saucer movement—a former New Jersey sign painter named Howard Menger and his wife, an attractive blonde known to the space crowd as Marla Baxter. Howard and Marla have apotheosized their out-of-this-world romance in books: his, From Outer Space to You; hers, My Saturnian Lover.

As Howard tells it, when he was ten he was out in the woods one day meditating, when he came upon a beautiful blonde Venusian woman. She let little Howard know ("It was a tremendous surge of warmth, love and physical attraction which emanated from her to me") that big things were in store for him. "We are contacting our own," she said.

Scene: the same spot. Time: fourteen years later.

Big Howard: Are you actually the girl ...?

Venusian Woman: Yes, I am. The same girl, Howard.

Big Howard: But you're no older---

Venusian Woman: Oh, but I am ... I'm more than five hundred years old. Now you can refute anyone who says a woman tells little falsehoods about her age!

The following year Howard met Marla and recognized her as the sister of the five-hundred-year-old Venusian beauty. Then it all came back. He himself had been a citizen of Saturn before assuming earthly form; on a refueling stop at Venus he had fallen in love with Marla and now they were, like Daphnis and Chloë or Abercrombie and Fitch, together again.

"My Saturnian lover," writes Marla, "did wonderful things for me.... My body seemed to grow more softly contoured through this Pygmalion transformation as the Saturnian sculptor, by his unique artistry, molded me by his every electric touch and caress." Soon her body was contoured to the point of being "a little bit pregnant."

Once this obstacle was overcome (in her book Marla simply wills the pregnancy dissolved; verbally, she explains that her Saturnian lover aborted her with his third eye), and once the first Mrs. Menger had made for the divorce courts, Howard and Marla proceeded with their earthly mission. They spread the word that the Space Brothers are coming, a New Age is imminent, and the way to prepare for it all is to read their books (his, $4.50; hers, $2.50), hear their lectures (admission by contribution), listen to the recording ($3.98) of Howard, who had never played the piano before being exposed to the music of the spheres, tinkling out Theme from the Song of Saturn, or attend the First Eastern Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention in 1958 at their new hundred-acre farm near Lebanon, New Jersey (admission, two dollars; attendance, two thousand). Good works occupy them so utterly that Howard no longer has time for sign painting and has hired a business manager to relieve him of tedious details.

According to Long John Nebel, an all-night talk-jockey for New York's WOR, the real entrepreneur among the contactees is George Van Tassel. Long John should know, since he's interviewed about fifteen contactees on his show, a Pandora's Box of esoterica tuned in by two million Night People with an interest in the occult.

Once Van Tassel told Long John that he had collected over $40,000—$15,000 in a lump sum from one elderly lady—to construct a Longevity Machine for which some accommodating Martians had provided the plans. As we age, Van Tassel explains, the electron orbits in our atoms become eccentric; his machine will rejuvenate us by restoring them to circularity. He has been quoted as saying, "I have every reason to believe it will eliminate the medical profession." When finished, the rejuvenator will resemble a long tunnellike building through which clients will stroll and be processed by its beneficial rays, a little like a cosmic carwash and not taking much longer than a minute at that. When they come out the other end, they won't look any different, but the inner change in "youthful vitality" will, the prediction goes, be impressive.

Long before Van Tassel first claimed a physical contact with a caller from another planet in August 1953, he had been experiencing telepathic o.s.c. (outer-space communication). Thus, for example, on March 21, 1952, he telepathically received and passed along this message: "Greetings. I am Totalmon, fourth projection, seventh wave, space patrol, realms of Schare. Elevation 750 miles above you, speed 170,000 miles per second; returning from the second sector. Our light-cast instructs us to bring you blessings from the Center and the realms of Blaau."

When he is not performing oracularly or off on lecture tours in his private plane, Van Tassel also runs the Giant Rock Airport in California, the College of Universal Wisdom, and the heavily attended (ten thousand came one year) annual West Coast Interplanetary Spacecraft Conventions at which contactees set up booths to sell their books, saucer photographs and space souvenirs.

"Aside from Van Tassel and a few others," observes Long John, "there aren't many fast bucks in the saucer-contact line. Most contactees have to struggle. They lecture at fifty or sixty dollars a night, possibly twice a week. But they've got travel expenses to pay. They stay at people's homes, not at fine hotels. Their shirt cuffs are frayed. When they're on my show and the food comes up from the delicatessen, even some of the vegetarian saucer people start gobbling pastrami as if the Russians were at the Jersey end of the Lincoln Tunnel."

Obviously, only the most dedicated would enter such an exacting calling. Indeed it was the saucer movement's religious aspects that first attracted the interest of Dr. Carl G. Jung, the late renowned Swiss psychiatrist. Wrote Jung in his 1959 book, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, "... space-guests are sometimes idealized figures along the lines of technological angels who are concerned for our welfare.... In a difficult and dark time for humanity a miraculous tale grows up of an attempted intervention by extraterrestrial 'heavenly' powers.... It is characteristic of our time that, in contrast to its previous expressions, the archetype should now take the form of an object, a technological construction, in order to avoid the odiousness of a mythological personification. Anything that looks technological goes down without difficulty with modern man."

This shotgun wedding of technology and faith has produced strange offspring. Some contactees say (and they are only repeating what the Space Brothers have told them) that Jesus and Buddha are among the pilots of the strange round craft; in fact, they reveal, all of the world's religious leaders were spacemen who temporarily assumed human form before being translated heavenward. The Second Coming will occur and the world will end neither with bang nor whimper, but with a saucer landing.

While the Space Brothers, as Isabel Davis of Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York has noted, "are positively neurotic about having their pictures taken," one saucer fan claims nothing less than to have photographed God himself. Should any shutterbugs be interested, he says he did it "through a hundred-inch telescope on an exposure of four hours and forty-seven minutes." The snapshot (like UFO photos in general) is somewhat blurred, however, due either to the unfortunately high radiation or the electromagnetic flux in space.

"The religious flavor of the [saucer] clubs," comments Richard R. Mathison in Faiths, Cults and Sects of America "... is obvious by their names—Celestial (continued on page 168)Leader(continued from page 102) Vehicle Investigation Committee, Christ Brotherhood, Inc., Cosmic Circle of Friendship, First Christian Spiritualist Church, Fellowship of Golden Illumination, Ministry of Universal Wisdom, Pacific Lemurian Society, Sanctuary of Thought.... Publications devoted to the cause include such titles as Thy Kingdom Come, Cosmic Voice, Love with Understanding, The Universal Key."

Many up-to-date yearners for that Old Time Religion have seized upon the saucer phenomenon in an attempt to harness modern technology for their own traditionalist purposes. In the words of one saucerian author: "... the long-drawn-out battle between Science and Religion might suddenly end in a surprise knockout just at the very moment when Science appeared to have won hands down."

Religion has frequently been associated with the ability of certain rare mortals to make contact with creatures not of this world. Before people had become acquainted with outer space, at stages of history when man's view of the universe was more theological than it is today, these unearthly beings were considered to be supernatural rather than superterrestrial. Thus, Medieval history is filled with devils and witches. Nor did the Protestant Reformation ease the flying-sorcerer mania initiated by the Catholic Inquisition. Indeed, as A. D. White comments in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, "... the new Church being anxious to show itself equally orthodox and zealous with the old ... Catholic and Protestant theologians vied with each other in detecting witches ..."

By the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, Satanic contacts had fallen off and were being replaced by more benign occult visitations. Emanuel Swedenborg, the Scandinavian mystic, did not see his first spirit-caller until 1744, when he was fifty-six years old, but he then proceeded to make up for lost time until his death at the age of eighty-four. He not only received his protoplasmic friends here on Earth, but he politely returned their visits, thus setting a pioneering example for today's contactees. Describing his travels through the Unseen World in twenty thousand pages which Swedenborgians reverently refer to as The Writings, he says that beyond the veil is an exact counterpart of the visible world. Among other things, Swedenborg wrote, there are "schools for infant angels; universities for the learned; and fairs for such as were commercially inclined—particularly the English and Dutch angels!" Swedenborg also reported that there is sex after death, which may account for his following among the middle-aged.

Although extraterrestrial visitants in earlier centuries were largely supernatural, persevering researchers have found evidence of doings even in the preflight age. For example, British UFO historian Desmond Leslie quite definitely traces the annals of saucery to the year 18,617,841 B.C., when, he says, the first space vehicle landed on Earth from Venus; he backs up his calculations with references to "vimanas" (meaning "cars celestial" or "fiery chariots") in Sanskrit scrolls and to "Pearls-in-the-Sky" in ancient Tibetan works.

In Flying Saucers on the Attack, Harold T. Wilkins (one of the very few writers who feel saucers are hostile) says that certain old Irish manuscripts refer to mysterious "demon ships" in the years 212, 763, and 956 A.D. In particular, Wilkins quotes this episode from the Speculum Regali in Konungs-Skuggsja: "There happened in the borough of Cloeva, one Sunday, while the people were at Mass, a marvel. In this town is a church.... It befell that an anchor was dropped from the sky, with a rope attached to it, and one of the flukes caught in the arch above the church door. The people rushed out ... and saw in the sky a ship with men on board, floating before the anchor-cable, and they saw a man leap overboard and jump down to the anchor, as if to release it. The folk rushed up and tried to seize him; but the bishop forbade the people to hold the man, for it might kill him, he said. The man was freed, and hurried up to the ship, where the crew cut the rope and the ship sailed away out of sight. But the anchor is in the church, and has been ever since, as a testimony."

Although some strange "globes" were apparently seen over Nürnberg in 1561 and over Basel in 1566, space consciousness did not really soar until the first successful balloon ascension in 1783. The heavens seemed accessible at last; man looked up, and anything seemed possible—even the famous Moon Hoax of 1835 when the New York Sun, as a circulation stunt, ran a satirical series of articles purporting to describe life on the moon as seen through a new and powerful telescope. "They are doubtless innocent and happy creatures," said the account, referring to the moon's apelike, four-feet-tall inhabitants, "notwithstanding some of their amusements would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum." The satire was taken straight by about half the paper's readers, many of whom refused to disbelieve what they had read even after the reporter made a public admission of what he'd been up to.

In 1882, a Great Saucer was reportedly sighted at England's Greenwich Observatory. In 1897, a huge object, described either as torpedo-shaped or cigar-shaped, supposedly passed over large portions of the United States. Charles Fort, who spent much of his life probing strange phenomena, assembled whole chapters of sightings of strange sky objects, most of them cigar-shaped, reported in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Abhorring certitude on anyone's part, Fort speculated that they might be piloted by Martians deliberately observing us, or "... I conceive of other worlds and vast structures that pass us by, within a few miles, without the slightest desire to communicate, quite as tramp vessels pass many islands ..."

Just before the turn of the century, Theodore Flournoy, Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva, began a lengthy examination of a remarkable thirty-year-old Frenchwoman known by the pseudonym Helene Smith. In his book, From India to the Planet Mars, Flournoy tells how she went into a series of related trances forming a Martian sequence in which she traveled forty-three million miles through space like a spiritual Sputnik.

Interplanetary travel reporter Smith revealed that the Martians rode in horseless and wheelless carriages, that they looked just like humans and wore ski suits, and that the women wore flat round hats shaped like nonflying saucers. She drew countless sketches of the landscape on Mars and she regaled Professor Flournoy with samples of the Martian language, both written and spoken: "Metiche," for example, means "Monsieur"; "Medache" stands for "Madam." After four detail-larded years of this sort of thing, Professor Flournoy wrote, "I myself, I am ashamed to acknowledge, began, in 1898, to have enough of the Martian romance."

This brings to mind the more recent space-travel episode described in The Fifty-Minute Hour by the late psychoanalyst, Dr. Robert Lindner, of which he, too, "had enough"—but in a different way. In the chapter called The Jet-Propelled Couch, Dr. Lindner described his treatment of a brilliant research physicist working for the Government, normal in every way except in his belief that he was Lord of the planet Seraneb, which he visited regularly. Lindner described that therapeutic tactics required him to participate fully in the patient's fantasy and then, from within, to underscore inner contradictions and miscalculations which would bring down the whole structure. But Lindner did not reckon on getting so involved that the fantasy became more important to himself than to the patient. In fact, the physicist went on pretending to believe in his trips to Seraneb for weeks after he had shed his psychosis, "Because I felt you wanted me to!"

Despite the fact that superterrestrial visitants were gradually becoming more numerous than supernatural ones, fascination with the occult persisted well into the Twentieth Century. In 1921 Sigmund Freud wrote that it represented "one manifestation of the devaluation which, ever since the world catastrophe of the great war, has affected everything established ... part of the attempt to probe the great upheaval toward which we are drifting." Freud regarded the public's recurring interest in the esoteric as an effort "to regain by other 'supernatural' means the lost appeal of life on this earth."

Man's wish or need to believe in the exotic has existed in all eras and has taken many forms. Today, more than a few world catastrophes after Freud made his observation, the need is apparently still with us, only now it is dressed up in a space suit. Jung said, "The basis for this kind of (visionary) rumor is an emotional tension having its cause in a situation of collective stress or danger, or in a vital psychic need." As an example of the former he cited "the strain of Russian policies."

Whatever the specific cause, or complex of causes, the Twentieth Century has undergone a long build-up to the present saucer craze. Interplanetary commuters have always figured prominently in science fiction, whose popularity has mounted since the turn of the century. Men from other planets were central to H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, just as they are in such contemporary fiction as Arthur C. Clarke's poetic Childhood's End, John Wyndham's chilling The Midwich Cuckoos (basis of last year's movie The Village of the Damned), and Fredric Brown's ironic Martian, Go Home! From only one science-fiction magazine in 1926, the field has grown to about two dozen today. And the science-fiction novel is now catching up in popularity with its older brother, the detective yarn.

If anything at all was proved by the panic which struck an estimated one million of the six million listeners to Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' story about a Martian invasion (a panic which caused them to see and hear the invaders all over the country), it was that, for better or worse, people were even then ready to believe in the landing of other-worldly beings. World War II and high-powered jet airplanes brought space travel that much closer. Then in 1957 Sputnik put earthlings over the hump into the Space Age and in 1961, the Russians sent a ship to Venus. Saucers seem here to stay: for if we now have the means to scout around Out There, isn't it just as likely that they have the means to get here?

Some contactees say the Space People are actually revisiting the Earth, having established an ancient civilization here millions of years ago before blasting off for greener pastures in another corner of the solar system. In any event, the extraterrestrial guests, like their hosts, are worried about the A- and H-Bombs. Some spacemen are strictly altruistic in their concern over the Earth's welfare. Others are worried that a nuclear war here may accidentally upset the balance of the universe's basic forces. Either way, they're here to help head it off. If they fail, it won't be a total loss: they've promised to send spaceships to evacuate contactees and their followers Before It's Too Late.

Most American contactees are west of the Mississippi, perhaps because visibility for spotting saucers is better out in the wide, open spaces, or perhaps because there are more Californians west of the Mississippi than east of it. Around each contactee has formed a core of True Believers who subscribe to a synthesis of fundamentalist religion, supersonic technology and extroverted sex (the proportions vary from group to group, although Long John Nebel says "most of them are strongly in the pad with Venusian women") which serves as their ideological gospel for the New Age.

There are few college graduates among the contactees, but many have finished high school. They, like their followers, are drawn largely from the ranks of the humble and obscure, where most virtue resideth; not a few are quick to point out that Jesus Christ was a lowly carpenter. However, they are not wholly antistatus, for they also claim that a number of "top scientists" are actually cryptosaucerites who cannot reveal their convictions publicly for fear of colliding with the Government's conspiracy of silence. Scientific corroboration is drawn upon wherever it can be found. Thus, it is pointed out that on September 2, 1921, Guglielmo Marconi reported receiving radio signals, which he thought were in code, from some station on a wave length not of this world. One is referred to the two Government installations in West Virginia that beam electronic signals to outer space and patiently listen for a reply. And then there is the recent Brookings Institution research report on space, a 190-page study costing $96,000, which says, "While the discovery of intelligent life in other parts of the universe is not likely in the immediate future, it could nevertheless happen at any time."

On occasion, however, the contact wing of the saucer movement has attempted to buttress its case with more detailed evidence. For example, in 1958 there appeared a book called Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery. Its French author, Aimé Michel, contended when he plotted the sightings of any single day on a map of France, the connective tracings formed a series of straight lines intersecting at one point which he took to be the location of a mother ship sending out scout craft. By thus using "orthoteny" (derived by Michel from the Greek word for "stretched in a straight line"), he inferred that the Earth was being subjected to systematic aerial exploration. For contrast, the book also contains charts on which a handful of catnip seeds has been sprinkled at random, with connecting lines drawn through their locations. Beneath every chart is an indispensable caption to tell the reader whether he is looking at plottings of saucer sightings or catnip seeds.

Given the inherent difficulty of their subject matter, it is not surprising that contactees pepper their pronouncements with tantalizing escape clauses ("... cannot be revealed at this time ... will be revealed at the proper time") that serve to bridge the gap between apparent differences of opinion; for example, are the visitants Venusians or Martians or both? In the end, despite a measure of off-the-record rivalry and animosity, the contactees usually recognize their community of interest and back each other's stories in public.

By and large, American contactees have reported intelligible chats with humanoid visitants who were usually quite attractive physically, if not downright sexy-looking. Truman Bethurum, a California construction worker, met eleven times in the desert with "chic petite brunette" Captain Aura Rhanes, commander of an "Admiral's Scow" and its thirty-two-man crew from the planet Clarion, which, being on the other side of the moon, is invisible to our eyes and, apparently, to the camera the Russians recently sent back there. In his book, Aboard a Flying Saucer (Non-Fiction: A True Story of Personal Experience), Bethurum offers the following sample of Captain Aura's prose style: "I love to read and ride and swim and fish in lakes and rivers. I like to dress up nice and dance. But housework gives me shivers." Her style in clothes usually runs to a red-and-black dress with a beret to match. On one occasion, Bethurum says she switched to a light-gray slack ensemble and "looked very chic indeed ... with her fully developed small figure set off by the slacks, which appeared almost as if painted on her, so snugly did they fit." Another time Aura looked up at him "with a speculative expression in her big brown eyes," and the following dialog was exchanged.

Aura: Truman, you seem distraught and worried tonight. Is anything wrong with you or your world that you think I might be able to help you with?

Truman: Yes. A lot of things in my world are wrong. I wrote my wife about you, and she thinks I've gone off my rocker.

Aura (smiling sympathetically): Yes, I can see how she might feel that way.

Truman Bethurum's book appeared in 1954. Two years later, according to ufologist Isabel Davis, Mrs. Bethurum successfully sued for divorce in Los Angeles, naming Captain Aura Rhanes as correspondent.

In foreign countries, the visitants have only rarely resembled "chic petite brunettes." Usually they have been reported to be everything along the scale from lemurlike to insectiform, from midgets twenty-three inches in height to fifteen-foot giants, or sometimes simply as "medium-sized blobs." South Americans seem to go in for hairy dwarfs, while the French have displayed a strong predilection toward little green men who drop such remarks as, "Oumph ... grobrezabri ... trobobranana!" What all this indicates about differing national characteristics is a nice debating point for the sociologists. Perhaps it only proves that it takes all kinds to make a solar system.

Despite disagreements among the saucer movement's Faithful over who or what is seen, or over other quasitheological bones of contention, they are monolithically united in their awareness of hidden conspiratorial threats all around them. Fortunately, they have allies. As Miss C. Lois Jessop, assistant director of the procontactee New York Saucer Information Bureau, informed a recent interviewer, "The space people will put a beam on a writer if he ridicules them."

Several contactees, however, are relying upon their own terrestrial acts to right the conditions that bother them. George Van Tassel and Gabriel Green, for example, have entered politics, and managed to poll some California write-in votes for President in the last election. (Green's slogan: "Abe in 1860—Gabe in 1960.")

Lately the flying-saucer movement has been taking more and more eccentric twists and turns in its attempt to provide a meaningful pattern of life for its followers. The omniscient Space Brothers have begun passing along increasingly detailed and vehement advice on the following: health foods and organic farming (OK); vivisection (NG); Yoga (OK); fluoridation (NG); Salk vaccine (NG); vegetarianism (OK); tobacco (NG); alcohol (NG); chemical food additives (NG); Hoxsey cancer cure (OK); progressive education (NG); United Nations (NG); isolationism (OK); antibiotics (NG).

This set of views falls within the "naturalist syndrome," a phrase coined by Morris Davis, Professor of Political Science at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, to describe the "fear of unnatural novelty." If it be objected that few things could be more novel or more unnatural than flying saucers, one must remember that the Space Brothers long ago learned to power their craft by tapping into the natural forces of the universe.

Another recent development has been the influx of anti-Semitic and Jim Crow tidbits into the spacemen's teachings. Buck Nelson, an elderly Missouri farmer turned contactee, reports that on Venus "the races are nicely segregated." (He's been there and seen for himself; to prove it, he brought back a 385-pound Venusian dog which no one has ever seen, but whose hair he has been selling as a souvenir; according to one report, he "sold several dogfuls" at a recent space convention.) The Jews, Nelson declares, are off in a ghetto on one side of the planet, the Negroes on the other; in the central lebensraum are only white Gentiles. Nelson once told Long John Nebel that the Venusian Twelfth Commandment is along the lines of "Thou shalt not commit adultery," adultery being defined as Jew marrying Christian.

George Van Tassel, in addition to his other interests, has been hitting the miscegenation theme. In his pamphlet Into This World and Out Again, he makes a novel contribution to Higher Criticism as he records a spaceman saying, "The black people and the yellow people are as true a race of humans as the white people, as long as they do not propagate cross seed by intermating. This is the 'original sin.' "

Transvaal Episode, anonymously authored but published by John McCoy's Essene Press in Corpus Christi, Texas, quotes a "Great Master" whose saucer lands in Africa: "Throughout the Universe there is a White Brotherhood and a Dark Brotherhood, the latter the less evolved.... Stand firm—for like all slaves—though they be slaves unto themselves—the lesser evolved will try to overthrow and dominate the higher if they can. Stand firm."

George Hunt Williamson is a self-proclaimed anthropologist who, according to the jacket copy of his book, Other Tongues—Other Flesh, "attended Cornell College, Eastern New Mexico University, the University of Arizona, and took a special course at the University of Denver." The blurb neglects to say that he was graduated from none of them. "Dr." Williamson's writings might easily be dismissed as those of a hallucinated Frazer, except that every so often one runs up against a puzzling sentence like, "The swastika, itself, always retained a warm corner in the people's hearts." This becomes somewhat more intelligible when one learns that Williamson was once William Dudley Pelley's assistant at the Soulcraft Publishing House in Noblesville, Indiana. Silver Shirt Pelley, it will be recalled, was convicted of sedition in 1942 and went to prison for seven years. Separately and in collaboration, Williamson and McCoy have turned out a number of UFO tracts in which they rehash every anti-Semitic classic from the "International Banker" bogey to Moscow-dominated Communist conspiracies.

Is there any correlation between the saucer movement's racist tendencies and the other new ideas which lately have begun to infiltrate its thinking? Is there any reason why it so frequently happens that people who like wheat germ and blackstrap molasses don't like Jews and Negroes?

Brandeis University Professor Max Lerner believes he has the key. He would change Professor Davis' "naturalist syndrome" to read "purity syndrome." The common denominator in this interconnected set of attitudes, suggests Lerner, is the emphasis on purity of food, drinking water, body and race. A person who is anti-"pollution" in virtually every aspect of his life, he goes on, is usually motivated by a guilt feeling over his own deep sense of impurity, which he then projects onto others. And who is a handier scapegoat than an "inferior," "impure" race bent on "defiling" or "mongrelizing" the pure of heart, body and soul?

That is where the flying-saucer movement stands today. As Richard R. Mathison writes, "The doctrine which will establish the flying-saucer phenomenon as a cult is taking shape. In study circles, the true believers are searching the Bible for those references which, by their interpretation, will establish their cult as the only true approach to God."

In their efforts, the contactees and their disciples are undeterred by opposition or ridicule. They care not at all that Donald H. Menzel, Professor of Astrophysics at Harvard College Observatory, has said that eighty percent of the UFO sightings are attributable to misinterpretations of natural objects, such as planes, vapor trails, astronomical bodies, balloons, clouds, kites, birds, bits of newspaper, etc.; and that the other twenty percent consist of various kinds of optical illusions, aurora-related phenomena, or unusual kinds of shooting stars. Nor is the logic which governs the movement adversely affected by the fact that ten years ago the Saturday Review, never a magazine to fling money about recklessly, offered a reward of $100,000 "to the first little man from another planet who walks into this office," and that this sum is still unclaimed.

The Society for Psychical Research of London once queried seventeen thousand people and found that 9.9 percent of any given population "have had sensory hallucinations in the course of normal everyday life." Another student of the subject has observed, "Among hysterics and the insane, hallucinations often tend to reflect current beliefs and ideas of the age."

Putting all this together at this point in our survey of mankind's experiences with extraterrestrial visitants, it is just possible that there may be some current relevance to the remark which the French author Fontenelle made over two centuries ago. "Show me," he said, "four persons who swear it is midnight when it is noon, and I will show you ten thousand to believe them."