5

REALIZATION

READING THE PARANORMAL WRITING US

ALL THESE DREAMS, MYTHS, AND NOSTALGIAS WITH A CENTRAL THEME OF ASCENT OR FLIGHT CANNOT BE EXHAUSTED BY A PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION; THERE IS ALWAYS A KERNEL THAT REMAINS REFRACTORY TO EXPLANATION, AND THIS INDEFINABLE, IRREDUCIBLE ELEMENT PERHAPS REVEALS THE REAL SITUATION OF MAN IN THE COSMOS, A SITUATION THAT, WE SHALL NEVER TIRE OF REPEATING, IS NOT SOLELY “HISTORICAL.”

MIRCEA ELIADE, SHAMANISM: ARCHAIC TECHNIQUES OF ECSTASY

DO I HAVE TO ADD THAT . . . ALL OUR SO-CALLED CONSCIOUSNESS IS A MORE OR LESS FANTASTIC COMMENTARY ON AN UNKNOWN, PERHAPS UNKNOWABLE, BUT FELT TEXT?

NIETZSCHE, DAYBREAK: THOUGHTS ON THE PREJUDICES OF MORALITY

Like Charles Fort’s growing intuition that he was caught in some Martian-projected movie and that it was time to “step out of the screen,” we too are now leaving our Super-Story. We are catching glimpses. We are awakening.

The superreader approaches this stage of Realization when he or she begins to suspect that paranormal processes are real. Realization is achieved when one comes to understand that such events are not only real, but also inherently participatory, that is, paranormal events often behave very much like texts: they appear for us and rely on our active engagement or “reading” to appear at all and achieve meaning. In some fundamental way that we do not yet understand, they are us, projected into the objective world of events and things, usually through some story, symbol, or sign. Realization is the insight that we are caught in such a story. Realization is the insight that we are being written.

Any model of the history of fantasy literature worth its salt should provide a certain payout. It should make sense of what was hitherto confusing and too often ignored. I suggested repeatedly in the previous chapters that the themes of the East and the Alien have played important, if not actually central, roles in the development of the Super-Story. I suggested that there is something foundational about the two first mythemes of Orientation and Alienation. If this is in fact true, we should expect to find these themes returning in surprising ways in figures central to the origins and development of the superhero genre.

And that is precisely what we find. Enter Otto Binder and Alvin Schwartz. Both men were key players in the Golden Age of superhero comics. Binder wrote many of the most memorable Captain Marvel stories for Fawcett and then performed similarly for DC with the Superman mythos, developing or introducing such central characters as Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Superboy, and Supergirl. Schwartz wrote many of the Batman and Superman newspaper strips in the late 1940s and ’50s and created one of the key Superman villains that Binder would also take up: Bizarro. Superman, Batman, and Captain Marvel are hardly minor characters. It would thus be difficult to underestimate either man’s influence on the genre—or what they finally realized.

FROM ADAM LINK TO THE DESK OF CAPTAIN MARVEL

Otto Oscar Binder (1911–74) published his first fantastic tale with his brother Earl under a fused penname (“Eando Binder,” for “E and O Binder”) in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories (October 1932). “The First Martian” features an alien landing in Bessemer, Michigan, where the two authors had lived as young boys before they moved to Randolph, Nebraska, and then on to Chicago. Significant mostly for what it presciently signals about Otto’s future fascinations, the story also happens to feature what would later be called a UFO scene, a topic that would come to absorb Binder’s last years.¹

Earl and Otto continued to write and publish in the pulps. As a result, they became humble celebrities of sorts among the early sci-fi fans, especially around Chicago, where they lived. The mid- to late 1930s saw Otto Binder actively pursuing a freelance writing career. His personal letters during this time are filled with references to “Mort” (Weisinger) and “Julie” (Julius Schwartz), two men who were or would become major forces in the fantasy and comic-book industries. Binder played bridge with both of them, dreaming up sci-fi plots amid the smoke and cards. Mort wrote him often. These letters make clear what the business was about on its most basic level: plot, plot, and more plot, and then length, character, and pennies per word.² The letters also reveal a single word that the authors and editors commonly used among themselves for their popular products: a story was called a “yarn.”

Binder, as we shall soon see, had many different writing careers. By all accounts, including his own, the high point of his first pulp fiction career was a three-year series featuring a loveable sentient “thinking robot,” the first of its kind, named Adam Link. Adam first appeared in a short story entitled “I, Robot” in Amazing Stories (January 1939), edited by an already very familiar figure—Ray Palmer. Palmer and Binder were close friends. In fact, Binder stayed with Palmer for a time just before his marriage.³ Historian and archivist of sci-fi fan culture Sam Moskowitz (to whom Binder willed his papers and manuscripts) notes in his The Coming of the Robots, which he dedicates to Binder, that Adam Link single handedly changed “the pattern of robot stories so that the robots were treated sympathetically instead of as villains.”⁴ “Sam,” as Binder knew him in his letters, would also discover another thing about Adam Link: he was the first robot in the literature to speak in the first person.

The idea of a humanlike robot would later be explored more famously by Isaac Asimov in an identically titled collection of short stories. To his credit, Asimov was all too aware of his debt to Binder and strongly objected to using Otto’s title, preferring his own instead, Mind and Iron. But his editor would have none of it, and Binder did not in the end object. All he asked in return was a signed copy of Asimov’s book.⁵

Late in 1939, Binder began writing comic strips. By 1941, he was writing scripts for Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America. But his real break would come with a different company, Fawcett. Fawcett became a major player in the industry after its introduction of Captain Marvel in Whiz Comics #2, in February of 1940. The character, essentially an answer to National’s Superman, was written by Bill Parker (who coined the expression “holy moley” in the strip) and designed by Charles Clarence (or C. C.) Beck, who used film star Fred MacMurray as his original model for the superhero.

The mythos of Captain Marvel involves a homeless young boy named Billy Batson who encounters a phantom figure in the street as he sells papers at night in the rain. The mysterious man guides him down into a subway tunnel and onto a train sporting strange symbols. When the train comes to a stop, Billy finds himself in a subterranean hall. The two walk past statues of the seven deadly sins and finally encounter a white-haired wizard sitting on a throne. His name is Shazam, an acronym for Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury. Shazam explains that he has been defending good and battling evil for three thousand years now. He is old, and it is time for him to go. He teaches Billy the magic word—Shazam. As he speaks it, a lightning bolt flashes down out of a dark cloud—Blam!—and transforms the young boy into a full-grown man, Captain Marvel. The wizard instructs him again to utter the word. Captain Marvel obeys, and a huge block of granite suspended from the ceiling falls on the wizard. The mystical vocation has passed on to a new generation. And with that, Billy finds himself back in the rain on the street, selling newspapers, as if it were all a dream.

But, of course, it is not a dream. Billy and Captain Marvel will spend hundreds of issues battling the evil Dr. Sivana, introduced in that very first issue, and other assorted villains. The Binder-Beck stories of Captain Marvel, or “the Big Red Cheese,” as he became affectionately known (for his red-gold costume and trademark humor), were classic examples of comic books that worked on two levels—that of the child reader, who took it all very seriously, and that of the adult reader, who could laugh at all the puns and playful humor.

As comic-book lore goes, Captain Marvel bestowed two major symbols on the subculture: his magical cry of “Shazam!” and his signature lightning bolt emblazoned on his chest. The latter symbol would become virtually synonymous with the superhero genre. It would also play a key symbolic role in another American folk hero whom Binder would come to know and write about—Ted Owens, the “PK Man,” whom we will meet in a moment.

Binder was assigned the writing duties for Captain Marvel in December of 1941. He never looked back. Binder’s biographer Bill Schelly calls him the “most prolific writer of the Golden Age.” It is difficult to argue with such a title. According to Binder, who kept studious records and careful files of his own work, between 1941 and 1960 he wrote no less than 2,465 scripts. In 1944 alone, he churned out 228 tales “on a smoking machine that I last remember melting away completely.”⁶ The majority of those 2,465 scripts were for Fawcett, but 24 of them were for EC, and he would come to write for DC as well. He probably identified with Captain Marvel more than any other superhero. I found, for example, some charming personal letterhead that Binder used to write Sam Moskowitz with the heading “A personal message from Captain Marvel.” The hero, his trademark lightning bolt blazing, looks down on the reader.

5.1   OTTO BINDER’S SECRET SHAZAM SELF AND SUPER WRITING

By late 1953, after a Fawcett-DC Superman lawsuit was finally settled (DC successfully insisted that Captain Marvel was a knockoff and infringed on its rights), Binder was no longer legally blocked from writing for National or DC, as he had been during the suit. Hence his old friends, DC editors Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz, welcomed him on board. Binder wrote first for Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space, then Jimmy Olsen and Superboy. He introduced the character of Supergirl in Action #252 (May 1959) and penned numerous Superman stories as well. Schelly draws attention to Binder’s accomplishments here by noting that when Giant Superman Annual #1 (1960) reprinted what were widely considered to be the best Superman stories from the 1950s, six of the nine were by Otto Binder.⁷

ON SPACE WORLDS AND THE SECRET OF THE SAUCERS

As the 1950s came to an end, Sputnik appeared in our skies, and President Kennedy began speaking of a moon shot, Binder became more and more interested in space exploration. He left comic writing and entered what amounted to a third writing career (after pulp fiction and superhero comics): popular science writing. In some sense, this was very much a return to origins, for science had always been his first love, even if the depression had frustrated his original dream to become a chemical engineer. Now in the 1960s, he would do things like contract with NASA to write school charts for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, write an instructional comic book for Disney on space exploration, and join multiple science organizations. Basically, he became something of a space guru in the heyday of the space race.

He would also invest almost everything, and then lose it all, in a new magazine he cofounded and edited. Space World #1 appeared in May of 1960. The magazine ran for about five years and then collapsed. But not until it put him in touch with a new subject that would fascinate him for the rest of his life: the UFO. The flying saucer was not really new, of course. It had always been there in some form, from Otto’s very first pulp story with his brother Earl. But now it was spinning into his own world and transforming him in the process. Here is how it floated in.

As the editor of a space science magazine, Binder participated in a radio show in April of 1961. During the course of the show, the conversation turned to the ever-present, ever-popular subject of UFOs. Binder expressed his doubts.⁸ There just was not enough convincing evidence. But as editor of Space World, he was also receiving a significant amount of correspondence on the subject, and he was gradually changing his mind behind the scenes and between the lines.

5.2   OTTO BINDER AS SPACE GURU

Schelly describes what would become Binder’s UFO interest as the phoenix that rose out of the ashes of Space World.⁹ The biographer also suggests that the skeptic-turned-believer Thane Smith, the central character of Binder’s two saucer novels, Menace of the Saucers (1969) and Night of the Saucers (1971), is a stand-in for Binder himself.¹⁰ Hence the opening line on the back cover of the first novel: “Smith was a writer of science fiction stories. Now, incredibly, he was witnessing the real thing.” Like Thane Smith, Otto Binder was witnessing his science fiction fantasies coming true. Why and exactly how they were coming true, he was not so sure.¹¹

The stories coming in, worthy of any pulp fiction magazine, were certainly delicious enough. Indeed, they were even better, since Binder was now writing them in nonfiction contexts. In a special UFO edition of the men’s magazine Saga, for example, Binder wrote about the reports that he had received from amateur ham-radio operators, who told him that they had intercepted secret NASA signals during the lunar landing of July 11, 1969. In a scene worthy of a Fantastic Four comic, the Watcher and all, Binder reports that his sources allegedly heard Neil Armstrong exclaiming: “These babies were huge, sir. Enormous. Oh, God, you wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you there are other space-craft out there lined upon the far side of the crater edge. They’re on the Moon watching us.”¹²

It is not too difficult to know how Binder would have received such a tale. After all, by this time he had already published two nonfiction books on flying saucers, and he would soon publish a third just before he died. The first, What We Really Know about Flying Saucers (1967), was published by his old Captain Marvel publisher, Fawcett, thus linking, in the very act of physical production, the superhero fantasy and the real-world UFO encounter. The second contained in its very title a version of the line Armstrong would supposedly utter on the moon a year later, Flying Saucers Are Watching Us (1968). Then Binder pulled out all the stops and cowrote his boldest book on the subject with Max H. Flindt, Mankind—Child of the Stars (1974). This final book of the saucer trilogy, which we might read as a spiritual testament of sorts, makes explicit and speculatively real much that came before it in Binder’s multifarious writing career, including and especially some of the key components of his science fiction and superhero writing. And why not? In Binder’s mind at least, the imagined had become the real. Exactly like Thane Smith, Binder was “a writer of science fiction stories. Now, incredibly, he was witnessing the real thing.”

What We Really Know about Flying Saucers was his first major attempt to come to terms with this personal evolution.¹³ Of the three books, it is the most reserved, although it is not really very reserved, and most of Binder’s ufological themes can already be found here. Significantly, the book is introduced by none other than John Keel.

Binder saw his project as a scientific one, if also an admittedly heterodox one. Claiming at the beginning of the book to have “pored over thousands of sightings,” he states his conclusions as clear as they come: “That is all this book attempts to do—once and for all to take the UFO phenomenon out of the ‘myth’ category and place it firmly in the ‘reality’ category, despite all the brush-off machinations of the Air Force, the government, and orthodox science.”¹⁴ In this same spirit, he treats in the middle of the book such subjects as the famed cigar-shaped UFOs, widely believed to be mother ships; Ray Palmer’s atmospherea theory of a civilization of nonmaterial energy beings existing in the upper atmosphere and interacting with us as deep-sea denizens living on the bottom of an atmospheric ocean; the hypothesis of time travel, which would explain why the aliens do not contact us (“they can’t under this theory,” Binder points out, since they are appearing to us not as physical objects but as “‘projections’ across the time barrier”); the earth as a kind of space colony, with humans either as descendants of the original space travelers or as hybrids of an alien-ape breeding program (well before von Däniken, by the way); and, finally and perhaps most interestingly, UFOs as “dimension faeries” appearing as “ghosts” in our dimension, as we would no doubt appear in theirs.¹⁵

Binder retains a certain rhetorical distance from each of these individual speculations, but he is also clear that the cumulative weight of the data, and particularly the patterns into which it all falls, is indeed conclusive: “The flying saucers are not myths but machines.”¹⁶ Or again, in his last line: “The flying saucers are here. The UFO’s are real. The only thing unreal is earth’s attitude toward these significant objects and their mysterious masters, who may well be here to tell us of a brotherhood of worlds in the universe.”¹⁷

Flying Saucers Are Watching Us extends this project, radicalizing it further in the process.¹⁸ Although it appeared just a year after the first book, it is a very different sort of text. For one thing, Binder now introduces a long list of affiliations to his resumé of ten science books (the pulp and comics writing are never mentioned), including the National Aerospace Education Council, the American Rocketry Association, and NICAP (the premiere American UFO research organization founded by marine corps pilot Donald E. Keyhoe).

In terms of content, he has also already clearly adopted a very familiar thesis by now, namely, the ancient-astronaut theory. Binder came to it through the writings of engineer and research scientist Max H. Flindt, who had sent Binder his manuscript On Tiptoe beyond Darwin while Binder was publishing Space World. This self-published text propounded, in Binder’s words now, “that mankind is a hybrid product of prehistoric unions between spacemen and early tererrestrian primates or humanoids, deliberately bred ages ago in order to establish a future earth colony.”¹⁹ This is the core idea that will absorb Binder’s last years and culminate in Mankind—Child of the Stars.

Flying Saucers Are Watching Us is deeply Fortean. “We are property,” Binder announces at the end of chapter 1, employing, without reference, a famous Fortean gnomon. Then he softens the sinister undertones. “Family property, that is. Our extraterrestrial and current cousins, stemming from the same long-ago sires we did, are today streaking through our skies in amazing vehicles. We call them flying saucers and UFO’s.”²⁰ According to Binder, what our extraterrestrial sires were really about is the speeding up of evolution. Basically, they were using their biotechnology to “condense evolutionary processes into brief periods of time.” This is how the astonishing human brain evolved in such a short span of time. Binder thinks of the human brain as “imported,” that is, as an evolutionary product inserted into an early primate species through an intentional hybrid breeding program. The implications? We carry the alien in us. We are the extraterrestrial. Alienation and Mutation are completely united here.

And sex is the secret that joins them. Hence Binder’s elaborate discussions of “Sex and the Saucermen” (chapter 2); his fascination with the “star-borne” trait of the unusually large human penis (in the light of other primate penises, which are tiny in comparison); the sexual components of the contactee and abductee reports, which often look more or less like instances of what Binder calls “space rape”; and the famous 1957 Villas Boas case, in which a Brazilian farmer named Antonio Villas Boas reported being taken on board a landed ship and bred with a beautiful, but growling alien woman.

We, of course, have already seen this alien erotics, many times. Still, it is worth noting that at least three mediums or channelers made very similar claims both just before and just after Flindt and Binder. William Dudley Pelley’s Star Guests (1950), for example, had declared, as his title had it, that we are all “Star Guests,” that is, alien spirits from interstellar space (more specifically, the star system Sirius) who entered the bodies of primates fifty to thirty million years ago to cohabit with animal forms and produce hybrid beings, like us. Three years later, George Hunt Williamson published—through Ray Palmer’s press no less—Other Tongues—Other Flesh (1953), which claimed that the “Sons of God” of Genesis 6 constituted a spiritual migration from Sirius whose males co-habited with female primates in order to produce prehistoric or primitive humanity. Finally, in 1974 Phyllis Schlemmer, a trance medium from Ossinning, New York, began channeling a cosmic being named “Tom,” who claimed to be part of “the Nine,” a group of beings from “Deep Space” who oversee planet earth. Schlemmer’s revelations, now recorded in The Only Planet of Choice (1993), include the Alteans, a species of unisexual, blue-eyed, voiceless humanoids who glow with a kind of silvery iridescence. It was the Alteans, Tom taught, who produced the Atlanteans through a hybrid seeding project, one of the accomplishments of which was the enlargement of the sexual organs toward more physical pleasure.²¹ Why are such texts and teachings relevant here? Because they reveal in unmistakable ways the deep resonance, down to precise details, that exists between these channeled occult traditions and Binder’s UFO writing.

And elite science fiction. Here’s a whopper of a side-note. One of Schlemmer’s auditors was none other than Gene Roddenberry, the legendary creator of Star Trek, who, Schlemmer’s website claims, was visiting the medium as part of his research for the sci-fi series. Hence Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Maybe. The truth, as usual, appears to be even stranger. Roddenberry, a humanist who was deeply critical of religion but who was fascinated by psi phenomena and altered states of consciousness (possibly stemming from a childhood out-of-body experience) and who accepted some measure of the “latent abilities” of telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis, appears to have been recruited by a paranormal organization called Lab Nine to help prepare the public, via a film-script that he would write, for an impending first contact event. Toward this end, he was given tours of parapsychological labs and introduced to Schlemmer and, through her, to Tom and the Nine. Neither the film nor the first contact panned out, although the script was written. Film or no film, landing or no landing, Roddenberry conversed with Tom through Schlemmer. It was Roddenberry, for example, who got the entity to affirm that some of us are “of Altean blood” and possess Altean “genetic features . . . mixed with our basic Earth features.”²² Human-alien hybrids again.

What is so extraordinary about Binder’s particular version of this familiar alien erotic trope is how explicit he is. I suppose he has to be, though. After all, for Binder, cross-species sexual intercourse is the key to the central argument of this book (and the next). What he calls his Homo Hybrid thesis demands it, relies on it. Alien-simian sex is precisely what produces the human for Binder and Flindt. It is what makes us us. It is what gives us our dual nature, our sense of somehow being an angel and an animal at the same time. Binder and Flindt will even suggest in their later cowritten book that it this ancient sexual union that contributes to schizophrenia in some individuals: the uneasy union of the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial breaks apart in the schizophrenic “split mind” and produces all sorts of fantasies—fantasies, however, that often speak in distant and distorted ways of our true stellar origins.

Not surprisingly, then, Binder takes up the subject of religion itself at the very end of the book. Here he calls the saucermen “saintly” and imagines a “multi-million-year-old civilization” behind their advanced spiritual nature, which has developed a “universal super-religion more profound and meaningful than any [of] our fragmented and bickering sects on earth have ever reached.” The skymen were not gods, though, despite the likelihood that “the awed primitives called them gods.” They were only emissaries of “the God of the macro-cosmos from infinity to eternity.” In other words, the history of religions as we normally think of it is a series of major mistakes. The basic mythology, found all over the world, of a sky-god bestowing culture and knowledge on human beings and then disappearing back into the sky is only partly true.

And partly false. Such local sky-gods are products of an ancient conflation of alien technology and divinity, which is to say that they are products of our own ignorance. Still, for Binder, much as we saw with Ray Palmer and Jack Kirby, there is a God beyond the gods, a superdivinity, a Being reflected in that “grander sense of ultimate Godhood implanted genetically in our hearts.”²³ In the end, then, religion for Binder is a strange combination of naïvete and profundity, of fantasy and fact. More of Fort’s truth-fiction.

PSI-FI: FROM PK MAN TO STARMAN AND BACK AGAIN

Finally, there is Mankind—Child of the Stars. Before we get to this last and most adventurous component of the Binder saucer trilogy, it is important to trace Binder’s intellectual and philosophical development. We also need to take a brief detour and meet an apparent real-life superhero with whom Otto Binder corresponded between his second and third saucer books: Ted Owens, the self-proclaimed PK Man.

Like all thinking persons, Binder changed and developed his positions over the course of his life. His early philosophy is captured succinctly in an unsent postcard that I found in the Moskowitz Collection at Texas A&M University. There is no date, but the one-cent stamp puts it somewhere before 1952 (when the rate changed to two cents). In it, he thanks his correspondent for sending him some Rosicrucian booklets and confesses that his wide-ranging interests in different social movements or “Progressions” is mostly as a “spectator.” He himself takes no stand, but rides the fence. In a similar fence-sitting spirit, he is suspicious of any “true believer,” since no statement or doctrine can be absolutely true.²⁴ As the years and decades ticked on, Binder explored more and more of these “Progressions” and progressed himself into some quite extraordinary convictions. He finally got off that fence.

In his study of science fiction fandom, Harry Warner Jr. employs the catchy phrase “Psi-Fi” to discuss some groups of fans in the 1950s who turned to the scientific study of psychical phenomena.²⁵ These individuals did things like volunteer as subjects for J. B. Rhine’s parapsychology lab at Duke University or form flying-saucer organizations. Palmer and Arnold are obvious icons here, but Binder too was clearly moving in a Psi-Fi direction. In February of 1960, he published a Mechanix Illustrated article on “Things You Didn’t Know about Your Mind,” which was about the state of parapsychology and psychical phenomena. The piece included classical moves, like this one that drew from writer Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio to make the following analogy: “If telepathy is mental radio, clairvoyance can be called mental television.”²⁶ The article is balanced, but basically sympathetic. So too with another he published on reincarnation memories in the same popular magazine, “Have You Lived Before?”²⁷ This time, however, he wrote under a pseudonym, “C. J. Talbert.” Given the two pen-names, one factual, one fictional, we might conclude that at this point the real Otto Binder drew the (public) line somewhere between telepathy and reincarnation. That line would move—a lot.

On October 31, 1963, Binder wrote the air force’s Office of Aerospace Research, requesting copies of all the reports on a document entitled “Research in Extrasensory Perception.” Happily, the chief of the Documentation Division sent Binder exactly what he requested, a bound copy of a research report entitled “Testing for Extrasensory Perception with a Machine.”²⁸ The machine in question, an early random-number generator, was called the VERITAC.

By the late 1960s and early ’70s, Binder’s writing was making even the air force’s ESP machine look tame and boring. There were all those saucers, of course. But there was also a man named Ted Owens, the self-proclaimed PK Man. PK Man, short for Psychokinetic Man, is already, of course, a very clear and obvious superhero allusion, a consciously chosen title designed to recall more familiar ones, like Superman and Batman. In a very similar but more respectable vein, Owen’s biographer Jeffrey Mishlove described his subject as a real-life American folk hero, comparable to the likes of Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill.²⁹

Mishlove was not exaggerating. This, after all, was a man who claimed that he first realized his powers as a young man playing basketball when fellow players would find the ball in their hands without seeing him passing it: in short, a kind of athletic teleportation from the pages of those occult sport comics.³⁰ More dramatically, the adult Owens claimed to be able to produce and direct lightning bolts at will using a specific technique involving mental visualization and the pointing of his finger. To underline the point, he used an abstract symbol in his correspondence that featured a Saturn-shaped UFO and a lightning bolt. He even inscribed this symbol on a little disc, which came with his book, that he claimed was “charged and coded” with PK power—much, I would add, like a saint’s relic.³¹ He also wanted to found his own religion, something he would call the Church of Sota (secrets of the ages).³² Basically, Ted Owens was a real-life Captain Marvel or UFO mystic with his own Shazam! incantation and lightning-bolt insignia. If Binder had earlier witnessed his science fiction fantasies coming true through the UFO, now, more weirdly still, he was witnessing his superhero writing come to life through the PK Man.

And Owens’ claimed power over lightning was just the beginning. He also claimed to correctly predict (or cause) the ending of major droughts, the assumed lightning strike of Apollo 12 on November 14, 1969, and the near total ruination of the entire 1968 season of the Philadelphia Eagles professional football team. He had written over a dozen sports writers about the latter intention. Mishlove tells us that the Eagles suffered thirty injuries that season and lost eleven games in a row.³³

On a darker note, Binder claims that Owens wrote government agencies on March 4, 1968, warning them of the “destruction of one or more highly-placed U.S. Government Officials—by assassination.” Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated within the next twelve weeks.³⁴ The next summer, on July 30, 1969, Owens wrote President Nixon in order to warn him of a Cuban kidnapping attempt via the sea at his Key Biscayne residence in Florida. On August 24, 1969, the Miami Herald published a story with the headline “Spy Plot Shatters Prospects for Renewing U.S. Cuba Ties.” It read eerily close to Owens’s letter.

More bizarrely still, one could conclude that Owens “guided” Hurricane Inez with a map that he had drawn in October of 1966 (according to Binder, the hurricane did things that no one expected, as if it were following Owens’s directions) and correctly predicted the appearance of three simultaneous hurricanes in September of 1967 (Beulah, Chloe, and Doris were all active on the same weekend).³⁵ Owens originally thought that such feats were worked through communicating with “the Intelligence behind Nature.”³⁶ Later he concluded that these were actually UFO intelligences.³⁷ All in all, he claimed influence over or involvement in approximately two hundred predictions and events. And we’re not talking spoons and wristwatches here. We’re talking hurricanes, sports seasons, assassinations, and a U.S. president. He even claimed “to tap a reservoir of powers called the ODE forces,” for “other dimensional effects.”³⁸ Such Fortean wild talents seem to be involved in scenes like the one in which Owens found himself parked on a narrow mountain road: a car allegedly appeared in the darkness, met him head on, and passed right through his car.³⁹

This would all be easy to dismiss, except for the uncomfortable fact that Owens also had the foresight to collect signed affidavits from people who witnessed some of his predictions, which he then further documented with the later newspaper clippings. Indeed, he was obsessive about documenting everything and then sending the evidence to the proper individuals. Hence the back cover of his How to Contact Space People features a photograph of Owens holding a scroll, like Moses (to whom he often compared himself). When one looks closer, however, one notices that the scroll is in fact a scroll of address labels!

One can doubt (and that’s probably much too weak a word here) all of these stories. What is more difficult to do is question Owens’s sincerity. The man shows every sign of believing it all. He consistently sought out CIA and NASA officials, sports writers, team owners, government weather agencies, lawyers, and professional scientists. He wanted to be tested in the most rigorous manner. Most people, of course, completely ignored him.

Or simply made fun of him. Mishlove tells a heart-wrenching story of how Owens was laughed out of a scientific conference at the University of London in August of 1976 when he showed up with a toy wagon full of his newspaper clippings and claims. It was there that Mishlove first befriended the crestfallen psychic. Others, particularly the sports writers, but also at least one CIA official and one NASA official, also appear to have taken him more or less seriously. If nothing else, Ted Owens was a great story.

In terms of the evidence, the problem was not just that Owens claimed to control hurricanes, lightning strikes, and NFL seasons. The problem was that he claimed that he received these superpowers from a 1965 encounter with a cigar-shaped UFO spewing red, white, blue, and green flames near Fort Worth, Texas, before the thing just vanished, “like a light turned off,” when it got close to his car.⁴⁰ And that was not all. More specifically, he attributed his powers to the SIs or space intelligences, “strange beings of pure energy” from “another eerie dimension,” two of which he described as a cross between humans and grasshoppers (there is that damn insectoid theme again) and whom he affectionately named Tweeter and Twitter (it is at precisely this point that I begin to giggle).⁴¹ The cover of the original edition of How to Contact Space People features a painting of an SI, presumably rendered by Owens himself.

5.3   AN SI

Owens claimed that these space intelligences had performed “psychic surgery” on the right lobe of his brain in order to enhance his natural telepathic powers and make his brain a better receiver of their “high-voltage ESP messages.” He also reported a “deep indentation” behind his right ear that his wife first noted and interpreted as some sort of insertion mark or, as some would say now, an implant.⁴²

It is here that my own suspicions and intuitions kick in. Is it possible that such scenes constitute a sincerely believed but nevertheless coded story of some kind of right-brain trauma that opened Owens up to the altered states and empowered imagination of that myth-making hemisphere? There is certainly much to choose from here. Binder mentions not one, not two, but four brain traumas, what he calls “brain rattlings” or “brutal blows.” Here he lists getting knocked fifteen feet when a car struck him at the age of five, an early boxing concussion, another childhood incident in which a boy rolled a log down on him and ripped open his scalp, and a high-speed teenage car crash. Later, Ted would interpret these early brain injuries as planned by the SIs. In my less mythical translation, he saw them as somehow related to his paranormal powers.⁴³ I suspect that he was right about that, since, as I have already noted, brain or spinal trauma is a common theme in the biographies of major psychics.⁴⁴

In any case, Ted Owens honestly considered himself to be “the UFO Prophet” and constantly and sincerely compared himself to Moses for his ability to wreak havoc through the weather in order to prove his powers to his hard-hearted, unbelieving listeners (with the U.S. government as the new Egypt). He also understood his powers as “signs” that the SIs were using to get our attention, so that we could change our ways and avoid Nature’s coming war on humankind for its disastrous polluting and nuclear foolishness.⁴⁵

Mishlove, himself a psychotherapist, observes the obvious, namely, that much of this comes uncomfortably close to sounding like the symptoms of schizophrenia. When one encounters Owens describing how he communicates with the SIs through writing on a mental tablet or Men-Tel, one’s suspicions only grow stronger. Mine do anyway, as I am powerfully reminded of Richard Shaver.

This hardly explains everything, though, since, if this was schizophrenia and any of the stories are true (and I suspect some of them are), it was a schizophrenia doing things like wreaking havoc on the weather and the poor Philadelphia Eagles. Moreover, these altered states of consciousness—whether rendered paranormal, pathological, or, most likely, both—were expressing themselves in a relatively uneducated man with a genius-level IQ (150) who happened to be a member of MENSA. On the wild side (as if it could get any wilder), we might recall that Otto Binder had his own explanation of the similarity between a figure like Ted Owens and a schizophrenic: for Binder, schizophrenia was itself a symptom of our ancient alien-simian “split mind.”⁴⁶

In many ways, Owens was a contactee, that is, a member of a small group of eccentric individuals who, since the late 1940s and early ’50s, have claimed intimate contact with Martian, Venusian, and other assorted “space brothers,” often on board various spaceships and usually toward some sort of utopian spiritual message or prophetic warning involving nuclear war and/or the environment. Most writers strenuously distance themselves from such people, as contactee claims, at least literally understood, are often obviously fraudulent and take on explicitly religious tones that raise eyebrows . . . high.

Interestingly, Binder did not distance himself from such people or their claims, as his constant reference to a galactic “brotherhood” and his ultrapositive reading of the saintly saucermen make crystal clear (although he does distance Owens from the earlier contactees, since, as he points out, Owens’s communications were only “mental” and he never met the SIs face to face or traveled in their ships).⁴⁷ Such a qualified embrace of the contactee literature, I would suggest, is a natural outcome of both Binder’s early superhero writing and his later Homo Hybrid thesis. After all, in the terms of the latter, we are all contactees, and this ancient contact is encoded in our DNA and our large brains and sexual organs.

Binder initiated contact with Owens in early 1970, when he wrote Owens about an essay that he wanted to publish in Saga magazine. This initial correspondence would result in a four-year collaboration (without a physical meeting), with Owens passing on hundreds of files, reports, and clippings to Binder, and Binder acting as a kind of unofficial biographer. For his own part, Owens was deeply appreciative of what Binder wrote about him. Indeed, he claimed that Binder’s Saga essay, “Ted Owens—Flying Saucer Missionary,” was the authoritative statement on the nature of his powers. He also stated flatly that he considered Otto Binder to be the only person alive who was capable of writing his biography.⁴⁸

Binder never managed to write that biography. Mishlove did. But Binder, with Flindt (whom, like Owens, he never physically met), did write Mankind—Child of the Stars. I strongly suspect that he had Ted Owens in mind when he sat down to write this text. There is certainly nothing in the book that would deny Owens’s claims, and there is much that would support them, or at least give them a worldview into which to plug. The book, after all, is filled with truly extraordinary claims of its own. Maybe it is Ted Owens’s biography rendered in an implicit form.

All of Binder’s claims in the book boil down to just two major theses, but they are whoppers: the idea that “Man may be a star-crossed hybrid of two worlds” and that “mankind is a colony.”⁴⁹ These two basic ideas the authors call the Hybrid Man and Earth Colony theories. The book drives these two points home over and over again, with varying degrees of plausibility and outrageousness. In the end, though, their argument is carried most effectively not by a series of rational arguments or scientific proofs, but by a thought experiment involving an iconic figure named Starman.

Not too surprisingly, Starman was already the name of a superhero and had been appearing in comics since 1941. Binder would have definitely known about the Golden Age hero. But what he had in mind here was something altogether different. As this story is key to my own reading of Binder’s entire body of work, it is perhaps with quoting at length. Here is how the authors begin their thought experiment, that is, their double thesis encoded in a conscious just-so story:

MANY MILLIONS AND PERHAPS BILLIONS OF YEARS AGO—AND NO HUMAN ON EARTH KNOWS HOW MANY LIGHT-YEARS AWAY—MAN EVOLVED ON A DISTANT PLANET. . . . THEN, IN TIME, HIS PLANET BECAME TOO SMALL, TOO COLD, OR TOO CROWDED FOR HIM, AND HE COLONIZED ONE OR MORE YOUNG NEARBY PLANETS. EVENTUALLY, PERHAPS MILLIONS OF YEARS LATER, HE HAD TO MOVE AGAIN. . . . BUT THEN CAME THE SAVING DISCOVERY: STARMAN’S MIND WAS MARVELOUS AND HIGHLY DEVELOPED, FAR BEYOND THE CAPABILITIES OF OUR PRESENT-DAY EARTHLING MINDS. AT THE SAME TIME, UNFORTUNATELY, STARMAN’S BODY WAS TOTALLY INADEQUATE FOR PIONEERING JOBS ON OTHER PLANETS.

The solution? To divide the race into two branches: an ancestral race of wisdom and knowledge, and a hybrid colonial race that would be physically stronger but intellectually inferior. With this decision in place, other planets were colonized and scientific and spiritual progress continued apace. In the process, however, no colony was allowed to know that it was in fact a space colony. Until, that is, its population was sufficiently advanced to venture out into space on its own and was culturally and spiritually ready for the dazzling revelation. Then contact was initiated and the colony became aware of its true cosmic nature. “Thus, the colony fulfilled its destiny and became one more of the endless succession of planets chosen to be the home of the original interstellar Man. And there the tale ends.”⁵⁰

The moral of the story is clear enough: today, as one of those originally inferior colonies, we are almost ready ourselves to make contact with our interstellar colonizers. And so our interstellar cousins swarm about in our skies. The time is near.

So what should we make of all of this? Is there some way to make sense of the many lives of Otto Binder? What do pulp fiction, Captain Marvel, Superman, NASA, and Starman have in common?

I cannot help but note that much of Binder’s history, archaeology, and especially his knowledge of the history of religions, like that of his friend John Keel, is seriously flawed. For example, when he occasionally treats biblical texts or the history of Indian religions (topics about which I know a good deal), he is either embarrassingly literalistic or way, way off.⁵¹ And, alas, this makes me worry about what he is saying when he writes about other subjects, about which I know little or nothing. Schelly has described Binder’s science fantasies in his comic-writing days as “full of holes.”⁵² I suspect, strongly, that his saucer-trilogy science is similarly problematic, to say the least.

Which leads me to my main point, which is much more positive. Basically, I want to observe that Otto Binder’s final saucer trilogy is far more indebted to his pulp fiction, superhero, and contactee writing than it is to professional science. What we finally have here, then, is not a new science, but a new mythology of science. In short, we are dealing with yet another framing of the paranormal (which is why Binder’s saucer trilogy resonates so deeply with the channeled literature). The basic message of this paranormal mythology, moreover, boils down to a version of what I have called Realization. What Binder’s myth suggests, to me anyway, is that we are being written, indeed that we have always been written in the deep biological sense that we are someone else’s property or genetic experiment. We are, in effect, an unconscious colony of hybrid beings just now, barely, evolving into an awareness of who we are and where we sit in the cosmos. We have certainly not yet reached the stage of Authorization.

What does this have to do with Binder’s superhero writing? A lot. After all, the elaborate Starman thought experiment involving an ancient species leaving a dying world, traveling across space, and finding an earth colony looks more than a little like the Superman mythos that originally initiated the superhero genre. Indeed, I suspect that Starman is Superman, filtered, translated, and transformed now through thirty-six years of pulp fiction, ufology, NASA lunar programs, and Ted Owens. Otto Binder’s final UFO fascination, then, was not some fluke or late distraction. It was a “return to origins.” O. O. Binder had lived up to his double name: he had come full circle.

WAKING UP INSIDE A STORY

Alvin Schwartz began writing comics in 1939 for Fairy Tale Parade, one of the earliest runs of the new genre. He wrote comic books to pay the bills, certainly not because he wanted to be writing cheap children’s entertainment. At heart, he was a young intellectual, an aspiring novelist, and a friend of people like the writer Gertrude Stein, the poet William Carlos Williams, and the abstract painter Jackson Pollock, who famously wielded his splashing buckets of paint in a studio barn not far from where Schwartz lived. Schwartz would publish his first novel, Blowtop, in 1948. The New York Times described the book as the first conscious existentialist novel in America. Others considered it the first beat novel, influencing the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

This, anyway, is what Alvin Schwartz wanted to be doing. In the 1940s and ’50s, however, he was spending much of his time writing superhero stories. He wrote his first Batman story in 1942 and his first Batman and Superman strips in August and October of 1944, respectively. Between 1944 and 1952, he did most of the writing work for these two syndicated properties. Schwartz continued to work in the business until 1957, when he walked out after a sharp disagreement with Mort Weisinger over a storyline that he considered to be silly and unfaithful to the characters (Weisinger wanted Schwartz to have Superman transfer his powers to Lois Lane). One of his last creative acts was the invention of the reality-twisting villain Bizarro, “his own effort at deconstructing Superman,” as he later put it.⁵³ He estimates that in the nineteen years of his career in the industry he wrote a total of some twenty thousand comics pages. After he left comics writing, Schwartz went on to other forms of the craft. He wrote three pseudonymous novels and two feature-film scripts and worked on thirty documentary dramas for the National Film Board of Canada as both a writer and researcher.

During these later careers, he did not think much (in both meanings of that expression) of his earlier superhero days. He tried not to anyway. Indeed, he told me flat-out that he had a “real distaste” for writing comics for a living. We saw this same pattern, of course, in Otto Binder, who, when he turned to science writing, space exploration, and ufology later in life consciously suppressed the fact, at least in his published bio pages, that he had spent most of his early career writing comic books. The point is a simple and understandable one: until very recently, comic books were considered childish, silly, escapist, or kitsch, if not actually subversive, dangerous, and obscene. Basically, they were considered a kind of “junk literature.”

Otto Binder did not live to see the meteoric rise in popularity of all things super-heroic in the 1990s. Alvin Schwartz did. Partly because of this new cultural context (and a speaking invitation to the University of Connecticut that catalyzed his reflections), he began to look back on his career with a new eye. He also began to remember strange experiences that punctuated his life, magical moments that he had repressed or simply forgotten. “I realized that each of them had happened after I had gotten involved with Superman, as though my Superman experience had provoked them or had somehow been an initiating factor.”⁵⁴ Stranger still, he began to realize that it was precisely these moments that had led him to write Superman in the first place.

He remembers the day in 1944 that he decided to accept the writing assignment. And the sandwich shop—Chock Full o’ Nuts at 480 Lexington Avenue. A man walked in, as bland as they come, almost nonexistent in his indistinctness: “He was as vapid as the thin cheese-and-nut sandwich he was almost daintily munching on.” Then it hit him. Clark Kent was just as bland, and he had to be—“in the ordinariness of each of us there had to be a place of rest, of relief. I didn’t yet grasp all the implications of this, except that Superman seemed to highlight that common condition because in him the extremes were so much greater. . . . The sharp contrast between the self as nonentity and the self as all-powerful seemed to suggest a secret, private, but universal experience.”

Then he began to remember all the ordinary “super” powers he had encountered in his own life. Like the housewife who knew, regardless of distance, whenever a family member was in trouble; or the lithographer who could see people’s auras and diagnose their health and emotional states on the spot; or the German refugee whose Nazi horrors rendered him incapable of holding down a job, but who could walk into a betting parlor and walk away a winner almost every time. That was the day he first realized, as the title of his University of Connecticut lecture and later published essay had it, “The Real Secret of Superman’s Identity.”⁵⁵

Back in the 1990s, when he was writing his first metaphysical memoir, Schwartz noticed something more. He noticed that these sorts of paranormal experiences tended to appear in his own life only after he began writing comics, and that they worked in ways that led to his first novel, a process in turn that “had unveiled something within me that would speak of things I didn’t know I knew” (UP 17–18). Hints of Ray Palmer.

Interestingly, this theme—quite common among artists and writers—found its most dramatic memory not in an authorial moment, but in a painterly one. Actually in two painterly moments. The first involved his first wife, Marjorie, and one of their more famous neighbors across the bay at Springs, East Hampton—Jackson Pollack. A little group of friends got to discussing what Marjorie, herself a painter, called ways of “uncovering that element in a canvas that went beyond what one knew.” Alvin expressed frustration about not knowing how to do this in his own work. Pollack thought it easy and offered to show them how. He painted for them. Schwartz was stunned by what he witnessed in the barn that night: “the paint did not seem to obey the law of gravity. It poured in impossible directions . . . as if some other force were directing it.” He concluded that “the circular forms already on the canvas were doing the influencing as though in their representations of pure acceleration they formed tiny gravitational fields of their own” (UP 20). It was as if the painting had taken on a life of its own.

A few months later, Alvin witnessed something similar happening through Marjorie. She was working on a semiabstract painting of flowers, fruit, and table when she felt blocked, then inspired. She began to paint over the flowers and fruit. Alvin was the first to realize what was emerging from the canvas: the Hindu elephant-headed god, Ganesha. Then Shiva appeared. And then the Buddha. Orientation everywhere.

Marjorie was amazed, fearful . . . and angry. “Take it away! That’s not how I want to paint. There’s nothing of mine in it.” She then found herself picking up a pencil, which wrote out a command that they both become vegetarians. Not exactly a welcome message either. She was then commanded to bathe and meditate before the canvas. This she could do, and so she did it. After collecting herself through this method, she began to speak of “this force” and how it did not belong to her, how she belonged to it. She also spoke as if something was wrong or not quite right, as if the creative energies had somehow “short-circuited” in her.

Alvin remembered his reading of Tantric yoga and the chakras and how these sometimes become blocked or prematurely opened. Inspired by something himself now, he asked Marjorie to cross her wrists and hold his hands. She did. Alvin then held her hands and immediately felt “a swift surge of force rushing up my arms and through my body.” It was exhilarating for Alvin. Marjorie quickly relaxed. She was breathing easier again (UP 22–23). Orientation to Radiation, again through the chakra system of Tantric yoga.

Schwartz tells us this story in the 1990s in order to explain why he decided to write Superman. Essentially, the story of the Manifestation of Ganesha and the mysterious creative force that gripped his wife, short-circuited in her body, and then “grounded out” through him acts as a gloss or commentary on his original decision to write the Man of Tomorrow. What do the two stories have to do with one other? What do they both mean or point to? “Precisely this: that there really had to be some sort of deeper hidden self of which our outward Clark Kent personality was but the dim reflection” (UP 25). Put mythically, each of us, whether we know it or not, is both a bumbling Clark Kent and a Secret Superman. We are persons. And we are portals.

And these memories of the telepathic housewife, the aura-seeing lithographer, and the empowered painters were just the beginning. There were many more. Now remembered and accepted as real, these anomalies began to fall into a consistent pattern. They seemed to connect to one another, to refer to each other in complex metaphorical ways across the decades. Sometime in the 1990s, Schwartz began to see in a new way that reality can be organized around meaning, story, and symbolism as well as matter, time, and cause. He began to realize in his own italicized terms that “in the multilayered universe, as it really exists, there are clumps of events that belong together, that are related in a kind of noncausal grouping, their connection having to do with value and meaning rather than material events” (GS 83).

Following C. G. Jung, he would call these patterns “deeper currents and vital synchronicities” (UP 14). In effect, these strange events were now making up their own story, as if they were taking on an independent life of their own. In my own terms, Alvin Schwartz was entering the stage of Realization, that is, he was beginning to realize that even as he wrote, and especially when he wrote, he was being written, and that the paranormal, like the person, is first and foremost a story.

SUPERMAN AND BATMAN IN TIBET: THE METAPHYSICAL MEMOIRS

Schwartz has expressed his own unique version of this idea in two metaphysical memoirs. The first, on the symbol or archetype of Superman, appeared in 1997 as An Unlikely Prophet. The second, on the dark forces embodied by Batman, appeared in 2007 asA Gathering of Selves.

Schwartz sees these two books as representing two distinct stages in his spiritual life. In the first stage and book, he comes to realize the most fundamental teaching of Tibetan Buddhism (which is in fact the fundamental teaching of Tantric traditions across all of Asia), namely, the deeper unity of form and formlessness, of the finite and the infinite, of the temporal and the eternal, of consciousness and energy, of mind and matter, and so on. This is precisely “the Path without Form” that Schwartz signaled in the subtitle of the book’s first edition (Revelations on the Path without Form). It is also the universal wisdom he finds embodied in the mythical two-in-oneness of Superman and his fumbling alter ego, Clark Kent, who is a temporary form, a “superficial or temporal ego-accretion [of the real but invisible roots of consciousness] in the sense of his being at the center of the rational world of information—the newspaper.”⁵⁶

The plot of the first book revolves around a seven-foot Tibetan teacher named Thongden, who happens to be a tulpa or mind-created entity that materialized from the lifelong scholarship of a now-deceased scholar of Tibetan Buddhism named Everett Nelson. Thongden shows up at Alvin Schartz’s house one day after reading the published version of Schwartz’s lecture on Superman’s identity at the University of Connecticut, a real-world text that I already cited. To Schwartz’s considerable bafflement, Thongden begins to teach him that he has a “Superman phantasm” hanging over him, that Superman is, in effect, his own tulpa, his own mind-created entity that has taken on an independent life of its own. What is more, Thongden insists, Schwartz must work through this phantasm now. He must acknowledge its projected presence and power and, as we eventually learn, dematerialize its formed becoming back into his own formless being. This, of course, is the very same insight with which we began our own Super-Story in chapter 1, with Joscelyn Godwin’s discussion of the imaginal status of Shambalah within the initiatory tradition of the Kalachakra Tantra and the need of the initiate to realize its illusory status, and hence the illusory status of every other mental and social construction (which is pretty much everything).

We could hardly ask for a more apt literary metaphor of what I have called Realization than a seven-foot tulpa teaching a baffled Alvin Schwartz about his Superman phantasm and the impossible imaginative powers that it might still actualize in him. Indeed, we are on target in an almost ridiculously precise way here. Thongden, after all, is a presence who has literally been written into being by the thoughts, meditations, and scholarship of a writer, in this case Everett Nelson. Very much like Schwartz’s own life narrative seen now through the prism of synchronicities and paranormal events (or Binder’s Captain Marvel “becoming real” in the person of Ted Owens), Nelson’s scholarship has “taken on a life of its own” in the person and presence of Thongden. Thongden is Realization Incarnate.

Everett Nelson, Schwartz tells us, was a student of W. Y. Evans-Wentz, an historical figure who specialized in the comparative study of folklore (he was an expert on faerie folklore, among other things) and did much to popularize Tibetan Buddhism in the 1940s and ’50s. We also learn that Nelson began his scholarly life working on early forms of Gnostic Christianity but then moved on to Tibetan Buddhism. As his choice of subjects suggests and as the story makes very clear, Nelson’s knowledge was more than technical. It embodied an “understanding that goes beyond mere scholarship” (UP 56). Gnosis once again.

But Nelson is now dead and so Thongden, alas, is fading away. Like the ancient Greek gods, he will soon disappear if there is no human being to imagine him, to talk to him, to make him real. More specifically, he needs Alvin Schwartz if he is to survive as a form within the formless. So Thongden teaches Schwartz that he, very much like Everett Nelson, has played a major role in creating a different kind of tulpa—Superman. Thongden helps the author look back on his life and see the superconnections, the places where his own red, white, and blue tulpa took form.

As a result of all of this, Schwartz begins to weave around the pop figure of Superman any number of what he himself calls “philosophical glosses.” Superman, for example, now appears alternately as “a sort of degenerated religious symbol—an avatar for the underprivileged and the dispossessed”; as “the image of something that [comes] into being in the individual in moments of extreme personal crisis” or in the midst of severe trauma; and, employing the language of quantum physics now, as “an archetype expressing the sense of nonlocality that is always present in the back of our minds—the capacity to be everywhere instantly.”⁵⁷

By “symbol” and “archetype,” Schwartz intends something very specific, something in accordance with the depth psychology of C. G. Jung. A symbol is not a sign. The meaning of a sign is always known and is often arbitrary (for example, the English word “cat” or an octagonal red American stop sign). A symbol, on the other hand, arises from the depths of the unconscious and “acts as a means of release and transformation of psychic energy.” A symbol, in other words, effects a kind of psychological or spiritual mutation, and this by virtue of its ability to open up the ego or conscious self to the archetypal depths and powers of the individual psyche and even the collective unconscious or World Soul. In the end, then, a symbol or archetype possesses a certain “living quality” or “autonomous functioning.” This is precisely what Superman is for Schwartz. The writers and editors may have thought that they were manufacturing him, but in fact “we did no more than ‘discover’ Superman.”⁵⁸

Schwartz’s invocation of quantum physics relates to his experience and understanding of telepathy. Telepathy, for Schwartz, is a function of the “nonlocal” nature of quantum processes (this, we might recall, was also the conclusion of Russell Targ, the laser physicist who helped originate the remote-viewing program at SRI). Just as Ingo Swann suggested in his own terms, for Schwartz, there are no “senders” or “receivers.” Nor is telepathy a superpower that emanates in rays from our eyes or brains, or tingles around our skull, as in a Spider-Man comic book ora Jack Kirby drawing. Rather, telepathy is a human translation of the nonlocal nature of reality itself. “You don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to look for anything. It’s there. Beyond the dimensions” (UP 131–32). This, of course, is where the mytheme of Orientation disappears, joins up with the mytheme of Radiation, and becomes the mytheme of Realization. This is where one realizes that the “Tibet” one desires is inside one, or, better yet, that the Somewhere Else one seeks is in fact Everywhere.

Toward the very end of the book, Schwartz explains to his wife, Kay, what he has learned through his various adventures and conversations with Thongden, namely, that Superman appears only in moments of crisis or trauma: “Don’t you see—that’s what Superman really is. The highest point of individual consciousness. He’s totally fixed on a single point. His one defining act—his rescue mission. That’s what he does. He’s a being that converges totally, with all his mind and strength and energy, on a single demand arising out of a single moment. He’s specialized, you might say, to live entirely in the now. . . . He’s us—when we’re truly impermeable, indestructible—totally concentrated” (UP 204–5).

Schwartz is particularly intrigued by why “Superman is silent.” He is the Witness behind all that we do. One might say that Superman is pure consciousness streaming through the imaginative, language-less right brain that then becomes the chatty little rational ego or Clark Kent of the left brain. I think that Schwartz would have little difficulty with this reading. He points out, after all, that whereas speech and writing are always after the fact and represent acts of doing itself, being, in the Now, is always silent. “And that’s why,” he now explains to Kay, “you can’t have a Superman without a Clark Kent—because no one can live all the time at that level of experience. There has to be a retreat to ordinariness, to self-recollection, to talk and planning and remembering” (UP 205). We need the ego. We need reason and language. We need that left brain.

We are back to the original 1944 insight in the sandwich shop. We are back to the central Schwartzian theme of the simultaneous reality of form and formlessness, of the finite and the infinite. This is the final lesson of Superman for Alvin Schwartz, and the final lesson of Clark Kent: “The Superman self, as you believed even then, was not something one could live in all the time. It’s a far too heightened level of the personality. Sustaining it for too long could burn one out very quickly, and possibly do the same to those around one. So the Clark Kent everyday personality was a necessary safety valve—a retreat where one could live normally” (UP 96).

Schwartz also comes to understand the human imagination as a kind of near-omnipotent mystical organ that can act as a magical bridge between the poles of the formless and its forms—the “phone booth of consciousness,” as he humorously dubs it. It is the imagination that creates our different experienced realities, including and especially our social and psychological realities. It is also that “chief organ of consciousness” that “particularizes” an identity or personality out of that “bedrock of ultimate self”—neither “I” nor “me”—that is watching it all, like a play or comedy, as if from “outside the whole thing” (GS 43, 177, 36). It is that place in our mind, from left to right or right to left, where we can switch back and forth between our different identities, as in a phone booth.

In his second metaphysical memoir, A Gathering of Selves, Schwartz descends from the heights of his hard-won Realization in An Unlikely Prophet and moves into a new stage of understanding, that is, into a conscious, active engagement with the world of forms, people, and even money.⁵⁹ As he explains his situation on the very first page, his was no longer a life of “higher understanding, promising peace or contentment,” for this very understanding had become “a source of unrest and a strange new goad to pass beyond a state of passive awareness to one of action and participation” (GS 1). He was moving into Authorization. In his own terms, Schwartz was now uniting in his life, as he had in his vision, the forms of the temporal order and the formlessness of the eternal. What he once saw as polarized opposites he now was learning to see as two sides of the same fundamental reality.

Schwartz sees the very aesthetics of Batman in a similar Tantric light (and darkness). In a recent essay introducing a collection of the Batman Sunday strips, for example, he pointed out “the unique qualities of light and dark, of polarized contrast in the drawing style that Bob Kane introduced and that Tim Burton recaptured so effectively” in his classic 1989 Batman movie.⁶⁰ And he thinks that this “extreme polarity” is especially notable in the Sunday strips he wrote, one of which I have reproduced here. Indeed, “the whole strip is a study in polarity—an accurate simulacrum of the way the psyche works. As the bat on which the superhero founds his identity is a creature of the night, so also is Batman. The Batsignal that summons him to Commissioner Gordon’s headquarters is only visible at night. And the underworld against which Batman’s efforts are directed is also a night world. As anyone who has dabbled in psychology will recognize, the stage on which Batman appears is subliminal.”⁶¹ There is that word again—subliminal, under the limen or threshold—popularized early on by Frederic Myers of the London Society for Psychical Research.

5.4   A SCHWARTZ BATMAN STRIP

This, of course, is all unconscious in popular culture. Artist Bob Kane or writer Bill Finger knew nothing of Fred Myers and did not set out to explore the psychical, subliminal psyche with their original art and scripting in the late 1930s and early ’40s, anymore than Schwartz and his colleagues were aware of such psychological processes when they were writing, sketching, and publishing the Superman Sunday strips in the 1940s and ’50s. As Schwartz explains, “it simply never would have occurred to us that we were, to put it bluntly, ‘being directed.’”⁶²

Late in life, Alvin Schwartz took up Batman’s union of opposites, the darkness and the light, in both very practical and very metaphysical ways. Most dramatically, he confronted and employed the business savvy of Bruce Wayne and the raw strength of the dark figure of the Batman to carry him into the next stage of understanding, that is, into the interpersonal realization that what “we think of as ‘self’ is but one layer of an onion-like structure of multiple selves that coexist, representing the foundation of the fundamental unity of all being.”⁶³

Schwartz, like so many of our other authors and artists, also came to the understanding that there is only Now, and that linear time is an illusion. “Wherever you go, it is now. . . . Now is a point. Timeless, dimensionless. . . . Now is you. Now is—the observer. Do you understand? You are always and absolutely here and now.” And our selves? Our egos? There are many of these, but they are really all happening at once: “You don’t have any previous lives. But everyone has literally dozens of simultaneous selves” (GS 212–13, 46).

There is another way, a familiar way, to say this. In one of the more delightful exchanges of the second book, Thongden has just led the writer through a contemplative exercise with a mirror and shown him that he is not really “Alvin Schwartz,” that his social ego is really “no more than a reflection in a mirror.” When the teacher takes the experiment further and asks him to become his Bruce Wayne persona, Schwartz becomes puzzled:

“MY BRUCE WAYNE? HOW?”

“YOU MUST ASSUME THAT PERSONALITY. YOU WILL THEN SEE FOR YOURSELF.”

“BUT I’M NOT BRUCE WAYNE. HOW CAN I—?”

“AS YOU JUST EXPERIENCED, YOU’RE NOT REALLY ALVIN SCHWARTZ EITHER. BUT IN FACT, YOU CREATED BOTH. IF YOU CAN ASSUME YOUR ALVIN PERSONALITY, IT SHOULD BE JUST AS SIMPLE TO TAKE ON THE BRUCE ONE.” (GS 34)

Again, the message is a familiar one by now. And it is as simple as it is profound. The imagined figures of Batman and Superman are indeed fictions. But so too is the imagined figure of your ego. Egos are interchangeable, malleable, plastic, and finally related to every other in the ground of being. They are like the suits put on and taken off by superheroes. They are costumes. They are masks (personas). They are also dreams. “Our dreams are us,” Thongden explains to a still unknowing student in the first book, “but we are not our dreams” (UP 142).

Such comparisons between the pop-cultural figure of Batman and the dizzying heights of Buddhist philosophy may strike some readers as forced and artificial. I mean, really, a Buddhist Batman? As it turns out, however, the Batman mythos, as if following Schwartz’s own realizations, has recently turned in exactly this direction, and in at least one of the character’s most celebrated and critically discussed appearances, no less.

We can catch glimpses of an Orientation mytheme already in Doug Moench’s storyline for Batman Annual #21 (1997). There, the same year Schwartz published his Unlikely Prophet with Tibetan monks on the cover, we are introduced to the concept of the tulpa, “a Tibetan term meaning ‘thought-form entity’ and the ultimate explanation, some feel, for the Yeti or ‘Abominable Snowman.’” In short, John Keel. The Yeti reference is hardly tangential here. Indeed, the tulpa Batman battles, in the golden city of Shambalah, is a Yeti.

Admittedly, this is a single story in a single comic. More recently, however, Grant Morrison explored a Buddhist Batman, very much in Schwartz’s philosophical direction, in a multi-issue story arc that climaxed in Batman R.I.P. (2008). This same arc, by the way, also includes an allusion to Morrison’s Kathmandu experience in the form of “an alien hyper-imp from the 5th dimension” who follows Batman around as a kind of comic genie-guide. Hyper-imp and all, here Morrison weaves his tale around Bruce Wayne’s decision to undergo the Tibetan meditation ordeal known as Thögal in a cave in Nanda Parbat.

5.5   BATMAN’S HYPERDIMENSIONAL IMP

There really is such a practice as Thögal. It is a supersecret practice of the Dzogchen tradition, which is itself part of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, which gave us texts like the Bardo Thodal, otherwise known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead (an instruction manual on how to negotiate the terrors and visions of the death process that is read to the disembodied soul as it hovers around its corpse). The successful practice of Thögal is said to be able to take the practitioner very quickly to the ultimate goal of complete enlightenment, which is accompanied by the attainment of something called the Rainbow Body—a consummate transformation, and dissolution, of the physical form into a Body of Light, often represented in Tibetan art as a huge rainbowlike energy field emanating from a Buddha (a theme we last encountered in Ezekiel’s chariot vision of the fiery humanoid being on the divine throne, surrounded by a rainbow light). The mytheme of Radiation par excellence.

Nanda Parbat is another matter, that is, a fictional one. In the DC universe, Nanda Parbat is a Himalayan city overseen by the six-armed Hindu goddess Rama Kushna (a probable allusion either to the Hindu gods Rama and Krishna, or, more likely I think, to the nineteenth-century Hindu Tantric saint Ramakrishna, who was quite popular in the 1960s counterculture in which the DC goddess originally appeared). In a celebrated storyline initiated in 1967, the same Tantric goddess had transformed a faithless circus trapeze artist by the name of Boston Brand into Deadman, a superhero who looks a lot like a corpse and who is essentially a kind of superghost who can fly, become invisible, and possess any living body in order to take revenge on enemies and crooks alike. Corpses and possession, by the way, are both common features of the more radical Tantric traditions of India, Nepal, and Tibet. Which is all to say that Morrison’s historical, fantastic, and mystical meditations around a “dead” Buddhist Batman in Tibet are rich and complex ones.

The Thögal practice itself is described on the first page of Batman #673: “The Thögal Ritual is one of the most highly advanced and dangerous forms of meditation. During a seven-week retreat know as Yangti, the practitioner undergoes an experience designed to simulate death and after-death. And rebirth, too.” Alfred, now in the first pages of Batman R.I.P., explains further: “Thögal is the peak meditative experience in the Dzogchen Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. . . . Nothing less, as I understand it, than a complete rehearsal, while living, of the experience of death.” Later in the story, Batman explains how through this practice he ultimately came to “a place that’s not a place.” His Tibetan interlocutor explains that this too “is customary. In Thögal, the initiate learns what the dead know. The self is peeled back to its black radiant core.” Like an onion.

CHANNELED WISDOM: THE PSYCHICAL BACKGROUND

Schwartz has described how he came to understand that his writing of the Superman and Batman adventures was finally “more like dictation than creation.” He has also written about An Unlikely Prophet as a kind of “channeling” of Superman.⁶⁴ Both metaphors, it turns out, are more than metaphors.

When I spoke to Schwartz about his two metaphysical memoirs, I wanted to get some clarification about how he thought about these two books. Naïvely put, I wanted to know whether he thought of them as fiction or nonfiction. Or both. Or neither.

“I have to make it clear,” he began almost immediately, “I don’t write fiction, except when I wrote comics. I write narrative. The gospels, for example, are narratives, but they are not fiction.” He then broke into a long discussion of a particularly powerful influence on his life that does not show up in either metaphysical memoir but that, I think, throws a great deal of light on his own intentions and authorial understanding of these two striking works. Much like Thongden had helped him to see that his original decision to write Superman was very much connected to his later experience with Marjorie being possessed by a greater force that painted through her brush and electrified him through her scared body, Alvin was now teaching me what he meant by “narrative” through another story.

This one stemmed back to the late 1940s, when he was involved in a long series of séance-like sessions with a disembodied entity named “Roy.” Roy, it turns out, was being channeled through an acquaintance of Schwartz’s, a psychically gifted man named Waldemar. But Roy had also been a historical, flesh-and-blood person. Roy was the deceased brother-in-law of Waldemar. He had died young. And now he was apparently communicating with the group through a traditional practice that bears directly, even literally, on my notion of “reading the paranormal writing us,” that is, the practice of automatic writing. Very much like Thongden, Roy was literally written into being. Or at least into appearance.

The first session began with a single penciled line: “I am Roy the brother of Waldemar. . . . You are fun. Put out the lights.” This was only the beginning. The communications soon became more explicit. “I have come to make Alvin my pupil.” Schwartz asked the obvious: “Why?” The pencil responded: “A master needs a pupil.” Roy then proceeded to speak of many things about which the young author was worrying at the time, including his career in comics.

The communications were sometimes didactic. At other times, they worked through parables or symbols. Schwartz described the reaction of one of his Freudian psychoanalyst friends, a man named Hans. Hans had studied with the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Hans thought it was all projection. Schwartz was not so sure. For one thing, the pencil never lifted off the page. At one point, moreover, it wrote in a script that looked like Greek, though no one in the group could read Greek. They asked one of their neighbors, who happened to be the former president of Black Mountain College, to come in and give his opinion on the script. Yes, it was Greek, he confirmed: Attic Greek, to be precise. One of the penciled communications was in fact the well-known injunction that hung over the door at the famous Oracle of Delphi: gnosthi seauton, that is, “Know thyself.”

This was what Alvin’s later life would be all about—to know the self and the Self. One of Schwartz’s central themes, after all, is the necessity of the Clark Kent alter ego. We cannot, and should not, live all the time in our secret Superman Self. Generally speaking (if one can speak generally about secretly being an omnipotent superhero), that other identity will only appear in times of grave crisis or severe trauma, such as a near-death experience. Otherwise, we are called to live in the ordinary, often humdrum world of family, profession, and business.

This same theme might already have been embedded in one of Roy’s consistent teachings to Alvin and their little group, namely, that one does not have to meditate. “I’ve found that I can’t meditate,” Schwartz explained to me, and this despite the simple fact that both of his metaphysical memoirs rely heavily on Buddhist ideas and practices. “None of these books were deliberately Buddhist,” he explained. “They came out the way they are because of what I am and what I experienced. I wouldn’t allow my friends to become Buddhists. My knowledge of Buddhism is like my knowledge of the New Testament or the apocryphal books. I’ve always been drawn toward the metaphysical. As a kid, I read people like Poe and H.G. Wells. I also read a lot of Evans-Wentz.”

This notion of a path that is not a path, this method that has no meditation, reminds me of any number of Asian contemplative traditions that teach more or less the same thing (and, ironically, a whole lot of meditation). Since the state of pure consciousness is always already there, there really is “nothing to do.” There is certainly no way to cause this state of pure consciousness, as nothing in turn has caused or produced it. It simply is. It will appear when it appears. “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him,” that is, if you think that the Buddha is some sort of historical person outside yourself, someone you can meet “out there” in the world of cause and effect, you are gravely, wildly mistaken.

Alvin had obviously seen the Buddha and killed the guy. So I asked him about the clear Tantric undertones of the two books, “Tantric” here defined again as referring to the already-always fusion of the metaphysical and the physical realms—in short, the Path of Form within an ultimate and fundamental Formlessness. “I also read a bit about Tantrism,” Alvin explained. “Roy got me into what I would call Tantric ideas, but they were not labeled as such.”

It was not simply the fact that Roy could write in Attic Greek and knew about the Oracle of Delphi that impressed Schwartz and his friends (very similar things would later happen to Philip K. Dick [V 196–97]). Nor was it the fact that he taught seemingly surprising things, such as the nonnecessity of meditation. It was that he could also make the whole house shake. Literally. Such high strangeness went on for two and a half years.

Somewhere in there, the Hungarian-born psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor began to visit the group. Fodor was well known as a writer on parapsychological subjects.⁶⁵ He also practiced what he preached. Or better, he married it. His wife was a practicing psychic. Fodor was delighted with what he found in the group gathered around Roy and the pencil. He took particular pleasure in shaking up his skeptical psychoanalytic colleague, Hans, who somehow thought all of this could count as a standard symptom of projection. Projection, of course, it may well have been, but of an order that can shake a house. We are back to the problem of Ted Owens’s seeming schizophrenic symptoms. Schizophrenic he may have been, but of an order that appeared to unite with the weather at its most awesome.

Schwartz described some of these events to me as “too grim, too serious.” It was all about “getting your soul wrenched.” Still, “that was an overwhelming event in my life. It impacted me in a much broader way than simply my writing career.” And it continued to impact him. Years later, he was in a Canadian airport and came across Seth Speaks, one of the many books by Jane Roberts, the ESP teacher who became famous for her channeling of an “energy essence personality no longer focused in physical reality” named Seth, whose teachings included one of our next chapter’s most radical themes, namely, the freedom from time and the Oversoul’s ability to influence both future and past selves.⁶⁶ This particular book, Schwartz explained, “suddenly reminded me of my experience.” He bought the book “because I felt that it was directed to me. It was like a continuation of my earlier experience, a stamp of authenticity.” Seth, in other words, reminded him of Roy. And soon enough of Superman.

And that is how Alvin Schwartz explained to me how he channeled Superman and became Bruce Wayne on the Path without Form.