Truman Bethurum, author of the 1954 book Aboard the Flying Saucers, reported that while laying asphalt in the desert in July 1952 he saw eight or ten small spacemen. They took him aboard their spaceship, where he met its captain, Aura Rhanes, a female he described as “tops in beauty,” from the planet Clarion. Again, the burden of the message was a warning against nuclear weapons and of the need for love.
Daniel Fry’s 1954 book, The White Sands Incident, prefigures elements of the Roswell and Area 51 stories but with a wholly different tone. Fry worked for Aerojet General at the White Sands rocket test site. On a remote corner of the base, on July 4, 1950, he said, he saw a flying saucer land. From inside, a voice belonging to a visitor called A-lan invited him for a ride to New York and back. In 1955, Fry published A-lan’s Message to Men of Earth, this time based not on a direct encounter but on “a voice inside my head.” Like many of the contactees, he veered toward mysticism, and he tied the saucer tales to classic prewar obsessions with the ancient continents of Lemuria and Atlantis. After a great conflict between the two, Fry suggested, the survivors had fled to Mars.
There was a pattern to the lives of these contactees: Almost all had come from the Los Angeles area — and had worked on the edge of the aeronautic industry. Their accounts share a tone and a language. They have been taken aboard saucers, not with the menacing experimental intent described by later abductees, but in a naïve, friendly way. The aliens are friends, “Space Brothers,” who address the contactee as “pal.” Unlike the abductees who would dominate the youfer lore of the 1980s and 1990s, the mood is not one of manipulation but of wonder, even enlightenment. The ruling spirit is Klaatu, the alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still, who has come to warn us of our own folly, specifically nuclear folly. In some of the accounts there is an old-fashioned, almost nineteenth-century feel, as in Van Tassel’s assertion that human beings were the result of beautiful Venusians mating with ugly Earth apes.
Fashions in ufology apparently offer a shadow version of the wider culture. For some the aliens are saviors, for others, invaders.
The first mystery “airships” in the 1890s arrived when the fascination with flying machines and balloons was at its height, a time of urbanization, immigration, and economic depression. While the first “foo fighters” of the 1940s, lights spotted by fighter pilots, were discounted as mere oddities, like the false bogeys on crude early radar, the ghost rockets of the immediate postwar years suggested a fear of attack from the Soviet Union.
The flying saucer craze of the late forties and early fifties — culminating perhaps in June and July of 1952, when Washington, D.C., was “buzzed” by multiple saucers, recorded by ground observers, radar watchers, and airline pilots — marched along in neat parallel to McCarthyism and the Red Scare. (To the Japanese, sociologists argued, Godzilla stood for the assault of the B-29s, their incendiary and atomic bombs.) During the hottest period of the Cold War, the aliens brought contactees a message of peace. But already a darker theme of cover-up was emerging, in the charges of leading UFO propagandist Donald Keyhoe that “silencers” were at work and the government was keeping the truth a secret.
Race sometimes emerged as a theme of UFO stories in the sixties, and the theme of government cover-up — a shadow of the assassinations, Vietnam, and the Pentagon Papers — grew stronger in that decade. The national humiliations of Watergate and Iran coincided with the cattle mutilation stories of the seventies.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind featured François Truffaut playing a thinking man’s UFO expert, based on the UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, who echoed Jung’s arguments about considering sightings on their own terms and skirted the issue of real existence. But in the end of the movie, real saucers do appear.
Fashions in ufology changed in the eighties, when E.T. (1982) was understood as a fable for childhood. Children, like aliens, are new to the planet, with innocent assumptions and virtually no knowledge about how life is lived here on Earth.
The eighties craze for abduction stories was in keeping with the cultural trends of the rest of the decade. Its sexual and personal obsessions — I was taken because I was special, I was abused — tied in with talk-show psychology, itself an emblem of the times.
In the eighties, too, Stealth created its own shadow culture in the Bob Lazar story. The F-117 looked like a flying saucer when viewed head on — and for sound technical reasons. Ben Rich would write of the design of the fighter, “Several of our aerodynamics experts, including Dick Cantrell, seriously thought that maybe we would do better trying to build an actual flying saucer. The shape itself was the ultimate in low observability. The problem was finding a way to make a saucer fly. Unlike our plane, it would have to be rotated and spun.” This statement was widely cited by both those merely curious about flying saucers and those firmly convinced of their existence.
The secrecy around Stealth helped nurture rumors that it had been created with the assistance of alien technology; one saucer organization noted that when a still secret Stealth fighter crashed in the summer of 1986, the whole area was cordoned off and cleaned up just as the Roswell crash and other “recoveries” had been.
The eras of changing fascinations in the UFO culture suggest periods in fashion or movements in art. And many of the contactee visions reminded me of what is called outsider or visionary art. In the paintings of these socially marginal and untrained artists—“kooks” or “loons,” in the later parlance of the Interceptors — flying saucers appeared as frequently and naturally as angels or Jesus, or 727s and locomotives. These artists often actually paint UFOs. Like many of the contactees, they not only see visions but hear voices, inspiring them to paint landscapes from other planets or construct saucer shrines, even landing pads.
Many of these images possess a dreamy, otherworldly quality, like Angelucci’s prose, in which Tiny’s Cafe in Twenty-nine Palms turns into a magic chamber where he sips amber. Others share the intrigue in detailed alternative engineering and dissident cosmology with the saucer buffs, who look to Nikola Tesla and Townsend Brown as alternate-world heroes of the technology of conspiracy.
Van Tassel’s Giant Rock “spaceport,” it turns out, was merely one of many smaller offshoots. I came across a book that documented a world of such people who built UFO detectors and landing sites for saucers. These were believed to be the vehicles of angels or aliens, or both. Douglas Curran, the book’s author and photographer, recounts that the title, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, had come to him in a dream. Curran, like Jung, found that when he tried to approach the saucer sighters and cultists as a folklorist, there were those who still pulled him aside and earnestly asked, But do you believe? This suggested just how close such folk cultures were to religious sects, which helps explain the shrinelike nature of the places Curran photographed.
Sightings and imaginings, theories and conspiracies — the cultures of Dreamland made up a folklore of its own. Did it matter whether the Aurora airplane or the “alien replicated aircraft” actually existed, any more than whether Hermes actually had wings on his feet? Folklore and superstition begin where science and knowledge end. And knowing stopped at the perimeter around Dreamland.
After reading Jung, I became more aware of patterns in the tales surrounding Dreamland. Like UFOs, the actual existence of the flying black triangles (or bats or rays or pumpkin seeds) was a matter of serious debate. The black-plane stories shared a consistency of account and rough detail that made up a corpus of experience. I came to think of it collectively as the Lore.