::: The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers :::
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]
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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 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)
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.
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.
Earth Slaves to Space!
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.
-=oOo=-
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.
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.
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.
-=oOo=-
Another delightfully iconoclastic cross-cultural experiment courtesy
of:
Brother Blue, B:.B:.,33°,8=3
Dr. Blue Resonant Human, Ph.D.
Interdimensional Intelligence Analyst
Sacerdotal Knights of National Security
USENET Meme Acquisition and Propagation Directorate
"An Equal Opportunity Mystickal Fraternity and Stuff"
http://web.archive.org/web/19980424200237/http://www.brotherblue.org/
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