Lemuria, the Theosophical Continent

Mapped by William Scott-Elliot (1849-1919), Lemuria is the Theosophical continent. With fellow Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbetter (1854-1934), Scott-Elliot was also a kind of ethnologist of Lemuria and its fifteen-foot-tall, egg-laying people. There were other people before and after these Lemurians. They occurred in great variety, in varying heights and colors and bodily configurations. In reading about them in Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature by L. Sprague de Camp (Dover, 1974), I am reminded of the men of Edgar Rice Burroughs' version of Mars, and I wonder if Burroughs could have been influenced by Theosophy. Both he and they wrote of Lost Worlds. His red Martians also lay eggs.*

Scott-Elliot and Leadbetter remembered Lemuria. So did Richard S. Shaver (1907-1975), and he is credited with a story to that effect, conveniently called "I Remember Lemuria" and published in Amazing Stories in March 1945. Shaver's story was the first in the so-called Shaver Mystery of the mid to late 1940s. The mystery began with a letter to Ziff-Davis of Chicago in which Shaver described a discovery he had made of the ancient and forgotten language Mantong, a kind of proto-Indo-European language for people on the fringes of science and sanity. Editor Raymond A. Palmer (1910-1977) seized on the letter and printed a version of Shaver's Mantong in the January 1944 issue of Amazing Stories. The heading was "Mr. Shaver's Lemurian Alphabet." More than a year passed before Palmer published "I Remember Lemuria." Although Shaver got credit for the story, it was Raymond A. Palmer who turned it into something publishable (and probably readable, too). And it was Palmer, I think, who added the Lemurian/Race Memory-angle. I'm not sure that Shaver was very keen on that addition. Anyway, more stories of Lemuria and the Shaver Mystery followed. I have written about all of this before in my series "The Shaver Mystery." Click on the label on the right to read more.

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Raymond Palmer was familiar with Theosophy and its Lost Worlds. For years he pushed Oahspe, subtitled A New Bible, written anonymously and published in 1882. Palmer was also a Fortean and was responsible for Fate, the world's longest-running and most successful magazine of Forteana. And of course Palmer as much as anyone was responsible for successfully launching flying saucers and keeping them in the air. John Keel in fact dubbed Ray Palmer "the man who invented flying saucers." It's hard to argue with that idea.

Palmer seems to have been a man of boundless energy and enthusiasm, despite the fact that he was badly crippled in childhood and suffered time and again from ill health. He wrote reams of science fiction, science fantasy, space opera, editorial content, and (supposed) non-fiction, most of which is in the realms of Forteana, esoterica, the paranormal, and other fringe topics. He was an editor and publisher for all of his adult life. You might say that he was one of the editors who really shaped science fiction and fantasy during the 1930s to the 1950s. This is where the theorizing begins.

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A few weeks ago, I acquired part of a collection of science fiction, fantasy, and horror assembled by Margaret B. Nicholas and William Nicholas of Bartlett and Marietta, Ohio. Included in it are dozens of digest-sized science fiction and fantasy magazines from the 1950s and '60s. I have been looking through these magazines lately, and something stands out, or seems to stand out. What stands out is that there seems to have been three main strands in the look and feel of these magazines and their contents. First is what you might call the Raymond A. Palmer strand. Lurid, sensationalistic, maybe a little exploitative, fringe-worthy (my new word), this strand is represented by Palmer's own magazines plus some similar titles, such as Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy, Other Worlds Science Stories, and so on. I think this same kind of look and feel was in other magazines, too, such as Planet Stories of the 1940s and even the shudder pulps of the 1930s.

There are copies of Galaxy, Worlds of If, and similar magazines in this collection, too. These represent a second strand, a more conservative, more nearly respectable, maybe even sometimes staid approach to science fiction and fantasy, but especially to science fiction. Science fiction writers of the 1950s often satirized the supposed conservatism and conformity of 1950s America. Yet some of the magazines in which their stories appeared seem to have used (almost) Reader's Digest as their model. It's almost like they were trying to break into mainstream America--to make of themselves something respectable instead of remaining on the fringes, like Palmer and his associates. I don't have any copies of Astounding Science Fiction in this collection, but it seems to me that Astounding under its renowned editor John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) was of the second type and probably its original. Lest you think Campbell and his writers were strictly science-minded and not given to fringe ideas, remember that the editor of Astounding had his own madman. And remember that Campbell's madman and that madman's ideas were and are far more dangerous and influential in people's lives than was Richard Shaver or anything he ever wrote. There is more about Campbell's madman coming up. In fact, part of the reason I have expanded this series is a discovery I think I have made about John W. Campbell, Jr., his madman, and their circle of writers and hangers-on.

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The third strand of magazines was unique, and it was subtitled just that: The Unique Magazine. Weird Tales had its imitators, but none that lasted or have lasted as far as I can tell. Weird Tales was more or less alone. It stayed to itself. It had its own singular vision. But maybe the third strand represented by Weird Tales ran like a river into another magazine that I have in my new collection. It's a connection--or a continuation--that I had never known about before. I have already mentioned the magazine. It's called Fate.

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*Update (May 4, 2022): Reader Carrington B. Dixon has let us know that someone has already looked into the idea that Edgar Rice Burroughs was influenced by Theosophy. That someone was Fritz Leiber, Jr., in an essay called "John Carter: Sword of Theosophy," originally in Amra, September 1959, and reprinted in The Spell of Conan (Ace Books, 1990).

Dale R. Broadhurst looked into the question even more in his article "John Carter Beginnings? Part One: Wondrous Secrets or Outrageous Nonsense?" You can read it on the website Bill & Sue-On Hillman's ERBzine by clicking here. Mr. Broadhurst's conclusion is that Burroughs was not influenced by Theosophy. I suspect that these common ideas were in the zeitgeist of the times in which Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Rice Burroughs lived. There need not have been influence of one on the other.

To be continued . . .

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Summer Reading List No. 4-The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg

I had planned on finishing this series before the end of summer. My Internet non-provider had other plans though. Call it (this series) now obsolete. But maybe not quite, for it will end with books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and an imitator of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and so I'll be back to the previous series, which may also be, if not quite obsolete, at least late in arriving.

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Before getting to Barry N. Malzberg's book, I'll bring up another book I read more recently, Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (1980; paperback edition, 1981). It's a crazy, funny book, full of crazy, funny, and inventive expressions, similes, metaphors, and other turns of phrase. Reading it is likely to color your own thoughts and words for a time. It did mine. First, I'll offer you the opening paragraph of chapter one:

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting--with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui--for something momentous to occur. (p. 3)†

So even in the late 1970s when Mr. Robbins was tapping out his story on an "all-new Remington SL-3," decline had set in. I can't say whether we're in the same curve now--maybe we climbed out of it somewhere along the line, at least for a while--but signs of decline are all around us. The image that came to me while I was reading Still Life with Woodpecker is that we live in an elaborate and carefully constructed world, one like a great palace--except that it's made of sugar. And the rains have started to fall. Things might be okay where you are, but over here, there is already pitting, like acne scars or astroblemes, in the surface of this sugar-palace of a world. Things might be okay where I am, but over there it's starting to melt and crumble. Soon the melting might look like the acid-blood of a face-sucking alien burning through the decks of the Nostromo, threatening the whole ship with destruction. How long can it hold?

Although Still Life with Woodpecker is not really a genre work, there is talk of UFOs, ancient aliens, pyramid power, and other outré subjects in its pages. (The book is divided into phases, like the moon, and so "the last quarter" of the opening sentence carries with it a double meaning.) You might call the whole book outré. But in seeing what has happened in our world over the past year and a half, and in witnessing what is happening now, I wonder whether we might be headed for some kind of science-fictional situation, something previously only imagined and not really foreseen. Maybe something momentous will occur after all, and we will no longer be, in our everyday lives, bored and tired. We will live in interesting times.

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In August, I read The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties by Barry N. Malzberg (Bluejay Books, 1984). It's a good and interesting book, but I wish there were more detail in it. The subtitle is misleading, for Mr. Malzberg copyrighted his book in 1982; the Bluejay edition is from September 1984. In other words, less than half of the decade had passed by the time The Engines of the Night was published; there is no mention of William Gibson and his Neuromancer.

There are some interesting discussions of science fiction during previous decades, though. More than once, Barry Malzberg referred to science fiction in the late 1940s as "dystopian." I think he used that word in a general, less precise way, meaning pessimistic or negative, dim or dark. He didn't really provide examples, and I don't know enough about science fiction to say, but if it's true that the genre was dystopian in the late 1940s, it's no wonder that science fiction writers--Raymond A. Palmer and L. Ron Hubbard specifically--came up with more hopeful or positive or affirmative visions. Maybe that's how the religions of science fiction were born.

There were of course seeds of dystopia in Hubbard's belief system. He seems to have been afflicted with a totalitarian personality and riddled like a disease with totalitarian impulses and ambitions. So his vision became spoiled soon enough. The flying saucer vision, though, was more hopeful and positive. These were, after all, our space brothers, and they were bringing to us messages of peace, love, and salvation. It was not merely by chance that The Day the Earth Stood Still was released in 1951, four years after the first sighting of flying saucers and a year before the great flap of 1952.* In contrast to Dianetics and Scientology, the more freeing and hopeful vision of the flying saucers endured . . .

But only for so long. Remember that The Thing from Another World was also released in 1951. It provided an alternate version of the visitation-from-outer-space story. Its giant walking carrot was no space brother. By the mid fifties, certainly by the end of the flying saucer era in 1973, the hope represented by a belief in flying saucers had been replaced with fear, paranoia, conspiracy, even madness and despair.** Maybe it's no coincidence, either, that science fiction again became more negative or dystopian in the 1970s. Barry N. Malzberg was there to write some of it and to write about some of it in The Engines of the Night.

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Mr. Malzberg has been canceled, or something like canceled. I don't have anything to say about that controversy. I'll just point out that in his essay "The Cutting Edge," he listed his choices for the ten best science fiction stories of all time. His top two are by women, "Vintage Season" by C.L. Moore (1946) and "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon; 1974). I have never read Alice Sheldon's story, but I won't argue with anybody who says that "Vintage Season" is the greatest science fiction story ever written.

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*In Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins continued: "Something momentous was bound to happen soon. [. . .] But what would it be? And would it be apocalyptic or rejuvenating? [. . .] A change in the weather or a change in the sea [. . . .] or a UFO on the White House lawn? (p. 3) That image, of course, is straight from the movies (but before Independence Day [1996]).

**Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers were both released in 1956. In the real world, UFO investigator Morris K. Jessup, a troubled man to be sure, killed himself in 1959. The supposed first alien abduction case, with all of its dark overtones, came two years later, in 1961, when Betty and Barney Hill were taken aboard a flying saucer, reliving in the process the experiences of General Hanley (no relation) and the police officer in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. As I have suggested before, things happen in science fiction--and in the works of artists--before they happen in the real world.

†Update (Jan. 11, 2024): It occurs to me now that Mr. Robbins' introductory paragraph to his novel echoes that of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1897):

     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. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. 

The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties by Barry N. Malzberg (1984), with cover art by Wayne Douglas Barlowe. The title is suggestive of something dark or dystopian. Mr. Barlowe's illustration depicts that kind of darkness.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A Flying Saucer Lineage

In my previous article, I wrote about a picture drawn in 1920 of what look to our eyes like flying saucers. Some of the details are wrong. For example, the occupants ride in gondolas slung under the main body of their ships. Also, the domes on top look like classical architecture. Then, too, there are planes--I guess they're supposed to be flight control surfaces--extending from each craft. Flying saucers don't have flight control surfaces. On the whole, though, the flying saucers drawn by the unknown artist E.R.H. conform pretty well with visions and images from what I call the Flying Saucer Era, 1947 to 1968 (or 1973). If you look on the lower left of the drawing, you will even see one of these craft firing a death ray at Earth's surface. A plume of smoke rising into the clouds is the obvious result. No word on how many people were vaporized in the blast.

The flying saucers drawn by E.R.H are disc-shaped. Oblate spheroid might be a better description, but even that isn't quite right. Maybe a geometer can come up with a better term. Anyway, let's assume that the flying saucer shape evolved sometime in the early twentieth century. (Like I said before, science fiction is for the most part evolutionary and not revolutionary. I'm not sure that there have been many truly radical events in the history of the genre.) Where, then, did that shape come from? That question got me to thinking.

The flying saucer shape differs from the shape of conventional aircraft in that it has radial rather than bilateral symmetry. Every edge is potentially a leading edge, leaving its opposite as a trailing edge. This every-directional shape allows flying saucers to move in every direction, to change direction, and even to reverse direction instantaneously. And that's how they're reported to move. The flying saucer drawing made by E.R.H. would appear to show craft of this type, except for the presumed flight control surfaces extending from them. These planes--each ship has a pair--turn what at first looks like a radially symmetrical craft--a disc-like or oblate spheroid-like vehicle--into a bilaterally symmetrical ship with fore and aft ends and discernible starboard and port sides. Even with E.R.H.'s leap, we were still not there in the full development of the flying saucer.

As an artist, I started thinking about the early twentieth-century evolution of the flying saucer, not of the thing itself but of the image or depiction of the thing. A drawing is a two-dimensional representation of what is supposed to be a three-dimensional object or world. The real (or imaginary) thing is flattened in the process of drawing it. We know now about streamlining. We test aircraft and cars in wind tunnels to see how they perform. Early shipbuilders knew about streamlining, too, of course, and they made their ships a particular way so that they might slip more efficiently through the stream. In this they plagiarized from nature, as we do with most things we make. So if you slice a ship or vessel lengthwise as you would a tomato and look at the cross section from above, you will see a fusiform shape: a three-dimensional object now reduced to its two-dimensional essence, in this case, a shape that is somewhat broader in the middle and tapered on both ends for purposes of slipping through the stream. Fish have fusiform bodies. So do birds when they fold their wings. Their wings, too, are more or less fusiform in cross section, although the leading edge is more rounded while the trailing edge is more pointed, just as in the wings of our own plagiarized aircraft.

What happens, then, when you flatten--in the form of a drawing--a three-dimensional, fusiform object? Well, you get something like this:

The "aeronon of the Twentieth Century" as depicted in The Century Magazine in 1878. Drawn and engraved by B. Sayer and R.M. Smart, though I'm not sure which was the original artist and which was the engraver. 

The aeronon of the future is fish-like or whale-like in appearance--in other words fusiform--but if you take away the tail, gondolas, and other protuberances, it also looks in its two dimensions like a flying saucer. And if you want to bring it back into three dimensions, one of your options is to make it radially rather than bilaterally symmetrical. So is that what artists of the early twentieth century did? Did they spin the fusiform airship on its vertical axis like a pinwheel to make a disc shape or oblate spheroid in which any lengthwise cross section that passes through the center (or focus) is also fusiform? Excellent. Now craft from other worlds are freed from the bounds of direction, by notions of forward and aft, of starboard and port. They can now move about our atmosphere as they please, leaving us to gape at their advanced capabilities. That still leaves up and down--in other words, three-dimensional space--as a problem in the design of the craft and its movement, but not every problem can be solved at once. Or, the up-and-down problem can be solved by way of anti-gravity or some other unexplained technology that negates weight.

Anyway, that's what it looks like to me, that the flying saucer of the twentieth century is simply the airship of the nineteenth, taken from two-dimensional representation, spun on its axis, and freed into three-dimensional space. (Remember that the alien spacecraft in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, from 1956, spin. Could this have been a holdover from the turning of the object in the artist's imagination? Probably not. I suspect it was to invoke the spinning of a gyroscope, done for stability's sake, and the lack of stability is one of the things that undoes the aliens in the movie.) If that's what really happened, then flying saucers were actually created by artists and not by writers at all. They were literally spun from the imagination. (Another word for fusiform is spindle-shaped.) I'm not sure that Charles Fort ever described the craft of the outer-space people who had their great battles in the sky, the same people who now own us. I wonder whether any writer did in fact. But artists imagined flying saucers and by drawing them brought them into reality.

We should remember in all of this that the first flying saucer flap in American was actually an airship flap and that it took place in 1896-1897, fifty years before Kenneth Arnold and Raymond Palmer launched us into the Flying Saucer Era. With their fins, propellors, gondolas, and gasbags, those airships were distinctly nineteenth-century in appearance. It was only during the first half of the twentieth century that they became saucer shaped and freed from the forces of weight and drag. My how alien technology advanced in just fifty short years!

Text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

From War of the Worlds into Star Trek

I think the history of science fiction is evolutionary: there have probably been few really radical events. In 1953, Paramount Pictures released The War of the Worlds, a big-budget adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel of 1897 (magazine serial) and 1898 (hardbound book). In the movie version the Martian tripods no longer walk. Instead they glide, and there isn't anyplace they can't go as they rain terror upon the people of Earth. These ships may have seemed an innovation, but they had precedent in magazine science fiction. More importantly, they would have brought back only recent memories of death from the skies for people then living in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, from Great Britain to Japan to Pearl Harbor. I think there's a third influence, though, one that came from a place where real life--or supposed real life--meets the science-fictional (and Fortean) imagination. You can see that, I think, through a series of images:

If you take the head and neck of the Loch Ness Monster from the famous photograph of 1934 . . .

And attach it to the top of the supposed "disk"--the first flying saucer as described by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 and published in the book The Coming of the Saucers by Arnold and Raymond A. Palmer in 1952 . . .

You kind of get the Martian ships from The War of the Worlds (1953).

These were designed by Albert Nozaki (1912-2003). There may have been an influence in his designs of the flying wing- or lifting body-type aircraft, too.

Now that's not to say that the makers of the movie were directly influenced or inspired by these previous visual sources, but few imaginations operate in a vacuum or in isolation (thus few really radical events).

The evolution continued into another Paramount production of the 1960s:

Here in the Klingon battlecruiser from Star Trek, the boom of the head and neck are rigid and attached to the front of the ship. (Note that the top part of the head is shaped like a flying saucer.) There are also pods like the wingtip fuel tanks or missiles of real-life aircraft. (Remember that the Vietnam War was going on at the time and images of aircraft would have been in the daily news.) The general shape of the hull or fuselage is more or less the same, though, as in the previous Martian ship.

The Martian ship and the Klingon ship both have a biomorphic appearance. This works well not only in visual terms but also for storytelling purposes, for the ships become almost like characters in themselves rather than just cold, hard, inanimate machines. I remember when I was a kid playing with Star Trek models and toys and thinking of them almost as animals, with a head, neck, body, and limbs. The Romulan Warbird even has animal art on its underside, a depiction of a bird in flight. The Romulan ship is probably the least biomorphic of the three main ships in the original series. The addition of the art helps to make it more relatable as a living thing, thus as a kind of character . . .

With its rounded leading edge and notched trailing edge, the Romulan ship also resembles an alternative version of the first flying saucers, here shown on the cover of the first issue of Raymond A. Palmer and Curtis Fuller's magazine Fate, from the spring of 1948. (Having worked on airplanes, I see these ships in terms of aircraft instead of as naval vessels.)

The head and flexible neck of the Martian ship from The War of the Worlds reappeared on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise in the form of the gooseneck viewer shown in the first pilot for the show, "The Cage," from 1966 . . .

As for the Enterprise itself, we should remember that it is made up three main sections: the engine nacelles and booms (behind), the secondary hull or fuselage (below), and the primary hull or fuselage (in front), also called the saucer section. Yes, if you take away the rest of the ship, the primary hull is simply the flying saucer of the popular imagination, which originated not in real life as some people might think or hope, but in science fiction.

The designs were by Matt Jeffries (1921-2003), an aviator, aircraft draftsman, and flight engineer who served in World War II aboard bombers over Europe. He, too, thought of his creations in terms of aircraft designs.

Star Trek was heavily influenced by the science fiction of the 1940s and '50s, but it was also influenced by the flying saucer culture of the time. Science fiction was likewise influenced by flying saucer culture, and vice versa. Both can be traced back to The War of the Worlds, but there is another possible lineage, too. Before long I'll write about the progenitor of that alternate line of descent. Hint: you have already seen the adjectival form of his name in this posting.

Text and captions copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

July: Losses and Gains

During the month of July just passed I did two things: forestry work and work on my story.  And during a very hot week and more here in the Midwest, I stayed home and wrote for ten to twelve hours a day some days. That might not have been good for work that pays, but it was good for my story: in about four days' time I wrote 10,000 to 12,000 words, and in another week or so I wrote 5,000 to 10,000 more. I finished my first draft on July 28 and printed it on July 31, thus meeting my own personal deadline. It's not often that I meet or have met deadlines during these past few months or years, but I did in this case. That alone was cause for happiness, but to write a story at its own rapid pace and to finish it to my own satisfaction was a kind of elation. As C.L. Moore wrote, "To be panting along behind a headstrong story . . . is one of life’s major glories--a high better than drugs or drink." (1)

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Also during July I wrote a little on this blog, but only a little, and I missed out on a lot. If it's okay with you, I would like to catch up . . .

On July 16, I noted the passing of João Gilberto, who died on July 6, 2019, at age eighty-eight. What I failed to note is that his wife, Brazilian singer Miúcha, had died six months earlier, on December 18, 2018, at age eighty-one. Their daughter, singer Bebel Gilberto, then, lost both of her parents in half a year's time. I would like to express my sorrow for her loss and to extend the same feelings on behalf of all of you if you'll have it. I would also like to urge all of you to listen to Bebel Gilberto's very fine album Tanto Tempo (2000), which opens with a slow, sultry rendition of "Samba da Bênção" by Vinicius de Moraes and Baden Powell, two giants of Brazilian music with whom her parents performed and recorded.

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I was also saddened to learn of the death of Rosemary Ellen Guiley, who left us on July 18, 2019, at age sixty-nine. I met her at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, many years ago, and she seemed to me a kind and gracious person. Rosemary wrote on occult and quasi-religious topics, but she also wrote on Fortean topics and was an editor with Fate magazine, co-founded by Raymond A. Palmer as a journal of Forteana. I don't think that she wrote fiction, but in being influenced by the writings of Charles H. Fort, directly or indirectly, Rosemary Guiley joined legions of authors of fantasy and science fiction, including many tellers of weird tales. This is the centennial year, by the way, of the publication of Fort's first book, The Book of the Damned.

Note

(1) Quoted in "C.L. Moore (1911-1987) [and] Henry Kuttner (1915-1958)" by Frederick Shroyer and Richard Bleiler in Science Fiction Writers, 2nd edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999), pp. 545-546.

Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained by Damon Knight (1970). In addition to being a biographer, critic, and author of science fiction and related topics, Damon Knight was a poet and artist who contributed to Weird Tales. His first illustration for the magazine was for H.P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West: Reanimator," from the issue of November 1942. So again, we have mention of Lovecraft in the week of his birthday.

Original text copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Barker and Bender on the Case-Part Four

The first monster of the flying saucer era came to Flatwoods, West Virginia, on the evening of Friday, September 12, 1952. Witnesses to the event were a beautician named Kathleen May, a seventeen-year-old national guardsman, Eugene Lemon, and five boys aged ten to fourteen. Oddly enough, one of the boys was named Shaver. What they saw above Flatwoods gave them the fright of their lives. Upon encountering the monster, they turned and ran, down the hill and into town, scared, shaken, and hysterical. One or two of the boys were so badly disturbed that they vomited as night went on and as word of what they had seen spread into Flatwoods, across Braxton County, and onto a darkened continent.

On Monday morning, twenty-seven-year-old Gray Barker was having breakfast in a restaurant practically just up the road from Flatwoods when he read of the encounter with the "Braxton Monster." The newspaper spread out in front of him variously described it as a "smelly boogie-man," a "half-man, half-dragon," and a "fire-breathing monster." Kathleen May was quoted as saying, "It looked worse than Frankenstein." She added, "It couldn't have been human." Although Barker was working in Clarksburg, West Virginia, as a booking agent for movie theaters, he originally hailed from Braxton County. His birthplace is supposed to have been Riffle, located about eight miles northwest of Flatwoods as the saucer flies. (He was counted in the censuses of 1930 and 1940 in the Otter District, just outside of Gassaway to the south.) Riffle wasn't much more than a riffle, though, and so, when Barker later wrote about the Flatwoods Monster, he called the place where it had come to earth "my home town."

At a time when people still sent telegrams, Barker contacted Fate magazine by wire, asking if it was interested in the story. Raymond Palmer was still publisher or co-publisher at the time. Whether it was he or someone else who wired back, Gray Barker had his reply:

STORY PROBABLY HOAX BUT INVESTIGATE RIGOROUSLY. DON'T SPECULATE SIMPLY STATE FACTS. 3 OR 4 PICS UP TO 3000 WORDS MONDAY DEADLINE. (1)

That Friday after work, Barker drove the fifty-five or sixty miles from Clarksburg to Flatwoods to begin his investigation. While in town, he met another investigator, the zoologist and explorer Ivan T. Sanderson, who, as he himself admitted later, also thought the story was a hoax. Both men came away from Braxton County that weekend convinced that the witnesses had really seen and experienced something extraordinary and that their sighting of the Flatwoods Monster was no hoax.

Sanderson got his story in print first. The Pittsburgh Press, for example, ran it on Wednesday, September 24, under the title "Saucer Reports Valid, Expert Says" (page 14). Gray Barker, on the other hand, had to wait until the January 1953 issue of Fate before his account, entitled "The Monster and the Saucer," saw the light of day. In the meantime, he had introduced himself by mail to Albert K. Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the two had begun corresponding and even talking by telephone. After that, things moved pretty quickly towards a strange and mysterious climax and denouement.

To be continued . . .

Note
(1) According to Albert K. Bender, Jr., in his book Flying Saucers and the Three Men, Robert N. Webster was editor of Fate when Webster wrote to Bender on August 29, 1952. (p. 40)

The drawings are undated, but these may have been the first depictions of what became known as the Flatwoods Monster. The sources are authoritative: they were three of the boys who saw the monster in its one and only visit to Earth. From The Encyclopedia of UFOs, Ronald D. Story, ed., (1980), page 128.

Here is the first or one of the first attempts to depict the actual scene that took place on the hill above Flatwoods. The monster and the witnesses are here, as is the fence, the flashlight, and the rural setting. Mrs. May is missing, though. So are the oak tree and the dog. (Maybe he has already hightailed it home.) Also missing is the glowing light or grounded saucer some of the witnesses saw in the distance. The artist was Dick Bothwell, a columnist and cartoonist with the Tampa Bay (Fla.) Times. The source is the Times for October 11, 1952, page 11.

The sighting of the Flatwoods Monster opened a door for Grayson Roscoe Barker (1925-1984) of Braxton County and Clarksburg, West Virginia. Later describing himself as "a frustrated writer," he jumped on the chance to get his name in print again. (I don't know where or when he was first published.) His article "The Monster and the Saucer" appeared in Fate in January 1953, topped with a drawing of the monster, done by an unknown artist. By the end of the 1950s, Barker was one of the most well-known writers on and investigators of flying saucers in America. He also began publishing his own newsletter, The Saucerian, and he created his own publishing company, Saucerian Press or Saucerian Books, based in Clarksburg. In 1956, he published his own book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (from which much of the information here is drawn). His title only hints at the mystery and rampant paranoia of the flying saucer era.

On Friday, September 19, 1952, the day on which Gray Barker arrived in Flatwoods to begin investigating the incident, Kathleen May, Gene Lemon, and newspaper publisher A. Lee Stewart, Jr., were in New York City to appear on the NBC-TV program We the People. As this undated newspaper item says, an artist in New York drew the monster from eyewitness descriptions. That unidentified artist was probably the first to have a published depiction of the Flatwoods Monster, and this is the image we now have of it, despite all attempts at revision or reinterpretation. Source: the Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette.

Gray Barker, who admitted that he was no artist, seems to have taken the New York artist's drawing and superimposed it on a photographic background. The result is pretty creepy, I think. I don't know whether the background photo was taken at the actual location or not, but there was a large white oak tree along the edge of the field in which the witnesses walked, and the monster floated under one of its branches, as shown here. The tree has since died, but there may still be a rotten stub or stump in its place. I think it deserves a historical marker.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

From Palmer and Shaver to Barker and Bender

If it weren't for Ray Palmer, we wouldn't have had a Shaver Mystery, and if it weren't for him, we probably wouldn't have flying saucers. You can curse him or praise him, but you sure can't ignore him.

Palmer didn't invent either of these belief systems, but he knew a good thing when he saw it, and he was likely unmatched among science fiction editors in bringing fringe ideas into the real world. Perhaps thwarted in his visions and ambitions while at Ziff-Davis of Chicago, Palmer founded, with Curtis Fuller (1912-1991), Clark Publishing Company sometime in 1947. Venture Press, also founded or co-founded by Palmer, may have been a forerunner to Clark Publishing Company. On the other hand, the two may have run side by side, with Fuller and Palmer at the helm of one and Palmer alone on the other. In any case, in 1948, Venture Press published in hardback I Remember Lemuria! by Richard S. Shaver, while Fuller and Palmer put out the first issue of Fate under their jointly held Clark Publishing Company. The cover story in that inaugural issue of Fate was of course Kenneth Arnold's account of his sighting of flying saucers over Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947. That was the same month--June 1947--in which Ziff-Davis put out an all-Shaver Mystery issue of Amazing Stories under the editorship of Ray Palmer. It's funny how all of these things fit together.

Palmer was out the door at Ziff-Davis at the end of 1949. The last issues of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures in which he was credited as editor were those of December 1949. By then he was already working as editor of a new digest-sized magazine, Other Worlds Science Stories, first issued in November 1949. Put out by Clark Publishing Company, then by Palmer Publications, Other Worlds printed both fiction and non-fiction (plus pseudo-fiction and pseudo-non-fiction) in its eight years in print. Just before giving up the ghost in 1957, Other Worlds Science Stories became Flying Saucers from Other Worlds.

It was through the letters column of Other Worlds that Gray Barker and Albert K. Bender met in 1952-1953, and it was through their meeting that a new and bizarre chapter in the history of science (non-)fiction (or science-pseudo-non-fiction) began. It occurs to me now that in writing about the Flatwoods Monster, Men in Black (MIB), the Shaver Mystery, secret bases in Antarctica, and people who knew too much about flying saucers, Barker played the Palmer role to Bender's mad Shaver.

To be continued . . . 

Other Worlds Science Stories, November 1949, the first issue, with a cover story by Richard S. Shaver called "The Fall of Lemuria." In hindsight, the title can be seen as ironic, for the Shaver Mystery was, as we now know, in decline by the end of the 1940s. Very nearly banished from the Ziff-Davis titles, it would survive another few years under the wing of Raymond A. Palmer. The cover art is by Malcolm H. Smith.

Shaver's name next appeared on the cover of the March 1950 issue of Other Worlds. I don't know what's going on in this picture, but it looks like it involves a giant red rubber band. (The slingshot effect maybe?) The cover artist was once again Malcolm H. Smith. 

The September 1950 issue, with cover art by Smith, included a story by Shaver under his pseudonym Peter Dexter.

Shaver's name reappeared on the cover for October 1951, but only his surname and only at the bottom of the page. Far more prominent were the title and author's byline of the presumed cover story, "I Flew in a Flying Saucer." The confessional title of Captain A.V.G.'s two-part serial evokes the equally confessional "I Remember Lemuria!" from Amazing Stories from six years before. The cover artist by the way was H.W. McCauley.

This issue of Other Worlds was probably on the newsstand in September 1951, the same month in which The Day the Earth Stood Still was released. (The exact date of release was September 18.) I can't say for sure, but that film may have been the first to show an alien abduction. A more sensationalistic title could easily have been I Was Abducted by an Alien from Outer Space or I Went Aboard a Flying Saucer. Keep in mind, all of this took place several months before George Adamski first claimed to have gone aboard a flying saucer. In other words, it happened in science fiction (or science-pseudo-non-fiction) before anyone made any claims that it had happened to him or her in real life. This trend continued throughout the prime years of the flying saucer era, from 1947 to 1968 (or 1973): ordinary people imagined little if anything before it was imagined by authors and artists of science fiction. 

Other Worlds Science Stories, January 1952, with more flying saucer content, this time concerning Kenneth Arnold, the original witness. The cover art, again by McCauley, was reused, I think, for a cover of Fate magazine. Or maybe it was on the front of Fate first.

Other Worlds Science Stories, March 1952, with cover art by Malcolm H. Smith. This was the first issue of the magazine to show flying saucer-like craft on the cover, this despite Palmer's obvious enthusiasm for the subject.

Other Worlds got along for many issues with good cover art, not only by Malcolm H. Smith--the artist here--and H.W. McCauley but also by Hannes Bok and others. Smith's cover, from April 1952, is one of my favorites. This is the kind of image that made people love science fiction during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. The interior of the ship in the foreground reminds me of the the tomb-lid at Palenque, which some people believe shows a Mayan king at the controls of a rocketship.

Shaver's byline was back on the cover of Other Worlds in July 1952. The artist was Malcolm H. Smith.

Other Worlds Science Stories, August 1952, with cover art by Smith. This was the last issue of the magazine to appear before the sighting of the Flatwoods Monster, which took place on September 12, 1952. (There was no September 1952 issue of Other Worlds.) I doubt that any of the witnesses saw this image, but the men shown here encased in their machines bear a vague resemblance to the monster, especially a later interpretation that says that what Kathleen May and the boys of Flatwoods saw was not an alien itself but an alien riding inside a kind of machine. I would refer you to the theories and artwork of Frank Feschino, Jr.

Albert K. Bender's letter to the world, informing it of the creation of the International Flying Saucer Bureau, appeared in the December issue of Other Worlds. Gray Barker down (or up) in West Virginia read that letter and sent one of his own to Bender in his Connecticut home, thereby introducing himself. For a year or more prior to writing, the two men must have read a lot of flying saucer content in Other Worlds: fiction, non-fiction, and even advertisements. Both had been interested in science fiction, flying saucers, and--significantly--the Shaver Mystery for years prior to that. Their enthusiasm must have been high at the end of 1952, and each must have felt he had found in the other a kindred spirit. This remarkable cover, by Malcolm H. Smith, shows what might be called an influencing machine at work. See the last image below for another machine of this type.

This cover of Other Worlds, from January 1953, has nothing to do with anything, but I couldn't pass it by. The artist was H.W. McCauley. You might notice an influence on Frank Frazetta. I thought of a different image by Dave Stevens . . .

. . . proof that there is nothing new under the sun (or moon).

Something happened to Other Worlds Science Stories in 1953. Although Bea Mahaffey, a science fiction fan out of Cincinnati, came on to assist Raymond Palmer, the magazine disappeared after its July issue that year and didn't reappear until May 1955. Palmer and Mahaffey were still editors then, but the magazine was now published by Palmer Publications, Inc. I suspect this was all tied up with Palmer's selling his interest in Fate (presumably also in Clark Publishing Company) to Curtis and Mary Fuller. That may have left him with Other Worlds Science Stories, but the magazine seems to have taken a step down after the deal. That's Virgil Finlay art on the cover and you can't go wrong there, but it was old art even then and reproduced here in black and white instead of the original color. The design and maybe the paper and printing were cheaper, too. After seventeen years as an editor of science fiction magazines, Palmer seems to have gone into decline. 

Other Worlds Science Stories, May 1957, with cover art by an unknown artist, colored and recycled from a previous appearance on the cover of a Shaver Mystery-related title. I have wondered about this image before. It may have been done originally by Steele Savage, but I can't say for sure, and I don't think that anyone can at this point. In any case, its use demonstrates, I think, that Other Worlds and Palmer himself were falling on hard times. 

Then, in June 1957, Palmer issued Flying Saucers from Other Worlds, an unnumbered issue that may or may not have been a continuation of Other Worlds Science Stories. The occasion was no doubt the tenth anniversary of the first sighting of flying saucers. The cover art, if you can call it that, is pretty horrendous, a collage of photographic images and blobs of ink. I suspect that the moiré effects are in the scanning rather than in the original, but you never know.

Palmer returned to the Other Worlds format in July 1957 but retitled his magazine Flying Saucers from Other Worlds. The cover art, by Malcolm Smith, was recycled from the December 1951 issue. Inside was the story "Quest of Brail" by Richard S. Shaver, also recycled, from Amazing Stories, December 1945, that golden year of the Shaver Mystery. This was the penultimate issue of Other Worlds. The magazine came to an end in October 1957.

Finally, in July 1958, Shaver and his mystery had their last gasp in an American science fiction magazine when Fantastic published a special Shaver Mystery issue. Thereafter, he and it were relegated to the pages of magazines on the fringes, magazines published by Palmer and by Shaver himself. To be fair to both men, science fiction pulps were coming to an end, too, in the late '50s. I have read that the last pulp magazine of this genre was published in 1958 and the last pulp magazine of any genre in the early 1970s. By then, the flying saucer era had reached its end, too, while Shaver and Palmer were in the last decade of their lives. In the meantime, Gray Barker and Albert K. Bender kept the memory of the Shaver Mystery alive, at least for a while.

Text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley