Announcing his candidacy for president in the 1960 election, Gabriel Green told those present at his press conference that he had been instructed to run “by people from outer space. His advisers,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “were from the Alpha Centauri system.”1 While Homer Tomlinson may have been pulling publicity stunts that made him look nuts, this Green guy for sure was off his rocker—or rocket. Or, as with “King of the World” Tomlinson, is that too easy an answer?
Certainly one can call Gabriel Green a kook or a clown, as most Americans did at the time. Nevertheless this candidate of the self-created Universal Flying Saucer Party reveals how fringe candidates bring into focus the shape we’re in. In this instance it’s a shape very similar to one the United States had been in before and, alas, may someday be in again.
Green grew up in Whittier, California—ironically the same town as another 1960 presidential candidate, Richard Nixon. While they did not know each other, Nixon being eleven years older, Green said he had taken a typing course from the future president’s mother. Then again, he also said, “On several occasions I have talked to people from other planets.”2
Green first attracted press attention in 1956, when he formed a club whose members claimed to have seen UFOs. A wire service report that appeared in multiple newspapers told the nation, “The group [is] headed by president Gabriel Green . . . a 31-year-old photographer for the Los Angeles city school system,” then added a dash of ridicule by noting he was “a bachelor who still lives with his parents.”3 Back then there were so many claims of UFO sightings that, by 1956, newspapers reported them very selectively. The reason the press chose to report on Green’s club was the group’s prediction, based on messages they said they received from space people, that a flying saucer would appear in the skies over Los Angles at 10:30 p.m. on November 7, 1956. To which the wire service report couldn’t resist adding, “Whether the Martians will disembark and be photographed with Jayne Mansfield [a Hollywood sex goddess] at Ciro’s, he [Green] does not know.”
For all its wisecracks, the report also included three statements that were, even if inadvertently, significant. It observed that the belief in UFOs had “become virtually another popular religion.” It quoted Green as saying that the reason aliens from outer spaces were coming to earth was to “help people solve their problems.” And it speculated that Green was “enjoying local fame with his project, which might explain it.”
As to the last, that didn’t explain it. Green lived until 2001, yet at no time other than 1960 did he seek the spotlight. Why only then? We can’t climb into Green’s head, but we can climb back to the years leading up to the 1960 election to recollect what was going on at the time that led to his candidacy with its “Space Age Platform,” as he called it.
In 1945 the world learned of the atomic bomb. While very few fully grasped the physics that resulted in a heretofore inconceivable blast, given the devastation it wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and the Japanese surrender that followed—everyone believed in its power. No sooner had World War II ended than the cold war began. Four months after the end of the war with Japan, a wire service report informed Americans, “Army tells plans for new rocket weapon, space ships.” Eighteen months later newspapers were reporting, as headlined in the Chicago Tribune, “supersonic flying saucers sighted by Idaho pilot.” “Supersonic” meaning faster than the speed of sound, which was particularly eerie since human aviation had not yet achieved such speed.4
Unbelievable—except that many would have considered it unbelievable to detonate a bomb far more powerful than any previously conceived by splitting an atom. In this instance, however, scientists and the military scoffed. “Lt. Col. Harold R. Turner, an army rocket expert, ventured the opinion Saturday that Kenneth Arnold’s [the Idaho pilot] flying saucers were merely jet planes,” a wire service report stated three days after the sighting was first reported. But the report went on to state that “almost a dozen persons sprang up about the country to say they had seen the mysterious discs also.”5 This created a question that, as time went on, would increasingly shape the nation’s political landscape: Can we believe the government?
The front page of one Texas newspaper not only published that report but also a wire service report that stated, “A crackdown on communism and persons deemed ‘bad risks’ from the national security standpoint today cost ten State Department employees their jobs.” Similarly two wire service stories that ran on the same page of a Maryland newspaper on December 22, 1947, told the nation, “U.S. plane has flown faster than speed of sound,” and “‘flying saucers’ may be Russian.”6
In November 1949 the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson added to the nation’s shock and awe when he wrote, “Although the United States now has an A-bomb many times more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima, nevertheless it is true, as Senator [Louis A.] Johnson says, that scientists are working on a bomb more devastating than anything so far conceived by the mind of man. This is the hydrogen bomb.”7 Soon Americans were reading of “such advanced weapons as guided missiles” and that “the conquest of outer space has begun, with the first man-made satellite [the Soviet Union’s Sputnik] circling the earth every hour and 36 minutes,” followed not long after by the more startling headline “Russians Launch Rocket at Moon.”8
These reports about Russian rocketry now aiming for the moon, about increasingly powerful atomic bombs, about communist infiltration, and about flying saucers were appearing in greater numbers every year. By 1950 more than 150 suspected communists were listed in the book Red Channels and subsequently blacklisted from employment in film, television, and radio; by 1955 twice that many people had reported to the U.S. Air Force what they believed to be sightings of flying saucers.9 Stir all this together and by 1959 you get:
The Amalgamated Flying Saucers Clubs of America announced yesterday that the Russian moon rocket never reached its destination. A statement issued under the name of Gabriel Green said information received at 10:15 AM disclosed that intelligent beings manning space craft from other planets destroyed the moon rocket 190,000 miles from earth. Green said the moon rocket was destroyed because the nose cone contained active disease and virus bacteria intentionally placed there by the Russians. “The space people have indicated,” Green said, “that they cannot allow any vehicle of a destructive nature to contaminate outer space or the surface of any other planetary bodies.”10
And that same year you get this tidbit, under the heading “So They Say”: “The space people tell us that before we are ready to be received back into the universal confederation of planets, certain social and economic reforms on our planet are necessary.” It’s signed “Gabriel Green, director of Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America.”11 And ultimately you get, “Gabriel Green, 35, self-styled choice of the ‘space people,’ has declared his candidacy for the presidency. . . . His campaign would be based on his system of ‘prior choice economics’ which he explained thus, ‘Everything is or should be the sum total of all that has gone before.’”12
Quite likely the reason Green did not elaborate on what he meant by “prior choice economics” being based on “the sum total of all that has gone before” is that others had already detailed how economics could be restructured based on its historical arc. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels posited such a view in the Communist Manifesto when they wrote, “The means of production and of exchange on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up were generated in feudal society. . . . The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself . . . [by] the modern working-class—the proletariat. . . . The proletariat [also] goes through various stages of development.”13
Yikes. Better to attribute the view to space people than those guys. Especially during the cold war.
Not everyone, however, missed the connection. In a 1960 Harper’s magazine article, Hal Draper wrote, “Mr. Green told me his program was not entirely incompatible with Socialism; but Socialism is a dirty word here.” The article further revealed that a good deal of Green’s campaign strategy was actually very down to earth. “You’ve got to give something for everybody,” Green commented when speaking of “means to the end.”14
While Green gave few details during his campaign about “prior choice economics,” he did allude to it in ways earthlings had heard before, when a newspaper ad he ran spoke of “true freedom where there is oppression and economic slavery”—economic slavery being a phrase familiar to anticapitalists. As to the other touchy issue—space people in flying saucers—that same literature contained a similarly soft-pedaled statement in Green’s pledge of a “true Stairway to the Stars instead of missile-fizzles and launching pad blues.” It did not, however, mention space people providing the expertise to overcome America’s many failed efforts to launch a rocket. And, reflecting the era, the same document alluded to the cold war and the fears it engendered of World War III in a list headed “IF YOU WANT,” which included “Survival instead of annihilation” and “A better tomorrow instead of no tomorrow.”15
Green may have been a kook, but he was not necessarily crazy. UFOs were being reported by airline pilots and police officers—at considerable risk to their careers—along with too many otherwise totally stable individuals to dismiss all these people as even temporarily mentally unbalanced (though they may have been mistaken).16 Even another presidential candidate claimed to have seen UFOs—a 1976 contender named Jimmy Carter.17
On the flip side, most of the pledges Green made in that same campaign ad could have come from any mainstream candidate. Also under “IF YOU WANT” Green listed, “Results instead of promises,” “Ideas instead of double-talk,” “Leadership instead of rule by political opportunists . . . and pressure groups.” Normally banal, but weird when espoused by the candidate of the Universal Flying Saucer Party. What in God’s name is going on here?
Here, in God’s name, is a weird hint. James R. Lewis, a professor of religious studies, revealed a connection between flying saucer believers and cosmological politics in words from the Book of Exodus: “There were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount . . . so that all the people that was in the camp trembled . . . and Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire.”18 Lewis was not suggesting that God descended upon Mount Sinai in a flying saucer, nor that angels were piloting the UFOs so many people reported seeing in the years following World War II. What he and scholars such as Gordon Melton, John Saliba, and Ted Peters have suggested is that, as with many of those in this era who believed UFOs were present, others had long before similarly claimed they had acquired special knowledge by contact with heavenly beings.
Also among scholars who addressed this recurrence of visitations from the heavens was the noted psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Writing in 1959, Jung maintained that the UFO phenomenon then taking place was the result of “emotional tension having its cause in a situation of collective distress . . . [that] undoubtedly exists today, in so far as the whole world is suffering under the strain of Russian policies and their still unpredictable consequences.” As Jung went on, he shed light both on Green’s quest for the presidency and on Green’s political platform: “Such psychic tension issues in the unconscious a call for a Messiah to deliver us from our impending catastrophe.”19
The clearest sign that Green was not nuts is the fact that he withdrew from the presidential race one week before Election Day, stating, “Not enough Americans have yet seen flying saucers or talked to outer space people to vote” for him.20
Green again threw his hat, complete with its fully extended antennas, into the ring in 1972. His beliefs about space people had not changed, but the way he campaigned did—and did so in ways that amplified changes difficult to detect amid predominant views.
While fears remained regarding a nuclear war annihilating the planet, those fears had begun to lessen in 1972 with that year’s signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty by the United States and the Soviet Union. The groundwork from which the treaty sprouted became more fertile with the decline in the Red Scare that had gripped the United States in the 1950s.
Consequently Green could speak more freely, without fear of being branded a commie. As he did when one newspaper reported, “In place of money, Green said, the extra-terrestrial economics would substitute a worldwide system of credits.”21 Marx had similarly predicted money would become obsolete as communism became the dominant worldview: “Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges everything, it is the universal confusion and exchange of all things, an inverted world, the confusion and exchange of all natural and human qualities.”22
On the other hand, by 1972 those in a fever over flying saucers had increasingly commingled with other spiritualistic groups, resulting in Green’s running as the nominee of the Universal Party, founded in 1963 by Kirby J. Hensley, a Pentecostal minister, believer in UFOs, and staunch libertarian. The party’s 1972 platform called for “the establishment of Libertarian Government” and for “a Constitution for the United Nations of the World.” It went on to urge this one-world government to enact a “universal law . . . for all contact and social interaction with other Life Forms and Species in the Universe.”23
While the Universal Party was a sufficiently bigger tent to draw in Green, it nevertheless remained on the fringe. The convention that nominated Green for president was attended by about thirty self-appointed delegates.24 And despite the broader interests of the Universal Party, ridicule continued to hover over Green’s campaign. One West Virginia columnist wrote, “I would hesitate to guess how well the Green candidacy would do in West Virginia. Since we don’t trust anybody from out of state, Lord knows how we’d feel about somebody from out of planet.”25
Likewise Green hesitated to guess how well he’d do. When asked if he expected to win he replied, “Certainly not in 1972. The purpose of any campaign is to educate people to the new ideas to bring about changes.”26 Which not only shows this flying saucer candidate had his feet on the ground but describes a key significance of fringe candidates for president.
In 1996 a reporter for a Riverside, California, newspaper interviewed the seventy-one-year-old former flying saucer candidate. Green continued to believe that beings from outer space were periodically making contact with our planet. And while he had continued to be a featured speaker at gatherings of UFO believers, he had demonstrated no need to remain the center of attention; indeed his attention had turned to the theories of George Van Tassel, who, ostensibly following instructions provided by space people, constructed an Integreton in the remote southern California town of Landers. Green spoke of his and the late Van Tassel’s belief that, once the space people return to activate the Integreton, it will create an electromagnetic field to eliminate old age.27 In a sense Live Forever Jones did live on, in this aspect of the space age campaign of Gabriel Green. And in terms of living forever, both, as we shall see, returned yet again, in the 2016 candidacy of Zoltan Istvan.