BOOK: Ivan Sanderson, "Invisible Residents" (cont.)

Ivan T. Sanderson: Invisible Residents. London: Tandem, 1974. (First ed.: NY and Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1970.) SBN 426138805. 254 pp.

[Continued from last week.]

Miscellaneous

“[A] ridge 50 miles long by 15 miles wide rose 2¼ miles overnight in South Atlantic in 1924” (p. 22). He cites “Zodiac, staff magazine of Cable and Wireless, Ltd., October 1923; Daily Mail, 22 August 1923; Evening Standard, 28 August 1923.” I don't know how reliable these newspapers are, but I doubt that such a thing is possible. But I am very impressed that he fished out such obscure articles about obscure events, and all that in an age without Google and similar search engines :)

“[D]uring the past year, as of writing this [. . .] we now do have a working plane [. . .] that can go into and come back out of water.” (P. 58.) That would be very cool, but I have no idea what he's talking about. I've never heard of any such thing. He also mentions this on p. 98: “not merely on the drawing board, but in fact, as reported in Popular Mechanics. It is also thought that a prototype of such a plane, named the ‘Flying Fish,’ was built by the Douglas complex for, and on the specs of, the O.N.R.”; the first one supposedly crashed but the next model, after some adjustments, “performed as required”. In a footnote, he cites Popular Mechanics, September 1967, pp. 114–5.

I found chapter 6 to be particularly interesting. It's about a small artefact found in Colombia, dating from the pre-Columbian period. It could be representing a (quite unusual) fish or insect, but it could also be a delta-wing airplane. (“[T]his bloody thing does not look like any kind of known animal but it does look astonishingly like some kind of small airplane,” p. 92.) Sanderson showed casts of the object to various aviation experts, who say that it does look like an airplane but also differs in some important details from what a real plane would have to be shaped like (“Perhaps it is an artist's ‘impression’ ”, p. 92).

Another very interesting chapter is ch. 7, about underwater ‘lightwheels’: long and slowly rotating rays of light underneath the water, emitting from a common centre and their tips suddenly terminating at a certain distance away from the centre. See e.g. p. 107 for a description, written by one Comdr. J. R. Bodler (USNR). Sanderson also cites a proposed explanation of the phenomenon by one Dr. Wally Minto, who suggests that underwater sound waves may be activating the bioluminescence in certain kinds of plankton (pp. 115–7); but it isn't clear what could be causing such sound waves.

In ch. 9 he mentions examples of airplanes whose pilots found that they had covered a distance in an amazingly short period of time. He concludes that this cannot be explained just by strong tail winds, because meteorological stations on the ground would have detected these winds as well; thus perhaps “the planes slipped into areas wherein time ran slower” (p. 162). Oh dear. I think it's much more plausible that some unusual wind-related phenomenon is at work than that time somehow slows down in a certain area...

He mentions his ‘vile vortices’ several times without clearly explaining them, as if he assumed that the reader already knows them (pp. 134, 147, 151); but then in ch. 11 he describes how he got to define them. They are conveniently located around the world so that, if you also count the poles among them, you get the vertices of an icosahedron. And this despite the fact that he says “I don't like such neat patterns emerging in anything in nature; it looks far too much as thought somebody had got the idea first, and then tried to fit the facts into it. You can fit almost anything into almost anything else if you try hard enough” (p. 165). This is amazing — he is aware of all this, and yet he pursues his ridiculous vortex theory?!

An instance of amazing honesty: “[T]here is as of now totally insufficient evidence even for the existence of these vortices, per se.” (P. 177.)

He claims that in the Bermuda Triangle and a few other areas, the number of disappearances is unusually large, even if you take the amount of traffic into account (pp. 166–7); that's interesting, if it's really true.

Apparently the surface of the ocean is not perfectly level, but forms ‘depressions’ in some areas: “There is even a story, which I have been trying for four years to have confirmed or disproved, that some old freighters sold to Japanese scrapyards had failed to make the grate up the slope out of one of these patches and had to be helped out by ocean-going tugs.” :))))

In the last few chapters of the book, which try to present theories and explanations for the unusual events described earlier in the book, he has an annoying tendency to devote space to half-kooky ideas recently proposed (recently from the point of view of when he was writing the book) on the fringes of physics. The problem is that undoubtedly dozens of such ideas are proposed by physicists every year, with most of them soon discarded or forgotten, so that it's silly to take one from the last year and hint, in your paranormal book, that this one may turn out to be the explanation behind your paranormal phenomena. In practice what is more likely to happen is that in five years nobody will remember that theory anymore. Have you ever heard of Dr. John Carstoiu and his “Gravity II” (p. 173)?

“[T]here is currently considerable speculation as to whether there may not be a sort of counter-time that flows fromour future to our past” (p. 179). I don't doubt that there has been such speculation, but where? Among drug-addled new-age kooks?

“There is a theory that disturbs many geomorphologists. Briefly stated, this is to the effect that the earth is really a sort of vast crystal and is trying to adopt a tetrahedral form — namely, a three-sided pyramid with an apex at the Antarctic and a flat triangular base around the North Pole.” (P. 186.) ROFLMAO!!! I don't doubt that it disturbs the geomorphologists. They are probably laughing so hard that they cannot get any work done :)

I wonder if the book originally had a section of plates between pp. 192 and 193. It looks as if something has been cut out at that point.

He has a silly obsession with the idea that it's better to build underground than above the ground (or above the ocean floor, if you're a mysterious but advanced underwater civilization), presumably because above the ground you are more exposed to the elements (such as “vile currents (winds)”, p. 196 — he sure was fond of the word ‘vile’ :)). But why does he pretend not to notice how much more difficult and expensive it is to dig rooms from the bedrock than to put up walls and a roof above the ground?

One of the obvious problems with his idea that there's a super-advanced underwater civilization that we're mostly unaware of is of course that civilizations in general have a tendency to make themselves noticed. He suggests: “why it should not be so far in advance of us technically that we would neve have even noticed it until we started to develop a few really sensitive gadgets” (p. 199); earlier on the same page he emphasizes that, since life first evolved in water, there has been much more time for advanced species to evolve in the water than on dry land: “we have only just now achieved this after some 300 million years. What might intelligent entities, having had more than twice as long to evolve [in water] [. . .] have achieved?” But I think this line of arguing is completely implausible. Surely nobody doubts that (unless we destroy our civilization with some kind of ecological disaster or nuclear war or something of that sort) we will colonize the oceans in a few thousand years' time, let alone in 300 million years. Thus, if an advanced aquatic civilization had evolved that had 300 million years head-start on us, it would have colonized dry land long before our ancestors had ever even climbed the trees, much less came back down from them.

He makes a good point on p. 203: “It has always seemed strange to me that almost everybody not only believes in, but almost casually accepts, the existence of a Universal Power, God, [. . .] without a single iota of the sort of concrete evidence for His existence that they so clamorously demand before they will even ‘believe in’ anything as concrete as a lake or sea monster.” (P. 203.) But actually, it doesn't seem so strange to me. A person's beliefs aren't guided just by truth and evidence, but also by the consequences of those beliefs. Believing in the existence of lake monsters doesn't help you much, but believing in some kind of god might provide you with consolation and a sense that at least somebody cares about you and has this chaotic and messy world of ours under control. At least that's what I imagine that the good sides of believing in a god might be, although of course I don't know for sure, seeing as I don't believe in any myself.

A touching, and hilarious, glimpse of the good old days when it was believed that artificial intelligence was just around the corner: “We have ‘invented’ devices that we call computers. Some of these, such as those, for instance, developed by Drs John C. Loehlin of the University of Texas, Kenneth M. Colby of Stanford, and the Gullahorns of Michigan, are now already not only ‘thinking’ but developing personalities and showing characteristics such as we call emotions.” (P. 216.) ROTFLOL :))))

He suggests that, as our technology grows more and more complex, people are less and less able to really understand it: “Soon machines will be teaching the next generation of our species [. . .] Might it not be that at least some OINTs [= other intelligences] are so far ahead of our present status that they have completely lost controls of themselves and just plain given up thinking [. . .]? Take poltergeists, for instance. [. . .] the ‘work’ they do is, at least according to the record, 100 per cent stupid, mischievous, and for the most part both logical and insane.” (P. 217.)

ToRead:

• Sanderson's Abominable Snowmen, a book about the yeti, sasquatch, and similar legendary beings.

• Apparently Jung wrote a book the UFOs: Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (NY: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1959). (Mentioned here on p. 244.)

• Sanderson says on p. 127 that a radio commentator named Art Ford “has now spent many years investigating” the case of Flight 19, “and he has run into some really very extraordinary and disturbing facts concerning the affair. His book on the case is to be published shortly” — however, I couldn't find any such book mentioned on the web, nor in the LOC catalogue. I did find several web sites mentioning that it was Ford who reported that the Flight 19 leader, Lt. Taylor, was heard to say things like “They look like they're from outer space — don't come after me.” This perhaps gives us a hit of what Ford's book is probably like, if he did get around to publishing it.

BOOK: Ivan Sanderson, "Invisible Residents"

Ivan T. Sanderson: Invisible Residents. London: Tandem, 1974. (First ed.: NY and Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1970.) SBN 426138805. 254 pp.

Sanderson was a biologist and wrote several popular-science type books about zoology, but nowadays he's chiefly remembered for his interest in paranormal subjects. Probably the first time I've heard of him was when I read Berlitz's The Bermuda Triangle, which mentions Sanderson's theory that the Triangle is just one of twelve “anomalic regions” (Sanderson's phrase — he was quite fond of unnecessarily using words that end in -ic), situated around the world at regular intervals; he calls them “vile vortices”, and the whole thing is of course just as silly as this name would lead you to believe.

The only thing I've read by Sanderson before this book was a short article of his that was included in Mysteries and Monsters of the Sea, a collection of articles from the Fate magazine. I was rather disappointed by that book as a whole, and Sanderson's article (“Sea Serpents and Whachamacallits”, from January 1964) didn't particularly impress me either.

Anyway, I recently bought Invisible Residents very cheaply along with about 20 other books about paranormal topics, which explains the recent predominance of such books on this blog :)

The basic idea of this book is that there must exist a very advanced (and hitherto unknown to us) civilization living at the ocean floor (or even beneath it, pp. 84–5, 196). The main argument in favour of this theory are the supposedly numerous sightings of UFOs coming into or out of the water, and of unidentified submarine objects exhibiting patterns of behaviour beyond the reach of human technology. Just like with UFOs, I of course cannot quite believe such an incredible claim, but I'd be curious to know what these sightings (if they really occured as they are reported here) were all about; he tells a few interesting stories along the way, and he has a very peculiar style of writing, quite unlike any other paranormal author I've read so far. All of this taken together has made this book quite a pleasant and charming read.

His style

His unusual style is perhaps partly a result of his British origins; in addition, he comes across as a highly irritable person who doesn't mince words when he is annoyed, which he is much of the time :) The other paranormal authors I've read so far (not very many, admittedly) come across as calm and bloodless in comparison, even when they are *trying* to be lurid and sensationalist.

“I will not bore you with a reiteration of the so-called ‘flying-saucer’ nonsense, as it is now extant in more books and papers than I would care to enumerate.” (P. 15.) “The term ‘flying saucer’ is an abomination, preposteriously facetious, false, and irrelevant.” (P. 16. His complaint seems to be that they are hardly ever really saucer-shaped. He also complains against the term “UFO’: “that they ‘fly’, as we know flight, is rubbish”, p. 16.) “Heyerdahl is a perfectly splendid fellow [. . .] but he clings to an outmoded orthodoxy in a manner that is incomprehensible.” (P. 33.) “One does not wish to be grossly impertinent, but one is constrained to ask just what the heck is the matter with all the classes of skeptics, stuffed shirts, and other experts? [. . .] These two items are highly obnoxious to just about everybody, quite apart from the professional skeptics and other assorted clowns.” (P. 37.) “This list, while vey impressive, is frankly a crashing bore” (p. 42). “[M]y greatest delight is teasing stuffed-shirted experts” (p. 67). “[L]iterally hundreds of (from a mechanical point of view) obscene objects were reported” (p. 71). “The following may sound disreputably ‘cloak-and-daggerish’ and infuriate the stuffed shirts” (p. 77). “There is somethign dashed rum going on here” (p. 120).

Much of the time this ranting style is quite pleasant. One thing that annoyed me, however, was that he often jumps, for no very obvious reasons, between this very personal, very irascible authorial “I” and the sort of impersonal “we” that you wouldn't expect to find elsewhere than in an academic text or a royal proclamation. If he wanted to maintain a calm, detached academic tone, he would have to use “we” throughout the book and avoid venting his spleen on every other page. Therefore it was hard not to feel the use of the “we” as more like a pompous quasi-royal “we” (this feeling is further strengthened by curious constructs such as “[a]n old personal friend of ours”, p. 34; “I thought that this might be due to our having become bored with the whole UFO bit at that time — and indeed we personally did”, p. 68), which started to get on my nerves fairly soon. (Eventually it transpires that he had founded a “Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained”, pp. 164, 169, so presumably the “we” refers to him and other collaborators from this society.)

He also clearly enjoys taking swipes as “officialdom” and its helplessness and cluelessness when it comes to UFOs and similar phenomena. See pp. 17, 19, 67.

“taking the proverbial ungulate by its frontal protuberances” (p. 78) :))

He has an annoying fondness for words ending in -ic, such as “gravic” (p. 169) and “gravitic” (p. 175) — why the heck is ‘gravitational’ not good enough for him?

He cites quite a lot of sources, much more than is usual for paranormal books, but they are mostly to publications like the Flying Saucer Review, books by other UFOlogists, and newspaper articles. On p. 69 he mentions something from the New York Times, but doesn't provide an exact reference.

He says that he isn't interested in just piling together lots of facts: “It is not the ‘what’ that interests me but the ‘how’ and even more, the ‘why’ ” (p. 134). I agree in principle, but in subjects like this one, if you list the facts thoroughly and scrutinize them really carefully, you might have some kind of ground to sand on; but if you insist prematurely on proceeding into ‘how’ and ‘why’, you'll end up with nothing but yet another bullshit paranormal theory.

Interesting paranormal occurrences

Some of the more interesting of the unusual or paranormal occurrences mentioned in the book:

A ship listening for signals near the bottom of the sea, for the purposes of testing long-range underwater communications, caught the signal that had been transmitted to it during the course of experiment, “and then a repeat of the signal followed by a strange code which the computers are still trying to break” (p. 37); i.e., “ ‘something unknown’ ” picked up the signal and then “began transmitting its own signals on the same wavelengths” (p. 38). I hope they made sure that it wasn't just some kind of echo or random noise or something of that sort.

“For two weeks [in 1960] the Argentine Navy did everything in its power to track down two unidentified submarines detected in the Golfo Nuevo” despite the assistance of the U.S. Navy experts, equipment “and apparently uncounted tons of xplosives, the mystery subs eventually just went away, still unidentified” (p. 57). “And every nation owning so much as one submarine could well deny any complicity, because they all knew perfectly well that none of theirs could withstand the pounding these did” (p. 59).

Sanderson cites Vincent Gaddis' report about a cargo ship, the Ourang Medan, which sent out SOS messages ended by “All officers including captain dead [. . .] probably whole crew dead [. . .] I die” (p. 141). Rescue ships arrived in a few hours and found all crewmembers lying about the ship, dead, including the radio operator, “his lifeless hand still resting on the transmitting key. ‘Their frozen faces were upturned to the sun [. . .] the mouths were gaping open and the eyes staring.’ ” Soon afterwards a fire broke out on the ship, the rescue party left and minutes later, the ship exploded and sank (pp. 141–2). An excellent story, even if it isn't true — see the Wikipedia page, which casts some doubt on the whole incident.

His life

Sanderson seems to have had quite a colourful life (see the article about him in the Wikipedia), and glimpses into it appear every now and then in the book. “I was admonished in my youth by one of the most awesome personalities I have ever met, one Chief Ekumaw of the Assumbo people of the northern Camerun, in West Africa, to remember always that the proper place to begin a story is at the beginning.” (P. 28.)

Apparently he worked “as a counterespionage agent for a navy” during the war (p. 125): “My jurisdiction covered a considerable area of tropical seas [. . .] I was responsible for numbering thousands of craft in the area”.

“I was virtually brought up on the sea and lived for many years on my own schooner” (p. 138).

“I spent many years collecting animals in Africa, the Orient, and South America [. . .] a sting ray over six feet in width [. . .] turned up in a river that had been inhabited [. . .] for centuries [. . .] but nobody had ever seen anything like it before.” (Pp. 197–8.)

[To be continued in a few days.]

BOOK: J. Allen Hynek, "The UFO Experience"

J. Allen Hynek: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry. London: Corgi Books, 1974. (First ed.: Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1972.) 0552094307. 336 pp.

Introduction

Prof. Hynek was an astronomer who is nowadays chiefly remembered for his interest in UFOs. I don't remember when I first heard of him, but I suspect it must have been on some UFO-debunkery type of web site, for I remember that the writer of that web site went out of his way to imply, between the lines, that Hynek wasn't much of an astronomer and, presumably, that his interest in UFOs was just a way of compensating for his lack of scientific ability, and thus his work in UFOlogy isn't worth taking seriously.

That was several years ago. I wasn't ready to entirely accept that web site's point of view, but nevertheless, when I now started reading this book by Hynek, I approached it with a certain caution, waiting all the time when the wacky stuff would make its appearance. But, remarkably enough, it never did. I found this book to be impressively sober, measured, balanced, carefully considered — much more so than I would have dared to expect from a book about the UFOs. I don't know if his later work on the subject of UFOs is more wacky than this book, but if it isn't, I cannot help but conclude that Hynek is being unjustly maligned by the radical anti-UFO crowd.

Hynek's association with UFOlogy

As is well known, the first big waves of UFO sightings in the late 1940s made enough of an impression on the authorities that the U.S. Air Force started an official investigation into the phenomenon, mostly with a view to finding out whether the UFOs presented a threat to U.S. security (p. 212; e.g. if they should turn out to be a Soviet secret weapon). These investigations went through several changes of names (Project Sign, 1947–9; Project Grudge, 1949–52; Project Blue Book, 1952–66) but somewhere relatively soon along the way, the Air Force pretty much lost interest in these matters.

It became clear that the sightings were not due to a Soviet secret weapon, or indeed to anything else obviously hostile, and by establishing that, the Air Force felt that it had done its job and didn't have to keep on scratching its head in an effort to find out what the sightings were actually caused by (pp. 213, 216). At the same time, due to increasingly lurid coverage of the UFO phenomena in the press, the idea of studying the UFO sightings seriously had quickly lost whatever tiny amount of respectability it may have initially possessed. Thus, the Air Force investigators eventually stopped their efforts to seriously study the UFO sightings that were being reported to them, and were content to just ridicule and explain away each sighting as quickly as possible, e.g. by concluding that the observers really saw Venus/a meteor/an airplane/a baloon/etc. and mistakenly thought it was something unusual (such as a flying saucer); p. 219. “[P]articularly puzzling” cases “were frequently evaluated as ‘Unidentified’ and put aside. The objective had been attained: the UFO had been identified as ‘Unidentified’.” (P. 220.)

Hynek's association with these projects started when they hired him as an external scientific consultant for Project Sign — they anticipated that many UFO sightings were actually misidentified astronomical phenomena, so they wanted an astronomer to help them evaluate the reports of the sightings. This book, The UFO Experience, is based on Hynek's observations during the course of these projects, and ultimately on his disappointments with the way these investigations eventually turned out.

The message of this book

Basically, the main message of this book is that, in Hynek's opinion, the UFO sightings are a subject worthy of a proper scientific investigation (and not of being simply ridiculed and ignored, which is how most scientists tended to treat them), and that they weren't being given this treatment by the Air Force's Project Blue Book.

I entirely agree with the first half of this message — in my opinion, even if it would turn out that the UFO sightings are nothing but misidentified baloons, hallucinations and outright lies, this would still be a subject worth investigating, simply because the sightings are so numerous and attract such attention on the part of the public. Regarding the second half of the message, the part about the problems with the way Project Blue Book and related efforts functioned (or rather failed to function as it should have), I of course don't have any other information about these projects, but I see no obvious reason to doubt Hynek's claims here.

They certainly seem convincing enough. As far as I'm concerned, the only people whom I'd expect to dislike the book would be the hardline debunkers who want to simply treat the subject of UFOs with ridicule and are determined to laugh at every other approach to this subject, no matter how careful or unbiased.

Criticism of Project Blue Book

In several places in this book, Hynek points out problems with the way the Air Force's UFO investigations were organized. (See ch. 11 and appendix 4, containing Hynek's detailed criticism of Project Blue Book, which he wrote for Col. Sleeper from the US Air Force.)

The Blue Book staff was too small and usually lacked scientific training (p. 312); and it had to spend too much of its time on public relations and too little on actually investigating the reports of UFO sightings. Some problems were due to the strictly hierarchical organization of the military.

For example, typically a project such as Blue Book would be led by a relatively low-ranking officer who was chiefly interested in promotion and/or retirement (pp. 232, 327). Once it was clear to him that the higher-ups regarded the whole UFO business as ridiculous and weren't interested in seeing it investigated seriously, he naturally tended to discourage rather than encourage his staff from investigating the UFO reports seriously — why should he risk his promotion by annoying the people higher up in the hierarchy?

Additionally, since the officers involved with Project Blue Book were all relatively low-ranking ones, they had little influence when it was necessary to work with other parts of the air force (“a captain cannot command a colonel or a major at another base to obtain information for him”, p. 227; see also p. 328).

The Blue Book investigators often neglected to gather more data about their sightings (p. 221), e.g. by interviewing witnesses (such interviews might provide valuable additional details about the sightings), or did so only after a considerable delay; they rarely visited the locations of the sightings personally; when talking to witnesses, their tone often left no doubt of the fact that they thought the whole matter inane and that in their view the witness must have been imagining things, or making them up (“ ‘Tell me about this mirage you saw’ ”, p. 135).

And: “obvious cases of misinterpretation [. . .] Blue Book would take some pains to establish for the record;” but cases “which were open to question and contained the possibility that something ‘genuinely new and empirical’ might be contained in it, were treated with little or no interest.” (P. 139; see also p. 222.)

The project also worked in an unnecessary atmosphere of secrecy, even though many of the UFO reports didn't contain any sensitive military information (p. 216). They didn't even let Hynek, their own scientific advisor, browse through their files — he was allowed to receive a UFO report after requesting it explicitly, but how to learn that the report existed in the first place was entirely up to him. Similarly they refused to let him make copies of the reports on their xerox machine (p. 311).

The Blue Book team initially classified many cases as “possible/probable aircraft/balloon/etc.“; but later, when compiling their statistics, they simply counted such cases as if they were definitely identified — as if classifiers such as “possible” didn't imply a considerable amount of uncertainty! (P. 313.) Similarly, for some cases they concluded that insufficient data was available; but they didn't count these among the unidentified cases when compiling their statistics (p. 315). This allowed them to brag to the press that as little as 5% (or less) of their cases remained unidentified (p. 315–7).

Another thing which Hynek emphasizes several times is that an individual UFO sighting can always be somehow explained away as a fluke, an error, a hallucination; but when you get lots and lots of similar reports, patterns start to appear and they aren't explained away so easily any more. He suggested that they should store some information about the sightings in a computer for easier analysis (this sort of thing would be called data mining nowadays), but such suggestions were “summarily turned down” by the air force (p. 229), nor was the Condon committee much more welcoming (pp. 248–9). (He calls again for more statistical analysis on pp. 269 and 280.)

“So certain is Blue Book of its working hypothesis [i.e. that nothing unusual is going on behind the UFO sightings] that it reminds one of the doctor who was so certain that all abdominal swellings were the result of tumors that he failed to recognize that his patient was pregnant.” (P. 321.) :))

Criticism of the Condon report

The air force's involvement with UFOs officially ended with the Condon report, published in 1968, which investigated less than a hundred UFO reports (out of thousands that were available in the Blue Book files) and concluded that nothing about them suggests that the subject is worthy of further study. Here in The UFO Experience, Hynek includes some fairly serious criticism of the Condon committee and its work (ch. 12).

Had they studied a larger number of cases, and not just recent ones, patterns would become evident, which their approach overlooked (p. 242). They didn't discard, from their sample, cases that are easily explained as misidentified astronomical or meteorological phenomena; while, of course, the interesting thing for a UFO study are only those cases that *cannot* be easily explained in this way (pp. 242, 253–4). They downplayed the number of unexplained cases, e.g. by “playing down or ignoring what was unexplained and playing up possible explanations even when the detailed analysis all but rules them out” (from a paper by W. T. Powers, p. 260).

Hynek even includes a letter of resignation from one of the committee members, Mary Louise Armstrong, indicating that Bob the project coordinator was doing a very poor job and wasn't really interested in investigating the UFO cases seriously.

In several places in the book, Hynek mentions how unfortunate it is that, with the termination of the Air Force's projects, there is no central place to which people could submit reports of their UFO sightings. He says that with some colleagues they will be accepting such reports for purposes of scientific record (pp. 72–3, 270) — well, soon after the publication of this book, he took these efforts a step further and founded the Center for UFO Studies, which is apparently still active.

Here's an example from pp. 103–4, Hynek's somewhat exasperated summary of the conclusions of a certain Project Blue Book report: “the observers were reliable, the radar operator was competent, and the object couldn't be identified: therefore it was an airplane. In the face of such reasoning one might well ask whether it would ever be possible to discover the existence of new empirical phenomena in any area of human experience.”

Hynek's classification of UFO sightings

Anyway, apart from these things, the main part of this book presents Hynek's efforts to analyze the UFO sightings that reached him during his years of involvement with the Air Force's projects. After discarding the sightings that could be explained as planets, meteors, airplanes, etc., there still remained a nontrivial number of reports that weren't so easy to explain. To these he tried to assign a “strangeness rating”, measuring “the number of information bits the report contains, each of which is difficult to explain in common-sense terms” (p. 42) and a “proability rating” (measuring how likely it is that “the reporters could have erred” in their claims, depending on what we know about them and about the circumstances of their sighting; p. 43). In the remainder of the book he focuses on sightings with a sufficiently high probability rating; for example, most of the time, he deliberately excludes reports that involve just one witness rather than several, no matter how reliable the single witness in question is.

In terms of content, he divides the sightings into distant and close encounters. The distant ones can be summarized as either “nocturnal lights” if seen at night, or as “daytime discs” if seen during the day; additionally there are some radar-only sightings, but he ignores these because it would be too difficult to assess their reliability.

For close encounters, he describes the now-classic division into close encounters of the first, second and third kind — if I understand correctly, this is in fact the first book where this division was employed. First kind means that the UFO was just observed; second kind means that some physical consequences were also noted (e.g. car breakdowns seem to be especially common, but he also mentions scorched areas of vegetation, p. 165, and even landing marks, p. 167); third kind means that occupants were reportedly seen in the UFO. (He treats this latter group, close encounters of the third kind, with great skepticism, especially reports of contact with the aliens, which he says invariably come from lunatics.)

He then dedicates a chapter to each of these different groups of sightings and describes a few typical examples. One thing that I find particularly commendable is his emphasis on “hard” data, i.e. things such as how quickly the UFOs moved, and in what direction; how large they were, what color, what shape, what sort of lights did they have, etc.

There's a particularly amusing case of a close encounter of the first kind on pp. 130–4; on April 16, 1966, a UFO was seen by several people in Ohio, including several members of the Portage County police department, some of whom even chased it in a car “at speeds sometimes as high as 105 miles per hour” (p. 133).

Of the close encounters of the third kind, the one that I find the most interesting involved a missionary and a number of natives on Papua New Guinea on June 26–27, 1959 (p. 186). Hynek also includes an appendix in which Donald Menzel argues that the whole thing could be explained as a misinterpretation and a sighting of Venus, but Hynek points out several problems with Menzel's argument (p. 191).

Conclusion

In the conclusion of another case of the third count, Hynek says: “We are not, of course, justified in concluding [. . .] that real humanoids were seen. As in other aspects of the entire UFO phenomenon, the call is clearly for more study.” (P. 196.) See also pp. 242 and 247, where he makes it clear that UFOs do not have to mean that we are being visited by extraterrestrial intelligences; and, above all, we don't have enough data to either prove or disprove the ET hypothesis (p. 274). I'm emphasizing this to show how sober this book is: Hynek doesn't commit himself to any pro-alien views, he just argues that the UFOs as a phenomenon merit a closer study. This is also the main message with which he ends the book (ch. 13 and the epilogue).

ToRead:

• Jacques Vallée: Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Mentioned here on p. 196 as discussing the resemblance of aliens (as described by people in encounters of the third kind) to the ‘little people’ of various kinds, found in the folklore and mythology all over the world.

• John Fuller: The Interrupted Journey. Mentioned on p. 197; it's about the case of Betty and Barney Hill, one of the first famous contactee/abduction cases.

• Charles Bowen (ed.): Humanoids: A Survey of Worldwide Reports of Landings of Unconventional Aerial Objects and Their Occupants. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969. Mentioned on p. 205.

• David Saunders, Roger Harkins: UFOs? Yes!. Mentioned on p. 263 as containing “[t]he membership of the [Condon] committee and an illuminating history of its two-year existence”. Saunders was fired from the committee by Condon.

• David Branch, Robert Klinn: Inquiry at Redlands. A close encounter of the first kind, seen at Redlands, California, 4 February 1968 (pp. 321–2).

BOOK: Donald Keyhoe, "Flying Saucers from Outer Space"

Donald E. Keyhoe: Flying Saucers from Outer Space. London: Tandem, 1970. (First ed.: NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1954.) 256 pp.

I first heard of Keyhoe some time ago when I found an e-text of his 1950 book, The Flying Saucers Are Real, on the sacred-texts.com web site. Apparently its copyright had not been renewed and it ended up in the public domain. I found it readable enough (if not terribly exciting), so when I recently noticed Keyhoe's Flying Saucers from Outer Space for sale cheaply on eBay, I decide to give this second book a try as well.

Flying Saucers from Outer Space is very much a sequel of The Flying Saucers are Real; they are both written in the more or less the same style and use the same investigative approach. Keyhoe keeps on tirelessly running around and interviewing people from various governmental agencies, chiefly the Air Force; he is constantly pestering them for more information, asking them to release documents and reports, etc. Many of these conversations are then reported practically verbatim in this book, in a suitably colloquial 1950s style with a sprinkling of military lingo here and there. Thus it isn't so much a story of ‘these are the facts about the UFOs’ but rather ‘this is how I investigated the UFOs’. I found this style of writing rather boring and I couldn't even be bothered to remember who exactly his interviewee is at any given point.

The gist of the story is that Keyhoe has no doubts that the UFOs are flying saucers from outer space, and he's trying to find out how much the Air Force and similar agencies know about them, and how they intend to present this information to the public. He finds that the opinion in these agencies is divided; some people there believe that the UFOs are flying saucers, others believe that they are just optical illusions; and those who believe that these are saucers then disagree among themselves as to how much of this should be told to the public, and how, so as not to cause a panic. Throughout most of the book, the upper hand clearly belongs to the side that wants to downplay the flying saucer theory and to reassure the public that nothing unusual is going on. However, at the very end (ch. 14), the Air Force sends Keyhoe's publishers an official statement that practically amounts to admitting that the UFOs are from outer space (p. 244). Keyhoe ends the book with an epilogue calling upon the government to honestly share its knowledge of the UFOs with the public and to step up its investigation of this phenomenon.

The UFO incidents described in this book are mostly fairly sober, as far as such things go — no lurid abductions and the like; most of the cases involve UFOs (of various shapes and sizes) that were observed by pilots and often also by radar operators. From the radar sightings, it was sometimes possible to estimate their speed, which could go up to 10,000 mph; the accelerations were likewise very impressive and well beyond the reach of human technology. It would seem that the UFOs have a particular interest in military facilities, especially nuclear ones.

Keyhoe also includes some discussion about what the intentions of the UFOs may be. He presents several possible explanations without quite committing to any of them (which I think is commentable): they may be hostile, and reconnoitring for an attack; they may be friendly, trying to assess the situation before making contact; they may be looking for a planet to colonize, perhaps because their own is becoming uninhabitable; or they may be merely disinterested observers, just trying to see how humankind is progressing technologically.

An interesting reminder of how strong the cold-war paranoia was in the 1950s appears in Keyhoe's epilogue (p. 246), where he mentions, as another argument in favour of informing the public of the extraterrestrial origin of the UFOs, the possibility that the Soviet Union (which would soon “be able to stage a mass A-bomb attack”) “[b]y starting false rumours of Russian saucer attacks, they might cause stampedes from cities, block defence highways, and paralyse communications just before an A-bomb raid”!

All in all, I found this book fairly boring and didn't particularly enjoy reading it, mainly because of the style — a long series of interviews, press conferences, and UFO incidents. In a way it's nice to be able to follow Keyhoe just as he is investigating these things, but I personally am really not that interested in the course of his investigation, just in the results.

For me, the best thing about its book was that it mentions many sober UFO sightings. I still think it's unlikely that we are being visited by extraterrestrials, but I nevertheless cannot help wondering what is the explanation behind the sightings described here. Surely they cannot all be explained away by hallucinations, optical illusions and deceit.

Anyway, before buying this or any other Keyhoe book I suggest that you take a look at the free on-line text of his Flying Saucers are Real to find out if you enjoy his style.

BOOK: J. W. Spencer, "No Earthly Explanation"

John Wallace Spencer: No Earthly Explanation. New York: Bantam Books, 1975. (First ed.: Phillips Publishing Co., 1974.) x + 179 pp.

Introduction

A few weeks ago I read Spencer's Limbo of the Lost, a book about the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle (see my post about it). I thought it was a fairly good book, as far as pro-Triangle books go; Spencer wrote quite soberly, always emphasized the facts and didn't waste much time on discussing silly paranormal theories (unlike e.g. Berlitz in his Bermuda Triangle).

However, Spencer also left no doubt of the fact that he believed that the incidents in the Bermuda Triangle are connected to UFOs. His main idea was that aliens must be regarding humankind as a kind of subject of a scientific study, one that they want to observe but otherwise leave it unaffected. This is why they make no clear and official contact with governments, but on the other hand they do occassionally kidnap a few people and a ship or an airplane for their research purposes.

Of course all of this is perfectly bizarre, but in Limbo of the Lost Spencer mentions it just briefly and very matter-of-factly, as if this was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Anyway, I saw that he later wrote another book, No Earthly Explanation, in which he discusses these UFO theories of his at greater length. After the good experience with Limbo of the Lost, I didn't hesitate to give this other book a try as well.

Unfortunately, I was greatly disappointed. I was looking forward to seeing what sort of yarn he would spin to justify his claims about UFOs and the alien activity, but in this book I found nothing of the kind. It's little more than a mixture of dogma, unsubstantiated claims and irrelevant scientific facts.

One of the strengths of Limbo of the Lost was its emphasis on facts and details about the incidents in the Bermuda Triangle; I was hoping that here he would present notable UFO-related incidents in a similar way, but in fact only the first chapter (pp. 1–38) focuses on these things. And even here I found that the bare relation of facts was just barely enough to keep me interested.

Touched by His Noodly Appendage...

Things take a turn for the worse in the next chapter, where Spencer turns out to be a staunch creationist. He bluntly rejects the theory of evolution in just a few sentences (pp. 40–1), using the sort of half-baked ‘arguments’ that were undoubtedly already laughed at during Darwin's lifetime, let alone now. He describes his position as ‘divine evolution’: “through special creation each species or organism was originally created independently by God. Through the process of evolution, at a specific, proper moment in time, every basic life-form was specially created.” (P. 40.)

“The entire theory [of evolution] is composed mainly of gaps loosely woven by broken sequences. Most scientists are aware [i.e. Spencer is implying that most scientists disagree with the theory of evolution!] that new species of life and nearly all new categories suddenly appear without any lead-up by known gradual evolution.” (P. 40.) “Changes to certain life forms do occur but they never produce new structures such as feathers or horns. Mutations like color, length, and shape have been noted but extra legs, wings, or other structural changes have never been observed. To the best of my knowledge, not one scientist has come forward with fish eggs about to hatch into amphibians; a reptile growing even one feather; an ape or monkey that gave birth to a primitive-type man.” (Pp. 40–1.)

Really, this is so silly, so unsophisticated; I don't really care much for the creationism-vs-evolution debates, but I don't doubt that these things have progressed considerably since e.g. Darwin's time. A kind of evolution works in the sphere of ideas too, after all; under the pressure of the defenders of evolutionary theory, the creationists have been obliged to resort to ever more intricate and subtle (though undoubtedly still just as wrong as ever) arguments. But anyway, what I'm trying to stress is that in Spencer's book there is none of that sophistication; his creationism is just creationism 101, and I do not see how it can hold any interest whatsoever for a present-day reader. But this is not the main reason why this part of the book disappointed me; if I wanted to read good evolution-vs-creationism debates, I would pick up some other book anyway, or maybe I should have gone and read the talk.origins newsgroup; the big disappointment for me here was the fact that Spencer was a creationist at all. In Limbo of the Lost, as well as in many parts of No Earthly Explanation, he gives the impression of being a reasonable, science-minded person, but here in this chapter he writes like a dogmatic with a downright medievally closed mind.

Hilarity ensues

Unlike some creationists, however, Spencer is not of the ‘young Earth’ type. He agrees that the Earth is approx. five billion years old, and includes a perfectly decent section about “dating techniques” (in geology, not in romance :); pp. 46–47) and an overview of the geological history of the Earth (pp. 48–54, interspersed with passages from the Genesis, selected and arranged so that they seem to agree with the findings of geological science) and the evolution of hominids (pp. 55–60). These last two things contain a few real gems, such as: “Some people believe an absurd story about birds evolving from reptiles, that the earliest type of primitive birds were really flying dinosaurs which throughout the centuries developed feathers./ The major flaw in that theory is that following the appearance of the first birds, the next forty-five million years in the bird's evolutionary process are lost.” (P. 52.)

And: “The highest order of life to develop so far in the animal kingdom is a different tpye of mamal, ‘primates’ that live in trees. Prior to this creature all mammals gave birth to their young through an egg-laying process. Primates are born alive through a structure called the ‘placenta’ and are cared for by the mother until the offspring are strong and wise enough to take care of themselves.” (Pp. 53–4.) In the immortal words of a famous webcomic artist: dear sweet mother of god, noooooo! *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

He cites two anthropologists who say that they have no idea where the Cro-Magnon man came from, and merrily concludes that “with the foregoing factual information provided it is quite obvious that man, alone and unaided, could not have undergone such a transformation, that is, to jump the evolutionary span from late Homo erectus and Neanderthal man to Homo sapiens sapiens. Therefore, the only logical explanation is that beings from some other advanced civilization outside of this world, who had much earlier evolved into Homo sapiens sapiens, came to this planet with the sole intent to assist Earth man in compressing the evolutionary scale by millions of years, probably through interbreeding.” (P. 59.)

Oh, yeah. The super-advanced aliens popped into their saucers and travelled billions of miles just to help us lonely benighted earthlings get it on in some hot interplanetary man-on-alien action. Yup. Quite obvious. It doesn't get much more logical as that. “Honey, this is not what it looks like — this lady in my bed is an alien who's come all the way from Planet X495Z27, and we were just compressing the evolutionary scale — why are you getting so worked up over a little thing like that?”

(P.S. Diagonal copulation comes to mind... :])

Yet another ancient astronaut theory

In chapter 3 he suggests that the aliens also influenced the next big step in the progress of humankind, namely the rise of the first civilizations (p. 62). He describes the early history of Sumerian, Egyptian, Indian and Chinese civilizations, and falls into the familiar trap of claiming that the Egyptian civilization mysteriously sprung into life fully-formed and advanced (p. 64). How little has changed since the days of Donnelly! Except that he blamed it on Atlantis, and Spencer blames it on the aliens.

Another fine example of the rigorous style of argumentation that is such a strong point of this book: “How could the ancient Chinese discover and develop a medical procedure as complex as Acupuncture without the benefit of a higher education and the research facilities of a medical university. The answer is — they could not; but we know they did... but how?” (P. 70.)

And, on the Indus valley civilization: “They communicated by writing as indicated by a small amount of written material that was found. The strange part is that twentieth century scholars are still unable to decipher their writings.” (P. 70.) Holy fucking shit! How much more obtuse can he pretend to be? He admitted in the previous sentence that the amount of material is small; besides, we know next to nothing about the language, and the closest probably related language that we do know is a distant cousin 2500 years later than the Indus valley culture. It would be strange if the Indus valley writing had been deciphered; that it hasn't been is normal. See the interesting book Lost Languages for more about the decipherment of ancient writing systems.

And the grand finale on p. 71: “Twentieth-century scholars continually uncover evidence that certain people of pre-historic times were taught a high degree of scientific information. This is the only way it could have happened because the people of the day were not capable of the kind of accurate examining and separating of ideas that educated men and women of today possess./ The instructors may have been an inter-stellar team of scientists whose assignment was to provide the necessary information so that civilization on Earth would get underway. The evidence that such information suddenly existed is very impressive and the aliens had to have exercised prehistoric man's intellectual powers beyond his natural abilities.”

It is hard to resist picturing an alien babe from planet X495Z27, curling up with Spencer's book to get a sense of how far humankind has progressed intellectually since the days when they helped us skip a few steps on the evolutionary ladder. On seeing the quality of his arguments, she would probably slap her forehead and think “I slept with Zog the caveman 10000 years ago for *this*?”

Chapter 3 ends with a table of the world's most populous countries, some projections of future population (assuming 2% growth per year: 6,4 billion in 2000, 12 billion in 2073 — IIRC it was a very popular topic in the 1970s), and some Spengleresque remarks about the rise and fall of civilizations.

To bolster his claims that aliens have been involved with humankind since ancient times, Spencer describes some of the usual ancient sites for which it is often claimed that they cannot have been built by ‘primitive’ people: Stonehenge, the Easter Island, Tiahuanaco (p. 78: “High on a plateau, 30,000 feet above sea level in the Andes mountains of Bolivia” — ROFLMAO!!!!), Silbury Hill.

And on p. 75: “The evidence is very strong that Earth has been visited over many centuries by at least one, technically superior civilization. Engraved marks on bones, designs found in caves, paintings and prehistoric space junk tell us part of the story.” I cannot help being impressed by this casual reference to prehistoric space junk, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world :)

He claims that in a few instances, bones of anatomically modern people have been found in layers more than two million years old. “A logical theory expressed by many scientists is that the remains could be those of extraterrestrial scientific observers, some in family groups, who were stationed on Earth millions of years ago.” (P. 83.) You really can't make this shit up. However, I personally prefer the theory that they were really all just a bunch of hobbits who reached southeast Africa on the run from the witch-king of Angmar...

The Bermuda Triangle

Chapter 5 connects his UFO theories to the Bermuda Triangle, saying that the alien scientists are “sampling” people and their equipment (ships, airplanes) on an occassional basis. Well, at least he took the trouble to explicitly reject the other commonly suggested Bermuda Triangle ‘explanations’ (Cayce-style radiation from the sunken Atlantis; magnetic aberrations; space-time warps; giant waves; giant squid; etc.).

On pp. 98–9 there's an interesting description of a possible UFO sighting by Thor Heyerdahl's Ra II expedition (a bright light on the horizon, acting unusually). I read Heyerdahl's book The Ra Expeditions quite some time ago, and I don't remember whether this sighting is mentioned there or not.

Space Exploration

Much of the second half of the book (chapters 6 through 8) contains information about the universe (especially the Solar system) and about space exploration. In stark contrast to the creationist and UFO bullshit I've mentioned above, these things are quite sober and reality-based. (There are still a few weird passages here; he's quite sure that faster-than-light travel will eventually become possible, p. 114; and he promises to prove that “life on Earth is part of a tremendous universal plan and not just simply the result of a rare disease that attacked only Earth”, p. 127; as far as I can tell, he doesn't prove anything of the sort. On p. 144 he talks of a quasar “some 10-trillion light years away”, but surely if the universe is 13 billion years old, nothing can be more than 26 billion light-years away from us...)

I'm not exactly a space-exploration buff, but these chapters were nevertheless not uninteresting to read. Spencer talks about the various space missions that have been done until then (the Pioneer 10, for example, had just recently passed by Jupiter), and even discusses some of the plans for the near future; for example, the Space Shuttle was just on the drawing boards at the time when he was writing his book (p. 164). It's always interesting to see how people in the past saw the future, especially those parts of the future that have already happened by now. “Man is expected to land on the surface of Mars by 1980. However, a trip of this kind is based on the development of a reusable Space Shuttle [. . .] Between 1980 and 1990 NASA is planning over seven hundred test flights with the Orbiter.” (P. 165. Alas! as we know, the Shuttle program didn't go quite so well as it was originally planned...) Anyway, much of this part of the book is a perfectly decent example of popular-science writing about space exploration, and Spencer doesn't even plug his UFO-related theories all the time.

His sections about the Solar system are also in the same vein; the only exception perhaps is that he devotes an unusual amount of attention to discussions about whether this or that planet or satellite could support life or not. In some instances he seems unreasonably optimistic about the possibilities of life, but I'm not sure if this is because of his pro-UFO bias or because of the fact that much less was known about those planets in 1974 (when he was writing that book) than known now. See esp. p. 131 on Mars.

Still, although these chapters about the Solar system and space exploration are interesting, it isn't particularly clear whether they say anything in support of his idea that technologically advanced aliens are visiting Earth and kidnapping people and their machinery. These latter things he simply asserts (as we saw earlier) and pretends as if there was no need to prove them or even provide some additional arguments in their favour. This was really a disappointment; it's as if he was satisfied with just preaching to the already-converted, and as if he was hoping that, as long as he simply brazens it out, people won't be bothered by the lack of arguments supporting his views.

There's a crazy paragraph on p. 150: “Most all creatures on Earth, with the exception of certain insects, aquatic, amphibian, and microscopic life, are basically the same with respect to anatomy.” [Excellent, he just discarded like 90% of all species in one fell swoop, pretending that it's nothing :))] “To prove my point, allow me to select a cross section from the animal world. On one end of the spectrum take the elephant and giraffe and on the other, man and a Mexican Hairless dog.” [Great, now he implicitly discarded birds and reptiles, and even within the mammalian order he didn't exactly kill himself trying to get a maximally diverse sample...] “With the obvious exceptions all four creatures are basically the same; one head, two eyes, [etc., etc.]” [Hardly surprising after he limited himself to mammals.] “Despite the fact that the various species of earth life evolved independent of each other, the similarity apparently holds true and yet there is no logical scientific earthly explanation.” [Ah, no *earthly* explanation. Uncle Darwin must have been an alien! And Spencer gets bonus points for blithely ignoring the fact that the species he listed very much did *not* evolve independent of each other...] “There is no evidence or logical reason to believe that the inhabitants of any other planet would not resemble earth life. The only difference would be their position in the scientific and technological evolutionary scale.”

Now, don't get me wrong — I think that exobiology is a perfectly worthwhile pursuit, although it belongs perhaps more to speculation than to science; but anyway, to go about it in such a ham-fisted way is simply ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if alien life forms did indeed resemble those on the Earth in some ways. The eye, for example, is something that has evolved on Earth several times independently, so it's clearly a very useful thing that could very well evolve elsewhere as well. I'm guessing that a nerve system would be another good candidate.

Conclusion

The book doesn't have any very clear conclusion. The UFO sightings continue, space exploration will also continue, and Spencer clearly hopes that, after all his hand-waving throughout the book, he has managed to get the reader to somehow believe that these two things have got something to do with one another and that the book has managed to prove some sort of point. (But it hasn't.)

What to say at the end? I'm fairly new to the UFO genre, so I can't really judge how this book compares to others in the same genre, but I very much hope that the others are better rather than worse :) Regardless of whether you are a UFO believer or, like me, just read these things for entertainment (and as an alternative kind of science fiction), I can't really recommend you to read this book, except if you don't mind the risk of being disappointed, just like I was.

ToRead:

• We see that Spencer's theory in this book is a close relative of the ancient astronaut theory. I intend to eventually read a few books by the grand master of the AAT, von Däniken — I hope that they aren't quite as bad as this one. I know, I know — you can't prove a mistaken theory; but at least you could try to put up a decent fight...
• Spencer mentions Ralph and Judy Blum's book Beyond Earth — Man's Contact with UFOs, which also sounds potentially interesting (p. 107). Apparently it was published by the same company that also published Spencer's books, and of which he was the owner.