2

ALIENATION

SUPERMAN IS A CRASHED ALIEN

“I TEACH YOU,” CRIES ZARATHUSTRA, “THE SUPERMAN! MAN IS SOMETHING THAT SHALL BE SURPASSED. WHAT, TO MAN, IS THE APE? A JOKE OR A SHAME. MAN SHALL BE THE SAME TO THE SUPERMAN: A JOKE OR SHAME. . . . MAN IS A BRIDGE CONNECTING APE AND SUPERMAN.”

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA

MAN HIMSELF MAY WELL BE A THINKING AND LIVING LABORATORY IN WHOM AND WITH WHOSE CONSCIOUS CO-OPERATION [NATURE] WILLS TO WORK OUT THE SUPERMAN, THE GOD. . . . THUS THE ETERNAL PARADOX AND ETERNAL TRUTH OF A DIVINE LIFE IN AN ANIMAL BODY . . . A SINGLE AND UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS REPRESENTING ITSELF IN LIMITED MINDS AND DIVIDED EGOS, A TRANSCENDENT, INDEFINABLE, TIMELESS AND SPACELESS BEING WHO ALONE RENDERS TIME AND SPACE AND COSMOS POSSIBLE.

SRI AUROBINDO, THE LIFE DIVINE

By the turn of the twentieth century, the universe was not what it used to be. For one thing, it was getting embarrassingly big. In the early fifteenth century, the Europeans who would colonize what they mistakenly called the New World were still living in a medieval cosmos of profound meaning but relatively comfy proportions, with the sun, moon, stars, and planets all revolving around the earth, that is, around them. Already in the early twentieth century, the human being no longer lived in the center of the universe, but on a minor planet orbiting a minor (gulp, dying) star somewhere on the outer arm of an average galaxy, of which we would soon learn that there are billions.

The cosmos was now so unspeakably vast, its physics so utterly mindbending, that individuals were simply no longer capable of processing everything. A few elite astronomers and astrophysicists may have understood a portion of the math, but no one, no one, could now fathom the total vision, much less what it all meant. Hence the famous quip of J. B. S. Haldane that “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” There was more to it than queerness, though. The human being had, in a very profound sense, lost a home and, with it, a sense of belonging. Everything, literally everything, had become fundamentally alien.

SECRET ICONS: SUPERMAN’S OCCULT ROOTS AND SPIDER-MAN’S ALIEN EYES

Superman, created by writer Jerome Siegel and artist Joseph Shuster, first appeared in June of 1938 in Action Comics #1. The two young Cleveland men, both avid science fiction fans, had created the figure back in 1933, but it was not until 1938 that they finally had a taker in National Comics (later DC Comics). The immediate success was breathtaking, with each issue selling upward of a million copies until, in effect, a new genre, a new industry, and a new subculture were all established. It was thus Superman who “literally created the comic book industry as an important publishing business.”¹ It was also Superman who gave the superhero comic its archetypal form, that is, a costumed man or woman with a secret identity and superpowers.

The occult and sci-fi backgrounds of the Man of Tomorrow are well worth teasing out. Before Siegel and Shuster created Superman, for example, the same two young men created “Dr. Mystic: The Occult Detective.” As we have it in this single two-page strip, Mystic, as he was called for short, joins his ally Zator, and together they flash along through the spirit world “at a speed greater than that of light itself” toward India and “the Seven.” Dr. Mystic’s face and build look more or less exactly like the later Superman. These same two pages also contain what Greg Sadowski has described as “comic books’ first flying caped figure,” that is, Zator.² These, then, are some of the roots of the superhero genre: a mystic flying to India in the astral plane to do occult work.

This earlier explicit occultism was gently suppressed by Siegel and Shuster until it could only be gleaned from coded details like the notion that Superman was eventually said be an exile from another planet called Krypton (first introduced on January 16, 1939), which translates, if it were Greek (which it is), as the Hidden or the Occult. Put simply, Superman is a crashed Alien from the Occult.³ The accent, though, had clearly shifted from the Occult to the Alien, that is, from the mysticism to the science fiction, which is all to say from the mytheme of Orientation to that of Alienation.

2.1   DR. MYSTIC BOUND FOR INDIA

Superman has attracted a great deal of criticism, some of it quite thoughtful, some of it grossly exaggerated. It is often claimed, for example, that the trope of the Superman was originally Nietzschean. It is then pointed out, correctly, that the Nazis loved Nietzsche’s dream of the Übermensch—the Overman, Superman or, perhaps most literally, the Superhuman. This assumed conflation of the Superman and Nazism is then extended to the entire genre of superheroes, as if being a superhero is the same thing as being a fascist. The psychoanalyst Frederic Wertham, for example, consistently conflated Superman and fascism in his famous 1950s rant against comics, The Seduction of the Innocent. Numerous writers—from Frank Miller’s The Dark Night Returns to Alan Moore’s Watchmen—have since exposed the genre to similar withering critiques from within.

But equating the Superman, much less the superhero, in toto with fascism or any other political ideology is, at best, a half truth and, at worst, a gross misrepresentation. To begin with, Nietzsche was not a Nazi, and he despised the anti-Semitism, racism, and nationalism that he saw around him: he would have hated Hitler. It was his sister who later misrepresented him to the Führer and the Nazis. His concept of the Superman, moreover, is complex, undeveloped, and by no means clear. What is clear is that the men who created Superman were Jews, as were most of the movers and shakers in the early comic-book industry. And key superheroes, like Captain America, were explicitly and consciously created to fight Hitler, not sing his praises. Finally, the roaring success of the earliest American superhero comics is intimately connected to the GIs who fought the Nazis on the European front and took their comics, Superman and all, with them, too often to their own gruesome deaths. When the moral courage of World War II was no longer needed on the European front, the superheroes simply went away. To equate Superman and the superheroes with fascism, then, is a precise reversal of the truth.

There is also the deeper historical fact that the idea of a superhuman is finally an ancient religious trope, not a political, American, or even especially Western one. Indeed, we could easily trace the notion back to what many believe to be the “first” and most primordial figure of the history of religions: the shaman. The shaman’s mystical calling through an initiatory crisis, often around puberty (mental illness, anomalous sexuality, near-death experience via visionary dismemberment or descent into the underworld, lightning strike), and subsequent magical powers (clairvoyance, soul flight, luminous energies, the acquisition of animal languages, magical battle with demons and black magicians) look a lot like our modern superhero myths. Numerous other examples, moreover, could easily be found in the history of Western mystical literature, where notions of the Divine Man abound, from Christianity’s famous man-god and the Divine Intellect (nous) of the philosopher-mystic Plotinus through Goethe’s figure of Faust to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Oversoul and hymn to humanity as “a god in ruins.”

Similar notions of humanity’s secret identity can easily be found in Asia as well. In ancient and medieval India, for example, we encounter the lore around the Siddhas or “perfected ones” of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions and the literally towering figures of Jainism (portrayed still today in immense multistory-tall standing stone figures), whose supercosmic conception of the human form and its siddhis or “perfected powers” make almost anything in the superhero comics look downright banal. Indeed, one such founding Jain teacher is known as Mahavira, literally, the “Great Hero,” or, with just a little spinning, the “Superhero.”

Closer to the present, an Indian freedom fighter turned spiritual teacher by the name of Aurobindo Ghose taught an “integral yoga” that combined evolution and Indian philosophy. Aurobindo believed that such a yoga would eventually conjure a superconsciousness that would “descend” into this world in order to integrate the upper and lower worlds and finally enable humanity to realize its own inherent divinity. He named this the Supermind and suggested that it would descend to help evolve a new “supernormal” species of “gnostic beings” that he collectively called the Superman. Yes, that’s right: the Superman. Aurobindo, of course, was well aware of Nietzsche’s earlier expression, and he meant something entirely different by his own: he meant a humanity that has taken full possession of its spiritual nature, a supernature that includes all sorts of psychical powers (the siddhis again), with which Aurobindo personally experimented and then classified and cataloged with incredible precision in his yoga journals. Aurobindo, in short, was writing out and practicing the Superman a good two decades before Siegel and Shuster came on the scene in 1938.

And on and on we could go through culture after culture. So, no, the general idea of a superman is not new, and no, it has no necessary connection to Nazism, or any other political or religious system. Of course, the American Superman displays his own nationalist dimensions. All that red, white, and blue works on many levels, including the obvious and repeatedly stated one of representing “truth, justice, and the American way.” I am not denying the obvious. I am simply suggesting that there is also a “secret life” to Superman that extends far, far beyond his latest incarnation and “descent” (or crash landing) into American pop culture.

And there is more. In a pattern that is seldom fully appreciated, Siegel and Schuster’s Superman is closely linked to the mytheme of Mutation. Hence Superman’s early epithet as “The Man of Tomorrow,” which, of course, suggests that Superman is functioning as a model for the future evolution of human nature: basically, Superman is us from the future. Hence on the very first page of Action Comics #1, we read that the alien child’s “physical structure was millions of years advanced.” We are also treated to “A Scientific Explanation of Clark Kent’s Amazing Strength.” The latter two frames employ the examples of the ant, which “can support weights hundreds of times its own,” and the grasshopper, which “leaps what to man would be the space of several city blocks,” to make its case (the early Superman could not literally fly; he leapt, like a grasshopper). To extend our reading now, we might say that the genre of the modern superhero begins with the trope of the Alien from the Occult, who is compared to a super-evolved Mutant Insect as a sign of the Future Human.

I am highlighting such themes because they are weirdly resonant with the phenomenon of the alien in twentieth-century America. As the ufologist knows, the alien experience is suffused with an insectoid pattern that is in turn linked to an evolutionary schema. Hence the spaceships or the aliens themselves are often described as “buzzing” like bees or large flies, and they often appear to share a hivelike communal mind, two features emphasized as early as 1950 by British American writer Gerald Heard, who also, by the way, wrote extensively about psychical powers, was inspired by Indian philosophy, and was committed to an evolutionary mysticism.⁴

Moreover, in countless cases, the aliens are described as either super-evolved humanoids or as instectoid, or, combining these two themes now, as humanlike insects. Hence the last century’s most famous and eloquent abductee, Whitley Streiber, who consistently described the “visitors” whom he encountered as insectlike, hivelike, or, in one scene, a “terrible insect” that “rose up beside the bed like some huge, predatory spider” (T 181). When another abductee, this one interviewed by Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, drew what she had encountered, she sketched what amounted to a humanoid bug.

2.2   SUPERMAN AS INSECT

2.3   AN INSECTOID ALIEN

Or an alien Spider-Man. This is where things get a bit uncanny. Spider-Man, after all, is the humanoid insect par excellence. Moreover, his iconic wraparound eyes—created in 1962 by Marvel monster artist Steve Ditko in Amazing Fantasy #15—reproduce, almost perfectly, the classic almond eyes of the alien. With the exception of Superman’s S, there is no superhero symbol more beloved and more iconic than Spidey’s eyes.

Is it possible that Ditko’s Spidey eyes informed the later abduction accounts of the mid-1960s, ’70s, and ’80s? The dates certainly make this possible. The first major published study of an alien abduction, Saturday Review columnist John G. Fuller’s classic The Interrupted Journey (1966), recounts the September 1961 abduction of Barney and Betty Hill, complete with multiple descriptions of the aliens as possessing large foreheads, slits for mouths, and bluish gray or metallic skin. Most of all, though, especially for Barney, there were the awed descriptions of those haunting, vaguely Oriental or Asiatic “slanted” eyes.

2.4   AN INSECTOID SUPERHERO

Barney drew these eyes from within a hypnotic trance state: the sketch looks like a child’s drawing of Spider-Man’s head (with pupils now). In another passage, he describes how everything disappeared except a single eye, like, he points out, the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland: “this growing, one-beam eye, staring at me, or rather not staring at me, but being a part of me.” These eyes did strange things too. They “spoke” to him telepathically and told him not to be afraid. They carried a subtle smile. They “pushed” into his eyes as they came closer and closer. And they “burned” into his senses and left “an indelible imprint.”⁵ Such descriptions were drawn from hypnosis and therapeutic sessions that took place the first six months of 1964, well after Spider-Man’s first appearances, month after month, on the magazine racks of America. So the door of influence is left open here.

There are other likely pop-cultural sources. In “Gauche Encounters: Bad Films and the UFO Mythos,” Martin Kottmeyer traces the specifics of Betty’s dream-vision (big alien noses, examination tables, needles, and star maps) back to the imagery of the B-movie Invaders from Mars (1953) and Barney’s wraparound eyes to an episode of the PBS series The Outer Limits entitled “The Bellero Shield” (February 10, 1964). The latter episode, it turns out, aired just twelve days before the hypnosis session that produced this key iconic feature.⁶ And this is just the beginning: in case after case, Kottmeyer shows how this or that detail of this or that famous abduction looks a lot like this or that movie scene. In the end, his claim that it is “the badfilm buff” who has the privileged perspective on all things alien and abducted is difficult to counter. He has effectively reduced the paranormal to popular culture.

But is it really that simple? We have already seen Barney invoking Alice in Wonderland. Similarly, Betty herself reports asking Barney, after he has looked in astonishment at the thing in the sky through a pair of binoculars and realizes that the occupants of the craft have seen them and are coming after them, if he had watched a Twilight Zone episode recently. He doesn’t answer.⁷ My point is this: Barney and Betty’s experiences on the road clearly rendered any such simple explanations patently inadequate for them. They were perfectly aware of the possible pop-cultural influences, but these could not possibly explain the full contact experience.

2.5   DITKO’S SPIDEY EYES

This historian of religions can only agree. Many traditional religious encounters, after all, are equally “gauche” in their use of gaudy art. But just because something is encountered through the imagery of bad movies or sappy religious art does not mean that what is being encountered is a bad movie ora pious painting; it might simply mean that all religious experience is culturally conditioned, and that the human imagination often draws on the most immediate, not to mention the most colorful, to paint and frame an encounter with the sacred. It is a lesson well worth learning early in our Super-Story: trauma and Technicolor, God and the gauche, are not mutually exclusive.

Whatever we make of the ultimate iconic origins of the alien’s eyes, we can well posit that the influence eventually went the other way, that is, from the alien abduction experiences to the representations of Spider-Man, since some of the later artistic renditions of Spider-Man (including fig. 2.4) look more and more like an alien. This later “Ultimate Spider-Man” (created by artist Mark Bagley at the turn of the millennium, in 2000) approaches an almost archetypal or spiritualized form, as it moves further and further away from the human body of Peter Parker to the lithe, thin, huge-eyed, “subtle body” of the classic alien Gray.

Or Black. Consider also Spidey’s famous black suit, which first appears in 1984 in Secret Wars #8. Not only does this black suit appear at the height of the abduction narratives, and not only does it make the wall-crawler look even more like an alien, but we quickly learn that the black suit is an alien, that is, a sentient alien symbiote that can take on and exaggerate, inevitably in violent and aggressive ways, the personality features of anyone with whom it bonds (read: abducts). In the film Spider-Man 3, the alien symbiote even bonds to Peter in a manner eerily similar to the classic alien abduction experience, that is, in bed while Peter is sleeping on his back. This, I must add, is the classic physical posture and scenario of what folklorist David Hufford has called the “old hag” or “supernatural assault” tradition and tracked around the world, including through the modern American folklore of the alien and the physiology of “sleep paralysis.” Such universal experiences coded in local forms, Hufford shows, are usually terrifying experiences but also, strangely, sometimes possess ecstatic or spiritual dimensions.⁸ Rather like the blue and black Spideys.

There is also the further complication that there is one more very solid historical precedent for the modern almond eyes of the alien and the blue and black Spider-Man, and it has nothing to do with bad B-movies. That precedent is South Asian Tantric art. We are back, already, to Orientation. The slanted “alien” eye, after all, has been a standard feature of sacred art in South Asia for centuries, where it can easily be traced in any number of goddesses, including the sexually aggressive Tantric goddess Kali, one of whose classic poses (standing on her prostrate husband, Shiva, who is variously portrayed as a corpse, in ecstasy, sexually aroused, or asleep, but always on his back) renders her a remarkably apt South Asian embodiment of Hufford’s sleep paralysis traditions. The black almond-eyed Kali—known for her violent and redemptive ways, mounting a sleeping Shiva, and “bonding” with her devotees through mystical union—more than resembles the black alien suit taking on the physical form of a sleeping Peter Parker.

2.6   THE ALIEN SUIT

2.7   KALI IN HER TWO FORMS

And it gets weirder still. That Kali is usually portrayed with six limbs makes her look more than a little like a spider (okay, which has eight). Moreover, in West Bengal, where the Kali traditions are especially active, there are actually two major forms of Kali: a blue, gentle, motherly form and a black, aggressive, “sinister” form. Sound familiar?

Certainly there are numerous historical reference points here that render my speculations—really, personal confusions—more than simply suggestive. Aliens, after all, have often been described as “Oriental.” Flying discs have also been called “mandala machines,” and at least one very famous Western intellectual, C. G. Jung, even speculated that the flying saucers are mandalas—that is, Tantric circular diagrams designed to aid meditation and engender psychical wholeness—in the sky.

It is probably also relevant here that the origins of the UFO contactee cults in the 1950s were clearly linked to Theosophy and its “ascended masters,” indeed so much so that Christopher Partridge has suggested that in the UFO religions the “ascended masters” of Theosophy have been transformed into the “descended masters” of the UFO religions.⁹ Hence the first and most famous contactee, George Adamski, founded the Royal Order of Tibet in the Los Angeles of the 1930s before he claimed a sighting, on October 9, 1946, of an immense cigar-shaped UFO on Mount Palomar and became a spokesman for Orthon of Venus, appropriately (or inappropriately) just below one of America’s most famous telescopes.¹⁰ Which is all to say that Alienation easily slides back into Orientation, just as Orientation once easily slid into Alienation.

Superman and Spider-Man are by no means the only coded aliens among the superheroes. The simple truth is that, of all of my proposed mythemes, Alienation is probably the most central to both the science fiction and superhero genres. Even a series that seemingly has nothing to do with aliens, like Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan the Barbarian, set between the sinking of Atlantis and Lemuria and the dawn of human history, is filled with things like a magical star-stone (C 1.25), a Hindu-looking space-being mistakenly worshipped as a deity (C 1.93), a star-gate (C 2.64, 69), and a space-toad that manifests through a portal set up by two black monoliths (C 2.176). Indeed, I would go so far as to say that without the mytheme of Alienation, there could be no science fiction and no superhero comics. It is that foundational. This mytheme, however, is also extremely complex—historically, conceptually, and spiritually.

We might identify at least six layers here. First, there is the New Age literature of the 1980s and ’90s, filled as it is with notions of extraterrestrial contact and channeled wisdom (layer 1). This literature, however, was itself a popularizing and increasingly commercialized outgrowth of the occult “magical revival” of the American, British, and French countercultures of the 1960s and ’70s (layer 2). The origin point of the alien theme in both the countercultural and New Age literatures in turn lies partly in the much-maligned but nevertheless important early UFO contactee cults and UFO magazines of the 1950s (layer 3). These in turn were “predicted” in the pulp and fantasy literature of 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s (layer 4), which were in turn deeply indebted to the weird books of a single astonishing American author, Charles Fort, who was writing in the late teens, ’20s, and early ’30s (layer 5). Fort, however, was himself clearly influenced by the earlier novels or “scientific romances” of authors like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells (layer 6). So we have an immense literature here spanning over a century that looks something like this: New Age literature (1980s and ’90s) < countercultural occultism (1960s and ’70s) < contactee cults and UFO magazines (1950s) < pulp fiction (1920s, ’30s, and ’40s) < Charles Fort (1919–32) < scientific romance (1870s, ’80s, and ’90s). Obviously, we cannot treat all of this literature in a single little chapter. How, then, to proceed?

If I had to vote for the single most influential modern author of the paranormal as it relates to the mytheme of Alienation, I would not hesitate to choose Charles Fort. My second vote would go to the editor-author who did so much to translate various paranormal and alien themes into the garish covers and fantastic plots of the pulp fiction and paranormal magazines of the late 1940s and 1950s: Ray Palmer. Finally, if I were to pick a date around which the mytheme of Alienation orbits in the twentieth century, I would not hesitate to pick the summer of 1947. Together, these two men, immeasurably helped along by those few hot weeks, spawned an entire mythical universe in which many people are still living. It is to these two men and the events surrounding the middle of the last century that we now turn. In later chapters, I will treat some of the later contactee, countercultural, and New Age literatures that erupted in the decades that followed. In truth, we will never really leave the mytheme of Alienation.

BOOKS OF THE DAMNED: CHARLES FORT AND THE BIRTH OF THE SUPER-STORY

Charles Fort (1874–1932) was an odd, funny man who looked a lot like Teddy Roosevelt. He published a single novel and four really weird books: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932).¹¹ It is difficult to categorize these volumes, partly because Fort completely rejected the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. “I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either,” he wrote. There is only “the hyphenated state of truth-fiction” (WT 864). This is what he called his “philosophy of the hyphen.”

Nor—and this is key—did Fort believe in any stable distinction between the imagined and the physical (WT 1010). Indeed, the imagination, properly understood in its true scope, is nearly omnipotent in Fort’s worldview. Indeed, it is so powerful (and potentially perverse) that Fort suggested in more than one context that we are all living in someone else’s novel, which was not a particularly good one (BD 79). He even speculated about something called “transmediumization,” which basically boiled down to the idea that imagined things could become real, physical things.

He was quite serious about all of this (in a humorous sort of way), and he was out to prove it. His main occult method of proving that we are caught in someone else’s writing and that the world is a physical-mythical quasi-thing was a rather unique form of—what else?—reading and writing. There is a certain logic here, which is also the logic of the present book. It goes like this: if we are being written, the best way to realize this and eventually free ourselves from this writing is to read our situation more deeply, more critically, and then begin to write ourselves anew. If we do not want to be written and read this way, we must learn to read and write our lives differently.

So Charles Fort sat at a table in the New York Public Library (or, for a while, the British Museum in London), spending more or less every working afternoon for a quarter century reading the entire runs of every scientific journal and newspaper he could find, in English or French. “A search for the unexplained,” he explained, “became an obsession” (WT 918).

And he found quite a bit. In his quite ordinary newspapers and journals he found reports of frogs, fish, crabs, periwinkles, and other unidentified biological matter that fell from the sky and piled up in the ditches for anyone to see. Or smell. He found reports of rocks that fell slowly from the ceiling of a farmhouse or from the sky as if materializing out of nowhere just a few feet up. He found orphaned boys and servant girls who had the curious habit of psychically setting thing on fire, seemingly unconsciously and almost always in broad daylight (so no one, he reasoned, would get hurt). He found objects, animals, even human beings appearing out of nowhere on a cold city street or in the room of a house, apparently “teleported,” as he put it, from somewhere else.

That word that he coined, “teleport,” would have a long history in later science fiction. Any story that now employs it—from the “beam me up” of Star Trek, through the teleporting X-Men character of Nightcrawler, to the 2008 movie Jumper—is indebted to Charles Fort, whether he’s acknowledged or not. Indeed, Jumper is based on a serialized 1950s sci-fi novel called The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, which features a power called “Jaunting.” In the novel, Bester attributes the discovery of this strange ability to a man named Charles Fort Jaunte. In the recent movie, one of the teleporting or “jumping” protagonists is a fan of Marvel superhero comics. And on and on we weave.

Like Frederic Myers, Charles Fort very much liked the prefix super-. Only more so. As in the later superhero comics, almost anything could become super in the world of Charles Fort. To cite only a partial list, Fort writes of a super-bat, super-biology, super-chemistry, super-constructions, a super-dragon, super-embryology, super-evil, super-geography, a super-imagination, super-magnets, a super-mind, Super-Niagaras, a super-ocean, super-religion, the Super-Sargasso Sea, super-scientific attempts, super-sociology, super-sight, super-vehicles, super-voyagers, super-whiskeys (with ultra-bibles, no less), and super-wolves. In most of these cases, the expression carries a distinct but expansive meaning, one somewhere between and beyond our own present concepts of the paranormal and the extraterrestrial. In other words, he meant more or less what superhero comics mean by the prefix.

Fort’s total system was organized around the number three. Indeed, his entire system works through the neat dialectical progression of three Dominants or Eras. A Dominant or Era is a totalizing system of thought that defines reality for a particular culture or period. The three Dominants are important to set out here, since they also structure the Super-Story that I am trying to tell. Indeed, the Super-Story is basically a variant of Fort’s third Dominant. His three Eras or Dominants are: (1) the Old Dominant of religion, which he associates with the way of knowing called belief and the professionalism of priests; (2) the present Dominant of materialistic science, which he associates with the way of knowing called explanation and the professionalism of scientists; and (3) the New Dominant of what he calls Intermediatism, which he associates with the way of knowing called expression or acceptance and the professionalism of a new brand of individuating wizards and witches with various “wild talents”—in essence, superpowers.¹²

Whereas the first two Dominants work from what Fort called the systemic principle of Exclusionism, that is, they must exclude data to survive as stable systems (he called this “damning” a datum), the New Dominant works from the systemic principle of Inclusionism, that is, it builds an open-ended system and preserves it through the confusing inclusion of data, theoretically all data, however bizarre and offending, toward some future awakening. His The Book of the Damned, then, was so named because it contained and celebrated all those things the present Dominant of science and the previous Dominant of religion have excluded or damned.

He does not imagine, of course, that his particular expressions of the New Dominant are absolute, only that they include more and exclude less and so better approximate the Truth of things. This is why he also calls his New Dominant a species of Intermediatism. It is a humble term that announces its own demise. It is an open-ended system “intermediate,” in between, on its way to the Truth, but it is not the Truth, and it too “must some day be displaced by a more advanced quasi-delusion.” It is this sense of being intermediate, of thinking in-between, that constitutes Fort’s central insight.

Fort did not become famous for his three Dominants, however. He became famous for his many reports of what he called “super-constructions” in the sky. These were essentially spaceships, floating over cities around the world, shining searchlights, baffling witnesses, and otherwise making a mess of the rational order of things: “one of them about the size of Brooklyn, I should say, offhand. And one or more of them wheel-shaped things a goodly number of square miles in area” (BD 136). These super-constructions float through all of Fort’s texts, giving his implied narrative, which he seldom makes explicit, a certain ominous quality.

The possible implications of all of this hardly escapes Fort. He invokes the night of October 12, 1492, and the image of Native Americans gazing out over the ocean waters at lights they had never seen before. For Fort, what the newspaper stories imply is that we are all natives now, and we can no more fathom the intentions and powers of the airships than the American natives could fathom the intentions and powers of the colonial waterships. He thus speculates about a certain galactic colonialism going on, with the entire earth now as the colony.

But there are darker possibilities still. Earth may not be a colony at all. It may be a farm:

WOULD WE, IF WE COULD, EDUCATE AND SOPHISTICATE PIGS, GEESE, CATTLE?

WOULD IT BE WISE TO ESTABLISH DIPLOMATIC RELATION WITH THE HEN THAT NOW FUNCTIONS, SATISFIED WITH MERE SENSE OF ACHIEVEMENT BY WAY OF COMPENSATION? I THINK WE’RE PROPERTY. (BD 163)

Fort apparently wrote two earlier and now lost (or self-destroyed) book manuscripts, X and Y (1915–16). In Jim Steinmeyer’s reconstruction of the lost manuscript of X, largely through Fort’s correspondence with the American novelist Theodore Dreiser in a three-page letter dated May 1, 1915, it appears that X was a more confessional version of the worldview that later would be more agnostically presented in The Book of the Damned. Dreiser (who was an avid reader of Fort and helped him get his books published) was stunned by its thesis, which involved the idea that all of earthly biological and social reality is a kind of movie (we would now say “virtual world”) from the rays of some unknown alien super-consciousness (from Mars, Fort initially speculated). Dreiser, who then had a dream that seemed to confirm the thesis, summed up Fort’s X this way: “The whole thing may have been originated, somehow, somewhere else, worked out beforehand, as it were, in the brain of something or somebody and is now being orthogenetically or chemically directed from somewhere; being thrown on a screen, as it were, like a moving-picture, and we mere dot pictures, mere cell-built-up pictures, like the movies, only we are telegraphed or teleautographed from somewhere else.”¹³ But if the world can be thought of as a Martian movie, it is a movie out of which we can, conceivably at least, awaken and “step out of the screen.”

The acts of reading, collecting, and comparing all those damned stories, then, constituted a kind of occult metapractice for Fort that could lead, at any moment, to a sudden awakening. Hence Fort’s obscure but telling claim that “systematization of pseudo-data is approximation to realness or final awakening” (BD 22). He at least collected, classified, and compared in order to wake up, to become more fully conscious of reality as truth-fiction. He was not just reading the paranormal writing us (Realization), although he was certainly doing that as well with his notions of the earth as a galactic colony or farm. He also wanted now to share in the writing of the paranormal writing us (Authorization). He was ready to step out of the dream or movie screen and wake up. That’s what makes Charles Fort one of the premiere authors of the Super-Story I am writing (to not be written) here.

It is of some note that Fort was writing during a time in which the terms and rules of the science fiction genre had not yet been established, and that he wrote at least one early short story, “A Radical Corpuscle” (about a conversation between blood cells suspecting that they may be part of a larger cosmic body) that can be classed as early science fiction.¹⁴ Put a bit more to my point, Fort was writing during the exact period in which the genre was coming into clear focus. The stories of writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells had been marketed as “Voyages extraordinaires” or as “scientific romances.” It was the American pulp magazines of the 1920s—so named after the thick, cheap, and quickly yellowing paper on which they were published—that science fiction came into its own and was first named as such. The first pulp appeared in 1919, the very same year as The Book of the Damned, but it was not until editor Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, which began publication in 1926, that the industry really got off the ground. And it was Gernsback, by his own account at least, who first coined the expression “science fiction” out of an earlier, not so successful attempt—“scientifiction.”

As a perfect illustration (literally) of Fort’s fantasy future, consider the fact that in 1934, just two years after he died, parts of Fort’s Lo! were serialized in the pulp fiction magazine Astounding Stories. At the back of each issue, we come across Fort’s Lo!, described in some of the issues as “The greatest collation of factual data on superscience in existence.”¹⁵ There is that prefix again: super-.

This is how Fort’s career in science fiction began: as fiction and fact wrapped up in fantasy. By 1952, his reputation in the world of pulp fiction was considerable enough (and controversial enough) for the editor of another pulp magazine, Fantastic Story, to feel he must address it for his readers. The editorial begins with the apparently common assumption of the time that “no truly complete understanding of science-fiction is possible without at least a nodding acquaintance with the works of Charles Fort.”¹⁶ And the cover? A shapely woman in shorts stands behind some kind of astro-man sporting a long oblong oxygen tank on his back, which points to her breasts. The couple watches—she shields her eyes, he doesn’t—an explosive “eruption” in the distance that originates from the detonator poised between the man’s legs.

Now Fort was not being quite this fantastic (or this Freudian). But it is nevertheless very easy to see how he helped inspire the pulps. It is also easy to see why his first biographer was a well-known science fiction author, Damon Knight. Or why a later run of Amazing Stories would feature a series of quirky back-cover paintings illustrating Fortean scenes, from the USO we witnessed in chapter 1 (November 1947) to “The Rain of Fish” (December 1947) and “Spaceship Seen over Idaho!” (January 1948). Or, jumping closer to the present now, it is also fascinating to see how “Seed of Destruction” (1994), the opening story of Mike Mignola’s remarkable Hellboy series, begins with a reference to “the British Paranormal Society,” a clear allusion to the London Society for Psychical Research, and introduces us to the American paranormal expert Professor Malcolm Frost, who looks more than a little like Charles Fort. A few pages later, frogs fall out of nowhere in order to signal both a supernatural assault with the next page turn and, for the knowing at least, a grateful debt to Fort’s The Book of the Damned.

But it was not Fort who would finally fuse science and fiction into a potent Fortean potion of truth-fiction that would confirm the paranormal experiences of many a reader and confuse the hell out of the rest of them. That man was Ray Palmer.

2.8   FORTEAN FROGS FALL

THE PARANORMAL PULPS: THE AMAZING STORIES OF RAY PALMER

Even the man’s name alludes to paranormal powers and superhero comics. When a comic writer by the name of Gardner Fox re-visioned a Golden Age superhero called the Atom for DC Comics in 1961, he chose to give his hero an alter ego whose fantasy lineage was unmistakable: Ray Palmer. There was probably a bit of good-intentioned humor here, as Ray Palmer (the alter ego now) had the unique, and rather dubious, superpower of becoming really, really small (hence the early covers featured scenes like the Atom being picked up by a pair of tweezers and flushed down a drain), whereas Ray Palmer (the pulp fiction editor now) was really, really small in real life. The man stood a mere 4’ 8”.

There is a story here. Lots of them, actually. Palmer’s own real-life Origins story has him hit by a butcher truck at the age of seven, leaving him with a damaged spine that prevented further growth and a subsequent passion for pouring himself into pursuits, like pulp fiction, that did not require a normal body. One also wonders, though, if the broken back did more than make him a midget. One wonders whether it also opened something up, as Palmer’s life was riddled, really defined, by a whole host of precognitive and telepathic experiences, many of them connected to the imaginal band of dreams. “Ray Palmer,” then, as both the Atom and the psychically gifted pulp fiction editor, is an almost perfect cipher for my present musings on the fantastic fusions and mutual creations of superhero fiction and paranormal experience.

Palmer clearly deserves a biography of his own. We do not possess such a biography, although the writer left numerous autobiographical pieces and personal musings on everything from the nature of flying saucers and the hollow earth to the possibility of sex in heaven. In terms of the latter, he was especially interested in “the spiritually useful part of sex,” that is, “the fun part” (F 1.15.22), as opposed to the pro-creative part (and perhaps it is relevant that Palmer was a friend of Hugh Hefner and claimed that he was once offered a quarter share in Playboy [F 5.66.32]). Of particular note to the biographer are the first volume (the only one to appear) of a massive projected autobiography, The Secret World, and a chatty fanzine series featuring letters from his readers called “The Forum,” named after that part of ancient Rome where, as the cover had it, “any man could speak his mind.” Palmer certainly spoke his.

2.9   RAY PALMER AS THE ATOM

2.10   RAY PALMER AS HIMSELF

The Secret World, which appeared just two years before his death, was one of Palmer’s last publications. It opens with what I have called Realization and Authorization: again, the uncanny experience that one is being written (Realization) and the decision to take a more active role in this paranormal process (Authorization). As he begins, Palmer claims that a book like this one “just ‘happens’ by some mysterious on-going process that sometimes seems to be the whim of chance Fate, but in an awesome number of instances, seems manipulated by a Deliberate Manipulator—some super Intelligence beyond normal comprehension.” The conclusion dawns on one that “there is a Plan,” which, alas, sometimes feels more like a “Plot.” It is precisely this tension between the Plan and the Plot that fascinates Palmer so, particularly when he realizes that these different readings of a life are not “out there” somewhere, but rather express a basic duality within the person. Both the Plan and the Plot, it turns out, are in here.

The Human is Two for Palmer. This twoness spins out into numerous seeming paradoxes that are not really paradoxes, including this one: “It is as though Life is a blueprint, but a design that you manufacture yourself!” Everything, of course, depends on how one defines that “you.” Palmer, at least, was convinced that he was not who he thought he was, that his deepest self was not a “normal man,” that there was another being or “dream-maker” at work in his life. Given the nature of his reported experiences, it is easy to see why he thought this.

In terms of its own history, The Secret World is based on Palmer’s lifelong practice of writing a “Martian Diary,” which he tried to publish, without apparent success, late in life (F 5.66.27–32). He began such a diary when he was a young man as a creative way of stepping out of his culture in order to analyze it, “as though I were a visitor from Mars, researching Earth and its life forms, and was now making my report back to the home planet.” It seems to have worked, as some later readers would insist that he really was from Mars, and the women working in his office teasingly called him “the Martian” (F 1.22.24). Martian or Earthling, Ray Palmer came to realize that he had long been living “with the reality, the existence of a great Secret.” A secret life.

There are four Palmer fascinations that merit our special attention: (1) Palmer’s memory practice and his subsequent convictions in a kind of universal record or storehouse of meaning; (2) something called “the Shaver mystery”; (3) Palmer’s central role in the development of the flying saucer craze of the late 1940s and ’50s; and (4) his religious commitments to the Oahspe Bible. Here, then, are the barest outlines of Palmer’s secret life, with a special focus on these four metathemes.

If we begin at the beginning, the matter of the author’s earliest memories already lands us in some familiar Freudian territory and some unfamiliar spiritual spaces. In the course of The Secret World, Palmer explains how when he was spread out in his “torture-bed” (an orthopedic contraption called a Bradford frame) to straighten his broken back, he used to do two things: he would read voraciously, and he would practice remembering (SW 29).

In terms of the latter discipline, he would begin with what happened yesterday, then a week ago, a month ago, and so on, until he believed that he could remember very precise things about his childhood, his infancy, and beyond. One of the things he came to remember intensely was suckling at his mother’s breast. He could also remember “peering through the bars of my cradle at her, sitting naked on a chair in the sunlight beside the window, combing her long red hair, which was so long it touched the floor as she sat.” He especially remembered this beautiful naked mother crying and talking to her infant son about her own unspeakable sufferings. The infant could not understand her words, but the remembering boy could, and “it was then that I learned for the first time in my life how to hate.” This is the traumatic memory, which he refuses to explain to us, to which Palmer attributes his later vocation and his keen sense of justice. “These memories are not for this book, or any other,” he explains. “But they did influence my entire life. Coupled with the accident that crippled me, made me a hunchback, I became a lone-wolf, a bitterly determined, stubborn man dedicated to defying injustice and meanness wherever I found it” (SW 16). In a mother’s trauma, revealed to an infant boy at the breast of a beautiful naked woman, a real-life hero was born.

But Palmer’s memories did not stop there. He reports remembering back before he was born to the very moment he was conceived, “that moment when sperm mated with ovum and a single fertile cell was created.” Obviously, “we’ve left memory far behind now,” for “this has nothing to do with memory cells in a brain, because they do not yet exist. And yet I know!” (SW 17). He liked to italicize that kind of knowing. No doubt about it: Ray Palmer was a pulp fiction gnostic, a man who claimed to know things directly and immediately.

Impossible things like the possibility that “somewhere, somehow, the total sum of all knowledge exists” (SW 18). This, in fact, is an ancient idea to which we will repeatedly return in our journey through the Super-Story. Plato, for example, believed that any profound knowledge is not really learned but “remembered” from a preexistent source and life. Palmer, who shows few signs of having read Plato (Theosophy’s “Akashic Record” was probably the nearer influence), appears to have believed the same. Palmer’s most direct source of confirmation here was clearly his own occult experiences, particularly his dreams in which he would find himself present at historical events or in some sort of astral world.

Like the time he found himself “floating at some weird vantage point” where he could see all the details of a World War II naval battle as it took place. “As each ship was sunk, I would hear the name of it, and was aware of the number of men who died on each ship.” He decided to use this one as a test. Here, after all, was something he could verify. So he asked a coworker at Ziff-Davis (the publishing house where he worked at the time) to take out a piece of paper and record what he was about to say. Palmer gave him a list of names of ships together with a list of the men lost (their number, I presume). He then asked his colleague to put this information in an envelope and seal it. Eight months later, the details of the battle of Savo Island were finally released. Palmer asked his colleague to open the envelope: “I was correct to the last detail.” Palmer’s takeaway? That “somehow I was able to know something by a means that I am not able to identify.”¹⁷ When, through a kind of waking dream involving a spirit-guide, Palmer later learned the details of his brother’s death in a military hospital from injuries suffered after his leg was blown off in the same war, Palmer goes further still: “It is possible to gain information of any kind, if you want to get it earnestly enough” (SW 23).

Palmer’s first published story, “The Time Ray of Jandra” in Science Wonder Stories, was a classic example of the mytheme of Orientation, that is, it was a time-travel story that involved a lost civilization. He based the details of the landscape he wrote about on one of his many dreams (he claimed he dreamed every night and could remember his dreams in great detail), only to get a letter from a field guide in Africa who had just read the published story and was certain the writer was one of the few people whom he had personally guided up the mouth of a river on the Atlantic coast of southwest Africa: the details were all precise. The guide simply did not believe Palmer when the teenager wrote back and confessed that he had never been to Africa, much less to that particular river and secret city, which had been destroyed by a volcano exactly as Palmer had narrated. “His letters were a disaster,” Palmer writes. “They destroyed any complacency I might have had about being a normal person. . . . I dreamed true! How could this be, and what could it be?” And “if the dreaming was true, why not the imagining?” (SW 11–12). Palmer would write hundreds of stories in the future, and into each of them he would weave some little “dream-truth” from his secret life with the hope that some future readers might recognize them and write with their own confirmations, like the African guide.

In 1930, at the age of twenty, Palmer developed Pott’s Disease, a form of tuberculosis in the spine. He was admitted into Muirdale Sanatorium in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, for one purpose: to die. The doctors told him that the spine graft that had earlier saved his life was being eaten away by the disease, along with six of his vertebrae. He had a mere six months to live. Palmer responded by betting his doctor $5.00 that he was wrong. According to his own account, he then literally willed new bone into place: “For six months I held a mental picture of bone forming around that damaged series of vertebrae, first as cartilage, then slowly hardening and fusing into a solid mass” (SW 27). After those six months, that is, after the lapse of time in which he was supposed to die, Ray Palmer was taken into a conference room filled with a dozen flabbergasted doctors. The vertebrae had been encased by a solid mass of new bone and new cartilage.

In May of this same year, Palmer helped create with Walter Dennis the first fanzine in the pulp fiction world, a mimeographed bulletin called The Comet (later renamed Cosmology). He would then advance through the ranks of the pulp subculture as he held down a solid day job with a sheet-metal company on the South Side of Milwaukee. Then, in 1938, he hit it big: he became editor of one of the industry’s flagship magazines, Amazing Stories.

Palmer claims that he literally willed this position into being, like his bone. As he tells the story, he simply quit his sheet-metal job, sat in his apartment, and waited for the phone call that he wanted to come, and all of this despite the fact that Amazing Stories was published in New York City. Through a complicated series of events, the magazine was bought out by Ziff-Davis, a Chicago firm whose offices were just eighty miles away, and Palmer was offered the job (SW 26–27). He subsequently edited the magazine, and eventually all eight of its related pulp adventure titles, for Ziff-Davis from 1938 to 1949.

It was probably in the office building of Ziff-Davis in downtown Chicago that Palmer saw his first flying saucer shortly after he began working there, in 1939. It was “a brilliant silvery disk, apparently at an elevation of some 5,000 feet, directly west of Chicago’s Loop,” he writes. “It hung in the sky for more than forty-five minutes and was witnessed by more than a hundred people in the office building where [I] was located.”¹⁸ We are back to Fort’s truth-fiction: an office publishing pulp fiction on alien invasions stops its work to watch a flying saucer hover over the city. Palmer would see another flying saucer on February 4, 1952, near Amherst, Wisconsin, just after he copublished The Coming of the Saucers with Kenneth Arnold. Of course.

It was at the Ziff-Davis office building that the Shaver mystery began. This chapter in our story involved a specific sort of underground occultism. And I do mean underground, as in “under the ground.” The earlier Orientation strategies involving claims about a hollow earth took on a bizarre new life from December of 1943 to June of 1947, when Ray Palmer began obsessively publishing, really cowriting, a string of stories in Amazing Stories inspired by the occult (and probably schizophrenic) experiences of another man.¹⁹

In the course of his editorship at Ziff-Davis, Palmer would receive letters from enthusiastic readers. One day, in September of 1943, he received such a letter from a welder in Barto, Pennsylvania, by the name of Richard Shaver, which he then published in the first Amazing Stories issue of 1944. Actually, it was not a letter. It was more of a little treatise on an alleged twenty-six-lettered “ancient alphabet,” which readers would later learn was called Mantong (probably a bad pun for “Man’s Tongue”). Shaver believed that this language-key was “definite proof of the Atlantean legend.”²⁰ Palmer wrote back to ask about the source of the alphabet. Mr. Shaver responded with a ten-thousand-word story typed, Palmer explains with more than a little grace, “with what was certainly the ultimate in non-ability at the typewriter” (SW 36).

The garbled thing was entitled “A Warning to Future Man.” It set out an elaborate, deeply paranoid cosmology that Shaver claimed had been revealed to him by voices he heard emanating from the ground. Actually, he had originally picked the voices up around 1933 through his arc welder in a Ford plant in Detroit, Michigan: “I began to notice something very strange about one of the guns. Whenever I held it, I heard voices, faroff voices, of endless complexity. . . . right away I knew what was in Bill’s lunch box; which girl Bunny was going to take out that night; what Hank’s mother was planning for his wife. . . . That welding gun was, by some freak of its coils’ field attunements not a radio, but a teleradio: a thought augmentor of some power.”²¹ Shaver would come to understand these experiences through the prism of an elaborate and completely unbelievable sci-fi scenario: such “unseen rays,” he claimed, were beamed at him and other human beings by sinister machines below the surface of the earth.

According to Palmer’s reconstruction, the original story was about how the earth’s earlier inhabitants fled the surface when the sun’s radiation became too extreme about twelve thousand years ago. The lucky ones, the immortal ones called Titans or Atlans, fled their underground civilization and left in spaceships. They now live in the blackness of outer space, where they need no longer fear a star’s radiation. The not so lucky ones, the abandoned ones (called abandonderos), fled into the bowels of the earth, where they developed into two distinct races: the insane and largely sinister deros (for “detrimental robots”) and the good and noble teros (for “integrative robots”).²² Alas, the former soon outnumbered the latter and have been haunting and using the abandoned technology of the Titans and Atlans to zap the poor fools who could not escape into space or the underworld ever since—that is, us. We don’t remember any of this any longer, of course. All we have left are vague folk memories of “Atlantis” and “Lemuria” and weird stories about various species of giants, ogres, little people, gremlins, and devils, which, according to Shaver, are really all deros . . . that, or fake projections beamed up by the deros.

Much of this is, well, too much. Shaver’s ancient alphabet, for example, is clearly no such thing. It is nothing more than the English alphabet related to a series of Shaver’s own embarrassingly literalistic puns and free associations (“A—Animal [used AN for short],” “B—Be [to exist—often command],” “C—See,” and so on), which are then used to imagine a series of fake English etymologies: a handy tool perhaps for creating a fictional world, but definitely, most definitely, not an ancient alphabet. In terms of our earlier discussions, Shaver’s Mantong bears a very distant similarity to Élise Müller’s imaginary Martian and Sanskrit languages, and its claim to be the original language of the human race recalls Saint-Yves’s Vattan or Vattanian language of the subterranean kingdom of Agarttha.

No doubt relevant here is the fact that during the period Shaver claimed he was suffering in the hollow earth, he was actually, according to Palmer himself, suffering in a mental hospital. This certainly helps explain the embarrassing “Montang” alphabet episode, Shaver’s ultraparanoid fantasy of the underground deros, and his complete inability to distinguish between his visions and basic geology (which we have already seen with other hollow-earth visionaries). It does not, however, explain away the real-world weirdness that surrounded these fantasies, including Palmer’s own paranormal responses to them. This is a difficult but key point to our secret life: psychopathology and the paranormal go just fine together, as do mushrooms and religious revelation, or madness and holiness, or car wrecks and near-death experiences, or mystics and sexual trauma; once the ego is dissolved, however it is dissolved, the imaginal, the supernormal, and the spiritual can come rushing in. And when they do, they almost always rush in together. Hence the Shaver mystery.

Which was also something of an erotic mystery. Shaver, for example, likes to focus on the letter V, which he tells us stands for “vital (used as ‘vi’)” and refers to “the stuff Mesmer calls animal magnetism.”²³ When Palmer published an essay on Mantong, a single phrase was added after “animal magnetism”: “sex appeal.”²⁴ Shaver’s V probably alludes back to Bulwer-Lytton’s vril. Hence his elaborate explanations of how the deros possessed machines for rejuvenating the libido called “stim” machines (for “stimulation”). Indeed, an elaborate and explicit sexuality ran throughout the Shaver mystery stories. It is hard to miss the graphic erotic covers that advertised the Shaver issues of Amazing Stories. Or Shaver’s claims, in Jim Wentworth’s words now, that he “was given sex stim that augmented every cell impulse to a power untold, thereby producing joy and pleasure beyond description.”²⁵

Palmer’s own response to Shaver’s “A Warning to Future Man” was not too surprising. “I put a clean piece of paper into my typewriter, and using Mr. Shaver’s strange letter-manuscript as a basis, I wrote a 31,000 word story which I entitled ‘I remember Lemuria!’” It appeared in Amazing Stories in the March 1945 issue, with a preface by Shaver, who identified himself as “the racial memory receptacle of a man (or should I say a being?) named Mutant Mion, who lived many thousands of years ago in Sub Atlan, one of the great cities of ancient Lemuria! I myself cannot explain it. I know only that I remember Lemuria!” He then goes on to claim both that “What I tell you is not fiction!” and that “it is tragic that the only way I can tell my story is in the guise of fiction.” ²⁶

The early Shaver stories sold like mad. A magazine that normally ran a circulation of 50,000 quickly now ran to 185,000. The Shaver mystery was an immediate sellout. Then came the letters. And more letters. And more letters. Over fifty thousand of them, Palmer claims, before it was all over (the usual number was forty-five to fifty per issue). Stranger still was what the letters contained. Many of them recounted elaborate stories of the authors’ personal experiences with the caves, with the deros, and with the flying spaceships. “Actually,” paranormal investigator John A. Keel notes, “many of them were expressing the recognizable symptoms of paranoid-schizophrenia, while others were recounting the classic manifestations of demonology.”²⁷

Perhaps the most significant chapter of the Shaver mystery, though, is one that is not sufficiently emphasized, namely, the very real differences that existed between Palmer and Shaver. Shaver’s worldview was a deeply paranoid one in which pretty much everything of importance was traced back to evil deros and sinister machines in the hollow earth. He did not believe in God, an afterlife, a spiritual world, or paranormal powers: all such things were the purely physical and totally illusory effects of the ray machines of the deros. We have all been duped, and we are constantly being zapped in our dreams, diseases, and disasters. “The unseen world beneath our feet, malignant and horrible, is complete in its mastery of Earth,”²⁸ he declared with not a doubt or qualification in sight. So, too, there is no such thing as astral travel or spirits. The spirits seen in séances are in fact projections of the machines controlled again by entirely physical creatures seething and scheming below us. Like other hollow earthers before him, Richard Shaver was what Palmer called “an extreme materialist.”²⁹ He knew nothing of the psychology of projection, and he seemed completely incapable of thinking symbolically or metaphorically, which I take as a fairly clear symptom of whatever psychological condition he suffered.

2.11   A TYPICAL SHAVER COVER

Not so Ray Palmer. He believed in God, an afterlife, a spiritual world, and paranormal powers: all such things were perfectly real for him. His worldview may have been equally eccentric, but it was deeply spiritual and profoundly hopeful. Not to mention occasionally practical and down to earth: in a typical issue of Forum, for example, he could express his well-known opposition to the war in Vietnam, reject the principles of reincarnation and “Eastern philosophy,” refer to Shaver’s theories as “ridiculous,” and flatly reject all the conspiracy theories that had floated through his magazine pages for the real controller of modern life: money (F 1.4.4, 11, 13–14, 32, 4).³⁰ He also clearly recognized and constantly emphasized the metaphorical and symbolic nature of religious language.

An important exception here is his dual understanding of dreams. Palmer distinguishes between two kinds: (1) the “meaningless mumbo-jumbo” of the conscious and unconscious mind during sleep created by “juggled memories and imagined inventions,” which are usually seen in black and white and whose interpretation is pointless (since they possess no meaning); and (2) “the kind that seem to be actually occurring events,” which are always seen in color and should not be interpreted, since they are precisely what they seem to be (F 1.8.17, 32). In short, Palmer appears to have rejected dream interpretation in toto, even as he insisted that his astral color dreams were real experiences in real places. Hence those dream-inspired stories that turned out to be true.³¹

It was not just through astral travel and dream that one can fly, however. Palmer was also clear that the “me” or the “you” (he resisted the categories of “soul” or “spirit” as too confused and contested [F 1.16.31; 1.21.15]) is a personality that can also be dislodged from the body via those two famous acronyms: LSD and the UFO. Not that anyone should attempt such a thing. On the contrary, he pled with his readers not to trust either “opening of the door,” that is, not to take the psychedelic drug or to accept a ride on a flying saucer.³²

Indeed, Palmer (who explains that he has not taken LSD, but that he was given another drug in a hospital that had the same effect [F 5.67.22]) stated flatly that “I think LSD is an ‘open doorway’” into a real “area of existence,” but then goes on to compare the experience to “a fish out of water” discovering that there really are birds. Like the gasping fish, few individuals are truly ready for this, and such a realm should be approached only “with utmost care.” Here Palmer also objects to other common modes of surrendering one’s individuality, including automatic writing (F B.2.31–32), séances, the Ouija board, self-hypnosis, and “certain yoga practices” (F 1.15.11–18). As the latter phrase, his constant jabs at reincarnation, and his description of Madame David-Neel (a famous Western explorer and popularizer of Tibet) as “a fantastic garble of mysticism . . . containing a quite extensive weird cake-batter of pure fantasy and imagination” (F B.2.23) make more than a little clear, Orientation was a mytheme to which Ray Palmer was not the least bit attracted.

Much like Charles Fort, however, Palmer believed in intelligent civilizations in the upper atmosphere—four to one hundred miles up, he noted with an odd matter of factness. He routinely writes of these upper worlds as the true source of flying saucers, which are at once spiritual and physical. Indeed, Palmer insisted that ultimately “matter” and “Spirit” are two expressions of a single transcendent reality.³³ The flying saucer was a kind of symbol and sign of this deeper supersource.

In a similar spirit, Palmer suggests that flying saucers are “Earthly somethings.”³⁴ But by “Earth,” he does not mean what the geologists mean. He means the round rock for sure, but also the atmosphere and the magnetic fields that extend, he believes, for tens of thousands of miles into space. Like fish in water, flying saucers exist in both the outer and inner worlds of such an “Earth.” It was in this way that Ray Palmer could accept the visions of Richard Shaver but reject what he calls their “literal sense” (F 1.8.28). Palmer, for example, firmly denied the visionary’s location of the visions in the literal underworld of a physical hollow earth.³⁵ Quite the contrary, their true source is in the upperworld, in what he called the “atmospherea.”³⁶

Put a bit differently, for Palmer, Shaver’s “hollow earth” equals his own “atmospherea,” and since that atmospherea is as much a magnetic and spiritual reality as a physical one, it can penetrate our physical earth and be “underground” as well. The atmospherea, then, is a kind of alternate dimension not normally accessible to our senses in which our own understanding of “earth” and “sky,” or “up” and “down,” for that matter, mean nothing. Invoking a theosophical language, Palmer presents the atmospherea as a kind of astral plane and insists that “the planet Earth in its larger aspect, which includes its atmosphere, is more extensive than our meager science has dreamed it can be.”

Such an idea, by the way, was not original with Palmer. A West Coast psychologist by the name of Meade Layne, after making spirit contact with some aliens through a medium, published The Ether Ship Mystery and Its Solution (1950), which explained that flying saucers do not come from another planet but from another dimension.³⁷ This interdimensional reading, moreover, long a staple of Spiritualism through the famous “fourth dimension,” would have a very long life within ufology and is still very much with us today.

Palmer applied his atmospherea metaphysics to his friend’s visions and stated his “suspicion that between Shaver and the spiritualists there exists no real difference of opinion, only interpretation.” As already noted, Palmer was even more attracted to another, by now familiar nineteenth-century tradition: that of Theosophy and its key terms “astral” and “astral powers.”³⁸ Hence, in his mind at least, Shaver’s deros were degraded human spirits in the afterlife, his travels to the caves misinterpreted astral travels, and his “voices” the products of an unrecognized clairvoyance. He also pointed out, with some refreshing common sense, the reason no one could find any physical proof for Shaver’s caves: they don’t exist. ³⁹

Palmer also adamantly rejected Shaver’s claims that he was ever in any caves, “and he knows it!” He was not in some underground world those eight years. He was in an insane asylum.⁴⁰ Indeed, even in the famous “Shaver issue,” Palmer calmly states that he never believed that Shaver got his original story “from the caves.” That is precisely why Palmer retitled it according to his own psychical lights “I Remember Lemuria!” (recall that the original, more paranoid title was “A Warning to Man”).⁴¹ By “remembering,” Palmer seems to have in mind his own early experiences and some kind of access to Theosophy’s Akashic Records, or what he prefers to call “Thought Records.” In an issue of Forum, for example, he flatly explains how he and Shaver combined “fiction” and Shaver’s perception of these Thought Records (which Shaver misunderstood as literal messages) to create the entertaining pulp fiction that was demanded by the science fiction fans who read Amazing Stories. “Fiction was used as the vehicle” of the “facts,” he explains (F B.2.26).

Then there were perhaps the ultimate authorities: the wives, Marjorie Palmer and Dorothy Shaver. In November of 1950, the Palmers moved into a cabin near Amherst, Wisconsin, partly no doubt to be near the Shavers, who lived nearby. So the Shavers and the Palmers were neighbors. Both wives had some serious reservations about their husbands’ wild theories. As Wentworth describes the scene, Marjorie was well aware that Ray was considered a “nut” in the area, and Dorothy would just emphatically shake her head no whenever Richard brought up the deros and those damn rays.⁴²

Whatever one thinks of such a duo, it is difficult to deny that it was a productive one. Palmer edited and cowrote Shaver mystery stories from the December 1943 issue to the June 1947 issue. Amazing Stories could have easily been renamed The Shaver Mystery Magazine during this time, for that is what it was. Not everyone was happy about this. Many of the faithful readers of Amazing Stories eventually grew weary with the Shaver mystery and became particularly upset about the blurring of alleged fact and indubitable fantasy in the stories and Palmer’s constant enthusiastic editorializing on them. They mounted a letter-writing campaign against the team. It didn’t help that one particularly upset letter writer wrote William B. Ziff directly and explained to him that the Shaver mystery contradicted Einstein (SW 40). And that was probably a gross understatement.

In support of Shaver, Palmer resigned from the magazine and left Ziff-Davis in order to publish a new magazine with one of his former office colleagues, Curtis Fuller. Numerous titles would follow, in a very confusing but sincere series of publishing ventures, most from the Amherst cabin. Among these were Fate, Mystic, The Hidden World, Search, Flying Saucers, and Forum.

Palmer chose for his first new publishing venture with Fuller the title Fate, which was rather odd, since he did not believe in the concept. Indeed, he despised it. Hence his amazing stories about things like willing his spine graft back into place and magically acquiring the editorial job at Ziff-Davis, or his rejection of automatic writing and the ingestion of LSD. Anything that compromised a person’s freedom, self-determination, or conscious control, Ray Palmer rejected.

Fate or no fate, Fuller and Palmer hit the ball out of the park with their first issue. Fate #1 featured a cover story by a businessman and small-engine pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold, who had recently witnessed nine silvery boomerang-like shapes zip in perfect formation near Mount Rainier in Washington state. It was this sighting, on June 24, 1947, that initiated the modern flying-saucer era and gave us the modern expression “flying saucer” (a reporter by the name of Bill Bequette coined it in a newspaper article after interviewing Arnold that same day). It helped that, just a few weeks later, the papers reported on a crashed flying disc that was supposedly recovered in Roswell, New Mexico. It helped even more that this second story was denied the very next day and replaced by what looked like a lame “weather-balloon” yarn. Now we had more than a story about crashed aliens. We had a story about crashed aliens wrapped in a government cover-up.

2.12   THE FLYING SAUCER DEBUTS

Superman of Krypton had crashed nine years earlier, in the summer of 1938. Now, in the summer of 1947, he had really crashed. Or so it seemed. An entire mythology had been developed in the pulps and the superhero comics all those years. It was waiting in the wings. Now it entered American history and the front pages of newspapers across the land. And Ray Palmer would not let go. He knew when he had a good thing. So he just kept publishing stories, and more stories, on flying saucers.

In 1952, Palmer teamed up with Arnold again and cowrote The Coming of the Saucers (1952). The title sounds like a bad B-movie. Except that they were being serious. Sort of. On the acknowledgment page, the authors thank J. Edgar Hoover “for the many nice chats we had with his operatives”; Fate magazine, “for the facts”; Amazing Stories magazine, “more truth than fiction”; the Saturday Evening Post, “not so true”; and the Little Men from Venus, “who weren’t there at all.”

But really, why stop at these stories about flying saucers? Why not just name a magazine Flying Saucers? And so that is what Ray Palmer did. The October 1959 issue featured on its cover the essay title “Superman—Does He Really Exist?” It was a rhetorical question, of course. He does. As do the “cosmic men” or “‘Federation’ of super beings,” who are watching our crude technology and doing things like raining fish and frogs down on us. Clearly, the author had read both his Superman comics and his Charles Fort. He saw the connection.

Finally, there was yet another paranormal dimension to Palmer’s late publishing ventures that is well worth mentioning. As Palmer became more and more involved with the Shaver mystery, he began to ask his readers for help. They gave him help. One such letter was from a woman who sent him a book entitled Oahspe, which she somehow felt had something to say to the Shaver mystery. Richard Shaver had never heard of this strange book, but to Ray Palmer it was a literal godsend: “The book proved itself. To me, it could not be a fake. It had to be authentic—because it proved the key to all the vast amount of material I had collected in my lifetime, and especially of that amazing adventure, the Shaver Mystery. Oahspe proved Shaver, and Shaver proved Oahspe. Somewhere between both, the actual truth lies. I don’t believe the literal ‘truth’ can ever be known—we can only approximate truth in the framework of our capability of understanding” (SW 32). There was a deeply personal side to this double attraction. Basically, when Palmer read the book, he recognized numerous details that were more or less exactly like the dream-vision he had three years earlier when he had seen his dead brother and determined the cause of his death in the war: “It was this ‘dream’ experience,” he explains, “which gave me such a tremendous jolt when I found so much of it corroborated in a book written [in] 1881” (SW 23).

What was this Oahspe? It was an “American Bible” channeled to a New York dentist by the name of John Ballou Newbrough (1828–91). In his own memoirs, Palmer explains that after years of spiritual searching, which included interviewing and hosting numerous mediums in his home, Newbrough began receiving his own revelation at 4:30 a.m. on January 1, 1881. Every morning hence he would sit down at his Sholes typewriter and watch his fingers type out, as if possessed, a revelation. If mediums before him had practiced automatic writing, Newbrough had invented a new one: automatic typing. This occult writing practice continued apace until December 15, 1881, when the revelation was complete. The book was published the following year.

Newbrough’s only biographer, Daniel Simundson, describes the visionary as a romantic, a reformer (concerned especially about orphans), as rabidly anticlerical, and as deeply invested in Spiritualism and the occult.⁴³ He would eventually lead a small pacifist and vegetarian community to the deserts of New Mexico, where they hoped to found a utopia modeled after the wisdom of Oahspe. That utopia, like all utopias, failed. But the book lived on in some unexpected places, including the warm heart and yellowing pages of Ray Palmer’s pulp magazines.

When Palmer came upon this strange book, he discovered that its publisher, a man by the name of Wing Anderson, was deceased. But he also discovered that Wing had a mailing list of forty thousand people who had purchased Oahspe. Ever the savvy businessman, Palmer commandeered the mailing list for the launching of his new magazine venture, Fate, and so joined the future of Fate to the future of Oahspe.

Palmer eventually located a copy of the original edition and republished it in his “Green edition” of 1960 (SW 34). The book, like many channeled theologies, is a complex and often frankly frustrating read. There are some real nuggets here, though. Oahspe, for example, is often claimed to be the first text to use the word “starship.” It also includes a section called the Book of Thor and develops a complex theology about how gods and goddesses are advanced angels and how every angel was once a mortal, either from earth or from some other planet. The Oahspe Bible, in other words, echoes some of the more radical strands of Mormonism, which also claim, in their own specific ways of course, an eventual divinization of the elected human being (and it is probably no accident that Palmer had read The Book of Mormon [F 5.67.24]). The Divine Superman again.

I do not want to make too much of these observations, mostly because I am working from secondary sources and can claim no expertise in any of these texts. Still, it is worth at least mentioning that many aspects of Palmer’s comparative vision were thoroughly gnostic both in the sense of emphasizing direct mystical knowledge and in the deeper and more difficult sense of advancing a sharp critique of orthodox religion. Palmer described his whole life, for example, as an outcry against the concept of faith, “this unthinking, illogical, unreasoning waste of the mind!” (F 1.17.32). He accepted “all bibles, but only as books, to be analyzed and questioned” (F 1.4.22). He insisted that scriptural texts contain errors, pointed out the common mistake of calling people who believe differently “heathen,” and observed that the intolerant followers of the world religions have helped catalyze untold violence (F 5.67.25). Similarly, he understood all religions as “really only way-stations along the line”; suggested that the religious founders people often met in their afterlife visions were really “false gods” or “pretenders” of the real founders out to recruit for their own selfish kingdoms; and read scriptural texts, including the Oahspe Bible, as largely allegorical. He even encouraged his readers not to read him literally, that is, he suggested that his writings may be “allegory in the same sense” (F 1.9.8–11, 22–24).

Like the early Christian and Jewish Gnostics, moreover, Palmer often sharply distinguished between the creator god and the true God. Whereas God is “the Entirety,” completely beyond all conception and human attributes, the Creator, for Palmer, is very much like a man. Indeed, he is or was a man who has advanced to a higher role in the cosmos, for “there is no such thing as a ‘spirit’ in my dictionary—There is nobody but REAL people, living in different ways, in different localities” (F 1.9.10, 19). Such an extraordinary claim, we might observe, echoes Blavatsky’s theosophical notion that humanity was created by a Superior Being who was not supernatural but super-human.

And things got wilder and more super still. In at least one version of Palmer’s Oahspe-inspired world, humanoid beings evolve into creator-gods over hundreds of thousands of years on other planets and then employ some of that already existing matter to chemically engineer their own planets. When a planet is sufficiently developed, the creator-man creates a physical container for immortal spirits from other planets, who are invited to take on these new bodies. These spirits then engage in sexual intercourse in order to create “reconstituted human beings,” who, like them, are immortal. Such a process is eventually refined through selective breeding and natural selection until an individual human being appears who is capable of fashioning, in Palmer’s own words now, “a WHOLE WORLD, and after that a Solar System, and even an Island Universe.” Indeed, “why not eventually a Cosmos?” (F 1.15.20–23).⁴⁴ Talk about superpowers!

However we interpret Ray Palmer or decide on his final views, clearly, this little big man did far more than read, write, and edit pulp fiction. With the help of Richard Shaver, Kenneth Arnold, and the Oahspe Bible, he created an entire occult world in the mirror of pulp fiction and his own paranormal experiences. And by “in the mirror,” I mean both “in the mirror” and “through the mirror,” since, in Palmer’s mind at least, he had stepped through the mirror of fantasy and encountered something very real on the other side. The pulp fiction had become psychical fact. He was now living inside one of those fantastic cover paintings and doing what he had long been doing—writing himself in the bright colors of those astral-traveling dreams. Basically, Ray Palmer had become his own Amazing Stories.

ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS IN THE COMICS

Charles Fort, Ray Palmer, and Ken Arnold had a tremendous influence on the fantasy worlds that followed them. We have already had occasion to note the role of Alienation in the creation of the superhero genre via the iconic figure of Superman, the crashed alien. We have also briefly mentioned the precedents, including John Carter of Mars, Buck Rogers, and Flash Gordon. But all of this was still in the realm of pure fantasy. All of that changed, and changed overnight, with Kenneth Arnold’s sightings of those nine silvery shapes; the Roswell cover-up (whatever was covered up); the various secret or pseudo-secret military projects designed to study, shoot down, mimic, or dismiss UFOs; and the widely reported UFO waves of the late 1940s and ’50s. Now the mytheme of Alienation took center stage. Now it became real. Or real-unreal.

Consider, as one of a thousand possible pop-cultural examples, EC Comics’ Weird Science #13. Weird Science was a boldly imaginative series that employed scientific ideas to write about traditional occult themes. The series also showed a remarkable ability to respond to the surrounding culture and times. In July of 1952, on two consecutive weekends, newspapers reported that seven UFOs buzzed Washington, D.C. The military certainly considered the objects real enough. The things showed up on radar, and F-94 fighter jets were scrambled in the sky to try to shoot them down.⁴⁵ The comic writers and artists at EC responded with Weird Science #13. What were strange darting lights in the sky in the original historical events now became very distinct discs in broad daylight on the comic cover. In short, the popular paranormal expression exaggerated and reshaped the original event around the stock motif of the flying saucer, but—and this is where things get tricky—there was an original event behind the popular paranormal expression.

2.13   SAUCERS OVER WASHINGTON

John Keel notes that “concurrent with the 1952 flap, Hollywood entered a flying saucer cycle,” which included the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Keel also reminds us that science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke turned to the same phenomena in the 1950s and concluded that the behavior of the things in the sky (with impossible speeds and turns that would instantly kill any human occupant) suggested that they were not physical at all. “So he looked deeper, into psychic phenomena, philosophy and theology,” Keel tells us, “and published his findings in Childhood’s End (1953).” ⁴⁶ This was a sci-fi classic that would come to have a major influence on the counterculture of the 1960s and future readings of UFOs, like those of Keel. The novel underlines the profound religious challenge the immense ships and the Overlords pose to the world religions below.

Clarke would also later sponsor three volumes of Fortean anomalies and write a number of critical essays on the subject of contactees and flying saucers.⁴⁷ He would also co-write, with Stanley Kubrick, what would become one the great alien intervention films of the twentieth century—2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Significantly, the film employs Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the title of Nietzsche’s famous text in which he introduced his notion of the Superman) to mark the evolutionary leaps from ape to man (via tool use early in the film) and from man to Star-Child (via astronaut Bowman’s visionary encounter with the black monolith at the very end of the film).⁴⁸ The mythemes of Alienation and Mutation have probably never seen a more powerful and more beautiful artistic expression.

We could list comic-book story arcs involving flying saucers and aliens for hundreds of pages (and by “we” I don’t mean “me”; I mean someone else). Just about all of them, however, would rely in some way on the four weird books of Charles Fort, the amazing stories of Ray Palmer, and the aftermath of those still unexplained events that swirled around pilot Ken Arnold that fateful summer of 1947.

When America entered the space race in the early 1960s, such themes became even more potent. A superhero team of astronauts was quickly introduced in Marvel’s The Fantastic Four #1, in the fall of 1961. The series both launched the superhero renaissance at Marvel and quickly became one of the premiere places to explore the motifs of the UFO and the alien. The historical context of the series, of course, was an American-Soviet space race featuring the Apollo space program heading, like the four astronauts in a later issue, to the moon. Hence the “Red Ghost” hinted at on the cover of The Fantastic Four #13 will turn out to be no ghost at all, but a communist or “red” mad scientist, battling the Fantastic Four for the control of the moon’s surface. The heroes also discover—as in many later NASA conspiracy theories—that the moon is already inhabited, that there is an alien base there, and that we are being watched from the moon’s surface by a benevolent, large-headed humanoid named, appropriately enough, the Watcher.

One of the most famous story arcs of the Fantastic Four series appeared in issues #48–50 (1966), a three-part series that has come to be known as the Galactus Trilogy. One version has it that the plot originated with four words from writer Stan Lee to artist Jack Kirby: “Have them fight God.”⁴⁹ Kirby’s story is different, but not that different: “I went to the Bible, and I came up with Galactus.”

Kirby, it turns out, had been reading popular science literature on the possibility of human beings encountering an alien species someday in order to exchange technology. But what if the aliens do not want our primitive technology? What if they want us, as in to eat us? This was Kirby’s worry. In The Fantastic Four #48, he created the Silver Surfer as a way of expressing this concern. He rendered the cosmic being humanoid, basically naked, with Spidey-like alien eyes (there they are again), and glowing silver skin, as if he were made of mercury. Painfully, he rode around on what was essentially a California surfboard, which was all the rage in 1966. Happily, the later movie version altered this: in a number of scenes, the angle is handled in such a way so that the “surfboard” looks more or less exactly like a small UFO. Issue #48 also reintroduced the Watcher, who now appears in order to warn the planet of an approaching supergod named Galactus. Galactus is a cosmic being who feeds off the life energies of entire planets, and the Silver Surfer is a kind of cosmic scout for this hungry deity.

2.14   SPACE RACE TO THE MOON

2.15   THE COMING OF GALACTUS

As has often been noted, the Galactus Trilogy is a profoundly gnostic tale: “Have them fight God.” Even Stan Lee, who usually wanted to emphasize the brighter and more positive aspects of his mythologies, wrote of the Silver Surfer as a kind of semidivine being “trapped” on the planet as a punishment for nobly refusing to do Galactus’s will, much as the soul is trapped in matter in the ancient Jewish and Christian gnostic systems. In any case, “fighting God” and “being a Gnostic” are more or less the same thing. What the Gnostic is really fighting, of course, is a lower god pretending to be the real God. What he seeks is the God beyond god, the cosmic truth of things beyond all the religious bullshit.

These same gnostic sensibilities can be detected again in one of the most popular subthemes of the mytheme of Alienation, something called the ancient-astronaut theory. This is the idea that UFOs are not recent appearances, but have been interacting with humans for millennia, if not actually millions of years, guiding and shaping our biological and cultural evolution. Some versions of this theory are very abstract and leave things largely unexplained, as we have it, for example, in Kubrick and Clarke’s mysterious black monolith. Some versions of this theory have it that the human species is a literal biological hybrid of early primates and visiting aliens (a theme, already present in the theosophical literature, that was given a dramatic new life in the abduction narratives and hybridization theory of the late 1980s and ’90s). Other forms function as popular theories of religion, focusing on how such ancient visitations were recorded in myth and legend and the ancient visitors thus became our “gods.” Sometimes this is read in a fascinated, positive light. Other times—and this is when it gets really gnostic—it is read in a very negative light, that is, as a millennia-long deception or control mechanism.

We will have occasion to return to this ancient-astronaut theme many times in subsequent chapters. We will have to. It is everywhere. One very obvious example will suffice for now. This is Marvel Preview #1 and its cover story, “Man-Gods from beyond the Stars,” written by Doug Moench, the same writer with whom we began this book.

The cover of Marvel Preview certainly suggests that the ancient-astronaut theory is more than a theory. “Impossible—or true?” is ambiguous enough, but the question mark is effectively rendered null in the next lines: “Photos, fantasy, and facts about the starmen who walked the earth before time began.” The Moench story is followed by, among other things, a bibliographic essay that correctly identifies Charles Fort as “the Great-Grandaddy of all the modern flying saucer broo-ha-ha”⁵⁰ and a number of supporting essays about the cultural phenomenon of Erich von Däniken’s Chariot of the Gods, which was clearly the real catalyst for this particular issue. Von Däniken, previously a hotelier by profession, is a Swiss enthusiast of ancient history. His mega-bestseller, which argued that much of the ancient history of religion was really a history of human contact with spacefaring aliens, was originally published in Germany in 1968, a year later in English in Britain, then in America in 1970.

2.16   ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS IN THE COMICS

It is easy, and all too common, to dismiss popularizers and so miss entirely the important, and often very subtle, roles that they play in the history of ideas.⁵¹ It is also all too easy to dismiss an idea by naïvely equating it with an easily dismissible popularizer, as if the popularizer was not popularizing a complex and nuanced idea that was already there in the culture. This is precisely the case with the ancient-astronaut idea. There were certainly earlier, more nuanced, and more elite versions of the same thesis.⁵²

To take a single example, von Däniken’s comparison of a photograph of an American Apollo astronaut and an ancient drawing from the Sahara, which could be construed as a one-eyed alien in a spacesuit, was almost certainly inspired by Carl Sagan’s earlier discussion of the ancient-astronaut theory, which appeared in 1966 (and there were many other authors, in England, France, and the U.S., who preceded and followed Sagan in these provocative waters⁵³). Sagan had imagined “colonies of colonies of colonies” in outer space (which echoes his signature line, “billions and billions”), and—much like Charles Fort—he deftly used the mythical memories of contact with European colonizers from North America and sub-Saharan Africa in order to suggest that other “contact myths” may encode ancient encounters with galactic astronauts, who “would probably be portrayed as having godlike characteristics and possessing supernatural powers.”

After teasing his readers with the aforementioned ancient fresco from central Sahara depicting, in the words of a French archaeologist, “the great Martian god,” Sagan zeroed in on a series of Sumerian myths as particularly suggestive of extraterrestrial contact. “Sumerian civilization is depicted by the descendents of the Sumerians themselves to be of non-human origin,” he wrote. “A succession of strange creatures appears over the course of several generations. Their only apparent purpose is to instruct mankind. Each knows of the mission and accomplishments of his predecessors. When a great inundation threatens the survival of the newly introduced knowledge among men, steps are taken to ensure its preservation.” As for the gods themselves, they were associated with individual stars, the cuneiform symbols for “god” and “star” being identical.

Sagan, of course, is offering this as a thought experiment, not as the truth of things, although it is also clear that he considers such scenarios to be real historical possibilities. He even speculates about a possible interstellar base on the far side of the moon (remember The Fantastic Four #13?) and suggests one possible reason for intervening in another planet’s evolution: “to head off a nuclear annihilation.”⁵⁴ These, of course, are all standard tropes in the contactee and ufological literatures, not to mention science fiction and the later alien abduction literature. In short, the mytheme of Alienation.