Science Fiction, Folklore, Myth, the UFO, and Ufology: a note

January 25, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 3 Comments

Commenting on my review of Gerald Heard’s The Riddle of the Saucers: Is Another World Watching? (1950), part of an on-going series “Jung’s Ufological Bookshelf”, Martin S. Kottmeyer generously provides extensive cultural context to Heard’s speculation that the flying saucers were piloted by super bees from Mars. Kottmeyer concludes: “Heard may seem prescient, but he was part of a tradition of science and science fiction speculations that was quite orthodox within the genre he was part of” (my emphasis). This sentence is curious: what genre does Heard’s book belong to?

The beginnings of a rigorous answer would evoke genre theory and reception theory; a prima facie materialist answer would trace the way Heard’s book was marketed and how librarians catalogued it over the nearly seven decades since it was published.

Kottmeyer seems to group Heard’s book, one of the first on flying saucers, with a “tradition of science and science fiction speculations,” which seems paradoxical. Science writing, even when it is popular or speculative, makes a claim to being true, while science fiction, as a kind of fiction, does not (or, more accurately, it makes a claim to an artistic truth…). However much A Brief History of Time and The Time Machine might have the same word in their titles and be science writing and science fiction, respectively, they surely belong to two different genres.

Today, and surely for some decades before, ufology is a liminal, paradoxical genre. On the one hand, it makes claims to being true, but in a way that is difficult to pin down. Some ufological volumes, e.g. Jacques Vallée’s Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965) would make a claim to being true, in a provisional sense, in the same way any other sufficiently speculative science book might. Others, such as Desmond Leslie’s Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) stake a different truth claim, one more akin to that of a religious work.

However much the truth claim of that paraliterature ufology is oscillates between the natural and spiritual, it can’t quite claim to belong to the same genre as, e.g., Carlo Rovelli’s Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017) regardless of how speculative the later chapters of Rovelli’s book might be. As many have pointed out, ufology is a pseudoscience (perhaps a genre all its own), though, as Vallée has cogently remarked, no problem is scientific in itself, only the approach to the problem can be properly called scientific.

For these reasons, perhaps, the literature about the UFO that is not explicitly fictional has been read as a kind of folklore in the making or mythology, not that either term in its generality gets us much further. But this middle way has the advantage that it can make its truth claim and bracket it, too. However much folk wisdom might possess a merely heuristic truth, that truth is still practical and uncannily modern: however much depression might be ultimately a result of brain chemistry, the folk psychology that underwrites meditative practice prescribes an effective therapy, and stories of faeries are as age old as they are contemporary (just ask highway builders in Iceland). A mythology, likewise, following Levi-Strauss, can claim an effective truth, just of a different kind than that of the natural sciences: regardless of whether an axe is made of stone or steel, it’s still an axe. Myth, like folklore, in the case of the ufological literature, is possessed of a weird reality, as daemonic as those entities and situations it deals with.

For these reasons, I tend to take the pseudoscientific ufological paraliterature as belonging to a genre neither scientific nor science fictional, as its truth is neither one that is subject to experiment nor calculation nor one that invites us to only imagine the world as other than it is or was. Its truth, like the flying saucer, hovers between the two; like the UFO, it is both/neither material and/nor immaterial; nevertheless, like its namesake, it leaves traces, in the culture and its imaginary.

Gerald Heard’s Super-Bees from Mars

January 9, 2019September 30, 2021 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ Leave a comment

Some readers of my review of Gerald Heard’s The Riddle of the Saucers might wonder why I bothered, given my obvious distaste for the book, and why they should bother, given that, considered ufologically, the book’s value is strictly historical, really adding nothing new to solving that riddle of the book’s title.

In the first place, the review is part of one of the projects underway here at the Skunkworks: to read and review all the Ufo books mentioned in Jung’s Flying Saucers, reviews that will be collated under the category “Jung’s Ufological Bookshelf”. Aside from being an interesting task in itself, the project will contribute to better understanding Jung’s reflections on the subject, and, more importantly, begin the process of concretely articulating the material that Jung develops, connecting it, for instance, to his alchemical studies.

As should be obvious to anyone reading this blog with any attention, my central concern is to reveal the ways the UFO illuminates or takes up in its vortex (considered both poetically and para-scientifically) galaxies of other concerns, including our most pressing, social, ecological, and “spiritual” (Geistig), all in the hopes of someday presenting the work as a book or, ideally, a poem. (Though, I fear, the project will more likely end up a textual version of Jonathan E. Caldwell‘s…).

I observed already in my review the prescience of Heard’s imagining the ufonauts to be insects. In the Alien Abduction literature, the ETs are often described as being insectoid in various ways, and the figure of the Mantis is prevalent. So, in the context of the development of the myth (if not the hard core of the mystery), Heard’s book is, intentionally or not, significant.

But consider Heard’s description (150) of how the Martian Super-Bees might appear:

A creature with eyes like brilliant cut-diamonds, with a head of sapphire, a thorax of emerald, an abdomen of ruby, wings like opal, legs like topaz.

From a strictly literary critical, stylistic or philological, perspective, this description is tired, but from a poeticreative one, much more suggestive.

Within the context of the myth as a whole, the insectoid form of the Super-Bee will rime with a more general insectoid theme that reappears, at least, in the context of Alien Abduction stories, as noted. Moreover, the red of the ruby, green of the emerald, and pure white light of the diamonds rimes with the colours of lights reported, for example, on the Phantom Airships of 1896/7. That UFOs are often described as flashing or strobing multicoloured lights or to be scintillating (like gems might be said to) winds another thread into the aesthetic texture.

However doubtful it is that Ezekiel’s Chariot is analogous to a modern-day UFO, that Ezekiel’s vision is read as a premodern sighting report makes it, too, part of the myth. (Parties, skeptical and curious, are encouraged to consult (Milton scholar!) Michael Lieb’s Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of the End Time that unfolds the developing meaning of Ezekiel’s Chariot from the prophet’s own times to the present). In this context, it becomes not insignificant that “the appearance of the wheels [of the chariot] and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl” (Ezekiel I.16) and the throne on the chariot has “the appearance of a sapphire stone” (Ezekiel I.26). This happenstance rime is more suggestive than it might seem offhand.

Jung’s Ufo study is artistically compelling by its associating aspects of the Ufo visionary rumour not only to the concrete historical horizon within which flying saucers first appear but to Alchemy, that vast literature that functions as a subliminal inspiration in the works of Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats, Pound, H.D., Robert Duncan, and others. A few minutes of paging through the indices of Jung’s Alchemical Studies and Mysterium Coniunctionis turn up allusions to a description of

the sapphire stone, [which] takes on divers colours from the highest powers, and works in created things now in one wise, now in the contrary, administering at times good, at others evil, now life, now death, now sickness, now healing, now poverty, now riches (Mysterium Coniunctionis, 447)

taken, unsurprisingly from the Kabbala denudata. One of the goals of Chinese Alchemy was the creation of “the diamond body” (Alchemical Studies, 21). And, if one, understandably, were to associate the Latin lapis (as in the Alchemical expression Lapis Philosophorum, Philosopher’s Stone) with the constellation of associations generated by just some of the precious stones that go to make up Heard’s Martian Super-Bee, one might be forgiven to call to mind the Alchemical “Visita Interiora Terra Rectificanto Inveniens Occultum Lapidem“: Visit the interior of the earth and rectifying [purifying] you will find the hidden stone.

Hear, the most preliminary tracing of associations leads us to the Hollow Earth, another famous dimension of the myth, as one putative origin of the UFOs (which rimes, too, with other associations, underground bases, or Earth Lights and ELF waves (which pun, in turn, brings in the whole dimension of Faery lore…)). Along with the depths of the earth’s oceans, the deeps of space, or even the depths of past or future time, or equally infinitely distant and near other dimensions, all these homes of the Other, all Other places, rime with Jung’s Unconscious (the psychoanalytic Other)….

Nor should one eschew the phonemic near rime of lapis and ‘laugh’ or the interlinguistic rime with French lapin….As Whitman said, “the theme (or, in this case, a kind of rabbit hole (!)) has vista”….

Jung’s Ufological Bookshelf: Gerald Heard, The Riddle of the Saucers: Is Another World Watching?

January 9, 2019January 15, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 4 Comments

51hyugp-u1l Gerald Heard. The Riddle of the Saucers: Is Another World Watching? London: Winter and Worsfold, 1950. 157pp.

In the commentary to the third dream Jung analyzes in his Flying Saucers, he writes:

A round metallic object appears, described as a flying spider….we are reminded of the hypothesis that Ufos are a species of insect from another planet and possessing a shell or carapace that shines like metal. An analogy would be the metallic-looking chitinous covering of our beetles. Each Ufo is supposed to be a single insect, not a swarm. (46)

The idea that the Ufo might be an extraterrestrial insect, the footnote to this passage tells us, is found in Sievers’ Flying Saucers über Südafrika that “mentions Gerald Heard’s hypothesis that they are a species of bee from Mars”.

If UFO reports constitute a “visionary rumour” then Heard’s book reads like a link in the chain of gossip, what Jung called “sensation mongering” in the case of ordinary rumours, despite Heard’s calling his book a “report” several times in the Foreward. Loosely written both in presentation of the cases and in their documentation (e.g., Heard refers to what Arnold saw as discs or saucers (12)) Heard’s book might seem a hack’s attempt to cash in on the public interest in the new phenomenon (written between late 1947 and late 1950), until one discovers what a widely-published and highly-regarded figure he was, a graduate of Cambridge, the author of thirty-eight books, and a friend of Aldous Huxley.

Nevertheless, despite being one of the earliest books on the topic Jung consults, it sets out both the (to us) well-known and well-worn history of the earliest years of the modern phenomenon as well as the more general lineaments of the myth with which readers today will be well familiar.

In the opening chapters, Heard recounts Kenneth Arnold’s inaugural sighting of 24 June 1947; the UAL sighting of 4 July 1947; the Maury Island incident; the Muroc sighting of 8 July 1947; and Fred Johnson’s Cascade Mountain sighting 24 June 1947, famously before Arnold’s and including the first association of magnetic anomalies with the presence of the saucers, the hands on Johnson’s compass spinning wildly while the discs he witnessed were overhead. Heard continues with the Chiles/Whitted case of 23 July 1948; the death of Thomas Mantell, 7 January 1948; and the Gorman Dogfight, 1 October 1948. Heard concludes the first, historical half of his volume detailing the efforts of Project Saucer. Heard then, tediously, turns his attention to the mystery of the nature, origin, and intent of the discs, concluding, first, that their technology, because of its performance capabilities must be non-terrestrial. He is thereby moved to reflect on those characteristics, shape, size (including terming the largest “motherships”), velocity, silence, and apparent intelligent behaviour, remarking, in the process, on the earliest photographic evidence, in this case, the Trent/McMinville photo. He goes on to propose mcinville the discs’ pilots, like we would soon be, are space explorers. He then ranges over the possible origins of the discs and concludes with the hypothesis Jung notes, that the pilots are likely “super bees”—from Mars. Further evidence of Mars’ being the discs’ homebase is the peculiar size, appearance, and orbits of Mars’ moons, Demos and Phobos, whose oddness prompts Heard to propose they are artificial, orbital launch platforms. Heard then, in classic, ufological style, detours into a catalogue of premodern sightings, from the Eighteenth Century to Foo-fighters and Ghost Rockets, before speculating that the Martian bees’ purpose is likely to observe our industrial, technological, and military development, and to determine what threat the earth might pose to Mars, drawn in the first instance by their witnessing the detonation of atomic bombs. Heard concludes by summarizing the classic argument that, since the flying dics are neither hallucination nor terrestrial they must therefore be extraterrestrial.

In the course of the above narration, he expresses ideas that will become commonplace. Already, in the forward, the flying saucers are “some sort of super flying-machine”. Reliable witness reports are debunked or suppressed by authorities, whether the press or “Air-authorities”. Evidence is murderously suppressed by the military or government, as evidenced by the B-52 crash and death of USAF officers Brown and Davidson August 1947 transporting samples of the Maury Island ejecta. Heard categorizes the dramatis personae of the mystery into three characters: the reliable, trained but mystified witness; the witness reluctant to report his experience; and the suppressing authorities. The haughty dismissal of the mystery of the saucers is compared to that of psychical research or Eighteenth century reports of meteorites. The UFO is described as possessing what are now the classic shapes of discs or torpedoes and of making impossibly tight turns. Heard posits the explanation that the Flying Saucers were said to be U.S. secret weapons or feared to be foreign, that the public revelation of their extraterrestrial origin would result in a “War of the Worlds” hysterical reaction, their being extraterrestrial borne out by the Saucer’s technology being ahead of ours, likely relying on magnetism or antigravity. Finally, as noted, it was the flash of A-bomb blasts that piqued the Martians’ curiosity.

For all its turgid near unreadability, Heard’s book possesses at least two (almost) saving graces. For such an early work, it presciently identifies and describes salient cases that will become “classics” and reflects on them in a manner that will be repeated over the coming decades. Remarkably, Heard’s imagining the ETs are insectoid uncannily foresees the various mantid species that will make their entrance most markedly with the advent of the Abduction phenomenon. Most importantly, though, Heard’s “hypothesis” that the pilots of the flying discs are Martian bees is developed from his ruminations about terrestrial bees, concluding they are possessed of an intelligence equal to that of humankind, being social, and capable of both calculation and communication. That he does not anthropomorphize the extraterrestrial as too many will and still do but discovers a nonhuman intelligence in our own backyard makes Heard a radical, ecological thinker avant le lettre, decentering the ontotheological primacy of human intelligence and of humankind in the process.

bee face