For that reason, I have no tendency to explain every appearance of a light in the sky by declaring it to be a spaceship manned by extraterrestrial beings.
Nowadays, in an effort to gain respectability, people who accept the wilder hypotheses about flying saucers call them “unidentified flying objects” and abbreviate it UFO. On numerous occasions, I have been asked if I “believe” in UFOs.
My usual answer is, “I assume that by UFO you mean ‘unidentified flying objects.’ I certainly believe that many people have seen objects in the air or sky that they can’t identify, and those are UFOs.
But then, many people can’t identify the planet Venus, or a mirage. If you are asking me whether I believe that some mysterious object reported is a spaceship manned by extraterrestrial beings, then I must say I am very skeptical. But that, you see, is an identified flying object, and that’s not what you’re asking about, is it?”
Mysterious objects have been reported in Earth’s skies all through history. Usually they are interpreted according to the preoccupations of the day. In ancient and medieval times and in primitive societies, they would be interpreted as angels, demons, spirits, and so on. In technological societies, they would be interpreted as first balloons, then dirigibles, then airplanes, and then spaceships.
Of course, if they’re spaceships now, then they’ve been spaceships all the time, and some people have indeed interpreted Ezekiel’s vision in the Bible, for instance, as the sighting of spaceships manned by extraterrestrials.
The modern surge of flying saucer sightings began on June 24, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a salesman, claimed he saw bright disk-shaped objects flying rapidly through the air near Mount Rainier. From the shapes he described, the expression “flying saucers” came into being.
Nothing much might have happened in consequence, for wild reports about all sorts of things reach the news media every day and then fade out. In this case, though, the report attracted the attention of Raymond A. Palmer, who was then the editor of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.
Palmer may not himself have been a piece of broken pottery, but he was certainly not averse to building circulation by means of items that appealed to crackpots. He had shown this in his earlier work on something completely wacky that he called “The Great Shaver Mystery.”
Now he took up flying saucers and single-handedly promoted them into an international mania. That is one connection (an important one) between flying saucers and science fiction.
Mind you, I have a soft spot in my heart for Ray Palmer. Way back in 1938, he bought the first science fiction story I ever sold, and sent me the very first check I ever earned as a professional writer.
Nevertheless, candor compels me to state that for years after this noble deed of his I never had occasion to believe a word he said.
At the other extreme of the flying saucer spectrum is professor J. Allen Hynek. He is a respectable and learned scientist who has spent decades examining the evidence and who remains firmly convinced that there is something there. He doesn’t accept the extraterrestrial spacecraft hypothesis, but he thinks that something mysterious underlies the phenomenon, which, if understood, may revolutionize science.
However, in all the years he’s been investigating the phenomenon, he’s come up with-nothing! Far from revolutionizing science, his work has not added one even marginal item to the world of physical science.
Then what am I doing helping edit this anthology?
That brings us to the second connection between flying saucers and science fiction. The whole concept of flying saucers-the whole notion of thousands upon thousands of spaceships hovering about us without ever seeming to do anything or to affect us in any way-has supplied science fiction writers with an endless supply of story material.
All of us have written flying saucer stories. I have myself, and one of them is included in this book.
Generally, we have to deal with a situation in which extraterrestrial spacecraft visit us, but keep out of sight for some reason, or decide not to do anything for some reason, or try to do something and fail for some reason, or fail to manage to convince Earthpeople they are real for some reason.
You see, science fiction writers, being sane and rational, have to find some reason for so many spaceships doing nothing. Usually the results turn out to be funny, satiric or ironic; sometimes tragic. Very often, they prove to be stories that are entertaining and good-so what we have done is to collect a sizable number of them into one book for your delectation.
Come, see for yourself that every cloud has a silver lining, and that even the silliest notions can undergo a sea change into something rich and strange in the hands of skilled science fiction writers.
Invasion
Invasion is undoubtedly as old as humanity. Hunting groups must occasionally have encountered each other, if only by accident. Each side must have felt the other was invading. The obviously weaker side would have had to decamp. If the matter were not obvious, there might have been threats or even a brief struggle to settle the matter.
Once agriculture became a way of life and farmers were pinned in place by their farms and food stores, these same food stores became an overwhelming temptation to surrounding nomads; invasions were more terrible because farmers could not flee but had to stand and fight.
We begin to have records of early civilizations suddenly inundated and taken over by raiders. The Sumerians were taken over by Gutian invaders as early as 2200 B.C. The Egyptians fell under the grip of the Hyksos invaders soon after 1700 B.C. We can go through an endless list of such things.
Considering that those people who were invaded (until quite recent times) had little knowledge of the world outside the boundaries of their own cultures, the invasions must usually have come as unbelievable shocks, as a sudden influx of the unknown from the unknown. This would be especially so when the invaders spoke strange languages, wore strange clothes, had strange ways, and even, perhaps, have looked odd.
As the most recent example of our cultural ancestors being subjected to the horror of an unexpected invasion, we need only go back to 1240, when the Mongols (short, squat, slant-eyed) swept into Europe on their hardy desert mounts. Europe knew nothing about them, had no way of knowing they were on the way (they had been ravaging Asian kingdoms for twenty years). All they knew were that these terrible horsemen, moving with incredible speed and organization, winning every battle, smashed Russia, Poland, Hungary, and were penetrating Germany and reaching for Italy, all in a matter of a single year. And then they left and raced eastward again, smashing Bulgaria en route. (They left because their khan had died back in Mongolia and the army had to be there for the election of a successor. Nothing the Europeans could have done would have stopped them.)
But the Mongols were “the last of the barbarians.” Partly because of the Mongolian empire that was set up, communications between China and Europe became smoother. Such things as printing, the magnetic compass, and (most of all) gunpowder, leaked westward from China, and these things-for some reason not exploited by the technologically more advanced Chinese-were put to amazing use by Europeans.
And beginning about 1420, the tide of invasion was reversed. The “civilized” Europeans, with their ships and their guns, fell upon the coastlines of all the continents and, eventually, penetrated the interiors until Europe dominated the world politically and militarily (and as it still does, even today, culturally.)
But how did the non-Europeans feel about it? How about the Africans who watched the Portuguese ships come from nowhere and carry them off as slaves; the Asians who watched Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships come in set up trading posts, skim off profits and treat them as inferiors; the Native Americans who watched the Spanish ships come in and take over and destroy their civilizations? There must have been the feeling of monsters arriving from some other world.