From Irvington to the Stars

We lived and grew up in Irvington. Once its own town, Irvington was annexed by the city of Indianapolis in 1902. Irvington is and was a cultured place. Its streets were named for prominent authors and artists of the nineteenth century, including Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Hoosier poetess Sarah Bolton, and John James Audubon. Butler University got its start in Irvington before moving to the north side of Indianapolis. The Disciples of Christ had a prominent place in our neighborhood for decades. We walked past the Christian Church on our way to school. As much as anything, Irvington is now known for its annual Halloween Festival.

The painter William Forsyth lived in Irvington, as did caricaturist Kin Hubbard, creator of Abe Martin. Bill Shirley, the original Prince Charming, was from Irvington. Marjorie Main--Ma Kettle--lived there for a time. So did C.L. Moore (1911-1987). One of the homes in which she and her family lived was around the corner from that of the Cornelius family, who saved Weird Tales from extinction in the 1920s. On the opposite end of the social order, H.H. Holmes murdered and hid the remains of young Howard Pitezel in a house in Irvington in October 1894. Holmes poisoned Pitezel with drugs he had purchased at a local pharmacy. That small fact will come into play shortly. We never heard of Holmes and knew nothing about those events from the distant past. Holmes and everything he did seems to have been forgotten after his execution in 1896.

When we were kids, we walked to a lot of local businesses, many of which were in a Tudor-style block of buildings on the north side of the National Road, U.S. Highway 40, which, in Indianapolis, is called Washington Street. One of those businesses was Peacher Drugs, located at the northwest corner of Washington Street and North Audubon Road.* The pharmacist was Rex Peacher (1913-1983). Only today did I learn his name or anything about him. Peacher started his business in 1956 after having worked for Haag Drugs and probably in other places. He seems to have been destined to become a pharmacist, for if you take away the 'e' from his Christian name, you're left with Rx. Peacher sold everything at auction in September 1975 and retired in 1976. Like Howard Pitezel, he died in October.

Rex Peacher attended Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis. One of his classmates was Robert Padgett Moore (1913-1973), who also became a businessman. If you look back two paragraphs, you will see again the surname Moore. In this world of strange coincidences, Rex Peacher's high school classmate was first C.L. Moore's younger brother. Peacher's drugstore was just one block east of the Moores' childhood home, though those two places were separated by decades. Remember that she used the surname Padgett, her grandmother's maiden name, as a shared pseudonym with her husband Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) in their writing lives. Robert Moore was buried out of Shirley Brothers mortuary, run by the family of Bill Shirley.

I don't know whether there was a pharmacy on the site of Rex Peacher's drugstore before he set up shop in 1956. I don't know where in 1894 H.H. Holmes might have bought his killing drugs. But the house in which he committed his crimes was on Julian Avenue, only about four blocks east of the site of Peacher's drugstore. That house is supposed to exist still. Sometime in the twentieth century, though, it was turned to Good.

The entrance to Peacher Drugs, or Peacher's as we called it, sat at a slant facing the street corner. Upon entering the store, if you turned to the right and went all the way to the rear, you would find a shelf upon which plastic model kits were set up for sale. We didn't have much money when we were kids. Revell models were the high-end brand and were mostly out of reach for us. Monogram models were more affordable. Very often, though, we could afford only models from the Lindberg Line, which sold for $1.25 apiece.

I have always liked airplanes, and when I was a kid I usually bought only airplane models. (I made an exception for Aurora monster models, later for the AMT Gigantics series.) I remember building a Grumman Hellcat, one of my favorites, and a Messerschmitt Bf 109. I remember my older brother had an Me 262. Like kids did in those days, we hung our airplane models from the bedroom ceiling. Airplane models hung from the ceiling of the day room in our barracks at Lackland Air Force Base, too. On our last night there, late into the night, I built a C-119 Flying Boxcar to add to the collection. The next day, I slept almost the whole way on the bus to Sheppard Air Force Base. That's where I learned to work on the real thing, in my case the F-16 Fighting Falcon, sometimes in places far from the Irvington of my childhood, including in two war zones.

When I was a kid, I thought the Lindberg Line models were named after Charles Lindbergh. That seemed logical enough: he was a famous airplane pilot, the Lindberg Line were airplane models, and so the models were named in his honor. Only later did I find out that the Lindberg Line was named for the founder of the company, Paul Lindberg (1904-1988). Again, Lindberg models were cheaper than most other brands. The box art wasn't as good and there were fewer parts and fewer decals. But there were enough parts to put wings on a dream. 

I have been writing about Charles Lindbergh and Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988). Like Lindbergh, Keyhoe was an aviator. Born in Iowa, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1919 and became a pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps. Keyhoe was injured in a plane crash in Guam in 1922 and later discharged. In his convalescence, he began writing. He wrote about aviation for magazines and newspapers, but he also wrote pulp fiction, including early stories for Weird Tales. Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) also graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. He, too, was discharged for medical reasons and became a writer of pulp fiction. Both men died in the same year, 1988, nigh on forty years ago. Heinlein of course won a far wider fame.

One of the ideas that came out of the Flying Saucer Era is that Earth was visited in ancient times by people from other planets. Although he wrote mostly on the flying saucers of the present, Keyhoe also touched upon this ancient astronaut hypothesis. Modern-day researchers have traced the origins of the ancient astronaut hypothesis to the works of another pulp-fiction writer, H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), especially to "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928) and At the Mountains of Madness (Astounding Stories, Feb.-Mar.-Apr. 1936). I have a feeling the idea goes back farther than that, though perhaps not very much farther. I wonder what, if anything, Charles Fort had to say about the whole matter.

Flying saucers were one of two major religious belief systems to come out of science fiction. The other, Dianetics/Scientology, also draws on the ancient astronaut hypothesis. The story is that a long time ago, in a galactic empire far, far away, an alien named Xenu packed his people into spacecraft that looked like the Douglas DC-8 and proceeded to bring them to Earth. I have seen online images of a Lindberg Line model of the DC-8. One of these bears the Pan Am logo. Remember that in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), there are spacecraft with the same logo. These are shown after a long, wordless opening sequence in which ancient astronauts influence pre-men into becoming men. They do this using a monolith that hums because they don't yet know the words. Anyway, there weren't any parts to make Xenu attached to the sprue of those old Lindberg Line models. If you had wanted him, you would have had to build him from scratch, just as his creator did in the dark depths of his twisted mind. By the way, L. Ron Hubbard served in the U.S. Navy, too, and styled himself a hero. Instead I think he was more or less a nincompoop and a far, far cry from Lindbergh, Keyhoe, and Heinlein.

 Next: More on Keyhoe and then an end.

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For my younger brother, whom we have lost and whose birthday was last week.

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*One street was named for a Federalist, the other for a Romantic, both frontiersman. George Washington never set foot in what is now Indiana, but John James Audubon almost certainly did. By the way, the grandmother of my classmate Mary, named Jean Brown Wagoner (1896-1996), was also an Irvingtonian and also an author. She wrote a biography, Martha Washington: Girl of Old Virginia (1947), among others in the Childhood of Famous Americans series published by Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis. She came to talk to us and answer questions when we were in grade school. Her father was Hilton U. Brown (1859-1958) of the Indianapolis News, Indianapolis Newspapers, Inc., Butler University, and the Disciples of Christ Church. If I have this right, he lived across the street from the painter William Forsyth.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Update After a Long Absence

I haven't written since May 19. That's the longest pause in my writing, I think, since I began this blog. The reason is that I have moved. Most of my things are now in storage. I think I can keep going with my research and writing, but things will be different for me, at least for a while. I will pick up again where I left off, with Donald Keyhoe and his connections to Weird Tales and flying saucers.

Thanks for hanging in there with me and continuing to read my blog during my absence. Last month there were nearly 67,000 visits here. I hope that most of those were real people and not robots or AI.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Donald Keyhoe in National Geographic-Part Two

As I was paging through Donald E. Keyhoe's article "Seeing America with Lindbergh," published in The National Geographic Magazine in January 1928, I was struck by an oblique aerial photograph, and its caption, of the new airport at Oakland, California:

The caption reads:

A GLIMPSE OF THE CROWD AT OAKLAND (SEE, ALSO, PAGE 39)

     This modern airport when completed will cover 825 acres and will be one of the largest in the world. At present it has one runway 7,000 feet long and 250 feet wide. There is also a square area, part of which is here shown, now ready for use. This is 1,700 by 2,500 feet. The white circle and the name "Oakland" are made permanent by the use of crushed stone. These markings are a very great help to the airman who is flying cross-country over strange territory. Hangars, night lighting equipment, and other apparatus are being installed.

- - -

Pay special attention to the word "Oakland," the white circle with its stem, and the white square with its longer stem to the left. These features, along with the words of the caption--"These markings are a very great help to the airman who is flying cross-country over strange territory"--reminded me of other images and other ideas . . .

The idea pointed out by Keyhoe in his picture and caption is that large symbols made on the ground can be used to communicate with viewers in the air. If you read works of Forteana, you have probably encountered this idea before. I know I have, and I might have a date for my first such encounter: January 5, 1973, when the documentary In Search of Ancient Astronauts was first broadcast on NBC-TV. Or maybe it was on September 6, 1973, when "one of the most talked-about television specials of the past season" was repeated. The source of the quote is a syndicated feature article from various American newspapers published in September 1973. I suspect the documentary was repeated at later dates, too.

In Search of Ancient Astronauts is based on the book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken, published in 1968 and adapted to film in 1970. One segment of In Search of Ancient Astronauts is about the lines graven into the plains of Nazca in southern Peru. The "conclusion reached by von Däniken," says the narrator Rod Serling, using his best Twilight Zone/Night Gallery voice, is that these lines "represent a landing field: the Plain of Nazca is a gigantic abandoned airport."

Here are two images, with captions, from a double-page spread in Mr. von Däniken's book (Bantam Books, 1971):

The captions read:

(Above:)

Another of the strange markings on the Plain of Nazca. This is very reminiscent of the aircraft parking areas in a modern airport.

(It's also reminiscent of the circle and stem at the Oakland airport in 1927.)

(Below:)

This huge 820-foot figure above the Bay of Pisco points to the Plain of Nazca. Could this be an aerial direction indicator rather than a symbol of religious significance?

(In other words, could this figure have been put into place to help "the airman who is flying cross-country over strange territory"?)

- - -

The idea of communicating with people in the air from signals on the ground predated In Search of Ancient Astronauts, Chariots of the Gods?, and Donald Keyhoe's article from 1928, for in its issue of April 1920, Popular Mechanics published an article by Paul H. Woodruff called "Perhaps Mars Is Signaling Earth." The article begins with a recounting of events from January 1920, when "Marconi commercial-wireless stations at New York and London reported the receipt of certain strange and undecipherable signals." (p. 495) The author of the article quoted several prominent astronomers and physicists, including Albert Einstein, regarding these signals. An idea bandied about was that they were from people on another planet. A further idea was how we of Earth might signal them back.

There were different ways of doing that according to the men quoted in the article. Here is an illustration of one to go along with today's theme:

The caption reads:

Sir Oliver Lodge's Simple Suggestion Is to Form a Gigantic Geometrical Figure on the Surface of the Sahara Desert, Which Would Be Visible to a Martian Observer through a Telescope as Powerful as Those Used on Earth. It would be Understood as a Sign Because Geometry Is a Science of the Universe.

- - - 

We have encountered Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) before. Although he was a physicist, he was also the opposite of a physicist, that is, a spiritualist. I first wrote about him in an article called "Dr. Dorp by Otis Adelbert Kline," posted on September 4, 2023. You can read what I wrote by clicking here. Although Lodge, as a physicist, would have been interested in other planets and possible signals from outer space, I sense that his interest here had more to do with his beliefs in the paranormal and other things outside the realm of science. His geometric shape here might be a triangle, but it's also the shape of a pyramid in profile. (So now we have three basic shapes, circle, square, and triangle.) And look at that, there are four pyramids in the foreground. These are no doubt for scale, but they also introduce a connection to these ancient, mysterious, and some would say occult structures. Remember that proponents of the ancient astronauts hypothesis believe that the pyramids of Egypt were constructed with the help of extraterrestrial knowledge and technology. In the 1920s, there were paranormal and weird-fictional connections, for example in "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" by Houdini, ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft and published in the May/June/July issue of Weird Tales magazine. I'll have more on Egypt before too much longer.

The idea that people on other planets are watching those of Earth was older still. Here is the opening of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1897; 1898):

     No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

- - -

If Sir Oliver Lodge felt like Martians were watching us, maybe he had that idea from H.G. Wells in his work of less than a quarter-century before that April 1920 issue of Popular Mechanics.

But if Martians were watching us, we were watching them, too, and we believed we could see shapes and lines on the surface of their planet as well. In the 1880s and 1890s, American astronomers reported seeing canals and other strange and mysterious features on the surface of Mars. Among them was William H. Pickering (1858-1938), part of whose work was carried out at Arequipa, Peru, which is not very close at all to Nazca. By the way, there are pyramids near Nazca, too. These are called the Cahuachi pyramids.

The so-called Canals of Mars are most closely associated with Percival Lowell (1855-1916), though, who watched Mars for years and wrote three books about his observations. I can only assume that his first, Mars (1895), excited the imaginations of people all over the world and was an influence upon Wells in the composition of his novel of interplanetary invasion. Lowell no doubt inspired other authors of science fiction, too. From Wikipedia:

     Lowell's influence on science fiction remains strong. The canals figure prominently in Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein (1949) and The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950). The canals, and even Lowell's mausoleum, heavily influence[d] The Gods of Mars (1918) by Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as all other books in the Barsoom series.

- - -

Like the circle at the Oakland airport, we come back to beginnings, namely Donald E. Keyhoe. In his last book, Aliens from Space . . . The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects, published in 1973, Major Keyhoe devoted a whole chapter to what he called Operation Lure. Originally developed by--but not really, as we have seen--Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994), Operation Lure would have been designed to lure space aliens to land as if they were ducks landing on a pond stocked with decoys. Here is Keyhoe's one-sentence summary of Operation Lure:

     The Lure will be an isolated base with unusual structures and novel displays, designed to attract the UFO aliens' attention. (p. 291)

- - -

The main observation post for Earthmen would have been called Control, like in Get Smart. A communications station twenty-five miles distance from Control would have been called "Relay," like in Pete Townshend's never-completed project, Lifehouse. If you have never heard The Who song "Relay," you might want to give it a listen. In it, Mr. Townshend invented the Internet. Listen for the lyric, "The word is getting out about control."

The circle is getting tighter still: in Aliens from Space, Keyhoe wrote about ancient aliens, mentioning the Piri Reis map, the Theosophical Book of Dzyan, the plains at Nazca, the pyramids of Egypt, and even Carl Sagan!

Next: Miscellany about Keyhoe, Lindbergh, Heinlein, and other things.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Donald Keyhoe in National Geographic-Part One

Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988) had four stories in Weird Tales from April 1925 to May 1927. Two months after his last story for "The Unique Magazine" was published--at 12 o'clock noon on July 20, 1927, to be exact--Keyhoe took off on an aerial tour of the United States. That tour would take about three months and cover more than 22,000 miles in all. Keyhoe, referred to as Lieutenant Keyhoe for his previous rank in the U.S. Marine Corps, flew in an advance airplane piloted by Philip R. Love (1903-1943). Also on board was mechanic Theodore R. Sorenson. Following along behind them was the most renowned aviator of his day, Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974), piloting the most renowned of aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis. Keyhoe, who had previously been connected with the Byrd Polar Plane Tour of 1926, served as manager of Lindbergh's tour, and he wrote about it in The National Geographic Magazine of January 1928. Over the years, there were tellers of weird tales in the pages of The New Yorker, but could Lieutenant Donald E. Keyhoe, U.S.M.C. (Retired), have been the only one to have written for or had his picture in National Geographic?

* * *

Many years ago, the man who lived upstairs from me walked away from his apartment and left it like the cabin of the Mary Celeste. It remained that way, pretty well undisturbed, for years. Then, last year, he died, and earlier this year his heir came and cleaned out what we wanted--and left the rest. That was over a weekend. On Monday morning, I saw that there were workmen cleaning out the apartment and throwing things into the bed of a pickup truck for delivery to the landfill. I saw a box of books go in the bed, and that was enough for me. I went out to talk to them. They said I could have anything I wanted of what remained in the apartment. I said I would take the books at least. They replied, "There are a lot more of them upstairs." I had to go to work. I asked, if I were to leave boxes and containers for them, would they save the books for me? They said yes. I think they were happy not to take books to the dump.

When I came home that afternoon, the whole front of my house was piled with books and magazines--hundreds of them. Could there have been a thousand or more? Anyway, included in those piles were hundreds of National Geographic magazines going back to 1915. And in those piles within piles was The National Geographic Magazine for January 1928 with a lead story, "Seeing America with Lindbergh," by Donald E. Keyhoe, forty-six pages in all and with dozens of photographs, most of them aerial views of the American landscape. Others are of members of the tour, as well as of spectators and dignitaries they met along the way. One of these photos includes a young Lieutenant Keyhoe, seated in front of Colonel Lindbergh:

Donald E. Keyhoe, shown at the bottom right, in The National Geographic Magazine, January 1928, page 11. He had just turned thirty years old when this picture was taken. Charles A. Lindbergh, who sat just behind him, was five years his junior. On Lindbergh's right is Philip Love, pilot of the advance plane. Love was later killed in an airplane crash in Nevada. The others in this picture are not identified, but I believe the woman on the lower left is Lindbergh's mother, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh (1876-1954). The man on the far right may be mechanic Theodore R. Sorenson, who flew with Love and Keyhoe in the advance airplane during their tour.

Pulp magazines have had a reputation for being a lowly form, made by undistinguished writers or just plain hacks for a simple, working-class, or barely literate readership. One of the reasons I have written about those who wrote letters in "The Eyrie" is to show that the readership of Weird Tales at least came from all walks of life and all levels of society, even from prominent and well-respected men and women. As for the writers, they, too, came from all walks of life. They, too, could be prominent, well-respected, able and active in other fields besides just writing. I have to tell you, it was a thrill for me to discover a writer for Weird Tales in a mainstream magazine of the 1920s. In fact, I would call this extraordinary. And I wonder if there is any equal in the pages of other magazines of that time.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Nictzin Dyalhis & Donald Edward Keyhoe

Nictzin Dyalhis (1873?-1942) had his first story in Weird Tales in April 1925. So did Donald Edward Keyhoe (1897-1988). Dyalhis' story was of course "When the Green Star Waned," a science-fantasy set in the solar system of the future. Keyhoe's story was "The Grim Passenger," a tale of Egyptian archaeology and a pharaoh's curse. "The Grim Passenger" is, then, about the past. As it turns out, it is also set in the past, the past, that is, of 1925. You'll have to read the story to find out the year. I don't want to give away Keyhoe's twist ending.

"When the Green Star Waned" is in the prose style of the pulps. Dyalhis seems to have been influenced by H.G. Wells, but it looks like the greater influence came from Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Martian tales. In contrast, "The Grim Passenger" is almost journalistic or documentary in its tone and style. It could almost be an article rather than a story. In fact, it's barely a story as we understand and enjoy works of fiction. It seems to exist mainly for its twist ending and the occult connection made between one event and another. It's a somewhat Fortean construction, or like an expanded vignette from Ripley's Believe It or Not! If it had been true or mostly true, it would have found a place in later books by Frank Edwards or Vincent Gaddis.

Nictzin Dyalhis had eight stories in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1940 and five more in other magazines during those same decades. These proved very popular with readers. It's a shame there weren't more, even if, as I suspect, they were revised or even rewritten by authors within Farnsworth Wright's stable. (Maybe Dyalhis was the Richard Shaver of Weird Tales.) Despite the popularity and success of his stories and the powers of imagination behind them, Dyalhis worked as a common laborer and a hardscrabble farmer. He lived in poverty and died in almost complete obscurity. He was survived by his wife and daughter. The daughter died not long ago. She had children of her own, and so the enigmatic Nictzin Dyalhis still has living descendants. I doubt that anyone knows his real name. The facts of his life are extremely scanty. At least one of the supposed facts in his obituary is wrong. 

Donald E. Keyhoe moved in different circles. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1919 and served as a pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps, eventually attaining the rank of major (with his service during World War II). Although he wrote scads of stories for the lowly pulps, he was also an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce and an associate of the most famous aviator of his time, Charles Lindbergh, for whom he managed a 22,000-mile aerial tour of the United States in 1927. I'll have more on that next time.

Keyhoe was born on June 20, 1897. Four days after his fiftieth birthday, on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, another airplane pilot, saw a flight of unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier in Washington State. These and other such objects of course became known as flying saucers, named for Arnold's description of the way they flew. (The original description was of crescent-shaped or flying wing-type aircraft. They were decidedly not discs.) Keyhoe became deeply interested in--eventually obsessed with--the flying saucer phenomena. In January 1950, True magazine published his article "The Flying Saucers Are Real." It proved a sensation, and Keyhoe expanded it into a book of the same name, published shortly thereafter.

Several more flying saucer books flew from his typewriter. The last came in 1973, which can be considered the last year of the flying saucer era. In 1957, he took over as director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), founded the previous year. Also in 1956, the film Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, based on Keyhoe's Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953), was released. In this one, Hugh Marlowe played the hero instead of a louse, as he did in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is still a very watchable and enjoyable movie. Look for an alien abduction scene as a precursor to later, supposedly real-life abductions, such as in the case of Betty and Barney Hill.

Donald Keyhoe was a conspiracy theorist, though probably not the original conspiracy theorist when it came to flying saucers. On March 8, 1958, he appeared on ABC-TV on The Mike Wallace Interview, starring Mike Wallace and a Parliament cigarette. Keyhoe did pretty well in the interview, I think. Mike Wallace was not the savage interviewer of later years. Listen for the word "misinformation." The point of this is that Keyhoe and his subject, flying saucers, were taken seriously enough to have appeared on national television, where he was interviewed at length by a prominent and well-respected journalist. There has been recent media coverage of flying saucers, but this doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Recent witnesses might long for the 1950s.

In his last book, Aliens from Space . . . The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects (1973), Keyhoe covered the whole phenomenon and its various (human) actors. He speculated on the physical appearance of aliens from space. He also suggested that aliens might be up to no good. It's interesting that his first story in Weird Tales appeared in an issue in which a tale of an alien invasion of Earth was so prominent. In his own story of April 1925, Keyhoe looked to the past. In Nictzin Dyalhis' story, maybe Keyhoe saw the future.

I think Donald Keyhoe went to his grave believing in what he saw as the truth behind flying saucers. He died at age ninety-one on November 29, 1988. His obituary appeared in the Washington Post. Major Keyhoe was survived by his wife and three children. I don't know whether he has any living descendants.

In looking through Aliens from Space, I came upon the name of another teller of weird tales. He was Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994). By a strange coincidence, Carr also had his first story in Weird Tales in 1925. Entitled "The Composite Brain," it was published in the March issue. As it turned out, Carr became special advisor to NICAP, and so his path crossed that of Major Keyhoe three decades or more after they had had their stories in Weird Tales. Carr had lots of ideas, one of which was called Operation Lure. But this idea wasn't new at all. It had first been proposed in that decade of origins, the 1920s, in the pages of Popular Mechanics. It, too, seems to have been influenced by H.G. Wells in that Martians have been watching us and we have in turn observed phenomena on the surface of their Red Planet. It seems there is always watching and listening going on . . .

Next: Donald E. Keyhoe in National Geographic.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The Falling Man

The illustration on the cover of Weird Tales for April 1925 is for "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis. The artist was Andrew Brosnatch. It shows a man who appears to be falling into a mass of aliens that have invaded Earth. In actuality, the aliens have levitated him the way a Roman might hold a grape over his open mouth. The intent is the same: the aliens mean to eat him. In a moment, they will let go with their powers of levitation and he will plunge into their mass, where they await with their "triangular, gaping, hideous orifices." The man is spared his fate by the merciful actions of the Venus-Men.

Andrew Brosnatch's cover illustration makes me think of Christian art, especially depictions of Hell and the casting into Hell of sinners. His garb is also redolent of ancient or biblical dress. First is Brosnatch's cover, then an example of the falling man from Christian art:

"Casting the Damned into Hell," the right wing of a triptych entitled The Last Judgment, by German-Flemish artist Hans Memling (ca. 1430-1494). See in particular the figure on the middle right.

There are many more examples of the falling man, cast into Hell, in Christian art. If you go looking for such imagery, be ready for some nightmarish, yet fascinating, depictions of Hell, some of which remind me of William Hope Hodgson's description of our nightmarish future in The Night Land (1912).

Depictions of Icarus by European artists show a similar falling man from pre-Christian and pagan times. The image of the falling spaceman is common in science fiction art, the art of the future. (I guess apocalyptic art is art of the future, too.) Here's an example of that:

The Fallen Spaceman by Lee Harding (1973), with art by John and Ian Schoenherr. Be aware that I have adjusted this image from an online photograph of the cover. This is not a true representation of the original.

I don't know whether Andrew Brosnatch intended to evoke thoughts of the fall of man from the Book of Genesis, of the sinner and the damned cast into Hell, or of the general image of man falling from grace or from great heights into opposing depths. Those of us with religious upbringing and education can't avoid seeing such things, though.

I have just one more thing. My nephew and I noticed a long time ago that all of the major characters in Star Wars sooner or later fall into a pit. The same thing happens to Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood, also to characters in The Lord of the Rings saga. That fear, dread, and terror at falling or plunging, or being cast into pits and depths, must be deep in us, no pun intended, and always ready to come forth. 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

April Aliens & April Invasions

The cover story and lead story in the April 1925 issue of Weird Tales is "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis. The "Green Star" of the title is Earth as seen from the planet Venus. The men of Venus have noticed that the green light of Earth has faded and that their neighboring planet has gone silent. These two developments have raised the alarm on Venus. The great men of that planet decide to travel to Earth to find out what has happened. (1, 2)

"When the Green Star Waned" is about an alien invasion of Earth. The aliens of the story have enslaved Earthmen and it is we who prove weak, helpless, and powerless to save ourselves. The heroes and rescuers in "When the Green Star Waned" are in fact Venus-Men rather than Earthmen. That alone makes for an unusual story. There are other ways in which "When the Green Star Waned" is unusual or innovative.

Nictzin Dyalhis' story is an early example of weird fantasy, science fantasy, space fantasy, or the weird-science type of story. Later science fiction would treat the same kind of situation--going up against alien invaders of other planets--except that it is Earthmen who are the heroes and rescuers. It is we who free the oppressed, enslaved, or exploited peoples of those planets. The same kind of plot became a staple of the television show Star Trek, broadcast four decades after "When the Green Star Waned" was published. The episode "Operation--Annihilate!", first broadcast in April 1967, is an example. The plot of that episode has similarities to The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein before it (1951) and the movie Alien afterwards (1979).

There was a contrary development during the Flying Saucer Era of 1947 to 1968 or 1973. During that era, aliens from outer space were often represented as good and caring and benevolent. They were our space brothers, or like angels from on high. Their purpose in coming to Earth was to save us from ourselves. This is what much of the Contactee phenomenon of the 1950s was about. The space brother/space angel/space savior idea was captured pretty well in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, released in 1951.

A description of the alien invaders in "When the Green Star Waned" must have sounded familiar to readers of what was then called the pseudo-scientific story (see "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud in Weird Tales, Mar. 1923), scientifiction (Hugo Gernsback's name for stories of this type), or the scientific romance (a term more commonly used in Great Britain, I think). A passage from "When the Green Star Waned":

     And here we found life, such as it was. I found it, and a wondrous start the ugly thing gave me! It was in semblance but a huge pulpy blob of a loathly blue color, in diameter over twice Hul Jok's height, with a gaping, triangular-shaped orifice for mouth, in which were set scarlet fangs; and that maw was in the center of the bloated body. At each corner of this mouth there glared malignant an oval, opaque, silvery eye.

     Well it was for me that, in obedience to Hul Jok's imperative command, I was holding my Blastor pointing ahead of me; for as I blundered full upon the monstrosity it upheaved its ugly bulk--how, I do not know, for I saw no legs nor did it have wings--to one edge and would have flopped down upon me, but instinctively I slid forward the catch on the tiny Blastor, and the foul thing vanished--save for a few fragments of its edges--smitten into nothingness by the vibrations hurled forth from that powerful little disintegrator.

Here is a similar passage, of the narrator's first encounter with an alien, in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, first published in Pearson's Magazine from April to December 1897:

    A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.

    Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

    Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

Dyalhis' aliens aren't quite the same as Wells', but his description of them is close enough that I sense the influence of the latter upon the former. Wells' prose here found echoes in that of H.P. Lovecraft, too, I think. Maybe there was an influence there as well.

By the way, Nictzin Dayalhis was the originator of the term Blastor, later blaster, a weapon that will forever be indispensable in our fight against alien invasions.

Next: Andrew Brosnatch's Cover.

Note
(1) Light as an indication of life has been in the news as I write, for a spectrographic analysis of the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b shows signs of what some scientists believe could be life on that planet. (A skepto-graphic analysis might show something different.) The indicating compounds are sulfurous. Sulfur has of course been associated with Hell, the Devil, and a general wickedness or evil. Hold onto that thought for next time.

(2) The silence of the planet Earth in "When the Green Star Waned" makes me think of Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. In Lewis' version, Earth is "silent" because we are under a kind of cosmic quarantine, the reason being that human beings are "bent," another way of saying, I guess, that we are fallen in our nature. Hold onto the idea of a fallen man for next time as well.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley