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
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