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.
