Scientology Rare Book Library Dr. Christopher Evans - Cults of Unreason
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Myths in the Skies

ONE OF THE first commentators of any calibre to realize the strong mystical and religious themes surging along besides the enormous public interest in UFOs was the psychologist and theoretician, Carl Gustav Jung. Jung, a potent intellectual figure even when an octogenarian, had championed lots of odd causes in his time. Perhaps the most famous was astrology which he took as providing evidence for his own theories of `synchronicity'. This latter concept attempts to account for such dubious phenomena as telepathy, precognition, etc, as acausal but still significant events in the universe. Few people have managed to swallow his rather unclear arguments for the principle, but the fact that he was prepared to think in totally fresh terms when faced with an apparent conflict between philosophy and science reminds us that the great pioneer of psychoanalysis remained a force to be reckoned with throughout his life. It is no surprise therefore to find him turning a quizzical eye on the wave of UFO reports in the fifties.

The story of this interest he reveals in his controversial and significant book, Flying Saucers; a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, published in 1959 at one of the peaks of public interest in Ufology. It appears that Jung had been interviewed by the press in 1956 and had made statements indicating respect for the relatively large number of aeronautical experts who had indicated a belief in flying saucers - without however stating that he shared their views. The interview was later picked up by news agencies and metamorphosed, in the subtle way of the journalist, into implying that Jung himself was a believer. This made world news headlines, rather to the famous psychologist's chagrin, and he immediately issued a carefully worded press release to make his own position clear. To his surprise this made no kind of news anywhere, and Jung was forced to conclude that news confirming the existence of UFOs was welcome to press and public, while scepticism was undesirable. Why, he asks, should it be more desirable for saucers to exist than not?

Starting off with a hard look at the incredible physical feats of acceleration, change of course, overall maximum speed, which many UFOs are credited with, and their apparent lack of susceptibility to being caught by camera or radar, Jung adopts the premise that they are not physical in origin - that is to say they are not, collectively, aircraft, spaceships or weird interplanetary beings. Since they exist however, at the very least in the minds of the thousands of individuals who report them, then they have a psychic if not a physical reality and an examination of the reports of their sightings should reveal patterns in common with other major psychic manifestations. Not surprisingly for a man whose life has been devoted to a study of unconscious processes revealing themselves through dreams, Jung leans heavily on dream material which he suggests is increasingly filled with `archetypal' UFO images. Artists, too, tap the unconscious and non-linguistic depths of the human personality and Jung finds many examples of UFO-like objects featuring in modern abstract art - notably in works by Yves Tanguay, Jakoby and P. Birkhauser.

Flying saucers, the psychologist continues, are psychic projections or `visionary rumours' which reflect a deep-seated air of disquiet amongst humanity. With the old Gods dying, if not dead, and the world menaced by threat of total destruction as never before in its history, men are turning to the skies to seek their redeemers there.

Flying Saucers; a Modern Myth is in its way a brilliant little book, foreshadowing the current developments in Ufology by almost a decade and revealing those flashes of insight which made Jung one of the great thinkers of this century. If today the dream accounts seem unconvincing, if the post-hoc analyses of the examples from abstract art seem lame, and the implicit suggestion that these psychic projections might ultimately come to have objective physical reality, quite unacceptable, this does not detract from the force of his main argument. If alive today, Jung would undoubtedly have watched with great interest the overt expression of religious belief to be found in the activities of the Aetherius Society and its numerous lesser brethren.

The Aetherians, as we have found, have acquired a complex set of beliefs, rituals, spiritual exercises and the like and have even woven some of the great religious figures of the past - Jesus, Buddha, St Peter, etc. - rather incongruously into a modern science fiction setting. It is certainly significant that the revelations of this cult are delivered through a single individual (George King has several times been declared by Aetherius to be his `primary terrestrial channel') in a fashion very reminiscent of the messages that allegedly come from the personalities of the dead via Spiritualist mediums.

Spiritualism is a religion of minority standing which had its modern origins in an American cult and which has settled down as a specialist offshoot of Christianity in which survival after death is not just preached but allegedly proved. Although radical in a number of ways - for example most followers hold that Jesus was an exalted but not a divine being - its roots lie firmly in the nineteenth century and its mediums tend to relay prosaic, unimaginative information about a spirit world clearly modelled after Victorian ideals. A study of the nature of the information flowing from mediums today reveals a definite trend amongst some to incorporate or accommodate the data of Ufology. For example, the `School of Universal Philosophy and Healing' run by the medium Mrs Gladys Spearman-Cook in London regularly delivers information, often unconsciously hilarious, about spaceships and their occupants. Hints of the coming `Interplanetary Brotherhood', plus more specific information on flying saucers, have also come from the White Eagle Lodge, a well-organized Spiritualist group in Kensington. The late Lord Dowding was but one of a large number of Spiritualists who believed in flying saucers and at one time that movement's official organ, the Psychic News, devoted a good deal of space to reporting major saucer sightings, as the result of readers' interest.

In America, in particular, contacts with space beings (as opposed to the `spirits of the departed') through mediums have been on the increase for some time and there is some suggestion, which Spiritualists are quick to challenge, that the actual location of the `Summerland' as revealed by the nineteenth century mediums is not in some non-physical or extra-dimensional sphere, but on a separate planet either in this solar system or in some other galaxy.

In the first edition of Flying Saucers Have Landed, Desmond Leslie refers to the work of a `Dr' Meade Layne of California who was experimenting in `very advanced and mysterious fields of physics' and who believed that `life on Venus takes place at a higher octave of matter than on Earth' - or in other words, in case one is not exactly clear what this means, at a `higher vibrationary rate'. In a recent edition, Leslie evidently has examined this nonsense more closely and decided to delete it. Most of Meade Layne's data, it turns out, came not from physical experiments but from communications through a `deep trance medium', one Mark Probert of San Diego. In his book, The Coming of the Guardians, Meade Layne spells out the role which the majority of saucer fans no doubt hope that the saucer's occupants will play. Most of Probert's communicators - including such distinguished figures as the late Thomas Edison and the mystic Lao-Tze - live on an etheric counterpart of earth from which they launch their etheric saucers. These are but the vanguards of large-scale landings to take place on earth at an unspecified time in the future. Their main concern is the evil trend of life on earth and our dangerous tampering with nuclear fission.

Probert's communicators are at pains to point out that man survives death and that the astral worlds of the more orthodox Spiritualist mediums are interchangeable with the `ethereal' which they inhabit. It is all, it turns out, a matter of what we simple humans can accept without psychological collapsed - i.e. the truth about flying saucers and even their existence could not safely have been given to people in Victorian times when aircraft of any kind would have been incomprehensible.

Closely paralleling Meade Layne's findings in ethos, though not in their method of delivery, are those that come from a Mr George Hunt Williamson of Prescott, Arizona. Williamson's major contribution to the tomes of alleged psychic communications from space beings is a curious volume, The Saucers Speak, in which he recounts in detail messages received in morse code by a radio operator, `Mr R.', later revealed as one Lyman H. Streeter, a telegraphist for the Santa Fe Railroad. In his introduction to the book Williamson states confidently that the saucers have been surveying us for thousands of years and makes the obligatory dig at the American Government for prevaricating. When will the world's leaders wake up to the facts, he asks, concluding ominously, `only time will tell, and there isn't too much of that left'.

The book itself contains material of such banality that it is hard to credit that it could be published as a work of purported fact. After a long opening account as to the circumstances by which he came to hear of the mysterious messages and why he is obliged to accept their authenticity, Williamson then reveals that some of the material came via `automatic writing', some trough a kind of home-made ouija board, and others yet trough the tried and trusted method of the inverted tumbler.

For those readers who have not come into contact with this parlour game, it requires the distribution of the letters of the alphabet (together with one or two useful words, such as Yes, No, etc.) in a ring on a polished table, after which a tumbler or wine glass is upturned in the centre. Participants place a finger on the glass which will soon begin to move around the table, passing from letter to letter. There is no mystery in the fact that the sequences of letters frequently spell out coherent messages, as anyone who cares to try the experiment will find out. The glass moves with an ease on the polished surface which often surprises the novice, and most people soon find that they can easily exercise control over the glass without giving themselves away.

Whether the motive power in the case of the Williamson's experiment was spiritual or human is of course a matter for personal opinion, but the nature of the material itself does not leave one with the impression that the communicators were of particularly superior intelligence. One calling himself Nah-9 of the Solar X Group said that they had been observing earth for 75,000 years but were not interested in `those of carnal mind'. Another, Kadar Lacu, announced himself as Head of Interplanetary Council-Circle and stated that in due course certain chosen ones would be removed from earth and only a few would be saved. `Ankar-22' reported that the nuclear tests on earth had set off volcanic activity on Mars, and a being called Zrs, who hailed from Uranus, advised that earth had two moons, one which we never saw because of `certain conditions'.... Other alleged space entities had names like Zo, Regga, Actar (from Mercury) and Affa. Zo's wife, incidentally, was named Um.

In `Cosmic Rays and a Baby Sun', the fantastic final chapter of the book, the author attempts to stitch together all the material which came through the various forms of mediumship and concludes that the earth's path in space is heading for a cosmically disturbed area, the effect of which would soon be manifested in strange weather, melting polar icecaps, earthquakes, etc. He declares that the governments of the world are aware of this and that the UFOs are here to awaken us not merely to the cosmic catastrophe towards which we are surely moving, but also to fulfiller `all ancient prophecy in that they remind us that "our salvation draweth nigh"'. The space visitors cannot themselves intervene to avert the catastrophe but they will assist the remnant who survive to return to the arms of the `Interplanetary Brotherhood from which it fell countless generations ago'. The final sentence of the book is a biblical quotation, `Watch, for no man knoweth the hour!'

A somewhat more sophisticated analysis of the link between UFOs and theological beliefs was given at the 1968 UFO convention, held in Cleveland, Ohio, by an Evangelical Minister, the Reverend Brank R. Basille, who said that there was no doubt in his mind that we were under surveillance. The space people were probably performing `the will of God to raise us spiritually to stem the tide of evil'. There was a fair risk, however, that there might be both good and evil spacemen - an unfortunate complication if true, for one would never know whether the messages received were cunningly designed to mislead us or were genuine warnings from friendly aliens. The Reverend Basille added that the evil space-beings could collaborate with an evil group of humans with the eventual aim of forming an unholy alliance to take over the earth. If this were so, then we could expect some frightening things to happen before long. `Evil spacemen are, I believe, one day going to pick a man to whom they will give tremendous power and who will prove that he is almost God-like by the miracles he will perform.' These would be supernatural powers which would parallel the biblical prophecies about anti-Christ. `We are living in days of fulfilled prophecy', he concluded, but if we `keep ourselves right then maybe we can keep the world right too.'

The cleric's amazing speech drew considerable applause, as had an immediately previous address by a Jewish theologian who claimed that he had had fifteen years' study in theology in seminaries and who held that the Book of Moses is an accurate account of an encounter between a small group of people living in the Middle East and a race of space beings.

Such revolutionary interpretations of biblical stories are, as we have already seen, not uncommon and for anyone not convinced of the conceptual link being forged between UFO phenomena and religious beliefs, the writings of the Englishman Brinsley le Poer Trench are recommended. Mr Trench - his most important book is probably The Sky People - holds (and quotes extensively from the Bible and other holy books to prove his point) that the Greek Gods Apollo, Hermes, Prometheus and others, as well as Egyptian deities such as Osiris, were all visitors from outer space. The author writes in a scholarly and literate style. Unfortunately this does not make it any more credible. The Garden of Eden, he discovered, was on Mars and was in fact a kind of open-air laboratory designed to allow a significant genetic experiment - the crossing of two species of man - to take place under controlled conditions. For various reasons this failed, the `garden was shut down and its people turned out to fend for themselves'. The legend of the Flood is explained by the fact that the garden had been located by one of the polar icecaps which melted rather suddenly and drowned most of the inhabitants. One group alone, by dint of foresight and hard work, had taken the trouble to build a ship of refuge on to which, as the calamity approached, they duly climbed. Not for them, according to Trench, forty days of rain on a storm-tossed sea, for their lifeboat left the surface of Mars and headed for our own planet Earth. Noah's Ark, you see, was a spaceship.

The antiquity of flying saucer sightings can be attested in ways other than those of biblical reference. The most common of these is based on the marvellous principle of orthoteny, developed by the French mathematician, Aime Michel, which consists of a careful analysis of the sites of all saucer sightings and their subsequent plotting on a large-scale map. When the points are plotted, Michael claims, statistical distributions build up which are not simply a function of population centres, etc., but which seem to imply that the spacecraft follow definite courses and tend to congregate in certain specific areas. Much has been made of orthoteny in recent years, thanks to the publication of Michel's book, Flying Saucers and the Straight-line Mystery - the straight lines in question being the supposed `preferred pathways' chosen by the vehicles. The principle has a superficial curiosity value which, when backed by the author's unquestioned status as a mathematician, might reasonably be counted as a weapon in the Ufologist's armoury.

Unfortunately, mathematicians who have found time to look at the material of orthoteny are more likely to see it as a case of selective post-hoc analysis - the kind of exercise which used to lead people to say (not without some justification) that you can prove anything by statistics. The point is of course that the linear masses plotted by Michel and others look immediately impressive but they are open to at least two serious criticisms. (1) It is not at all clear what criteria are used in deciding whether to plot a UFO sighting or not. If this is at all selective then there is nothing surprising about the fact that some significant pattern appears to emerge - it is rather like pyramidology where, by dint of suitable filtering of measurements, the most amazing data can be produced. (2) The plotted points appear to be the positions of the observers rather than the UFOs themselves - an important distinction if the point being made is that the saucers are following rather precisely repetitive courses.

Although these criticisms have not gone unnoticed by the protagonists of orthoteny, the myth that saucers have and did, even way back in historical times, move around the world as though from checkpoint to checkpoint still survives. In England it is looked on with especial favour, and orthotenists have made good use of the country's magnificent one-inch ordnance survey maps to bolster their case. Opinion as to what are the significant reference points chosen by the saucer pilots in their restless scouring of the heavens varies, but for the argument about the antiquity of the space people's interest in earth to hold, it is universally agreed, they must be sites of historical importance - King Arthur's Castle, for example - or spectacular rock formations such as Glastonbury Tor. Hunting around on maps plotting saucer sighting points and joining them up in one or other of the myriad possible combinations will soon show the lines crossing historic buildings or prehistoric mounds - it would be very surprising indeed if it did not. And if a plotted line should just miss the White Horse of Uffington, Banbury Cross or some long forgotten Sussex burial site, well then the explanation must be of course that the observer was slightly incorrect in his original report and a little judicious correction will soon put matters right.

So keen in fact are many Ufologists in this curious variant of saucer lore that a little magazine, The Ley Hunter, is published giving up-to-the-minute details of the latest plottings, and exciting articles suggesting that these may be used to locate the Holy Grail (an old favourite of cultists) or unravel the mystery of Stonehenge. For those who feel they are getting left behind here, a ley is the special kind of line (most easily visible of course through the porthole of a speeding saucer) which you get if you join up prehistoric sites and you will not be surprised to learn that England is simply covered with them.

Some of the most important leys, incidentally, pass through (or near) the historic town of Warminster in Wiltshire, and for many people this has become the Mecca for saucer spotters in this country; UFOs appear, by all reports, with amazing regularity in this part of the world, and credit for drawing our attention to this phenomenon must largely go to a Mr Arthur Shuttlewood, whose book, The Warminster Mystery is a minor classic of its kind.

Arthur Shuttlewood, a good-natured, intelligent chap in his late forties, is a journalist on the local Warminster paper. As a reporter, of course, he was in an excellent position to document the amazing wave of UFO activity which started on Christmas Day 1964, and which has continued on and off ever since. Most of the activity seems to consist of lights in the skies, bangs, buzzing noises, etc., and these are particularly likely to be observed from the copse on Cradle Hill, a high point overlooking the town. Cradle Hill also happens to be close to the Army's training and firing ranges nearby and many Warminster inhabitants are inclined to think that the bangs, bumps and flashes come from such terrestrial nuisances as tanks and guns, but Shuttlewood points out that the noises frequently come from the `opposite direction' to the Army ranges. Whichever viewpoint is correct, throughout 1965 literally hundreds of people in the town reported mysterious flying objects of one kind or another and public disquiet began to grow. The principal objectors seem to have been local tradesmen who complained that the publicity the huge wave of sightings was getting in the national press was frightening people away and acting therefore as a kind of anti-tourist attraction.

If there were any doubts about the pulling power of saucers, however, the local tradesmen must soon have had their minds put to rest. A public meeting called to air the matter was a complete sell-out. Over 350 people were turned away from the doors of the Town Hall which, bathed in the glare of TV lights, looked as though it was the focal point of some popular uprising. The weekend following the meeting a vast surge of curiosity-seekers descended on Warminster, raising its population momentarily from 10,000 to nearly 20,000, bleeding the souvenir shops dry and bringing to the point of collapse the town's modest catering establishments. Motorists and radiators fumed for hours in immense, static traffic jams, pubs ran dry of beer for the first time since World War II and the roads to Cradle Hill and Colloway Clump (the strategic spots for optimum UFO spotting) were black with inquisitive humanity. If ever testimony to the pulling power of saucers is needed, the account of the invasion of Warminster on August Bank Holiday 1965 may be offered up with confidence.

Once a `hardened sceptic', Arthur Shuttlewood has now made so many sightings of UFOs over Warminster that he is quite convinced of their existence. The title of his second book Warning From Flying Friends gives some idea of the trend of his thinking at the moment. More than once he has been personally visited in his home by mysterious beings with unusual eyes, including one called himself Karne who said that the end of the world was due quite shortly. Mysterious telephone calls from individuals known as Selorik and Traellison, Queen of Aenstria, he thinks might have been hoaxes.

There is little point in plunging more deeply into the exotic details of the Warminster mystery, or for that matter any other of the many manifestations of the cult of Ufology that has spread across the world. Today it is the happy hunting ground of people from all walks of life - scientists, doctors, admirals, bishops, secretaries, soldiers, policemen, magistrates and hippies - no single group appears not to have representatives immersed in its mythology. The phenomena appear to be simple in essence, if complex in detail. Genuine unidentified flying objects prove to be not only attractive to the minds of a very sizeable slab of humanity but also, to many, essential. Thus despite all the denials of Air Force Generals and the tempered scepticism of specialist scientists, flying saucers and their superior occupants, whether sacred or profane, exist, have existed and probably always will exist. As someone else said in a slightly different context - `If UFOs did not exist it would have been necessary to invent them.'

 
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