Showing posts with label Ufology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ufology. Show all posts

Monday, December 23, 2019

Remembering Donald Keyhoe and the Birth of Ufology

The end of December marks the anniversary of the Cash-Landrum case, which we traditionally remember this time each year. Betty Cash, Colby and Vickie Landrum reported a terrifying UFO encounter that they said changed their lives on Dec. 29, 1980. 

Without the field of Ufology, the Cash-Landrum sighting might have have been forgotten and the story never revealed or investigated. Without Donald Keyhoe, there might never have been Ufology. This year, we look at the 70th anniversary of the article that established the foundation for the civilian study of UFOs.


Beliefs about extraterrestrial visitors goes back much further than the flying saucer wave of 1947, but it was mostly a matter for the fringe, from spiritualists and Forteans to crackpot science fiction fans. That began to change in December of 1949, when the news was abuzz over an article, "The Flying Saucers Are Real" by Donald E. Keyhoe in True magazine, cover dated January 1950. The article prompted a negative reaction by the Air Force.

Associated Press story, The Carbondale Southern Illinoisan,  Dec. 27, 1949
Donald Keyhoe was a retired Marine Major who had been writing professionally since the 1920s, everything from nonfiction aviation to pulp fantasy and science fiction. True magazine had been working on an article on flying saucers, but was stumped. Editor Ken Purdy assigned the job to Keyhoe, knowing his aviation background and military contacts would allow him to dig deeper. It did. 


Keyhoe was able to get factual information on cases, and also to get opinion and speculation on flying saucers from military engineers. Despite lacking physical evidence, some of them were persuaded that saucers were aircraft of an unknown design, and the reported performance of this craft exceeded the technical capabilities of anything that could be made on earth. Ergo, flying saucers came from another planet.

Donald Keyhoe’s article helped coalesce several saucer beliefs into a plausible package. His position was: The flying saucers are real, and are interplanetary spaceships. His secondary principle was that the US government knew about UFOs and that they were keeping it secret, in other words, there was a government UFO cover-up.

The military’s policy of secrecy, coupled with their confusion over the UFO situation fed into the suspicion and even paranoia of saucer buffs. The newly-formed Air Force was able neither to explain or control the saucer problem, and they’d tried hard to avoid talking about. When they did, there were often contradictory statements and explanations that just made matters worse. It may have been more of a foul-up than a cover-up.

Some of Keyhoe's UFO books over the decades.
With the phenomenal success of the article, Keyhoe expanded it into a paperback book released in May of 1950. Much of the flying saucer sensation was fueled by hoaxes, rumors and speculation, but Keyhoe did what no one else could, and he tenaciously focused on real incidents and documentation instead of hearsay. It’s true that his pulp writing style added some drama to the way they were presented, and also some speculation. The Air Force’s Capt. Edward Ruppelt would later offer a left-handed compliment saying, “Keyhoe had based his conjecture on fact, and his facts were correct, even if the conjecture wasn't.”

Keyhoe’s book is more well known today than his article that launched it all. It’s worth remembering an rereading the True magazine piece, where it all the excitement started. 

As long as UFOs are discussed, Keyhoe's story will live on.

True magazine January, 1950, "The Flying Saucers Are Real" by Donald E. Keyhoe
(Hosted at the site, PROJECT 1947, founded by Jan L. Aldrich)

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For more UFO history, join us at our companion site, The Saucers That Time Forgot



Thursday, August 29, 2019

Ufology's Legacy from Loch Ness



Last year, my friend Claude Falkstrom gave a high recommendation for a book on the Loch Ness Monster. Although it sounded interesting, I took no action, mostly due to feeling that I knew the story already. Recently he virtually forced a copy on me, and I found I’d been wrong. There was more in it new to me than not, and I found the book to be brilliant. As Claude had told me, it also indirectly had much of value pertaining to the study of UFOs. 

The book is A Monstrous Commotion: The Mysteries of Loch Ness by Gareth Williams, 2015. 

The press release for the book provides some biographical data on the author:
“Gareth Williams is Emeritus Professor and former Dean of Medicine at Bristol University. An internationally recognised authority in diabetes and obesity research, he has written 200 scientific papers and authored or edited over 20 medical books…”

With that background, one might fairly expect a scientific evaluation of the evidence, but this is something different, a detailed look at the history of Loch Ness sightings and of the people who pursued the study of the alleged Monster. The book is also heavily illustrated, with pictures of the key figures, maps, and photographs taken by the witnesses.

A Monstrous Commotion's central figure, naturalist Sir Peter Scott,
The Loch Ness Monster story really took off in 1933, getting over a decade’s head start on the flying saucer story, but they are close enough together in time and character to almost be twins when it comes to the matter of pursuing the respective mysteries. Williams shows how the story began in the press, but unlike Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers, the Loch Ness Monster was slow at the start. Once it emerged, it seemed almost equally contagious, and many other sightings followed the first. Unlike saucers, which could be seen anywhere, the Monster could only be seen  at the Loch. In time, a flood of visitors came to try to catch a glimpse as the legend grew over the decades.

As UFO authors would later do, reporters and investigators dug through historical records for matching reports. Indeed, old reports of mysterious events in the Loch were found, from myths and legends to newspaper stories. Though many of them differed in substantial details, it formed a database of sorts, driven by witness testimony. Some of those witnesses had multiple sightings, “repeaters,” with too much of a good thing. In time, there were a few photographs of varying quality, and a famous one came to be known as “the Surgeon’s Photograph.” It showed the definite form of an animal, taken by a witness, a professional man of unquestionable reputation. 

There were hoaxes, however; phony tracks, monsters and photos, frequent frauds that confused the issue and poisoned the topic in the minds of scientists. The fakes damaged the efforts of those who were pushing for a scientific inquiry. That takes us to another familiar element from ufology we find in the book, the clash between proponents and skeptics. Williams says of the supporters:

“Hoaxers might have taken the Monster’s name in vain, but they had little impact on the rapidly increasing numbers of believers around the world. ”

Regarding the opponents, even in the face of credible witness testimony and quality photographs:

“The vast majority of mainstream zoologists… were still unpersuaded that the Monster was real. They were entrenched in their scepticism, just as the scientific establishment had been since the 1930s. To them, the Monster was not the greatest zoological coup of the century, but a preposterous insult to the intelligence of anyone who understood the basic rules of science.”

Williams’ book is not a dry history, and one of its greatest strengths is making the figures discussed come to life, particularly Sir Peter Scott, the painter and conservationist who was persuaded to become an advocate for the scientific study of the Loch Ness Monster. With Scott’s reputation supporting the effort over the decades, the topic was given an air of respectability.

Illustrations from the book, an alleged photograph and some of the many scientific endeavors.
It was a struggle to have the studies taken seriously, and the scientific establishment seemed fiercely opposed to any effort by the advocates to have the Monster classified as a real animal. As a result, some reputations were damaged. A Monstrous Commotion chronicles at least one scientist who lost his job due to his support of the animal’s reality.

Nessie’s supporters scored several victories in the 1970s, most notably when an underwater photo was taken of the creature’s flipper and placed on the cover of the prestigious Nature magazine. This was an enormous boost for the hypothesis that Nessie was a surviving aquatic dinosaur species, and it encouraged other scientific attempts to investigate.

The book’s finale wraps the story up nicely by revealing some of the parts of the story that were hidden in the early days, the identities of some of the players reporting the news, making sighting claims, and in one instance, taking photographs. In another nice touch, Williams includes a chapter, "The human factor," that tells what became of the key people involved in the story of the Monster. Over the years, not all evidence was presented honestly, and some of the players involved seemed to have covered up some inconvenient facts. In his final chapter, he notes, “Almost all of us want the Monster to exist, whether or not we believe in it.”

William's book provides a perfect case for ufologists to study; to step away from their saucers and to look at how belief and media promotion can give something a mythological life of its own, quite independently of whether or not the underlying subject matter is of substance or not.

A Monstrous Commotion: The Mysteries of Loch Ness by Gareth Williams can be previewed on Google Books, and you’ll find several options there for getting the book in print.



Saturday, September 23, 2017

UFO Origins: Saucers That Time Forgot & The Outer Limit

There's a companion blog to Blue Blurry Lines, one exclusively focused on the forgotten history, folklore and origins of ufology, The Saucers That Time Forgot.


A five-part series was just completed, at STTF, an examination of "The Outer Limit" by Graham Doar, a science fiction short story from 1949 that deals with an interrupted journey, the test flight of an experimental rocket plane, and features now-familiar UFO case elements, put together for the first time:

A close encounter with a UFO, an alien abduction, missing time, contact with an advanced benevolent extraterrestrial race, telepathic communication, and a dire warning to the Earth about the use of Atomic weapons. At least one adaptation of the story includes the use of hypnotic regression to recover memories of the encounter. It's a prophetic tale of a credible witness of a relatively incredible event, but the colonel in charge chooses not to believe, and there's the strong suggestion that the UFO report will be the subject of a cosmic cover-up.

The series starts with the historical setting of the late 1940s, A-bombs and the arrival of the flying saucers, introduces the story itself, and shows how the tales was further spread through popular culture by being adapted into several radio and television programs, and how it was absorbed into ufology through George Adamski and the Contactees. The finale examines how it was imitated in several movies ranging from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, and even echoed in much more modern films.

The complete collection, linked for your convenience:

Flying Saucers, the Atomic Bomb and Doomsday: The Outer Limit (Part 1 of 5)
The Outer Limit by Graham Doar: The UFO Parable (Part 2 of 5)
Radio, Television & The Outer Limit Legacy (Part 3 of 5)
Ufology & The Outer Limit Legacy (Part 4 of 5)
UFOs, Hollywood & The Outer Limit Legacy (Finale)

Other articles focus on weird, warped, and sometimes fraudulent UFO cases that were newsmakers in their day, but lost through the cracks of time, forgotten- or perhaps even suppressed- by UFO historians.  STTF is written by Curt Collins, with the support of Claude Falkstrom, backed by the input of UFO buffs - and sages - both known and unknown, of this world and perhaps others.

Fight the UFO cover-up. Read each and every installment of The Saucers That Time Forgot.

Friday, June 30, 2017

Dr. J. Allen Hynek: Ufology is a Mess

“Ufology today is in the state I would say chemistry was when chemistry was alchemy,  a mixture of superstition, wild ideas, unproved claims, and yet out of that whole mess, finally the very first class science of chemistry evolved. And I think the same thing is going to happen eventually with Ufology, but right now, it is a mess. 
There’s a fantastic amount of wishful thinking, of desire, of pseudoscience, of pseudo-religion, of cultism, but eventually, I think that will all finally sink to the bottom, and we’ll have out of the whole thing a clear liquid of something we that can really see, and I hope, understand.” 
Dr. J. Allen Hynek in The UFO Experience (documentary, 1983)


The Close Encounters Man

Hynek is back in the news, due to the biography by Mark O'Connell, The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs O'Connell interviewed people who knew and worked with Hynek, and was given unprecedented access to Hynek’s professional files as an astronomer, and the UFO documents and correspondence at the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). 


It's not exactly a UFO book, but it touches on a lot of the topic's history in telling the story of the man, Josef Allen Hynek. So in that sense, it's a book that' is accessible to non-saucer buffs, and also provides an interesting look UFOs as part a cultural phenomenon, and Hynek's evolving role in making it happen.

More details about the book and the author can be found at this page at The Book Cellar.