From
the mysteriously missing pages of Brother.'. Blue.'.
Brother
Raymond and the Flying Saucer Mythos
"In
1947, the editor of Amazing Stories watched in astonishment as the
things he had been fabricating for years in his magazine suddenly
came true!... Once the belief system had been set up it became self-perpetuating.
The people beleaguered by mysterious rays were joined by the wishful
thinkers who hoped that living, compassionate beings existed out there
beyond the stars. They didn't need any real evidence. The belief itself
was enough to sustain them."
"I thought
it was the sickest crap I'd run into." -Howard Browne, Palmer's
Associate Editor [re: the Shaver Mystery Palmer was then pushing]
The
Man Who Invented Flying Saucers
by John A. Keel
North America's "Bigfoot"
was nothing more than an Indian legend until a zoologist named Ivan
T. Sanderson began collecteing contemporary sightings of the creature
in the early 1950s, publishing the reports in a series of popular
magazine articles. He turned the tall, hairy biped into a household
word, just as British author Rupert T. Gould rediscovered sea serpents
in the 1930s and, through his radio broadcasts, articles, and books,
brought Loch Ness to the attention of the world. Another writer named
Vincent Gaddis originated the Bermuda Triangle in his 1965 book, Invisible
Horizons: Strange Mysteries of the Sea. Sanderson and Charles Berlitz
later added to the Triangle lore, and rewriting their books became
a cottage industry among hack writers in the United States.
Charles
Fort |
Charles Fort
put bread on the table of generations of science fiction writers
when, in his 1931 book Lo!, he assembled the many reports of objects
and people strangely transposed in time and place, and coined
the term "teleportation." And it took a politician named
Ignatius Donnelly to revive lost Atlantis and turn it into a popular
subject (again and again and again). (1)
But the man responsible for the
most well-known of all such modern myths -- flying saucers --
has somehow been forgotten. Before the first flying saucer was
sighted in 1947, he suggested the idea to the American public.
Then he converted UFO reports from what might have been a Silly
Season phenomenon into a subject, and kept that subject alive
during periods of total public disinterest.
His name was Raymond A. Palmer.
|
Born in 1911, Ray Palmer suffered severe
injuries that left him dwarfed in stature and partially crippled.
He had a difficult childhood because of his infirmities and, like
many isolated young men in those pre-television days, he sought escape
in "dime novels," cheap magazines printed on coarse paper
and filled with lurid stories churned out by writers who were paid
a penny a word. He became an avid science fiction fan, and during
the Great Depression of the 1930s he was active in the world of fandom
-- a world of mimeographed fanzines and heavy correspondence. (Science
fiction fandom still exists and is very well organized with well-attended
annual conventions and lavishly printed fanzines, some of which are
even issued weekly.) In 1930, he sold his first science fiction story,
and in 1933 he created the Jules Verne Prize Club which gave out annual
awards for the best achievements in sci-fi. A facile writer with a
robust imagination, Palmer was able to earn many pennies during the
dark days of the Depression, undoubtedly buoyed by his mischievous
sense of humor, a fortunate development motivated by his unfortunate
physical problems. Pain was his constant companion.
|
In 1938, the Ziff-Davis Publishing
Company in Chicago purchased a dying magazine titled Amazing
Stories. It had been created in 1929 by the inestimable
Hugo Gernsback, who is generally acknowledged as the father
of modern science fiction. Gernsback, an electrical engineer,
ran a small publishing empire of magazines dealing with radio
and technical subjects. (he also founded Sexology, a
magazine of soft-core pornography disguised as science, which
enjoyed great success in a somewhat conservative era.) It was
his practice to sell -- or even give away -- a magazine when
its circulation began to slip.
Although Amazing Stories
was one of the first of its kind, its readership was down to
a mere 25,000 when Gernsback unloaded it on Ziff-Davis. William
B. Ziff decided to hand the editorial reins to the young science
fiction buff from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the age of 28, Palmer
found his life's work.
|
|
 |
Expanding the pulp
magazine to 200 pages (and as many as 250 pages in some issues),
Palmer deliberately tailored it to the tastes of teenage boys.
He filled it with nonfiction features and filler items on science
and pseudo-science in addition to the usual formula short stories
of BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters) and beauteous maidens in distress.
Many of the stories were written by Palmer himself under a variety
of pseudonyms such as Festus Pragnell and Thorton Ayre, enabling
him to supplement his meager salary by paying himself the usual
penny-a-word. His old cronies from fandom also contributed stories
to the magazine with a zeal that far surpassed their talents. |
In fact, of the dozen or so science
magazines then being sold on the newsstands, Amazing Stories
easily ranks as the very worst of the lot. Its competitors, such as
Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories
and the venerable Astounding (now renamed Analog) employed
skilled, experienced professional writers like Ray Bradbury, Isaac
Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard (who later created Dianetics and founded
Scientology). Amazing Stories was garbage in comparison and
hardcore sci-fi fans tended to sneer at it. (2)
|
The magazine might have limped
through the 1940s, largely ignored by everyone, if not for a
single incident. Howard Browne, a television writer who served
as Palmer's associate editor in those days, recalls: "early
in the 1940s, a letter came to us from Dick Shaver purporting
to reveal the "truth" about a race of freaks, called
"Deros," living under the surface of the earth. Ray
Palmer read it, handed it to me for comment. I read a third
of it, tossed it in the waste basket. Ray, who loved to show
his editors a trick or two about the business, fished it out
of the basket, ran it in Amazing, and a flood of mail
poured in from readers who insisted every word of it was true
because they'd been plagued by Deros for years. (3)
|
Richard Shaver |
Actually, Palmer had accidentally tapped a huge, previously
unrecognized audience. Nearly every community has at least one person
who complains constantly to the local police that someone -- usually
a neighbor -- is aiming a terrible ray gun at their house or apartment.
This ray, they claim, is ruining their health, causing their plants
to die, turning their bread moldy, making their hair and teeth fall
out, and broadcasting voices into their heads. [To the Reichian concept
of DOR (Dead Orgone), stir in the bizarre sci-fi tales of " Alex
Constantine," and Kathy Kasten, et al, for a latter-day equivalent
of the Shaverian Dero Ray-Gun Attack mythos -B:.B:.] Psychiatrists
are very familiar with these "ray" victims and relate the
problem with paranoid-schizophrenia. For the most part, these paranoiacs
are harmless and usually elderly. Occasionally, however, the voices
they hear urge them to perform destructive acts, particularly arson.
They are a distrustful lot, loners by nature, and very suspicious of
everyone, including the government and all figures of authority. In
earlier times, they thought they were hearing the voice of God and/or
the Devil. Today they often blame the CIA or space beings for their
woes. They naturally gravitate to eccentric causes and organizations
which reflect their own fears and insecurities, advocating bizarre political
philosophies and reinforcing their peculiar belief systems. Ray Palmer
unintentionally gave thousands of these people focus to their lives.
Shaver's long, rambling letter claimed
that while he was welding (4) he heard voices which explained to him
how the underground Deros were controlling life on the surface of
the earth through the use of fiendish rays. Palmer rewrote the letter,
making a novelette out of it, and it was published in the March 1945
issue under the title: "I Remember Lemuria -- by Richard Shaver."
The Shaver Mystery was born.
-=oOo=-
Somehow the news of Shaver's discovery
quickly spread beyond science fiction circles and people who had never
before bought a pulp magazine were rushing to their local newsstands.
The demand for Amazing Stories far exceeded the supply and
Ziff-Davis had to divert paper supplies (remember there were still
wartime shortages) from other magazines so they could increase the
press run of AS.
"Palmer traveled to Pennsylvania
to talk to Shaver," Howard Browne later recalled, "found
him sitting on reams of stuff he'd written about the Deros, bought
every bit of it and contracted for more. I thought it was the sickest
crap I'd run into. Palmer ran it and doubled the circulation of Amazing
within four months."
By the end of 1945, Amazing Stories
was selling 250,000 copies per month, an amazing circulation for a
science fiction pulp magazine. Palmer sat up late at night, rewriting
Shaver's material and writing other short stories about the Deros
under pseudonyms. Thousands of letters poured into the office. Many
of them offered supporting "evidence" for the Shaver stories,
describing strange objects they had seen in the sky and strange encounters
they had had with alien beings. It seemed that many thousands of people
were aware of the existence of some distinctly non-terrestrial group
in our midst. Paranoid fantasies were mixed with tales that had the
uncomfortable ring of truth. The "Letters-to-the-Editor"
section was the most interesting part of the publication. Here is
a typical contribution from the issue for June 1946:
Sirs:
I flew my last combat mission on May
26 [1945] when I was shot up over Bassein and ditched my ship in
Ramaree roads off Chedubs Island. I was missing five days. I requested
leave at Kashmere (sic). I and Capt. (deleted by request) left Srinagar
and went to Rudok then through the Khese pass to the northern foothills
of the Karakoram. We found what we were looking for. We knew what
we were searching for.
For heaven's sake, drop the whole
thing! You are playing with dynamite. My companion and I fought
our way out of a cave with submachine guns. I have two 9" scars
on my left arm that came from wounds given me in the cave when I
was 50 feet from a moving object of any kind and in perfect silence.
The muscles were nearly ripped out. How? I don't know. My friend
has a hole the size of a dime in his right bicep. It was seared
inside. How we don't know. But we both believe we know more about
the Shaver Mystery than any other pair. You can imagine my fright
when I picked up my first copy of Amazing Stories and see
you splashing words about the subject.
Brother Ken Arnold |
The identity of the
author of this letter was withheld by request. Later Palmer revealed
his name: Fred Lee Crisman. He had inadvertently described the
effects of a laser beam -- even though the laser wasn't invented
until years later. Apparently Crisman was obsessed with Deros
and death rays long before Kenneth Arnold sighted the "first"
UFO in June 1947.
In September 1946, Amazing Stories
published a short article by W.C. Hefferlin, "Circle-Winged
Plane," describing experiments with a circular craft in
1927 in San Francisco. Shaver's (Palmer's) contribution to that
issue was a 30,000 word novelette, "Earth Slaves to Space,"
dealing with spaceships that regularly visited the Earth to
kidnap humans and haul them away to some other planet. Other
stories described amnesia, an important element in the UFO reports
that still lay far in the future, and mysterious men who supposedly
served as agents for those unfriendly Deros.
|
A letter from army lieutenant Ellis
L. Lyon in the September 1946 issue expressed concern over the psychological
impact of the Shaver Mystery.
What I am worried about is that there
are a few, and perhaps quite large number of readers who may accept
this Shaver Mystery as being founded on fact, even as Orson Welles
put across his invasion from Mars, via radio some years ago. It
is of course, impossible for the reader to sift out in your "Discussions"
and "Reader Comment" features, which are actually letters from readers
and which are credited to an Amazing Stories staff writer,
whipped up to keep alive interest in your fictional theories. However,
if the letters are generally the work of readers, it is distressing
to see the reaction you have caused in their muddled brains. I refer
to the letters from people who have "seen" the exhaust trails of
rocket ships or "felt" the influence of radiations from underground
sources.
| Palmer assigned artists
to make sketches of objects described by readers and disc-shaped
flying machines appeared on the covers of his magazine long before
June 1947. So we can note that a considerable number of people
-- millions -- were exposed to the flying saucer concept before
the national news media was even aware of it. Anyone who glanced
at the magazines on a newsstand and caught a glimpse of the saucers-adorned
Amazing Stories cover had the image implanted in his subconscious.
In the course of the two years between march 1945 and June 1947,
millions of Americans had seen at least one issue of Amazing
Stories and were aware of the Shaver Mystery with all of its
bewildering implications. Many of these people were out studying
the empty skies in the hopes that they, like other Amazing
Stories readers, might glimpse something wondrous. World War
II was over and some new excitement was needed. Raymond Palmer
was supplying it -- much to the alarm of Lt. Lyon and Fred Crisman. |
Earth Slaves
to Space! |
-=oOo=-
Brother Meade Layne |
Aside from Palmer's
readers, two other groups were ready to serve as cadre for the
believers. About 1,500 members of Tiffany Thayer's Fortean Society
knew that weird aerial objects had been sighted throughout history
and some of them were convinced that this planet was under surveillance
by beings from another world. Tiffany Thayer was rigidly opposed
to Franklin Roosevelt and loudly proclaimed that almost everything
was a government conspiracy, so his Forteans were fully prepared
to find new conspiracies hidden in the forthcoming UFO mystery.
They would become instant experts, willing to educate the press
and public when the time came. The second group were spiritualists
and students of the occult, headed by Dr. Meade Layne,
who had been chatting with the space people at seances through
trance mediums and Ouija boards. They knew the space ships were
coming and hardly surprised when "ghost rockets" were reported
over Europe in 1946. (5) Combined, these three groups represented
a formidable segment of the population. |
On June 24, 1947, Kenneth
Arnold made his famous sighting of a group of "flying saucers"
over Mt. Rainier, and in Chicago Ray Palmer watched in astonishment
as the newspaper clippings poured in from every state. The things
that he had been fabricating for his magazine were suddenly coming
true!
| For two weeks, the
newspapers were filled with UFO reports. Then they tapered off
and the Forteans howled "Censorship!" and "Conspiracy!"
But dozens of magazine writers were busy compiling articles on
this new subject and their pieces would appear steadily during
the next year. One man, who had earned his living writing stories
for the pulp magazines in the 1930s, saw the situation as a chance
to break into the "slicks" (better quality magazines
printed on glossy or "slick" paper). Although he was
44 years old at the time of Pearl Harbor, he served as a Captain
in the marines until he was in a plane accident. Discharged as
a Major (it was the practice to promote officers one grade when
they retired), he was trying to resume his writing career when
Ralph Daigh, an editor at True magazine, assigned him to
investigate the flying saucer enigma. Thus, at the age of 50,
Donald E. Keyhhoe entered Never-Never-Land. His article,
"Flying Saucers Are Real," would cause a sensation,
and Keyhoe would become an instant UFO personality. |
Donald Keyhoe |
That same year, Palmer decided to put
out an all-flying saucer issue of Amazing Stories. Instead,
the publisher demanded that he drop the whole subject after, according
to Palmer, two men in Air Force uniforms visited him. Palmer decided
to publish a magazine of his own. Enlisting the aid of Curtis Fuller,
editor of a flying magazine, and a few other friends, he put out the
first issue of Fate in the spring of 1948. A digest-sized
magazine printed on the cheapest paper, Fate was as poorly
edited as Amazing Stories and had no impact on the reading
public. But it was the only newsstand periodical that carried UFO
reports in every issue. The Amazing Stories readership supported
the early issues wholeheartedly.
 |
In the fall of 1948,
the first flying saucer convention was held at the Labor Temple
on 14th Street in New York City. Attended by about thirty people,
most of whom were clutching the latest issue of Fate, the
meeting quickly dissolved into a shouting match. (6) Although
the flying saucer mystery was only a year old, the side issues
of government conspiracy and censorship already dominated the
situation because of their strong emotional appeal. The U.S. Air
Force had been sullenly silent throughout 1948 while, unbeknownst
to the UFO advocates, the boys at Wright- Patterson Air Force
Base in Ohio were making a sincere effort to untangle the mystery. |
When the Air Force investigation failed
to turn up any tangible evidence (even though the investigators accepted
the extraterrestrial theory) General Hoyt Vandenburg, Chief of the
Air Force and former head of the CIA, ordered a negative report to
release to the public. The result was Project Grudge, hundreds of
pages of irrelevant nonsense that was unveiled around the time True
magazine printed Keyhoe's pro-UFO article. Keyhoe took this personally,
even though his article was largely a rehash of Fort's book, and Ralph
Daigh had decided to go with the extraterrestrial hypothesis because
it seemed to be the most commercially acceptable theory (that is,
it would sell magazines).
-=oOo=-
Palmer's relationship with
Ziff-Davis was strained now that he was publishing his own magazine.
"When I took over from Palmer, in 1949," Howard Browne said,
"I put an abrupt end to the Shaver Mystery -- writing off over
7,000 dollars worth of scripts."
Moving to Amherst, Wisconsin, Palmer
set up his own printing plant and eventually he printed many of those
Shaver stories in his Hidden Worlds series. As it turned out,
postwar inflation and the advent of television was killing the pulp
magazine market anyway. In the fall of 1949, hundreds of pulps suddenly
ceased publication, putting thousands of writers and editors out of
work. Amazing Stories has often changed hands since but is
still being published, and is still paying its writers a penny a word.
(7)
For some reason known only to himself,
Palmer chose not to use his name in Fate. Instead, a fictitious
"Robert N. Webster" was listed as editor for many years.
Palmer established another magazine, Search, to compete with
Fate. Search became a catch-all for inane letters and
occult articles that failed to meet Fate's low standards.
Although there was a brief revival of
public and press interest in flying saucers following the great wave
of the summer of 1952, the subject largely remained in the hands of
cultists, cranks, teenagers, and housewives who reproduced newspaper
clippings in little mimeographed journals and looked up to Palmer
as their fearless leader.
In June, 1956, a major four-day symposium
on UFOs was held in Washington, D.C. It was unquestionably the most
important UFO affair of the 1950s and was attended by leading military
men, government officials and industrialists. Men like William Lear,
inventor of the Lear Jet [Yup, John "The Horrible Truth"
Lear's dad -B:.B:.], and assorted generals, admirals and former
CIA heads freely discussed the UFO "problem" with the press.
Notably absent were Ray Palmer and Donald Keyhoe. One of the results
of the meetings was the founding of the National Investigation Committee
on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) by a physicist named Townsend Brown. Although
the symposium received extensive press coverage at the time, it was
subsequently censored out of UFO history by the UFO cultists themselves
-- primarily because they had not participated in it. (8)
| The American public
was aware of only two flying saucer personalities, contactee George
Adamski, a lovable rogue with a talent for obtaining publicity,
and Donald Keyhoe, a zealot who howled "Coverup!" and was locked
in mortal combat with Adamski for newspaper coverage. Since Adamski
was the more colorful (he had ridden a saucer to the moon), he
was usually awarded more attention. The press gave him the title
of "astronomer" (he lived in a house on Mount Palomar where a
great telescope was in operation), while Keyhoe attacked him as
"the operator of a hamburger stand." Ray Palmer tried to remain
aloof of the warring factions, so naturally, some of them turned
against him. |
Bro. Adamski |
The year 1957 was marked by several
significant developments. There was another major flying saucer wave.
Townsend Brown's NICAP floundered and Keyhoe took it over. And Ray
Palmer launched a new newsstand publication called Flying Saucers
From Other Worlds. In the early issues he hinted that he knew
some important "secret." After tantalizing his readers for
months, he finally revealed that UFOs came from the center of the
earth and the phrase "From Other Worlds" was dropped
from the title. His readers were variously enthralled, appalled, and
galled by the revelation.
For seven years, from 1957 to 1964,
ufology in the United States was in total limbo. This was the Dark
Age. Keyhoe and NICAP were buried in Washington, vainly tilting at
windmills and trying to initiate a congressional investigation into
the UFO situation. [It is therefore with Great Thanksgiving in
Our Hearts that we applaud the Fine Efforts of CSETI's Steve Greer
to carry on this proud -- albeit amusingly Quixotic -- tradition,
some four decades later. -B:.B:.]
 |
A few hundred UFO believers
clustered around Coral Lorenzen's Aerial Phenomena Research Organization
(APRO). And about 2,000 teenagers bought Flying Saucers
from newsstands each month. Palmer devoted much space to UFO clubs,
information exchanges, and letters-to-the-editor. So it was Palmer,
and Palmer alone, who kept the subject alive during the Dark Age
and lured new youngsters into ufology. He published his strange
books about Deros, and ran a mail-order business selling the UFO
books that had been published after various waves of the 1950s.
His partners in the Fate venture bought him out, so he
was able to devote his full time to his UFO enterprises. |
Palmer had set up a system similar to
sci-fi fandom, but with himself as the nucleus. He had come a long
way since his early days and the Jules Verne Prize Club. He had been
instrumental in inventing a whole system of belief, a frame of reference
-- the magical world of Shaverism and flying saucers -- and he had
set himself up as the king of that world. Once the belief system had
been set up it became self-perpetuating. The people beleaguered by
mysterious rays were joined by the wishful thinkers who hoped that
living, compassionate beings existed out there beyond the stars. They
didn't need any real evidence. The belief itself was enough to sustain
them.
When a massive new UFO wave -- the biggest
one in U.S. history -- struck in 1964 and continued unabated until
1968, APRO and NICAP were caught unawares and unprepared to deal with
renewed public interest. Palmer increased the press run of Flying
Saucers and reached out to a new audience. Then in the 1970s,
a new Dark Age began. October 1973 produced a flurry of well- publicized
reports and then the doldrums set in. NICAP strangled in its own confusion
and dissolved in a puddle of apathy, along with scores of lesser UFO
organizations. Donald Keyhoe, a very elder statesman, lives in seclusion
in Virginia. Most of the hopeful contactees and UFO investigators
of the 1940s and 50s have passed away. Palmer's Flying Saucers
quietly self-destructed in 1975, but he continued with Search
until his death in 1977. Richard Shaver is gone but the Shaver Mystery
still has a few adherents. Yet the sad truth is that none of this
might have come about if Howard Browne hadn't scoffed at that letter
in that dingy editorial office in that faraway city so long ago.
Footnotes:
- Donnelly's book, Atlantis, published
in 1882, set off a 50- year wave of Atlantean hysteria around the
world. Even the characters who materialized at seances during that
period claimed to be Atlanteans.
- The author was an active sci-fi fan
in the 1940s and published a fanzine called Lunarite. Here's
a quote from Lunarite dated October 26, 1946: "Amazing
Stories is still trying to convince everyone that the BEMs in
the caves run the world. And I was blaming it on the Democrats.
'Great Gods and Little Termites' was the best tale in this ish [issue].
But Shaver, author of the 'Land of Kui,' ought to give up writing.
He's lousy. And the editors of AS ought to join Sgt. Saturn on the
wagon and quit drinking that Xeno or the BEMs in the caves will
get them."
I clearly remember the controversy created by the Shaver Mystery
and the great disdain with which the hardcore fans viewed it.
- From Cheap Thrills: An Informal
History of the Pulp Magazines by Ron Goulart (published by Arlington
House, New York, 1972).
- It is interesting that so many victims
of this type of phenomenon were welding or operating electrical
equipment such as radios, radar, etc. when they began to hear voices.
- The widespread "ghost rockets"
of 1946 received little notice in the U.S. press. I remember carrying
a tiny clipping around in my wallet describing mysterious rockets
weaving through the mountains of Switzerland. But that was the only
"ghost rocket" report that reached me that year.
- I attended this meeting but my memory
of it is vague after so many years. I cannot recall who sponsored
it.
- A few of the surviving science fiction
magazines now pay (gasp!) three cents a word. But writing sci-fi
still remains a sure way to starve to death.
- When David Michael Jacobs wrote The
UFO Controversy in America, a book generally regarded as the
most complete history of the UFO maze, he chose to completely revise
the history of the 1940s and 50s, carefully excising any mention
of Palmer, the 1956 symposium, and many of the other important developments
during that period.
