NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

AS	Amazing Stories magazine
GBC	Gray Barker Collection, Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library, Clarksburg, WV
IUR	International UFO Reporter
JUFOS	Journal of UFO Studies
UFOE3	Jerome Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2018)

INTRODUCTION

Most such books: The literature is vast and has increased exponentially with the internet. A full enumeration of the “believer” literature, or even of its authors, would require more space than this book has available. The major books in the “debunking” stream are those of Donald H. Menzel, Philip Klass, and Robert Sheaffer. Plentiful debunking materials may be found at websites like http://www.csicop.org/, http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/UFO.htm, http://www.reall.org/. The authoritative reference on UFOlogy, written from a believer perspective but critical and balanced throughout is Jerome Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2018), henceforth UFOE3. Donald Menzel . . . Carl Jung: Donald H. Menzel, The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age, with Lyle G. Boyd (New York: Doubleday, 1963); C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), trans. R. F. C. Hull, Ein moderner Mythus von Dingen, die am Himmel gesehen werden (Zurich: Rascher & Cie., 1958). twenty-first century cognitive psychologists: e.g., Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004); Justin L. Barrett, Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief (New York: Free Press, 2012); Bruce M. Hood, Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable (New York: Harper One, 2009); Jesse Bering, The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2011). Freudian dictum: Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage Books, 1939), 107. recent book on UFOs: David Clarke, How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth (London: Aurum Press, 2015). Simon and Garfunkel: Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence,” recorded June 15, 1965, Columbia Records. Area 51: Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base (New York: Little, Brown, 2011). Barack Obama: Paige Lavender, “I Think I Just Became the First President to Ever Mention Area 51,” Huffington Post, December 9, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/09/obama-area-51_n_4412310.html. Hillary Clinton: Lee Spiegel, “Hillary Clinton Vows to Investigate UFOs and Area 51,” Huffington Post, January 4, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-vows-to-investigate-ufos_us_5687073ce4b014efe0da95db. “courting the UFO believer vote”: Mike Albo, “Hillary Courts UFO Believer Vote,” Good, January 7, 2016, https://magazine.good.is/articles/hilary-ufo-politics. Clinton’s remarks were made on December 29, 2015. ABC News: Alon Harish, “UFOs Exist, Say 36 Percent in National Geographic Survey,” ABC News, June 27, 2012, https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ufos-exist-americans-national-geographic-survey/story?id=16661311. earlier surveys: Thomas E. Bullard, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 84–85; Roper Poll, “UFOs & Extraterrestrial Life: Americans’ Beliefs and Personal Experiences,” prepared for Sci Fi Channel, September 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20071210164517/http://www.scifi.com/ufo/roper. Why . . . want of public interest? George P. Hansen, “James W. Moseley as Trickster,” in The Astounding UFO Secrets of James W. Moseley, ed. Timothy Green Beckley (New Brunswick, NJ: Global Communications, 2013), 18–23. folklorist Thomas Bullard: Bullard, Myth and Mystery, 4; cf. George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation, 2001), 210–71. squirmed away from the challenge: Philip J. Klass, UFOs Explained (New York: Random House, 1974), 354–60. George Orwell: Orwell, “As I Please,” April 14, 1944, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 3, As I Please: 1943–1945 (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 122, referring to the belief in Hell professed by G. K. Chesterton. betray an emotional engagement: Allan Hendry, The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating and Reporting UFO Sightings (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), 106–7. symposium on UFOs: Carl Sagan and Thornton Page eds., UFOs—A Scientific Debate (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, with Cornell University Press, 1972). force its cancellation: Sagan and Page, 301–2. two psychiatrists: Lester Grinspoon and Alan D. Persky, “Psychiatry and UFO Reports,” in Sagan and Page, 245–46. “feel the emotional tug of such things”: George Orwell, “Antisemitism in Britain,” in Orwell and Angus, Collected Essays, vol. 3, 341. Kenneth Arnold sighting . . . Socorro, New Mexico: “Arnold Sighting,” UFOE3 1:169–72; Don Ecsedy, “The Flying Saucer as I Saw It, Kenneth Arnold,” Foreshadower, n.d., http://www.foreshadower.net/The%20Flying%20Saucer%20As%20I%20Saw%20It.php; “The Wraith of Arnold,” Foreshadower, March 21, 2013, http://www.foreshadower.net/The%20Wraith%20of%20Arnold.php.; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), 144–45; Matt Graeber, “21st Century UFOlogy, Part IV—Socorro Revisited,” SUNlite 2, no. 2 (March-April 2010), 15–21, http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/SUNlite2_2.pdf; “Socorro CE2/CE3,” UFOE3 2:1083–93. “the best UFO case ever?” Patrick Huyghe, “The Best UFO Case Ever?,” in Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat (New York: Paraview Press, 2001), 309–33. A few other cases: “Delphos CE2,” UFOE3 1:400–402 (November 2, 1971); “Trans-en-Provence CE2,” UFOE3 2:1131–32 (January 8, 1981). 10 percent were unsolved: Estimates of the percentage of “unknowns” among total UFO reports range from 20 percent down to the single digits: Hendry, UFO Handbook, 22, 264; Cheryl Costa and Linda Miller Costa, UFO Sightings Desk Reference: United States of America 2001–2015 (Syracuse, NY: Dragon Lady Media, 2017), 9–11; “Identification Studies of UFOs,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_studies_of_UFOs. photos taken by an Oregon farmer: “McMinnville Photos,” UFOE3 1:702–4. Footnote 1: Ralph Blumenthal: Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” New York Times, December 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html. Interviewed on MSNBC: “Interview with Ralph Blumenthal: The Pentagon UFO Study,” MSNBC, December 17, 2017, https://youtu.be/T-Dp1FzKods. D. W. Pasulka: D. W. Pasulka, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 17–24, 47–50, 73–77, 240–44.

CHAPTER 1: CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE UFOLOGIST

Kenneth Arnold: “Arnold Sighting,” UFOE3 1:169–72; Don Ecsedy, “The Flying Saucer as I Saw It, Kenneth Arnold,” Foreshadower, n.d., http://www.foreshadower.net/The%20Flying%20Saucer%20As%20I%20Saw%20It.php; “The Wraith of Arnold,” Foreshadower, March 21, 2013, http://www.foreshadower.net/The%20Wraith%20of%20Arnold.php. Roswell, New Mexico: Karl T. Pflock, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001), 26. Additional references can be found in chapter 8 notes. seven-foot monster: Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (New York: University Books, 1956), 11–35; five articles in Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 28, no. 3 (Fall 2002), http://www.wvculture.org/goldenseal/fall02/fall02.html. “Shaver Mystery”: Barker, 59–67. “Three men in black suits”: Barker, 92–93. “invisible college”: Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972); “J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies,” UFOE3 1:627. “I have always felt”: Barker, They Knew Too Much, 129. “My readers”: Barker, 140. “died of a peculiar disease”: Barker, 62–63. “Whoever or whatever”: Barker, 139. “last great public investigative enterprise”: Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 69, quoting David and Therese Marie Barclay, eds., UFOs: The Final Answer? (London: Blandford Press, 1993). mimeographed NJAAP Bulletin: The NJAAP Bulletin, November 27, 1963, David Halperin: Journal of a UFO Investigator, 2019, http://www.davidhalperin.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/NJAAP-Bulletin1.pdf. On April 24 . . . Lonnie Zamora: J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), 144–45; Patrick Huyghe, Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat (New York: Paraview Press, 2001), 309–33; Matt Graeber, “21st Century UFOlogy, Part IV—Socorro Revisited,” SUNlite 2, no. 2 (March-April 2010), 15–21, http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/SUNlite2_2.pdf; “Socorro CE2/CE3,” UFOE3 2:1083–93; see Frederik Pohl, “The Fanciful World of Flying Saucers,” in The NEW Report on Flying Saucers: By the Publishers of TRUE, ed. Frank Bowers (New York: Fawcett, 1967), 48–49, 73–76. Glassboro, New Jersey: David Halperin, “UFO Landing in Glassboro, NJ—Fifty Years Ago,” David Halperin (blog), September 12, 2014, http://www.davidhalperin.net/ufo-landing-in-glassboro-nj-fifty-years-ago/. the publisher will recall: Ed Conroy, Report on Communion: An Independent Investigation of and Commentary on Whitley Strieber’s Communion (New York: William Morrow, 1989), 38, quoting publisher James Landis. New York Times bestseller list: “Adult New York Times Adult Hardcover Best Seller Listings,” September 20, 1987, Hawes Publications, http://www.hawes.com/pastlist.htm.

CHAPTER 2: SCENES FROM MAGONIA

Charles Lindbergh . . . Carl Jung: A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh (New York: Putnam’s, 1998), 511–12; Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 572–73; Arthur I. Miller, Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 244–46. The source for the encounter is an unpublished letter written by Lindbergh on December 11, 1968. a mantra for Jung’s old teacher, Sigmund Freud: Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 381. “UFOs Considered in a Non-Psychological Light”: C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 146–53. “repressed uterus”: Jung, 30. Jacques Vallee . . . Claude Lacombe: Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 144; Mark O’Connell, The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 320, who quotes J. Allen Hynek as proposing French space scientist Claude Poher as the model for the Lacombe character. Kripal’s view seems the more solidly grounded. Passport to Magonia: Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969). Thomas Jefferson: Anna Berkes, “Who Is the Liar Now?,” Monticello (blog and community), November 14, 2008, http://www.monticello.org/site/blog-and-community/posts/who-liar-now. Magonia, “land of the magicians”: Miceal Ross, “Anchors in a Three-Decker World,” Folklore 109 (1998): 63–75; David Halperin, “The Magonia Problem,” posted November 19, 2011, on Magonia, currently accessible at More Magonia (blog), http://moremagonia.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-magonia-problem.html. “psychosocial” theory: Jerome Clark, “The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis in the Early UFO Age,” in UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of Knowledge, ed. David M. Jacobs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 139; Clark, “Psychosocial Hypothesis,” UFOE3 2:938–48; Thomas E. Bullard, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 252–85; David Clarke, How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth (London: Aurum Press, 2015). The outstanding organ of the “psychosocial” theory until 2008 was John Rimmer’s Magonia, which maintains a web presence at Magonia Archive, http://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/. classic W. C. Fields movie: The Fatal Glass of Beer, prod. Mack Sennett (Paramount Pictures, 1933). UFOlogist Matt Graeber’s phone: The account that follows is taken from Matt Graeber, “The Cat and Mice Game,” SUNlite 1, no. 4 (November-December 2009): 20–24, http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/SUNlite1_4.pdf. The drawing, reproduced here from an original provided through the kindness of the late UFOlogist’s son, Matt Graeber, Jr., was made by Graeber from the witness’s sketch. Saturn-like ring: Richard H. Hall, “Dyad ‘Scout Craft,’” IUR 25, no. 4 (Winter 2000–01): 23–25; David Halperin, “A Case from the ‘International UFO Reporter’—Scout Craft or Psychic Entities?,” David Halperin (blog), November 17, 2015, http://www.david-halperin.net/a-case-from-the-international-ufo-reporter-scout-craft-or-psychic-entities/. my Facebook Fan Page: David Halperin, January 13, 2013, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator; “Austin Powers (part 2) Giant Johnson,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/EkdOAgQMQvA. Footnote 7: Soviet moon probe Zond IV: Thomas Bullard, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 30–31. Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Kevin D. Randle, “UFOs on Memory Lane,” IUR 26, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 9–11, 30; David Halperin, “A Case from the ‘International UFO Reporter’—Scout Craft or Psychic Entities?,” David Halperin (blog), November 17, 2015, http://www.davidhalperin.net/a-case-from-the-international-ufo-reporter-scout-craft-or-psychic-entities/. the skies of Belgium . . . were filled with them: Eric Ouellet, Illuminations: The UFO Experience as a Parapsychological Event (San Antonio and Charlottesville: Anomalist Books, 2015), 67–89, based largely on the two-volume report published by SOBEPS (Société belge d’étude des phénomènes spatiaux): Vague d’OVNI sur la Belgique: Un dossier exceptionnel (1991) and Vague d’OVNI sur la Belgique, tome 2: Une énigme non résolue (1994). For other accounts of the Belgian wave, see Richard M. Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973–1991 (Rochester, NY: Keyhole Publishing, 2009), 500–502, 519–26; Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (New York: Harmony Books, 2010), 17–40. The systematic history of the triangular UFO: David Marler, Triangular UFOs: An Estimate of the Situation (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013; I owe this reference to Warren Naujalis); see also the index to Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State, s.v. “triangle-shaped aerial objects.” “signs and wonders” in the skies: Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009); Vallee and Aubeck, Wonders in the Sky, deluxe ed., rev. (San Francisco: Documatica Research, 2016). Yet radar is not infallible: Kenneth R. Hardy, “Unusual Radar Echoes,” in Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, eds., UFO’s—A Scientific Debate (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1972), 183–89; Allan Hendry, The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating and Reporting UFO Sightings (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), 70–71, 223–36. without benefit of drink or drugs or sensory deprivation: cf. Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). Morton Schatzman . . . “Ruth”: Morton Schatzman, The Story of Ruth (New York: Putnam’s, 1980). Historian Ronald Hutton: Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 269–71. Footnote 10: A single mother in her thirties: Russ Estes, in Kevin P. Randle, Russ Estes, and William P. Cone, The Abduction Enigma (New York: Forge Books, 1999), 72–79. “Miracle of the Sun”: Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 275–82. “Flying Saucers of Other Days”: Harold T. Wilkins, Flying Saucers on the Attack (New York: Citadel Press, 1954), 157–203. suggestions of Jacques Vallee: Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About UFO Influence on the Human Race (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), summarized in D. W. Pasulka, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 162–71. archival research by Portuguese UFOlogists: translated from the Portuguese and published by Anomalist Books in its Fátima Trilogy: Joaquim Fernandes and Fina d’Armada, Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon (San Antonio and New York: Anomalist Books, 2005); Joaquim Fernandes and Fina d’Armada, Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fátima Incident (2006); Fernando Fernandes, Joaquim Fernandes, and Raul Berenguel, Fátima Revisited: The Apparition Phenomenon in Ufology, Psychology, and Science (2008). Footnote 11: Truman Bethurum: Truman Bethurum, Aboard a Flying Saucer (Los Angeles: DeVorss, 1954); “Bethurum Contact Claims,” UFOE3 1:192–93. Abraham Cardozo: David J. Halperin, Abraham Miguel Cardozo: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001), 84–86, 285–88. Fifty thousand . . . Johannes Kepler: Edward Rosen, trans., Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 15. science-fiction bestseller of 1638: Francis Godwin, Man in the Moone; or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, summarized in Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 71–85. “all dressed in black”: Halperin, Cardozo, 389n37. The variant makes clear that all three entities were clad in black. Virgin of the Immaculate Conception: David Halperin, “Abraham Miguel Cardozo and the Woman on the Moon,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 8 (2003): 51–64. the quaternity: C. G. Jung, “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” in Psychology and Religion: West and East, vol. 11 of Jung, Collected Works (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1958), 109–200. ancient rabbinic literature: David J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision (Tübingen, Ger.: J. C. B. Mohr, 1988), 190–91. A cigar, Freud . . . cigar: Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006), 29–30. Four Messiahs: Halperin, Cardozo, 249–51, 264–66. “Gill sighting”: in addition to the VFSRS report cited in note 8 in the chapter text, see J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), 145–50, 241–42; Donald H. Menzel, “UFO’s—The Modern Myth,” Appendix 1, in UFO’s—A Scientific Debate, ed. Carl Sagan and Thornton Page (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 146–53; Philip J. Klass, UFOs Explained (New York: Random House, 1974), 234–44; “Gill CE3,” UFOE3 1:533–36; and a series of important articles by Martin Kottmeyer: “Gill Again: The Father Gill Case Reconsidered,” Magonia 54 (November 1995) and Magonia 55 (March 1996), http://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/2013/12/gill-again-father-gill-case-reconsidered.html; Kottmeyer, “The Astronomical Solution to Father William Gill’s Position Sketches of 5 UFOs Seen over Papua, New Guinea on the evening of June 26, 1959,” The REALL News 15, no. 5 (May 2007): 1, 4–9; Kottmeyer, “Gill’s Sketch of 8 UFOs—A Solution,” Mrherr Zaar Facebook page, May 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/la.wan.3538/posts/1895276350714620?__tn__=K-R. twenty-five of them: The names—twenty-five, including Gill, and including six teachers and two medical assistants—are listed on p. 12 of the VFSRS report. The introduction to Gill’s report by the VFSRS speaks of twenty-seven people having signed “the original statement examined by VFSRS investigators.” Had two people requested their names be deleted? “they were angels”: attributed to Gill, not by name but by clear allusion, in Gary Bates, Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the Evolution Connection (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2004), 221. Bates claims to have heard Gill say this “at a conference I attended” (no date given). I thank Martin Kottmeyer for supplying me with this reference. Gill offered a string of rejoinders: quoted in “Gill CE3,” UFOE3 1:535. Nearly twenty years: UFOE3 1:535. Gill . . . scoffed at both ideas: UFOE3 1:535. We humans . . . subtle ways: Bruce M. Hood, Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable (New York: Harper One, 2009), 25. An indigenous belief: Bill Gammage, The Sky Travellers: Journeys in New Guinea 1938–39 (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press of Melbourne University Press, 1998), 1. the land of the cargo cults: Peter Lawrence, Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1964); Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968); G. W. Trompf, ed., Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1990); Trompf, “UFO Religions and Cargo Cults,” in UFO Religions, ed. Christopher Partridge (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 221–38. The possibility of a “cargo” connection in the Gill sighting is discussed but deemed improbable in Kottmeyer, “Gill Again” (November 1995). Papuan university student: G. W. Trompf, Melanesian Religion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 123–26. “That ‘great white leader’ business”: UFOE3 1:535. The information that Gill left Boianai in September 1959 is on p. 534. “totality . . . the archetype of self”: Jung, Flying Saucers, 20–21. “if we got them to land”: UFOE3 1:535.

CHAPTER 3: THE ABDUCTIONS BEGIN

Betty and Barney Hill . . . Benjamin Simon: John G. Fuller, The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer”, with introduction by Benjamin Simon, MD (New York: Dial Press, 1966). The presenting symptoms (other than Barney’s high blood pressure) are listed by Simon on p. 278, the blood pressure and the warts on p. 53. “in analysing a dream”: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 555. Betty wrote a week later to Major Donald E. Keyhoe: letter to Donald Keyhoe, September 26, 1961, in Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 29–30. Transcripts of the tape-recorded hypnotic sessions: February 22 transcript in Fuller, ch. 5. “This is not a flying saucer”: Fuller, 78. “I want to wake up”: Fuller, 82–83. “showed very marked emotional discharge”: Fuller, 103. UFO debunker Philip Klass: UFOs—Identified (New York: Random House, 1968), 229–30. Walter Webb . . . reported: quoted in Stanton T. Friedman and Kathleen Marden, Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2007), 52. “Dr. Simon had become sort of a close friend”: Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 132. “I was hunting for rabbits”: Fuller, 88–89. a past even more distant: suggestion anticipated by C. B. Scott Jones, “Push My Buttons: Color and Sex,” in Phoenix in the Labyrinth (Falls Church, VA: Human Potential Foundation, 1995), 52–75, cited by Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 238. I have not seen Jones’s book. The year: 1763: Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 88–90. You were abducted: Rediker, The Slave Ship, 102. “dark faces, framed by small holes”: Rediker, 2. slave ships . . . altogether fantastic: Rediker, 104–5, 147. reaching into her mouth: Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 175–76. attention to their potential purchases’ teeth: Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 22–23; contemporary accounts of slave auctions at “Slave Auction, 1859,” Eyewitness to History, 2005, http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/slaveauction.htm; “Slave Auctions: Selections from 19th-Century Narratives of Formerly Enslaved African Americans,” The Making of African American Identity, vol 1., 1500–1865, National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox, 2007, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/enslavement/text2/slaveauctions.pdf. Footnote 16: one slave-trade historian’s description: Taylor, If We Must Die, 22–23. Footnote 17: “My mouth was opened”: Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 187. “two dreams, really”: Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 238. No such “body of water” is mentioned in the appendix to Fuller’s book (295–302), which purports to be an account of Betty’s dreams that she wrote down shortly after the experience (and well before the hypnosis). I have my doubts whether this narrative is what it claims to be. It feels much too fluent and coherent, not at all dreamlike, and it presupposes that the UFO pilots are a different species from us—whereas throughout most of the hypnotic sessions they’re treated as essentially human. his neck is left bruised: Fuller, 254–55. “coffles” . . . neck: Taylor, If We Must Die, 15; Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (Pittsburg, 1854), in Ulrich B. Phillips, Plantation and Frontier, 1649–1863 (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1909), 59; David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries . . . (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866), 374–79, from which figure 3 is taken; this and other illustrations in “Capture of Slaves and Coffles in Africa,” Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/itemset/38. children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors: Dina Wardi, quoted in Daan van Kampenhout, The Tears of the Ancestors: Victims and Perpetrators in the Tribal Soul (Phoenix, AZ: Zeig, Tucker & Theisen, 2008), 70; M. Gerard Fromm, ed., Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma Across Generations (London: Karnac Books, 2011). Footnote 18: “Ghost in Your Genes”: “The Ghost in Your Genes” (transcript), NOVA, PBS, October 16, 2007, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3413_genes.html; cf. the more skeptical treatment in Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 97–114. “I would look over at Betty”: Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 255. Philip Klass: Klass, UFOs—Identified, 230. another New Hampshire family: Jim Macdonald, “Alien Abduction: Betty & Barney Hill,” Making Light (blog), posted September 19, 2007, http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009378.html. the observation tower had been torn down: “Details for Benchmark: PF0988,” royswkr, “Fire tower . . . now removed,” 9/24/2008 post, Geocaching, http://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.aspx?PID=PF0988. An earlier note, dated 8/3/2007, “confirmed that the tower is still there.” It was apparently replaced: Tim Printy, “Taking the Betty and Barney Hill Drive,” SUNlite 4, no. 2 (March-April 2012), 6–9, http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/SUNlite4_2.pdf. “slanted . . . but not like a Chinese”: Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 88. a sketch he made: Fuller, 143; reproduced as figure 4. Barney later told John Fuller: Fuller, 260. UFO skeptic and pop-culture expert Martin Kottmeyer: Martin Kottmeyer, “The Eyes that Spoke,” Skeptical Inquirer 4, no. 3 (September 1994), http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/eyes_that_spoke/. “the eyes don’t have a body”: Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 95. “white men with horrible looks”: Taylor, If We Must Die, 26; Rediker, The Slave Ship, 108; both quoting The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, published in 1789, describing events of 1754, during the former slave’s childhood, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15399. pushing a long needle: Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 164–65. “My groin feels cold . . . cup around my groin”: Fuller, 117, 123. historical highway marker: Lee Speigel, “Betty and Barney Hill UFO Abduction Story Commemorated On Official N.H. Highway Plaque,” Huffington Post, July 25, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/25/betty-and-barney-hill-ufo-experience_n_907770.html.

CHAPTER 4: THE LURE OF THE UNREMEMBERED

Dr. Rima Laibow: Dr. Rima Laibow, interview by Patrick Huyghe, in Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat (New York: Paraview Press, 2001), 144–46; originally published in OMNI, September 1993. stellar sales: “Adult New York Times Adult Hardcover Best Seller Listings,” Hawes Publications, http://www.hawes.com/pastlist.htm. no critical acclaim whatsoever: Gregory Benford, “They’re Only Humanoids,” New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1987; David Brooks, “Summertime Best Sellers: Irrationality Pays,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1987. a master artist named Ted Jacobs: “About/Faculty,” Studio Escalier: Contemporary Classical Art Center, n.d., https://studioescalier.com/students/faculty/; “Classical Realism,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Realism. An extensive website showcasing Jacobs’s work, which I saw a few years ago, appears to have been removed. nearly two hundred thousand such letters: Whitley and Anne Strieber, The Communion Letters (London: Simon & Schuster, 1998; originally published 1997), 3, and dedication page; different numbers in Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Random House, 2016), 32. The archive of surviving letters, numbering in the thousands, is now available to researchers in the Anne and Whitley Strieber Collection, Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston. A selection of about one hundred is published in The Communion Letters. “Sitting right there on the kitchen stove”: The Communion Letters, 27–29. One man recalled: John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 271. biochemist Kary Mullis: Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 130–36. Easy to make fun: Thomas M. Disch’s reviews in The Nation of Communion (March 14, 1987) and its sequel Transformation (November 14, 1988) provide repellent examples. The anal rape described by Strieber (see next section of this chapter) was cruelly parodied in Trey Parker and Matt Stone, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe,” South Park (pilot), August 1997, Comedy Central Network. temporal lobe epilepsy: Philip J. Klass, UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), 135–36; cf. the exchange of letters between Ed Conroy and Dr. Donald F. Klein in Ed Conroy, Report on Communion: An Independent Investigation of and Commentary on Whitley Strieber’s Communion (New York: William Morrow, 1989), 43–51. the night of December 26, 1985: Whitley Strieber, Communion: A True Story (New York: Avon Books, 1987), 11–21. “the most essentially and powerfully feminine presence”: Strieber and Kripal, The Super Natural, 130. Klein hypnotized Strieber: transcripts in Strieber, Communion, 52–66 (March 1), 69–84 (March 6), 144–51 (March 10), 152–60 (March 14). Klein would author a statement: Strieber, 303; cf. Conroy, Report on Communion, 48. Strieber speaks of being sodomized: Strieber, Communion, 77–79 (March 6). he could not tell what he remembered from what he imagined: University of Texas episode discussed in Conroy, 91–96. Two further examples of the fluidity of Strieber’s memories at David Halperin, “Alien Abduction, ‘Erotic Mysticism’—The Strieber and Kripal Challenge (Part 2), David Halperin (blog), November 18, 2016, https://www.davidhalperin.net/alien-abduction-erotic-mysticism-the-strieber-and-kripal-challenge-part-2. a short story called “Pain”: Whitley Strieber, “Pain,” in Dennis Etchison, ed., Cutting Edge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986), https://www.scribd.com/document/194411862/Pain-by-Whitley-Strieber. Disch’s review of Communion in The Nation stresses the importance of this story for understanding Communion. Cf. Strieber and Kripal, The Super Natural, 131–33. she and the “powerfully feminine presence” . . . were one and the same: cf. Strieber and Kripal, 133. “anima” . . . “unconscious”: Strieber, Communion, 100. “little green men”: Martin S. Kottmeyer, “Little Green Men,” The Anomalist 10 (2002), 189–218. said to have crashed in 1948: Frank Scully, Behind the Flying Saucers (New York: Henry Holt, 1950). For this and the incidents described in the following paragraphs, see “Scully Hoax,” UFOE3 2:1044–47; “Kelly-Hopkinsville CE3,” UFOE3 1:642–43; “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” UFOE3 1:269–70; “Villas-Boas CE3,” UFOE3 2:1226–29. Footnote 22: “terrifying round object”: Whitley Strieber, Communion: A True Story (New York: Avon Books, 1987), 131. Footnote 23: Coral and Jim Lorenzen: Coral Lorenzen and Jim Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants (New York: New American Library, 1967), 42–72. shifted the blood-red hair: Coral Lorenzen, interview with Kevin D. Randle (1972) in Kevin D. Randle, Russ Estes, and William P. Cone, The Abduction Enigma (New York: Forge Books, 1999), 33. Footnote 24: J. Allen Hynek: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972). abducting aliens come in different shapes and sizes: Thomas E. Bullard, UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery, vol. 1 (Bloomington, IN: Fund for UFO Research, 1987), 238–80. “The large, compelling eyes”: Bullard, vol. 1, 243–45. the much-publicized abduction at Pascagoula: “Pascagoula Abduction Case,” UFOE3 2:893–98. The illustrations in Patrick Huyghe, The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials (New York: Avon Books, 1996) convey how little the eyes were characteristic of UFO aliens prior to the growth of the abduction tradition, and particularly prior to 1987. sometimes proposed as a model: e.g., Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 234. “Wells of darkness” . . . “old gods”: Strieber, Communion, 166, 89, 100. sitting with Ted Jacobs: Strieber, 165–66. the ever-helpful Budd Hopkins: Jacobs had worked with Hopkins at least since 1980, when he provided a painting of the alien abductors of “Steven Kilburn” (pseudonym) for Budd Hopkins, Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1981). Abductions’ Heyday: The 1990s: David M. Jacobs, Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994); C. D. B. Bryan, Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at MIT (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Thomas E. Bullard, “Abduction Phenomenon,” UFOE3 1:1–38. A story circulated: not quite an urban legend, since the witness—Bruce Lee, a senior editor for Communion’s publisher William Morrow—was not only identified but stood by his story. First reported by Tracy Cochran, “Invasion of the Strieber Snatchers,” New York, March 30, 1987, 26 (citing an unnamed “senior editor”); Whitley Strieber, afterword, Transformation: The Breakthrough (New York: Avon Books, 1988), 235–37; and Conroy, Report on Communion, 39–42. that number had leaped into the thousands: In the summer of 1992, Thomas E. Bullard sent a survey questionnaire to thirty-one abduction investigators; thirteen sent back usable responses. Those thirteen claimed to have dealt with a total of 1,700 cases of abduction: Bullard, “The Influence of Investigators on UFO Abduction Reports: Results of a Survey,” in Andrea Pritchard et al., Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference Held at MIT, Cambridge, MA (Cambridge, MA: North Cambridge Press, 1994), 571–619; more fully in The Sympathetic Ear: Investigators as Variables in UFO Abduction Reports (Mt. Rainier, MD: Fund for UFO Research, 1995). Extrapolate these figures to all thirty-one individuals queried, and the number of reported abductions rises above four thousand. Roper poll of doubtful methodology: Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the Data from Three National Surveys Conducted by the Roper Organization (Las Vegas: Bigelow Holding Corporation, 1992); Robert L. Hall, Mark Rodeghier, and Donald A. Johnson, “The Prevalence of Abductions: A Closer Look,” JUFOS n.s. 4 (1992): 131–35; Peter Brookesmith, “Roper’s Latest Knot: The 1998 Abduction Survey,” The Anomalist 8 (2000): 32–38; Huyghe, Swamp Gas Times, 235–39. Footnote 28: the comic strip Guy Stuff: Denver Post, July 28, July 30, August 1, 1992. the vanished children: Bullard, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 178–79; “Abduction Phenomenon,” UFOE3 1:17. Bullard traces the popularity of the missing-children motif to the story of “Kathie Davis,” made famous through Budd Hopkins, Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (New York: Random House, 1987). alien eyes . . . their sexual overtones sometimes very blatant: Jacobs, Secret Life, 96–99, 198, 202. A male abductee: Mack, Abduction, 177–200. “Screen memories”: Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 301–22 (originally published in German in 1899). For the concept in the abduction literature, see Jacobs, Secret Life, 50; Geoff Olson, “The Eyes Have It,” IUR 19, no. 6 (November-December 1994): 10–12; Strieber in Strieber and Kripal, The Super Natural, 214. The friendship soured: Klass, UFO Abductions, 141–49; cf. “Strieber, Louis Whitley,” UFOE3 2:1112–14; Strieber, Transformation, 274–76. The UFO Controversy in America: David M. Jacobs, The UFO Controversy in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975). “We now know the alarming dimensions”: David M. Jacobs, The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 258. biography of T. E. Lawrence: John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). raised in a secular Jewish household: Ralph Blumenthal, “Alien Nation: Have Humans Been Abducted by Extraterrestrials?” posted May 10, 2013, Vanity Fair, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/05/americans-alien-abduction-science, published as “Alien Invasion” in the June 2013 print issue. The thread running through Mack’s endeavors: Stephen Rae, “John Mack,” New York Times Magazine, March 20, 1994, 30–33. his hands-down favorite was an Israeli woman: Mack, Abduction, 241–62. In Beirut in 1980: John E. Mack, “Trying to Make a Difference,” in Ellen L. Bassuk and Rebecca W. Carman, eds., The Doctor-Activist: Physicians Fighting for Social Change (New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 1996), 224–25. Lawrence . . . was also a pro-Zionist: Mack, Prince of Our Disorder, 252–53, 259–61, 268–69; cf. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon Books, 1989), 345; Andrew Lawler, “Alien Concepts: An Interview with Dr. John Mack,” John Mack Institute, 2001, originally published in New Age Journal, July 2001, http://johnemackinstitute.org/2001/07/alien-concepts-an-interview-with-dr-john-mack/. Bassett proclaimed her coup: James Willwerth, “The Man From Outer Space,” Time, April 25, 1994, 74–75, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,164273,00.html; Thomas G. Genoni, Jr., “Exploring Mind, Memory, and the Psychology of Belief,” Skeptical Inquirer 19, no. 1 (January/February 1995), https://www.csicop.org/si/show/exploring_mind_memory_and_the_psychology_of_belief. Philip Klass wondered rhetorically: UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), 168–69. Hopkins . . . using the words “I bet”: Bryan, Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, 370, 386. “Underground!” Bryan, 375. The friend who’d shared: Bryan, 392. The psychiatrist James S. Gordon: “The UFO Experience,” Atlantic Monthly 268, no. 2 (August 1991), 82–92. Carl Sagan: Budd Hopkins, “Carl Sagan and Me,” IUR 22, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 11–12, 28–30. A second Roper poll: Brookesmith, “Roper’s Latest Knot.” The “implants”: Keith Basterfield, “The Implant Motif in UFO Abduction Literature,” JUFOS n.s. 8 (2003): 49–83. not the era’s only expedition back into the mists of the unremembered: cf. Thomas Bullard, “False Memories and UFO Abductions,” JUFOS n.s. 8: 85–160. “You may have no conscious memory of being abused”: Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (New York: Perennial Library, 1988), 22. The backlash . . . was ferocious: Bass and Davis, “Honoring the Truth: A Response to the Backlash,” in The Courage to Heal, 3rd ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), http://fsa-cc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/HONORING-THE-TRUTH.pdf. The literature on the controversy is extensive and often vehement. The case for the essential reliability of recovered memories is stated eloquently, and in my view persuasively, by Ross E. Cheit, “Consider This, Skeptics of Recovered Memory,” Ethics & Behavior 8 (1998), 141–60; Ross E. Cheit, “Junk Skepticism and Recovered Memory: A Reply to Piper,” Ethics & Behavior 9 (1999), 295–318; Ross E. Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Cf. Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 173–201. Bessel van der Kolk: van der Kolk, 191. “part of a pattern so shocking”: Strieber and Kripal, The Super Natural, 208–9. “the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse”: Susan Marie Powers, “Thematic Contact Analyses of the Reports of UFO Abductees and Close Encounter Witnesses: Indications of Repressed Sexual Abuse,” JUFOS n.s. 5 (1994): 52. “One possible explanation”: Susan Marie Powers, “Dissociation in Alleged Extraterrestrial Abductees,” Dissociation 7 (1994): 49. Cf. Susan Marie Powers, “Fantasy Proneness, Amnesia, and the UFO Abduction Phenomenon,” Dissociation 4 (1991): 46–54; George K. Ganaway, “Historical versus Narrative Truth: Clarifying the Role of Exogenous Trauma in the Etiology of MPD and Its Variants,” Dissociation 2 (1989): 205–20, UFO abductions discussed on 213–14. David Jacobs wrote in 1992: Jacobs, Secret Life, 286. Hopkins did a hypnotic regression: Bryan, Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, 224, 353–57, 383. His family pleaded for clemency: Will Bueche, “Driver in Dr. John Mack Accident Sentenced,” UFO UpDates (mailing list), October 8, 2005, http://ufoupdateslist.com/2005/oct/m08–012.shtml, drawing on a notice that had appeared on http://www.johnemackinstitute.org. David Jacobs soldiered on: Jack Brewer, “The Bizarre World of Doctor David Jacobs: An Interview and Review,” The UFO Trail, April 26, April 29, and May 3, 2012, http://ufotrail.blogspot.com/2012/04/bizarre-world-of-doctor-david-jacobs.html. Abductions were still reported and remembered: Bullard, “Abduction Phenomenon,” UFOE3 1:10–13. Martin Kottmeyer, “Abduction Mythos Master Chronology” (which he was kind enough to share with me) lists 464 abduction reports from 2000 through 2014 (though often referring to incidents that allegedly happened years earlier). The notorious cases of “Emma Woods” (pseudonym for one of Jacobs’s abductees) and James Mortellaro (one of Hopkins’s) belong to the first half of this period: Jeremy Vaeni, “Aliens vs. Predator: The Incredible Visitations at Emma Woods,” UFO Magazine 24, no. 1, issue 154 (December 2010): 34–45, https://cropcirclefilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/UFO-Magazone-online-102010.pdf; Carol Rainey, “The Priests of High Strangeness: Co-creation of the ‘Alien Abduction Phenomenon,’” Paratopia 1, no. 1 (January 2011), http://www.carolrainey.com/pdf/ParatopiaMag_vol1_1–15-11.pdf; Jack Brewer, The Grays Have Been Framed: Exploitation in the UFO Community (privately published, 2016), 43–106. “huge staring eyes of the old gods”: Strieber, Communion, 100. Predionica mask: Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe 7000–3500 BC: Myths, Legends and Cult Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 57–66. Michael Hesemann’s UFOs: The Secret History: Michael Hesemann, UFOs: The Secret History (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1998), 449. Kottmeyer also cites Lynne Kitei, The Phoenix Lights: A Skeptic’s Discovery That We Are Not Alone (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2004), 220; I have not seen this book. Random coincidences . . . are part of our daily lives: David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014). Footnote 33: “doppelgängers” . . . posted to the Web: Luke Darby, “This App Matches Your Face to a Museum Portrait and the Results May Vary,” GQ, January 14, 2018, https://www.gq.com/story/app-face-museum-portrait; Steve Dent, “Google’s Museum App Finds Your Fine Art Doppelgänger,” Engadget, January 15, 2018, https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/15/googles-museum-app-finds-your-fine-art-doppelganger/. “That book started to sell”: Conroy, Report on Communion, 38.

CHAPTER 5: ANCIENT ABDUCTEES

Footnote 34: abducted . . . from the dock in the Pascagoula River: Ralph and Judy Blum, Beyond Earth: Man’s Contact with UFOs (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), 9–36; Philip J. Klass, UFOs Explained (New York: Random House, 1974), 293–311; Tony Nugent, “Quicksilver in Twilight: A Close Encounter with a Hermetic Eye,” in Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience, ed. Dennis Stillings (St. Paul, MN: Archaeus Project, vol. 5, 1989), 109–24; audio and transcription of the two men’s conversation in the documentary film UFO’s Invade the US (date uncertain, possibly 2009), on disc 1 of Aliens, Abductions and Extraordinary Sightings (Golden Valley, MN: Mill Creek Entertainment, 2011), approximately 21’50”–26’04”, courtesy Wendy Conners, Fadeddiscs.com (I thank Martin Kottmeyer for calling my attention to this resource); “Pascagoula Abduction Case,” UFOE3 2:893–98. Michael Lieb and Stephen C. Finley: Michael Lieb, Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). Stephen C. Finley, “The Meaning of Mother in Louis Farrakhan’s ‘Mother Wheel’: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Cosmology of the Nation of Islam’s UFO,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80 (2012): 434–65; “Hidden Away: Esotericism and Gnosticism in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam,” in Histories of the Hidden God: Concealment and Revelation in Western Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical Traditions, ed. April DeConick and Grant Adamson (Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2013), 259–80; “Mathematical Theology: Numerology in the Religious Thought of Tynnetta Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan,” in Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There Is a Mystery,” ed. Stephen C. Finley, Margarita S. Guillory, and Hugh R. Page (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015), 123–37; “The Supernatural in the African American Experience,” in Religion: Super Religion, ed. Jeffrey J. Kripal (Farmington, MI: Macmillan, 2017), 231–46. Cf. also Ilia Rashad Muhammad, UFOs and the Nation of Islam: The Source, Proof, and Reality of the Wheels (Memphis, TN: Nation Brothers, 2013), uncritical but valuable for its insider perspective; David Halperin, “An African American UFOlogy?,” David Halperin (blog), September 26, 2014, https://www.davidhalperin.net/an-african-american-ufology; Edward E. Curtis IV, “Science and Technology in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam: Astrophysical Disaster, Genetic Engineering, UFOs, White Apocalypse, and Black Resurrection,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 20 (2016): 5–31; and the touching memoir of the twin sisters Shurlene B. Wallace and Earlene V. Carr, From the MotherLand to the MotherShip (Dallas, TX: Crystal City Publications, 2001). “Ezekiel saw the wheel”: R. N. Dett, Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro as Sung at Hampton Institute (Hampton, VA: Hampton Institute Press, 1927), 60–61; “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel,” variations on lyrics, Mudcat Café (mailing list), various dates, https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=42235. “The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel”: Analog Science Fact-Fiction 67, no. 2 (March 1961): 99–115 (reprinted as The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel: Ezekiel and the Ancient Spacemen: Extreme UFOs in the Bible, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30252/30252-h/30252-h.htm). Similarly, M. K. Jessup, UFO and the Bible (New York: Citadel Press, 1956; repr. 1970 (Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1970), 55–59; Y. N. ibn A’haron [Yonah Fortner], “Extraterrestrialism as an Historical Doctrine: Part 4: K’vod Y’hova; the Glory of the Lord,” Saucer News 6, no. 4 (September 1959), 11–12; Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 37–39; Josef F. Blumrich, The Spaceships of Ezekiel (London: Corgi Books, 1974); “Ancient Astronauts in the UFO Literature,” UFOE3 1:103–14; “Extraterrestrialism,” UFOE3 1:472–73. Cf. Donald H. Menzel, Flying Saucers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 124–34, who interprets the vision (very implausibly) as an atmospheric phenomenon akin to contemporary flying saucers; and the extraordinary Ezekiel-UFO drawings found in 2008 in a wooden box abandoned by a North Carolina roadside (David Halperin, “The ‘Box of Crazy,’ UFOs, and Ezekiel’s Vision (Part 1),” David Halperin (blog), November 21, 2013, https://www.davidhalperin.net/the-box-of-crazy-ufos-and-ezekiels-vision-part-1/). mythic iconography: Othmar Keel, Jahwe-Visionen und Siegelkunst: Eine neue Deutung der Majestätsschilderungen in Jes 6, Ez 1 und 10 und Sach 4 (Stuttgart: Verlag Kathologisches Bibelwerk, 1977), 125–273. Ezekiel’s wheels: on the late fourth-century BCE Gaza coin, showing a bearded deity on a chariot-throne with prominent wheels, see Keel, Jahwe-Visionen, 273; Baruch Kanael, “Ancient Jewish Coins and Their Historical Importance,” Biblical Archaeologist 26 (1963): 40–41. Footnote 36: some early transmitter: David J. Halperin, “The Exegetical Character of Ezek. x 9–17,” Vetus Testamentum 26 (1976): 129–41, and the sources cited on 129. human-faced monsters called “cherubim”: W. F. Albright, “What Were the Cherubim?” Biblical Archaeologist 1 (1938): 1–3; Keel, Jahwe-Visionen, 15–45. bear only a distant resemblance: Keel, 253. Jung had a handle on it: Answer to Job (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984; first published in German in 1952, first published in English in 1954), 32, 33, 95–96; Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 114. “Symbols that have an archetypal foundation”: C. G. Jung, “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” in Psychology and Religion: West and East, vol. 11 of Jung, Collected Works (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1958), 111. Scriptures to be kept away from the young: Origen, “Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs,” in R. P. Lawson, trans., Origen: The Song of Songs, Commentaries and Homilies (New York: Newman Press, 1956), 23. “unless he is wise”: Mishnah, Hagigah 2:1. fire might leap out from them: Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 13a. Some researchers place them: The classic studies (favoring an early dating) are Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), 40–79; Gershom G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1960). My own views are expressed in David J. Halperin, The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1980); and David J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision (Tübingen, Ger.: J. C. B. Mohr, 1988). Important recent studies include James R. Davila, Descenders to the Chariot: The People behind the Hekhalot Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Ra’anan S. Boustan, From Martyr to Mystic: Rabbinic Martyrology and the Making of Merkavah Mysticism (Tübingen, Ger.: Mohr Siebeck, 2005); and Peter Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). The introduction to James R. Davila, Hekhalot Literature in Translation: Major Texts of Merkavah Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 2013) gives a good summary of the current state of research. a peculiar Hebrew literature called Hekhalot: published most fully by Peter Schäfer, Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur (Tübingen, Ger.: Mohr, 1981); normally cited by paragraph numbers in the Synopse, which Davila also uses for Hekhalot Literature in Translation. “Rabbi Ishmael said”: Synopse, no. 81. In one episode: Synopse, nos. 201–3. “taller than mountains” . . . “eat glowing coals out of their mangers”: Synopse, nos. 213–14. They do it to each other: Schäfer, Geniza-Fragmente zur Hekhalot-Literatur (Tübingen, Ger.: Mohr-Siebeck, 1984), no. 8, 2b, 27–32; cf. Synopse, nos. 186, 536, 796, 816. they do it to the human visitor: Synopse, no. 407. a human being can do the same to an angel: Synopse, no. 636; cf. Michael D. Swartz, Scholastic Magic: Ritual and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 140. “bring him back . . . from the vision”: Synopse, nos. 224–28, describing Nehunyah’s recall from his trance-journey, is universally regarded as an insertion into the extended story of Nehunyah’s lecture; Peter Schäfer, “Ein neues Hekhalot Rabbati-Fragment,” in Hekhalot-Studien (Tübingen, Ger.: J. C. B. Mohr, 1988), 96–103. This does not affect the likelihood of its reflecting something that was actually practiced. Gershom Scholem: Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 10. The shaman journeys in spirit: Daniel Merkur, Becoming Half Hidden: Shamanism and Initiation among the Inuit (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1985), 95–101, quoting Knud Rasmussen. On “merkavah mysticism” and shamanism, see Davila, Descenders to the Chariot. a quarter of abduction stories: Bullard, UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery, vol. 1, 112–17; “Abduction Phenomenon,” UFOE3 1:16–17. Betty Andreasson: Raymond E. Fowler, The Andreasson Affair: The Documented Investigation of a Woman’s Abduction Aboard a UFO (Newberg, OR: Wild Flower Press, 1979), 86. “a very curious . . . change of phraseology”: Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 20; Annelies Kuyt, The “Descent” to the Chariot: Towards a Description of the Terminology, Place, Function and Nature of the Yeridah in Hekhalot Literature (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1995, reviewed by David J. Halperin, Journal of Jewish Studies 47 [1996], 386–88); Guy G. Stroumsa, “Mystical Descents,” in Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys, ed. John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 139–54. “A Sexual Image in Hekhalot Rabbati and Its Implications”: David J. Halperin, “A Sexual Image in Hekhalot Rabbati and Its Implications,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on the History of Jewish Mysticism: Early Jewish Mysticism, ed. Joseph Dan (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1987; Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6, 1–2), English section, 117–32. The passage is in Synopse, nos. 244–50. “Ophannim” . . . a class of angel: Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 13b. winnowers’ sieve: reading menappim, “winnowers”; all the manuscripts are corrupt at this point. the clue in another passage: Synopse, no. 189 (also from Hekhalot Rabbati). a patient of Freud’s: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 234–35. Footnote 39: multiplication process: Based ultimately on the Targum to Ezekiel 1:6, developed in Hekhalot Zutarti (“The Lesser Treatise of the Palaces”), Synopse, no. 354. Sheela-na-gig: Jørgen Andersen, The Witch on the Wall: Medieval Erotic Sculpture in the British Isles (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1977); Anthony Weir and James Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (London: B. T. Batsford, 1986); Barbara Freitag, Sheela-na-gigs: Unravelling an Enigma (London & New York: Routledge, 2004); Georgia Rhoades, “Decoding the Sheela-na-gig,” Feminist Formations 22 (2010): 167–94. Footnote 40: The Astounding She Monster: Tim Lucas, “Close Encounters With the Astounding She Monster,” Video WatcHDog, no. 158 (September/October 2010), 16–19. Footnote 41: another Hekhalot passage: Synopse, no. 102; Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 92. More than one researcher . . . shamanic trance journeys: Alvin H. Lawson, “Perinatal Imagery in UFO Abduction Reports,” Journal of Psychohistory 12 (1984), 211–39, especially 227; Peter M. Rojcewicz, “The Extraordinary Encounter Hypothesis and Its Implications for the Study of Belief Materials,” Folklore Forum 19 (1986): 131–52; Thomas E. Bullard, “UFO Abduction Reports: The Supernatural Kidnap Narrative Returns in Technological Guise,” Journal of American Folklore 102 (1989), 147–70; Kenneth Ring, “Near-Death and UFO Encounters as Shamanic Initiations: Some Conceptual and Evolutionary Implications,” ReVISION 11 (1989): 14–22; Kenneth Ring, The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large (New York: William Morrow, 1992); John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), index s.v. “shamans.” humiliating and sometimes painful ordeals: Bullard, “UFO Abduction Reports,” 162–63. Mircea Eliade’s account: Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 34; cf. J. R. Porter, “Muhammad’s Journey to Heaven,” Numen 21 (1974), 64–80. helping spirits . . . “crow, etc.)”: Eliade, Shamanism, 89; cf. Mack, Abduction, 32, 408. “a love affair with a goddess”: Strieber, in Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Random House, 2016), 97. “in the form of a beautiful woman”: Davila, Descenders to the Chariot, 55, from Joan Halifax, Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives (New York and London: Arkana/Penguin, 1979), 120–23. “On that night in December 1985”: Strieber, in Strieber and Kripal, The Super Natural, 130. kidnapped or enticed into fairyland: Bullard, “UFO Abduction Reports,” 159–61; Thomas E. Bullard, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), index, s.v. “fairies,” and, with particular attention to the motif of stolen children and alien “hybrids,” 176–200. Georgia Rhoades: Rhoades, “Decoding the Sheela-na-gig,” 167. thinkable that this was the point: Weir and Jerman, Images of Lust, 11. coins deposited . . . worn away by caressing fingers: Rhoades, “Decoding the Sheela-na-gig,” 175, 191–92. “vulgarly called the Idol”: Andersen, Witch on the Wall, 10. ethnographic data: Andersen, 131–37, followed by Rhoades, “Decoding the Sheela-na-gig,” 173–75. Rhoades writes: Rhoades, 175. borderline between the living and the dead: cf. Freitag, Sheela-na-gigs, 68–118. one Bible scholar: Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962): 1–13, https://www.scribd.com/document/220553887/Parallelomania-by-Samuel-Sandmel. Jerome Clark: “Psychosocial Hypothesis,” UFOE3 2:938–48, quote on 946. masks a myth much like that of the Babylonians: Wilhelm Bousset, The Antichrist Legend: A Chapter in Jewish and Christian Folklore (London: Hutchinson, 1896); Umberto Cassuto, The Goddess Anath: Canaanite Epics of the Patriarchal Age (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1971); Arvid S. Kapelrud, “The Mythological Features in Genesis Chapter I and the Author’s Intentions,” Vetus Testamentum 24 (1974), 178–86. Strieber’s now deceased wife, Anne: Strieber, in Strieber and Kripal, The Super Natural, 37, 73–74. Cf. Kripal’s comments, Strieber and Kripal, 52–53; Whitley and Anne Strieber, The Communion Letters (London: Pocket Books, 1997), 259–81. Gershom Scholem thought so: Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 14–19. an important difference: Martha Himmelfarb, “The Practice of Ascent in the Ancient Mediterranean World,” in Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys, ed. John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 123–37. a Greek verb: Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), s.v. “harpazo.” Footnote 45: 2 Corinthians 12:1–5: James D. Tabor, Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise in Its Greco-Roman, Judaic, and Early Christian Contexts (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986); C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Paradise Revisited (2 Cor 12:1–12): The Jewish Mystical Background of Paul’s Apostolate,” Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993): 177–217, 265–92; cf. Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians, and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 79–94. the composite text . . . 55 CE: J. Albert Harrill, Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 169–70, following Mitchell’s analysis. not, apparently, to be equated: Morray-Jones, “Paradise Revisited,” 284–92. Morray-Jones’s own proposal, that 2 Corinthians 12:1–5 alludes to the experience in the Jerusalem Temple described in Acts 22:17–21, seems to me unconvincing. Jeffrey Kripal: Jeffrey J. Kripal, Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 82–83, 273–78, cf. 346, 385. turned sour and nasty: J. Albert Harrill, Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 61–67. Footnote 46: multiple heavens: Testament of Levi, chapters 2–3; Book of the Secrets of Enoch (2 Enoch), chapters 8–9; Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 12b. Betty Hill was shown a book: Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 173–78. “epilepsy . . . malady”: Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians, and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 11; cf. C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Paradise Revisited (2 Cor 12:1–12): The Jewish Mystical Background of Paul’s Apostolate,” Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993): 281–83. “Implants”: Keith Basterfield, “The Implant Motif in UFO Abduction Literature,” JUFOS n.s. 8 (2003): 49–83, listing 84 cases, including Strieber’s. Whitley Strieber was among them: in Strieber and Kripal, The Super Natural, 174–88. thornlike in their appearance: Roger K. Leir, The Aliens and the Scalpel: Scientific Proof of Extraterrestrial Implants in Humans (Columbus, NC: Granite Publishing, 1998), plate 15; color photos at J. J. P. Robinson, “Alien Implants: Proof of Physical Contact?,” May 13, 2017, https://www.jp-robinson.com/single-post/Alien-Implants-Proof-of-Physical-Contact.

CHAPTER 6: THREE MEN IN BLACK

although he was both: John C. Sherwood, “Gray Barker: My Friend, the Myth-Maker,” Skeptical Inquirer 22, no. 3 (May-June 1998), https://www.csicop.org/si/show/gray_barker_my_friend_the_myth-maker. He uses mythmaker in precisely the way I do not. Barker described Bender: Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (New York: University Books, 1956), 69. chief timekeeper: Max Krengel, “We Want You to Meet,” Space Review 1, no. 1 (October 1952): 12. Others . . . portrayed him differently: e.g., Robert Sheaffer, UFO Sightings: The Evidence (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 196–97, based on the self-description in Albert K. Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men (Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1962), 15–18. Two documentary films: Ralph Coon, Whispers from Space (1995); Bob Wilkinson, Shades of Gray (2009). Wilkinson’s is the masterpiece. “I am neither a scientist nor a scholar”: Barker, They Knew Too Much, 14–15. a seven-foot monster . . . near Flatwoods: Barker, 11–35. barn owl: Joe Nickell, “The Flatwoods UFO Monster,” Skeptical Inquirer 24, no. 6 (November-December 2000), https://www.csicop.org/si/show/flatwoods_ufo_monster. quarterly called The Saucerian: Barker, They Knew Too Much, 42. Barker . . . had written to him: Barker, 66–67. The IFSB . . . Space Review: “Bender Mystery,” UFOE3 1:189–92. The complete file of Space Review, October 1952–October 1953, was republished (under Bender’s name) by Saucerian Books, Clarksburg, WV, 1962. On Sunday, September 27: described in a “talking letter”—a letter spoken into a tape recorder—from Lucchesi to Barker, made on September 29 and quoted in full in Barker, They Knew Too Much, 111–22. I see no reason to question the letter’s authenticity. The following Sunday, October 4: The transcript of the interview (Barker, 129–35) is supposedly based on Roberts’s notes. Though doubtless edited by Barker for greater effect, they seem to me essentially genuine. As we’ll see in a moment, Bender’s description of the clothing of his three visitors doesn’t quite suit what Barker would have wanted him to have said; in spite of that, Barker didn’t tamper with his testimony. James Moseley . . . recalled: James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock, Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 120. Correspondence in the Barker Collection: Barker to Jessup, December 17, 1954; Jessup to Barker, December 20, 1954; Barker to Jessup, December 27, 1954; Jessup to Barker, December 28, 1954, file Jessup, Morris K. Correspondence w/Gray Barker, 1954–57, Gray Barker Collection, Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library, Clarksburg, WV (hereafter GBC). one of Barker’s . . . cards: Barker, They Knew Too Much, 95–98; referenced in Bender to Roberts, September 9, 1953, Bender Correspondence—August Roberts File, GBC. a panel of scientists: Brad Sparks, “Robertson Panel,” UFOE3 2:1012–18. Bender needed to be paid a visit: possibly preceded by an exchange of letters, in which Bender responded to an inquiry with an outline of his beliefs about flying saucers. This will explain Bender’s cryptic allusion to having sent his theory to a “friend” prior to the three men’s visit (Barker, They Knew Too Much, 132); cf. Lem M’Collum, “Mystery Visitors Halt Research: Saucerers Here Ordered to Quit,” Bridgeport Sunday Herald, November 29, 1953, which speaks of Bender’s having “submitted the report of the saucer conclusions of the IFSB” to an unnamed “higher authority.” I’m immensely grateful to the Bridgeport Public Library and to Elizabeth Van Tuyl for providing me with a scan of this article. a “nonsensical” business: Bender to Roberts, August 4, 1954, GBC. wooing Betty Rose: Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, 159–61; “Albert Bender to Wed Betty Rose Saturday,” Bridgeport Telegram, October 13, 1954. Footnote 48: Michael D. Swords: “Tales from the Barker Zone: Three Days at the Gray Barker Manuscript Depository,” IUR 17, no. 6 (November-December 1992): 4–10. Footnote 49: “suspected Red activity” . . . “fantastic rumor”: Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, 141–42. “UFO is a bucket of shit”: Greg Bishop, “Interview: James Moseley, 1994,” In Honor of Jim Moseley, February 5, 2014, https://www.jimmoseley.com/2014/02/interview-james-moseley-1994-by-greg-bishop/, originally published in The Excluded Middle magazine, 1994; recited by Moseley in both Whispers from Space and Shades of Gray. The poem’s date is uncertain. John C. Sherwood, “Gray Barker’s Book of Bunk: Mothman, Saucers, and MIB,” Skeptical Inquirer 26, no. 3 (May-June 2002), http://www.csicop.org/si/show/gray_barkers_book_of_bunk_mothman_saucers_and_mib), says that Moseley told him Barker had written it in the late 1950s. This is impossible: the poem’s “Shushed by the three men/Or masturbated by space men” is a clear allusion to the “three women in white” of Bender’s 1962 book (with women replaced by men; make of that what you will). On the other hand, the absence of any figure who came to UFOlogical prominence after 1960 suggests it can’t have been written too many years afterward. squalid pranks: Sherwood, “Gray Barker’s Book of Bunk”; Moseley and Pflock, Shockingly Close to the Truth!, 124–27 (the “Straith letter” of 1957), 199–201 (the “Lost Creek saucer film” of 1966). Whispers from Space has a long, excruciating segment on the faking of the “Lost Creek” movie and the shaming of those who were taken in by it. “Gray turned into a total hoaxer”: quoted in Jim Keith, Casebook on the Men in Black (Lilburn, GA: Illumi-Net Press, 1997), 157–58. “for God’s sake be careful” . . . “I hope not”: Barker, They Knew Too Much, 244, 246, 238. common knowledge . . . among UFOlogy’s cognoscenti: Moseley and Pflock, Shockingly Close to the Truth!, 121. autobiographical accounts . . . underage boys: interviews with Houchin and with Barker’s niece in Bob Wilkinson, Shades of Gray; Gabriel McKee, “A Contactee Canon: Gray Barker’s Saucerian Books” (paper, Sacred Literature, Secular Religion, LeMoyne College, October 2, 2015), 3–4, https://www.academia.edu/17008532/A_Contactee_Canon_Gray_Barkers_Saucerian_Books. Precisely what happened in 1962 remains obscure. Barker’s lover, interviewed in Whispers from Space, makes chilling reference to “evil children” on whom he blames the whole affair. “world . . . come to an end?” Barker, They Knew Too Much, 133. recurrent theme: e.g., 35, 166–76. Maury Island incident: “Maury Island Hoax,” UFOE3 1:720–23. The main primary sources are Kenneth Arnold’s reminiscences (nearly five years after the event) in Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer, The Coming of the Saucers (Amherst, WI: Legend Press, 1952), 9–84; and Jack Wilcox (FBI agent) to J. Edgar Hoover, memorandum, August 19, 1947, reproduced in Steven Edmiston and Scott Schaefer, The Maury Island Incident, press release (?), August 19, 2014, http://www.southkingmedia.com/wp-content/Maury%20Island%20Incident/AgentWilcoxMemo081947.pdf. Cf. Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 24–27. when the Man in Black first entered the story: Arnold (in Arnold and Palmer, Coming of the Saucers, 34–35) represents Dahl as having told him about the Man in Black in Arnold’s hotel room on the evening of July 29. A variant appears in the Wilcox memo of August 19 (9), contradicting Arnold as to both the date and the place of Dahl’s conversation with the stranger and saying nothing of the man’s black clothing or preternatural knowledge of Dahl’s experience. I assume Dahl told multiple versions of the mystery-man story in the days following the plane crash on August 1 and that in retrospect Arnold conflated one of these with Dahl’s original account of his UFO encounter, which he indeed heard in his hotel room on the evening of July 29. confessions of seventeenth-century witches: Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), 31–43; Keith, Casebook on the Men in Black, 15–26. Footnote 51: Talmudic legend: Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 39b; parallel in the Palestinian Talmud, Yoma 27a, which admittedly has the old man dressed in white on the final occasion as in his earlier encounters with the high priest, the evil omen lying solely in his entering with the priest but not going out with him. Scotland in 1670: Murray, Witch-Cult in Western Europe, 43. England in 1682: Montague Summers, The Geography of Witchcraft (Evanston & New York: University Books, 1958), 152. Tituba, the slave woman: Marion L. Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (Garden City, NY: Dolphin Books, 1949), 59; Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 53. Norway in 1730: “Men in Black,” UFOE3 1:726, drawing from Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (New York: Crown, 1959), 288–89. small metal disk . . . “Kazik”: Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, 91. implanted in him an “impulse”: Bender, 156–57. the disk vanished: Bender, 175. Barker . . . expressed reservations: Bender, 191–94. Moseley has plausibly suggested: Moseley and Pflock, Shockingly Close to the Truth! 121. they regularly abducted humans: Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, 91, 118. Footnote 53: “Suppose there was another world . . . people were black”: Barker, They Knew Too Much, 133. “a strange-looking table” . . . “Three beautiful women”: Bender, 153–55. a physical implant: Bender, 177. A casebook published in 1997: Keith, Casebook on the Men in Black; Jenny Randles, The Truth behind Men in Black (New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 1997), covers much the same ground. See also “Men in Black,” UFOE3 1:726–37. carrying a sickle: Keith, 183. MIB-themed pranks: Keith, 171–74; Randles, The Truth behind Men in Black, 158–60. Herbert Hopkins: “Oxford Abduction Case,” UFOE3 2:861–65. Clark bases his account largely on a series of Flying Saucer Review articles from 1976 and 1978 by Brent M. Raynes, Shirley C. Fickett, and Berthold Eric Schwarz, reprinted in Berthold Eric Schwarz, UFO Dynamics: Psychiatric and Psychic Aspects of The UFO Syndrome (Moore Haven, FL: Rainbow Books, 1983), 214–72. The first-person narrative in Schwarz, 241–45, is a synthesis of several versions related by Hopkins in a series of interviews; an audio recording of one of these is at Wendy Connors, “High Strangeness 03: Dr. Herbert Hopkins, MD,” Faded Discs, September 11, 1976, https://archive.org/details/HighStrangeness-Guide/03.mp3, and it is the source of most of my quotes. For Howard Hopkins’s recollections of his uncle Herbert, his cousin John, and John’s wife, Maureen, see Howard Hopkins, “The Truth About a Man in Black,” Dark Bits (blog), January 13, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20080524015603/http://howardhopkins.blogspot.com/2008/01/truth-about-man-in-black.html; and Howard Hopkins, “More MIB Weirdery,” Dark Bits (blog), January 23, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20080723185406/http://howardhopkins.blogspot.com/2008/01/more-mib-weirdery.html; cf. “The Sad Truth behind an MIB Story,” Magonia, February 27, 2009, http://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2009/02/sad-truth-behind-mib-story.html. obsolete cars that seem brand new: UFOlogist Rick Hilberg, interviewed in Shades of Gray (2009). Footnote 55: one bizarre case from 1968: Keith, Casebook on the Men in Black, 162–70; Randles, The Truth behind the Men in Black, 154–56. The witness is flawed: Even without his nephew’s testimony to his drinking, Hopkins’s bizarre insistence at the beginning of the Faded Discs interview that he had no prior interest in UFOs is enough to discredit his reliability; it’s clear from the interview that he was deeply involved in abduction research. fantastic details: Apart from those mentioned in the text, the man arrives at Hopkins’s door instantaneously after telephoning him (in an age before cell phones); he has no eyebrows or eyelashes; his speech and movements run down at the end of his visit as though he’s a machine whose battery is dying; after leaving Hopkins’s house, he vanishes, walking in a direction by which he’d have no way out of the property; once he’s gone, Hopkins finds in the driveway an inexplicable “series of marks that looked like a small caterpillar tractor tread,” which disappear overnight. Footnote 56: photographed wearing what appears to be lipstick: Wilkinson, Shades of Gray, 1 hr. 6’ 23”; cf. Moseley and Pflock, Shockingly Close to the Truth! 121. “Have you heard of men in black?” Robbie Graham, Silver Screen Saucers: Sorting Fact from Fantasy in Hollywood’s UFO Movies (Hove, UK: White Crow Books, 2015), 12–13. opening . . . second-highest grossing: “1997 Domestic Grosses,” Box Office Mojo, IMDb, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1997&p=.htm. Men in Black 3 surpassed it: Pamela McClintock, “Box Office Report: ‘Men in Black 3’ Becomes Highest-Grossing Title in Franchise,” Hollywood Reporter, July 1, 2012, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-report-men-black-mib3–will-smith-tommy-lee-jones-josh-brolin-sony-343957. Footnote 58: a visit . . . from a bizarre couple: Schwarz, UFO Dynamics, 245–50; Hopkins, “More MIB Weirdery.” “Here Come the Men in Black”: Will Smith, “Here Come the Men in Black,” Big Willie Style, 1997, Will Smith Lyrics, AZ Lyrics, https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/willsmith/meninblack.html. a nod . . . toward Frank Scully: stated as fact in Jack Womack, Flying Saucers Are Real! The UFO Library of Jack Womack (New York: Anthology Editions, 2016), 39; vs. Brian Lowry, The Truth Is Out There: The Official Guide to The X-Files (New York: HarperPrism, 1995), 11. MIBs . . . remain marginal to The X-Files: Two of them appear as semicomic figures in the highly atypical episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” April 12, 1996, a pastiche and parody of multiple features of UFO lore. The exception clarifies the rule: it’s only when we (temporarily) stop taking The X-Files plotline seriously that the Men in Black have any place in it. baroque counterhistory: Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 79–97; “Dark Side,” UFOE3 1:357–74. “Surely,” he wrote . . . “on your honor as an American”: Barker, They Knew Too Much, 132, 152. three out of four Americans trusted the government: Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2017,” December 14, 2017, http://www.people-press.org/2017/12/14/public-trust-in-government-1958–2017/?mod=article_inline. Barna Donovan: Barna Donovan, Conspiracy Films: A Tour of Dark Places in the American Conscious (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 179.

CHAPTER 7: SHAVER MYSTERY

what . . . made it a mystery: cf. Richard Toronto, War over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 119. Palmer seems to have been conscious of the oddity of the usage and to have made occasional attempts to explain it; e.g., The Observatory . . . by the Editor, AS 21, no. 4 (April 1947): 9. They were an odd couple: Toronto’s War over Lemuria is the best account of the pair and their synergy. Fred Nadis, The Man From Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2013), which focuses on Palmer, is also very much worth reading. The discussion in Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 92–111, is brief but very insightful. “Deliberate Manipulator”: Ray Palmer, foreword to The Secret World, vol. 1, 1975 (Amherst, WI: Amherst Press, 1975), 8. in September 1943: date supplied by Palmer, The Observatory, AS 21, no. 6 (June 1947): 8. Toronto, War over Lemuria, 58, gives the date as October but provides no source. This, at any rate, is the legend: questioned in Jim Pobst, Shaver Resharpened (privately published, 1982), 4–6. “tero see a dero”: The published text, “troc see a dero,” is evidently a misprint. Mantong: Ray Palmer, “Mantong: The Language of Lemuria,” appendix to “I Remember Lemuria!,” AS 19, no. 1 (March 1945): 71, 206. Miracle on 34th Street . . . fifty thousand: Toronto, War over Lemuria, 118. ultimate autodidact . . . “inner hiding place of the human mind”: Ray Palmer, “Martian Diary—Book I,” in The Secret World, 29–30. The two men struck up a correspondence: Pobst, Shaver Resharpened, 8–16, gives the following dates: December 25, 1943, Shaver mails Palmer the manuscript of “Warning to Future Man”; January 14, 1944, Palmer writes that he’s “giving serious consideration” to the manuscript; January 1944, Shaver sends Palmer an itinerary of the travels of Mutan Mion; February 1944, Shaver sends Palmer the manuscript of the story “Cavern Called Hel,” later retitled “Cave City of Hel”; early March 1944, Palmer begins the rewrite of “Warning to Future Man,” under the working title of “The True Story of Lemuria,” and Shaver writes to Palmer with an account of his voices, travails, wanderings; March 1944, the first notice hyping the forthcoming story appears in the issue of AS with the cover date of May 1944; September 1944, fuller notice hyping the story appears in the December 1944 issue; December 8, 1944, the March 1945 issue, containing “I Remember Lemuria!,” hits the stands. attributed to Shaver in a “foreword”: “I Remember Lemuria!,” AS 19, no. 1 (March 1945): 14. memories that stretched back to infancy and beyond: Palmer, “Martian Diary,” 13–17. prepublication hype: The Observatory, AS 18, no. 3 (May 1944): 6, 193. “I Remember Lemuria!”: “I Remember Lemuria!,” AS 19, no. 1: 11–70. Footnote 64: He was soon to backtrack: in an editorial footnote to Richard S. Shaver, “Thought Records of Lemuria,” AS 19, no. 2 (June 1945): 52. malformed dwarfs: “I Remember Lemuria!,” 56. our lives are brief and sorry affairs: “I Remember Lemuria!,” 46, 51, 64, 70. Footnote 65: “abandoned caves and cities”: “I Remember Lemuria!,” AS 19, no. 1: 56–57. Dero . . . “detrimental robot”: “Thought Records of Lemuria,” AS 19, no. 2: 22n. “detrimental energy robotism”: “I Remember Lemuria!,” AS 19, no. 1: 28–29. torment people on the surface . . . responsible for belief in religion: Richard Shaver, quoted in the editorial note to “I Remember Lemuria!,” 57; Ray Palmer, The Observatory, AS 21, no. 6 (June 1947): 8. “you trip him and laugh”: Ray Palmer, editorial note to Richard S. Shaver, “Thought Records of Lemuria,” AS 19, no. 2 (June 1945): 30. “Thought Records of Lemuria”: Shaver, “Thought Records of Lemuria,” AS 19, no. 2: 12–52. “This is our enemy’s pleasure palace”: Shaver, “Thought Records of Lemuria,” AS 19, no. 2: 29–30. Shaver wrote the story in January 1945: inferred from the date January 18, 1945, of “Open Letter to the World” with which he prefaces it (“Thought Records of Lemuria,” AS 19, no. 2: 12–15). First in Detroit: Toronto, War over Lemuria, 88–113. Footnote 67: Shaver himself noted the parallel: author’s footnote to “Thought Records of Lemuria,” AS 19, no. 2: 47. In an interview given in 1973: Eugene Steinberg, “The Caveat Emptor Interview: Richard S. Shaver,” Caveat Emptor 10 (November-December 1973): 5–10; issues of Caveat Emptor at http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/United%20States/Caveat%20Emptor/. Book of Job: 1:15–19. an interview twenty years later: Steinberg, “The Caveat Emptor Interview: Ray Palmer,” Caveat Emptor 1 (Fall 1971): 9–12, 26. The interview was conducted in October 1965, first published six years afterward. Footnote 71: Palmer . . . imagined: Toronto, War over Lemuria, 105. In one of his . . . footnotes: Palmer, “Thought Records of Lemuria,” AS 19, no. 2: 33. In a note on p. 34, Palmer calls Mu “an abbreviation for Lemuria.” In the regular column Report From the Forgotten Past? in the same issue, however, Palmer distinguishes the two: the continent Mu “is not to be confused with Mr. Shaver’s Lemuria which is the Earth itself” (p. 189). Lemuria was originally a scientific hypothesis: L. Sprague de Camp, Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 53–56. spinoffs of Atlantis or Atlantean: Palmer, “I Remember Lemuria!” AS 19, no. 1: 16; the home city of the Atlan narrator, Mutan Mion, is Sub Atlan, located just below “Surface Atlan” or Atlantis. The metropolis at the center of “Mother Mu” toward which Mutan Mion journeys is Tean City, probably a shortened form of “Atlantean.” “olden rite, the nocturnal Lemuria”: Ovid, Fasti, book 5, lines 419–92; Sir James George Frazer, trans., Publii Ovidii Nasonis Fastorum Libri Sex: The Fasti of Ovid, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1929), 275–81. This translation was published too late for Palmer to have seen it as a child. There were earlier translations, however, and one of these, or a book quoting one of these, is likely to have been among the holdings of the Milwaukee Public Library ca. 1920. the cover of the June 1947 Amazing Stories: All AS covers from this period at Pulps.Retro-Scans. com, http://pulps.retro-scans.com/Pulps-A/Amazing-Stories-1940–1953/Amazing-Stories.php. “That’s how it looks!” The Observatory, AS 21, no. 4 (April 1947): 8. Footnote 72: Lemuria . . . hardly occurs in the stories: The only mention of the name in “I Remember Lemuria!” after the foreword is on 52, where we present-day surface-dwellers are called “Lemurians unborn.” identifies her as the princess Vanue: Compare the cover of the March 1945 AS with the full-page illustration at the beginning of “I Remember Lemuria!” depicting “Glorious Vanue, Elder God.” “a Martian . . . abandoned”: Nadis, The Man from Mars, 206–10. the cover of the July 1943 issue: Nadis, 44–45. Cf. the September 1944 cover, where a bald, repellent, mostly naked dwarf brandishing a pistol tugs at the wrist of a lovely uniformed WAC with flaming red hair, who draws back in revulsion. Palmer with his auburn-haired beauty of a mother? Also the February 1942 cover, which parallels that of March 1945 but with perspective and power relations reversed: it’s the stooped dwarf in little boy’s clothing, not the obviously terrified young woman, who’s at the controls of what turns out to be a time machine. all but one included a story by Richard Shaver: Jim Pobst, A Checklist of the Fiction of Richard S. Shaver (Maple Ridge, BC: Spayderine Press, 1982). an extra 50,000; all 185,000 copies sold: Pobst, Shaver Resharpened, 13–15; Palmer, “Martian Diary,” 38–39; cf. Nadis, The Man from Mars, 75. sold 261,611 copies: Toronto, War over Lemuria, 152. trimmed back drastically: Bill Hamling’s recollection confirms Palmer: “Astounding Science Fiction . . . had 80,000 [readers]. Ziff-Davis had three or four times that through Palmer and the Shaver Mystery” (quoted in Toronto, 151). But Hamling and Palmer were good friends, and it’s possible Hamling was repeating the figures Palmer had fed him. Chester S. Geier estimates that AS “was selling some 90,000 copies” per month, “where a SF magazine was doing well to sell 50,000 copies and very well to sell 70,000 per month” (quoted in Toronto, 154). But in 1990, Curtis Fuller (who became Palmer’s partner in publishing Fate magazine) told Jerome Clark that “an audit indicated no significant change in circulation figures” with the advent of the Shaver Mystery (Clark, “Shaver Mystery,” The UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. [Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1998] 2:845; omitted from “Shaver Mystery,” UFOE3). telepathic messages . . . from their recently deceased pet turtle: Wesley and Bruce Herschensohn (letter), Report From the Forgotten Past?, AS 19, no. 2 (June 1945): 189–90. a letter from a certain “A.C.”: Discussions, AS 20, no. 3 (June 1946): 178. seventy-eight stories authored or coauthored: Pobst, Checklist. Not all . . . revolved around the central mythos: There’s no allusion to it, as far as I can see, in Richard S. Shaver, “The Mind Rovers,” AS 21, no. 1 (January 1947). “Calling All Crackpots” and “Crackpot Heaven”: Thomas S. Gardner, in Fantasy Commentator, spring and summer issues, 1945; quoted in William S. Baring-Gould, “Little Superman, What Now?” Harper’s Magazine 193 (September 1, 1946), 285–86; Toronto, War over Lemuria, 140–41. They passed resolutions: “A Rocketeer’s Credo,” quoted in Pobst, Shaver Resharpened, 17, from a resolution brought forward at the Fifth “World” Science Fiction Convention, Philadelphia, September 1947. In his editor’s column: The Observatory, AS 20, no. 4 (July 1946): 6. “Cult of the Witch Queen”: Richard S. Shaver and Bob McKenna, “Cult of the Witch Queen,” AS 20, no. 4 (July 1946): 10–38, 109–45. Footnote 73: whose four books: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), Wild Talents (1932); reprinted in Charles Fort, The Books of Charles Fort (New York: Henry Holt, 1941). Footnote 74: front cover . . . of Science Wonder Stories: “First Instance of the Flying Saucer as a Space Craft?,” Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange (Q&A community), September 2015, https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/103526/first-instance-of-the-flying-saucer-as-a-space-craft. proclaimed creator: Armando Simon, “Pulp Fiction UFOs: How the Origin of the Idea of UFOs Developed from the Extraterrestrial Spacecraft Depicted in Pulp Magazines,” Skeptic, Summer 2011, https://www.questia.com/read/1G1–268309705/pulp-fiction-ufos-how-the-origin-of-the-idea-of-ufos. Paul’s oeuvre: “The Official Frank R. Paul Gallery,” Room 1, n.d., Science Fiction and Fantasy Art by Frank Wu, http://www.frankwu.com/paul1.html. accompanying commentary: Alexander Blade, “Stories of the Stars,” AS 20, no. 5 (August 1946): 177. “Let’s make a few predictions”: The Observatory, AS 21, no. 4 (April 1947): 9. went to press on March 13: date given in The Observatory, AS 21, no. 6 (June 1947): 6. Palmer quoted Shaver: The Observatory, AS 21, no. 6: 8. One of the four Shaver stories: Richard S. Shaver, “Witch’s Daughter,” AS 21, no. 6: 62–88; quotes from 69, 77. “A portion . . . has now been proved!”: The Observatory, AS 21, no. 10 (October 1947): 6. shortly before July 4: date clear from Palmer, The Editor Interrupts, AS 21, no. 10: 172. “flying pie-pans”: The Editor Interrupts, AS 21, no. 10: 172. “underground hideouts of an unknown race”: The Observatory, AS 21, no. 10: 6. Shaver was less enthusiastic: Richard S. Shaver, “There’s Pie in the Sky” (letter to the editor), AS 21, no. 10: 178. beginning its long decline: Toronto, War over Lemuria, 152–72. first tentative feelers: Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer, The Coming of the Saucers (Amherst, WI: Legend Press, 1952), 20–24. he founded a new magazine, Fate: Nadis, The Man from Mars, 115–20. Gray Barker: Barker, They Knew Too Much, 147–48. evolved . . . into . . . Flying Saucers: Nadis, The Man from Mars, 164–66. “rock books” . . . “rokfogos”: Toronto, War over Lemuria, 218–22, 232–34. Footnote 76: recognized and exhibited as “outsider art”: “Richard Sharpe Shaver,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sharpe_Shaver; Michael Smith, “Drawings and Videos from Storage,” April 13–May 12, 2007, Christine Burgin Gallery, https://www.christineburgin.com/exhibitions/. “He believed in only one God”: Toronto, 235. Shaver admitted to Eugene Steinberg: Steinberg, “The Caveat Emptor Interview: Richard S. Shaver,” 6. never had much impact beyond them: I’m aware of two descriptions of the Shaver Mystery in mainstream publications, both disparaging, both in the context of broader articles on science fiction: William S. Baring-Gould, “Little Superman, What Now?” Harper’s Magazine 193 (September 1, 1946): 283–88; Winthrop Sergeant, “Through the Interstellar Looking Glass,” Life 30, no. 21 (May 21, 1951): 127–40. “The Super Race,” the cover story of Blackhawk comic book no. 103 (August 1956), http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=14359, is plainly inspired by the Shaver Mystery, perhaps mediated through Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (released on May 10, 1956; Barker to Jessup, March 29, 1956, GBC). The real money was in soft-core porn: Toronto, War over Lemuria, 180–83. he opened himself to interviewer Steinberg: “The Caveat Emptor Interview: Ray Palmer,” 11–12. told . . . a UFO conference: Toronto, War over Lemuria, 119. Footnote 77: John Keel: John Keel, “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers,” Fortean Times 41 (Winter 1983): 52–57, http://greyfalcon.us/The%20Man%20Who%20Invented%20Flying%20Saucers.htm. parroted Keel’s designation: Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 3–4; Nadis, The Man from Mars, 115–37. Both Peebles and Nadis use the catchy phrase as the title for a section or a chapter. “black and silent expanse of water”: Richard S. Shaver and Bob McKenna, “Cult of the Witch Queen,” AS 20, no. 4 (July 1946): 35. “War has come to a horrible pass”: Ray Palmer, editorial comment on R. L. Tanner, “Stay Out of the Caves!” Report from the Forgotten Past, AS 19, no. 4 (December 1945): 169.

CHAPTER 8: ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO

UFO crash at Roswell: The two most valuable book-length studies are Karl T. Pflock, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001); and Kevin D. Randle, Roswell in the 21st Century: The Evidence as It Exists Today (Naples, FL: Speaking Volumes, 2016); many excellent articles have appeared in the periodical International UFO Reporter (hereafter IUR). The only academic monograph devoted to the subject—Benson Saler, Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore, UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997)—has some useful insights but is handicapped by the authors’ patronizing contempt for the UFOlogists, referred to more than once as “true believers.” issued the following announcement: quoted in Pflock, Roswell, 26–27. He took pictures: close analysis of the circumstances in Randle, Roswell in the 21st Century, 11–23. actress Demi Moore: Bruce Handy, “Roswell or Bust: A Town Discovers Manna Crashing from Heaven and Becomes the Capital of America’s Alien Nation,” Time, June 23, 1997, 62. Stanton Friedman . . . ought to get in touch with Jesse Marcel: Don Berliner and Stanton T. Friedman, Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO (New York: Paraview Special Editions, 2004; originally published 1992), 8–11. Jesse Marcel Jr. . . . awakened one July night: Pflock, Roswell, 26, Marcel’s affidavit (dated May 6, 1991) on 268; Robert J. Durant, “C. B. Moore’s Mogul Tape,” IUR 23, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 7–9, 32. Interviewed . . . for a Roswell daily newspaper and the Associated Press: “Harassed Rancher Who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He Told About It,” Roswell Daily Record, July 9, 1947, 1 https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/4h7qzv/roswell_daily_record_july_9_1947_harassed_rancher/. The AP story appeared, e.g., in the Las Cruces (NM) Sun News, July 10, 1947, 2; I’m grateful to Janice Dunnahoo of the Southeastern New Mexico Historical Society Archives for providing a scan of this article. Quotes in the following paragraphs are from the Roswell Daily Record. what would have induced him . . . indigestible stuff: Kevin D. Randle, “Bessie Brazel’s Story,” IUR 20, no. 3 (May-June 1995): 3–5, 25; Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt, “Flight to Fort Worth: From Complicity to Cover-up,” IUR 25, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 30. In an affidavit forty-six years later: dated September 22, 1993; in Pflock, Roswell, 277–78. Bessie Brazel’s reliability as a witness is questioned in Randle, “Bessie Brazel’s Story,” and defended in a letter published by Pflock in IUR 20, no. 5 (Winter 1995). In Roswell in the 21st Century (45, 54), Randle seems to accept Pflock’s correction. its indestructibility: e.g., Jesse Marcel, interviewed in 1979 by William L. Moore and Stanton Friedman, quoted in Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, The Roswell Incident (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1980), 66. On Monday, July 7: on the date, see Pflock, Roswell, 89–92. “He brought some of the material into the house”: Pflock, 268. or possibly even without it: so Marcel told Moore and Friedman in 1979: “I heard he wasn’t authorized to do this, and I believe he was severely reprimanded for it” (Berlitz and Moore, The Roswell Incident, 68). Haut himself always insisted he acted with Blanchard’s approval: Randle, Roswell in the 21st Century, 205–28. “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer” . . . “Empties Roswell Saucer”: Scans of the newspaper articles may be found on the web by doing an image search for “roswell daily record.” Charles Moore . . . had a memory of flowered tape: Charles B. Moore, “The Early New York University Balloon Flights,” in Saler, Ziegler, and Moore, UFO Crash at Roswell, 82, 112–13, cited in Pflock, Roswell, 161–62. My description of Project Mogul follows those of Charles Moore and Pflock. Report of Air Force Research: Colonel Richard L. Weaver, Report of Air Force Research Regarding the “Roswell Incident,” July 1994, www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/ufo/report_af_roswell.pdf, which was released on September 8 and reissued the following year as part of a massive document, Richard L. Weaver and James McAndrew, The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (Washington, DC: Headquarters United States Air Force, 1995), https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a326148.pdf. Footnote 84: ‘Roswell UFO Encounter 1995’: proclamation signed by New Mexico Secretary of State Stephanie Gonzales, on display in Roswell’s International UFO Museum. columnist Molly Ivins: Molly Ivins, “We’re Odd, but Hey, We’re 221,” Raleigh News & Observer, July 4, 1997, from Fort Worth Star-Telegram. its problems: In addition to those mentioned in the text, engineer Robert A. Galganski has argued in a series of IUR articles that a Mogul balloon train could not have produced the quantity of materials discovered by Brazel: Robert Galganski, “The Roswell Debris: A Quantitative Evaluation of the Project Mogul Hypothesis,” IUR 20, no. 2 (March-April 1995): 3–6, 23–24; Robert Galganski, “An Engineer Looks at the Project Mogul Hypothesis,” IUR 23, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 3–6, 32; Robert Galganski, “The Roswell Debris Field: Size Doesn’t Matter,” IUR 25, no. 4 (Winter 2000–2001): 14–19, 30. a contemporary diary entry: journal of Dr. Albert P. Crary, published as Appendix 17 in the Air Force’s 1995 Roswell Report, entry for June 4, 1947. Randle’s analysis of the diary and its implications (Roswell in the 21st Century, 354–71) is convincing. UFOlogists have pointed out: e.g., Robert J. Durant, “Project Mogul Still a Flight of Fancy,” IUR 26, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 17–28. the recollection of Colonel Blanchard’s wife: Pflock, Roswell, 96, quoting William Moore. Cf. Thomas J. Carey, “The Continuing Search for the Roswell Archaeologists: Closing the Circle,” IUR 19, no. 1 (January-February 1994): 10, which cites a secondhand report of a crashed UFO that “everyone at first thought . . . was a Russian device, but it wasn’t.” sometimes called hieroglyphics: e.g., Jesse Marcel, quoted in Berlitz and Moore, The Roswell Incident, 66; Jesse Marcel, Jr., affidavit in Pflock, Roswell, 268; Glenn Dennis, affidavit in Pflock, Roswell, 254 (quoted below). Cf. Durant, “C.B. Moore’s Mogul Tape.” apparently decorative flower patterns: Moore’s statements about the tape are oddly inconsistent: David Halperin, “Roswell and Mogul: The Memories of Charles B. Moore, Part 2,” David Halperin (blog), May 19, 2017, https://www.davidhalperin.net/roswell-and-mogul-the-memories-of-charles-b-moore-part-2/. Vern and Jean Maltais . . . told a strange story: Berliner and Friedman, Crash at Corona, 13–14. reported in his book The Roswell Incident: Berlitz and Moore, The Roswell Incident, 53–62. Harold Baca: Berliner and Friedman, Crash at Corona, 88; Randle, Roswell in the 21st Century, 323–24. No archaeologists . . . can be found: Thomas J. Carey, “The Search for the Roswell Archaeologists: Casting the Net,” IUR 18, no. 6 (November-December 1993): 3–8, 23–24; Thomas J. Carey, “The Continuing Search for the Roswell Archaeologists: Closing the Circle,” IUR 19, no. 1 (January-February 1994): 4–12; cf. Thomas J. Carey, “The Strange Saga of ‘Cactus Jack,’” IUR 22, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 3–11. Carey’s argument that the archaeological team did exist, that its leader was Texas Tech history professor W. Curry Holden, and that Holden and his students did encounter a crashed UFO—not on the Plains of San Agustin but at the “real” impact site thirty miles north-northwest of Roswell—is unconvincing. Kevin Randle, who initially accepted it (The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell [New York: Avon Books, 1994], 7–8, 131), seems to have had second thoughts, for in Randle, Roswell in the 21st Century there’s no mention of Holden. Jim Ragsdale: Affidavit (dated January 27, 1993) in Pflock, Roswell, 272; Pflock’s index, s.v. “Ragsdale” and “Truelove”; Kevin D. Randle, “The Truth About the Jim Ragsdale Story,” IUR 21, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 13–16, 29–30. Glenn Dennis: extensively discussed in Pflock, Roswell, 127–42; Randle, Roswell in the 21st Century, 211–14. The affidavit (August 7, 1991) from which the following quotes are taken is in Pflock, 254–56. “Dennis had told them”: Randle, Roswell in the 21st Century, 141, quoting Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt, Witness to Roswell Revised and Expanded (Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books, 2009), 145. Dennis’s own account: Leon Jaroff, “Did Aliens Really Land?” Time, June 23, 1997, 70. Stanton Friedman . . . interviewed Dennis in August 1989: Berliner and Friedman, Crash at Corona, 114–20. Friedman asked Dennis for the name: reported, not in Friedman’s account of the interview, but by Pflock, Roswell, 128–34, from which the information in this paragraph is taken. Gerald Anderson . . . a liar and a hoaxer: Randle, Roswell in the 21st Century, 325–51. Footnote 89: Fanton . . . served as Dennis’s inspiration: McAndrew, Roswell Report, 82–83; followed by Pflock, Roswell, 138–39. “Dr. Buskirk”: Randle, 338–41. Anderson told Kevin Randle in February 1990: Randle, 326–27. by September 1990: interviewed by Friedman, see Berliner and Friedman, Crash at Corona, 105–8. by March 1991: interviewed by Bob Oeschler, see Randle, Roswell in the 21st Century, 334–35. Dennis’s story was featured: pointed out by Pflock, Roswell, 119. Charles A. Ziegler, in Saler, Ziegler, and Moore, UFO Crash at Roswell, 45–46, suggests, less plausibly, that the influence went the other way. as one interpreter has pointed out: Ziegler, 45–46. Judas Iscariot . . . Jews have been stereotyped: Ruth Mellinkoff, “Judas’ Red Hair and the Jews,” Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982): 31–46. children’s taunt song: Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper-Collins, 1998; originally published 1945), 61 (chapter 2). demon-god Set or Seth: Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, especially chs. 22 (359E), 30 (362E), 31 (363A), 33 (364A-B), 44 (368F), 55 (373D), with the commentary of J. Gwyn Griffiths, Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride (Cambridge, UK: University of Wales Press, 1970); H. te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion: A Study of His Role in Egyptian Mythology and Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977); te Velde, “Seth,” in Donald B. Redford, The Ancient Gods Speak: A Guide to Egyptian Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 331–34; Gay Robins, “Color Symbolism,” in Redford, 57–61; J. Hill, “Set,” Ancient Egypt Online, 2008, https://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/set.html. red-haired or ruddy-skinned: Frank Cole Babbitt picks the former option in his translation of Isis and Osiris 30 (362E) (Plutarch’s Moralia V, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann, 1936]). Griffiths chooses the latter. as a medieval devil is black: Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 68–69. he “made all the threats”: James McAndrew, The Roswell Report: Case Closed (Washington, DC: Headquarters, United States Air Force, 1997), 194, quoting the transcript of an interview used for the video Recollections of Roswell: Part 2 (Washington, DC: Fund for UFO Research, 1993). McAndrew gives no date for the interview; it seems to represent an intermediate stage between the Friedman interview of September 1990 and the Oeschler interview of March 1991. “All of a sudden”: McAndrew, Roswell Report, 191. Anderson told a reporter: Mike O’Brien, “Fact or Fantasy?” Springfield (MO) News-Leader, December 9, 1990, 5–7, quoted in Randle, Roswell in the 21st Century, 335. The Roswell Report: Case Closed: McAndrew, Roswell Report: Case Closed. Ignored for the most part by his fellow skeptics, mocked by the crashed-spaceship advocates, McAndrew is given his due by Pflock, Roswell, 140: “on key issue after key issue, his evidence and analysis are compellingly persuasive.” “dummies” . . . “plastic dolls”: McAndrew, Roswell Report, 56, 60, 191, 218. an eerie chill: McAndrew, 64, 190. I posted to my blog: David Halperin, “UFO Landing in Glassboro, NJ, Fifty Years Ago,” David Halperin (blog), September 12, 2014, https://www.davidhalperin.net/ufo-landing-in-glassboro-nj-fifty-years-ago/ (12 September 2014); discussion and analysis at David Halperin, “Glassboro to Roswell: The Telescoping of Memory,” David Halperin (blog), April 7, 2017, https://www.davidhalperin.net/glassboro-to-roswell-the-telescoping-of-memory/. The woman’s comment on my blog post was lost during an updating of my website; I have her subsequent emails on file. McAndrew tells the story: McAndrew, Roswell Report, 94–99; followed by Pflock, Roswell, 140–41. Footnote 92: Aldeburgh flying platform: “The Aldeburgh Platform,” Part 1, n.d., http://aldeburghplatform.blogspot.com/ (John Harney’s website); Chris Aubeck and Martin Shough, Return to Magonia: Investigating UFOs in History (San Antonio and Charlottesville: Anomalist Books, 2015), 299–314. The December 1915 issue of the American magazine The Electrical Experimenter featured flying platforms, imaginatively situated on Mars, on its cover: http://www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/technical/electricalexperimenter/ElectricalExperimenter1915-12.jpg.html. Did this or some similar picture influence the woman’s recollections? Footnote 93: Norio Hayakawa . . . Robert Lazar’s stories: Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 13–15. Kodachrome slides: David Halperin, “The Roswell Slides and Neil DeGrasse Tyson,” David Halperin (blog), June 18, 2015, https://www.davidhalperin.net/the-roswell-slides-and-neil-degrasse-tyson/. Charles Ziegler: in Saler, Ziegler, and Moore, UFO Crash at Roswell, 71–72. “an essential item . . . is impounded or hoarded”: Saler, Ziegler, and Moore, 51, cf. 67. Near Eastern vegetation deities: Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 25–73. Norse gods: Carolynne Larrington, The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 179–200. the Greek Icarus: following Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 8, lines 183–235, trans. A. S. Kline (2000), http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph8.htm#482327661. Canaanite deity: David J. Halperin, “Ascension or Invasion: Implications of the Heavenly Journey in Ancient Judaism,” Religion 18 (1988): 47–49, and the sources cited there. vibrant gaiety of the “Roswell UFO Festival”: Warmly and beautifully depicted by National Geographic Explorer Asher Jay in a 2017 Airbnb video, https://youtu.be/JVDAAsqdySw. Mexican Day of the Dead festivities: Stanley Brandes, Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). “the seminal event” . . . World UFO day (July 2): “World UFO Day,” Days of the Year, https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/ufo-day/. The website worldufoday.com, which would have provided firsthand information on the event, seems no longer to be functional; cf. “World UFO Day,” Wikipedia, last edited June 6, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_UFO_Day, and the sources cited there. Footnote 96: Proposed . . . as the date of the crash: Pflock, Roswell, 22–23; Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt, UFO Crash at Roswell (New York: Avon Books, 1991), 199 (versus the same authors’ timeline in their 1994 Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, where the date is shifted to July 4); Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt, “When and Where Did the Roswell Object Crash?” IUR 19, no. 1 (January-February 1994): 13–16. a modern reworking of an old Epicurean slogan: quoted on the web, e.g., at “Epicurus>Quotes>Quotable Quotes,” Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/662599-why-should-i-fear-death-if-i-am-then-death; based on Epicurus’s letter to Menoeceus in R. D. Hicks, Stoic and Epicurean (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 169, http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html). The 509th Bomb Group: “509th Composite Group,” Atomic Heritage Foundations, June 4, 2014, https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/509th-composite-group.

EPILOGUE: JOHN LENNON IN MAGONIA

“On the 23rd Aug. 1974” . . . sketch Lennon did at about the same time: Alejandro Rojas, “John Lennon’s UFO Doodle Auctioned Off,” Open Minds, March 25, 2014, http://www.openminds.tv/john-lennons-ufo-doodle-auctioned/26659 (March 25, 2014); Lee Speigel, “John Lennon’s UFO-Inspired Art Fetches Big Bucks,” Huffington Post, March 29, 2014, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-lennon-1974–ufo-drawing-auction_n_5038538.html; Jared Sauceda, “John Lennon Album Sleeve Art Recalls Alleged 1974 UFO Sighting,” Inquistr, April 21, 2014, https://www.inquisitr.com/1221048/john-lennon-album-sleeve-art-recalls-alleged-1974-ufo-sighting/. “Nobody Told Me”: John Lennon, “Nobody Told Me,” Milk and Honey, 1984, John Lennon Lyrics, AZ Lyrics, https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnlennon/nobodytoldme.html. Lennon . . . was living with Pang: Bill Harry, The John Lennon Encyclopedia (London: Virgin Books, 2001), s.v. “Pang, May,” 698–701. as she told an interviewer: Larry Warren, “There’s UFOs Over New York and John Lennon Wasn’t Too Surprised or Why I Hate December,” The Researcher, the magazine of the Merseyside Anomalies Research Association (MARA), quoted in David Halperin, “John Lennon, May Pang, and the UFO (1)—Their Story,” David Halperin (blog), February 11, 2016, https://www.davidhalperin.net/john-lennon-may-pang-and-the-ufo-1–their-story/. “I drop the clothes”: Halperin, “John Lennon, May Pang.” (I took the quote from a post on the now-defunct Examiner.com website: www.examiner.com/article/john-lennon-said-there-s-ufo-s-over-new-york-remembering-his-ufo-experience-on-august-23–1974.) “I was standing, naked”: quoted in Ray Coleman, Lennon (New York: McGraw Hill, 1985), 507–8. Cf. the 1997 interview with May Pang, “The John Lennon UFO Encounter New York 1974 August 23rd,” at https://youtu.be/Jdw4cibPh-U, 2' 5". hit it with a brick: radio interview quoted in Sauceda, “John Lennon Album Sleeve Art.” The photos turned out blank: Warren, “There’s UFOs Over New York.” “imagine” an ideal world: John Lennon, “Imagine,” Imagine, 1971, John Lennon Lyrics, AZ Lyrics, https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnlennon/imagine.html. Lennon has denied he was on any drug: Coleman, Lennon, 507–8. Unitarian minister Forrest Church: as quoted in Joe Holley, “F. Forrester Church, 61; Influential N.Y. Unitarian Minister,” Washington Post, September 29, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/28/AR2009092803831.html. Freud once wrote: The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 564.