Today’s folklore, or the nearest thing we have to it, is bounded by technical expertise and collective fascination. It lives in a group’s language, assumptions, and perspective, in its prides and prejudices. Technical subcultures — sharers of belief in a technology — are paralleled by those with a faith in conspiracy, a hidden order. Could it not be that in an age of technological explanation it took the unexplained to link us together? That in the age of information, it took mystery? Shared professions and shared fascinations had replaced the shared geography of village or town. Sometimes the cultures of technology could seem like cults, and the mechanics of conspiracy theory could seem as complex as science or engineering.
Both saucers and mystery planes had about them the same compulsive gathering of bits of information, the careful construction of databases of sightings, dimensions, aircraft specifications, and numbers. In this regard, both groups resembled the historian Richard Hofstadter’s descriptions of conspiracy groups who from time immemorial have built elaborate factual structures from which to launch speculations.
John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists saw the same sort of dynamic Carl Jung had observed among flying saucer buffs at work in the sightings of black aircraft. “Considered as a sociological and epistemological phenomenon, the parallels between reports of flying saucers and reports of mystery aircraft are striking,” he wrote. If, as Jung believed, flying saucers “were a response to the deep cultural anxieties of a society threatened with sudden nuclear annihilation,” then couldn’t mystery aircraft be a response to economic challenges and the decline in fortunes of the aerospace industry, whose future the end of the Cold War had made uncertain?
“Belief in the existence of marvelously capable and highly secret aircraft resonates with some of the deeper anxieties of contemporary American society,” Pike went on. “Aviation has long been one of the distinguishing attributes of American greatness, from Kitty Hawk to Desert Storm.
“It would be reassuring to believe that concealed in the most hidden recesses of the American technostructure were devices of such miraculous capabilities that they will astound the world when at last they are revealed and will restore America to its rightful station of leadership.”
The saucers might save us from the Cold War; the black aircraft could save us from its aftermath.
9. Ike’s Toothache
Not long before the Saucerian convention at Giant Rock, the president of the United States came to nearby Palm Springs to relax. He had made the eight-hour flight out to California on his Lockheed Constellation, named the Columbine after a wildflower he loved from his prairie childhood. On Saturday, February 20, 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower was enjoying a golfing vacation at Smoke Tree Ranch as the guest of golf partners Paul G. Hoffman, chairman of the Studebaker Corporation, George Allen, an insurance CEO, and Paul Helms, president of the Helms Baking Company. He rose early, met the press at eight-thirty to announce he had signed twenty-three bills, and made comments supporting his nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren. He spent the day playing golf. But that evening, after dinner, Ike disappeared.
One can easily imagine the press corps, happy for some time out of the Washington winter, sitting around their Saturday night card game in the nearby Mirador Hotel and getting irked when Eisenhower did not return from dinner as scheduled. Could he have had a heart attack? Was a world crisis brewing? What one correspondent would call “journalistic mob hysteria” seized the press when Merriman Smith of the U.P. dispatched an alarming report that the president had been taken away for “medical treatment.” The rival A.P. took it another step: The president was dead, it declared in a hastily retracted bulletin.
James Haggerty, the press secretary, was called out to make an explanatory statement. The wild rumors were quickly put to rest. “During [the president’s] evening meal, the porcelain cap on one of his front teeth chipped off,” The New York Times reported. “Mr. Helms took him to Dr. F. A. Purcell, a dentist, who replaced the cap. When the president goes to church tomorrow morning, his grin will look the same as ever.”
The reporters grumbled about a toothache being turned into an international crisis, but during the hours of Eisenhower’s absence, a legend was born: The Lore would record that he was secretly flown to Muroc, soon to be Edwards Air Force Base, to meet with aliens and view recovered flying saucers. Eisenhower’s dental mishap, like the crumb of cheese that grows into Scrooge’s nightmares, would grow into a whole fabric of conspiracy theories that will eventually end up in Dreamland.
The next morning Eisenhower took his wife and mother-in-law to the Palm Springs Community Church, his repaired grin inspiring crowds to political-rally warmth. In the sanctuary, the minister praised Ike and Mamie’s spiritual example, their witness to Christian principles and religious conviction. One aspect of his religiosity was that Ike did not play golf on Sundays.
Had Ike made that trip, met those aliens, could the grin indeed have looked the same as ever? It must have been a moment of profound philosophical reexamination for the former general. According to one account, the aliens “kept disappearing, causing him embarrassment.” Did he wonder where to focus his attentive gaze, his welcoming remarks? Could this man have indeed disappeared between dinner and breakfast to view hidden saucers and meet with aliens and then sailed off to listen happily to that sermon?
The idea of a trip to Muroc is hard to buy. The president would have had to fly to leave himself any significant amount of time at the base. He would have lost a lot of sleep.
The legend of “Ike’s toothache” was established in UFO lore as a result of a letter written in April 1954 by Gerald Light to Meade Layne. No one has much of an idea who Light was, beyond the fact that he was an adherent of a spiritualist organization called the Borderlands Foundation, founded in 1945 by Layne to explore “realms normally beyond the range of basic human perception and physical measurement.” Publishing works by Charles Steinmetz and The Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man by Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth, Borderlands was dedicated to investigations of “ether ships,” Vril energy, radionics, and dowsing. It stood somewhere between the Theosophist groups then influential in Los Angeles and today’s New Age groups. Layne himself had written on the saucers, which he called “ether ships” or “aeroforms,” tying them to the Kabala and other mystical writings.
Light’s letter has become a classic of the Lore, a record of suspicion emerging from enthusiasm, excitement mingling with dread.
My Dear Friend—
I have just returned from Muroc. The report is true — devastatingly true!
I made the journey in company with Franklin Allen of the Hearst papers and Edwin Nourse of Brookings Institute and Bishop MacIntyre of LA (confidential names, for the present, please).
When we were allowed to enter the restricted section (after about six hours in which we were checked on every possible item, event, incident, and aspect of our personal and public lives), I had the distinct feeling that the world had come to an end with fantastic realism. For I have never seen so many human beings in a state of complete collapse and confusion as they realized that their own world had indeed ended with such finality as to beggar description. The reality of “otherplane” aeroforms is now and forever removed from the realms of speculation and made a rather painful part of the consciousness of every responsible scientific and political group.