T. Peter Park
Wed, 22 Jun 2005 20:30:45 -0700
Friends, Forteans, Listmates!
This Friday, June 24, will be the 58th anniversary of the
incident that first set off our whole modern post-world-War II "Age of
Flying Saucers": private pilot Kenneth Arnold's June 24, 1947 sighting
of nine mysterious flying objects over Mount Rainier in the Cascade
Range, moving at incredibly high speeds in a somewhat erratic manner
"like a saucer if you skip it across water." The English Fortean "Earth
Mysteries" researcher Paul Devereux has some interesting comments on
Kenneth Arnold's sighting, and its social and cultural context, in his
book _Earth Lights Revelation_ (Blandford, 1989, 1990).
Devereux offers some interesting general reflections on
UFO's in _Earth Lights Revelation_ . He is extremely skeptical of the
extraterrestrial theory of UFO's. Instead, he regards them as a
subclass of "Earth Lights," balls or blobs of light produced by
electrical (and perhaps other) energy fields generated by subterranean
tectonic stresses (mini-earthquakes produced by underground rock faults
and slippages). As "Earth Lights," he considers UFO's close cousins of
ball lightning, "spook lights," will-o'-the-wisps, earthquake lights,
and the mystery light-forms often reported over certain hills and
mountains, such as the Andes Mountains, Brown Mountain in western North
Carolina, and Pendle Hill in England. Devereux sees the "Earth Lights"
as products of energy fields produced by tectonic stresses-but also
cites numerous reports suggesting they are somehow alive, intelligent,
and responsive to witness's actions and even thoughts!
Devereux devotes his second chapter, "The Cascades
Catalyst," to a discussion of Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting (Devereux,
_Earth Lights Revelation_, 1990 paperback edition, p. 29 ff.). Devereux
feels that "we all saw Kenneth Arnold's flying saucers," in "the first
mass media UFO sightings," because the times were ripe for such a
sighting (_Earth Lights Revelation_, 1990 ed., p. 31). We became willing
and eager then and in subsequent years to interpret the flying discs as
alien machines from outer space, "an interpretation that came out of an
_Earth blind_ cultural context" more interested in aerospace technology
than in an awareness of our own Earthly natural environment (_Earth
Lights Revelation_, p. 33). The "extra-terrestrial projection onto
UFO's," Devereux feels, "is the scream of a lonely species" in a
secularized technological society where "God is dead--in a dynamic,
cultural sense" (_Earth Lights Revelation_, p. 40).
Devereux begins his reflections on the cultural and
sociological significance of Kenneth Arnold's June 1947 sighting by
quoting another British Fortean writer, Hilary Evans', questions about
the Arnold case:
<<Maybe the question, "Did Kenneth Arnold see a UFO" is
essentially meaningless.
<<Maybe it would be more meaningful to ask "Why did it happen to
Kenneth Arnold and not to someone else?" or "Why in 1947 and not some
other year?" or "Why in the United States and not somewhere else?" or "Why
did this sighting, whatever it was, make such an impression both on him and
on society?">> (Hilary Evans, in _UFOS: 1947-1987_ (eds. H. Evans and J.
Spencer), Fortean Times, 1987], quoted in Paul Devereux, _Earth Lights
Revelation: UFO's and Mystery Lightform Phenomena: The Earth's Secret
Energy Force_ (Blandford, 1989, 1990), p. 31).
Why the sighting made an impression on Kenneth Arnold,
Devereux feels, is simple enough: "if it happened, Arnold was than
entitled to be impressed!" Also, Devereux points out, similar
experiences to Arnold' s _did_ reportedly happen to other people, both
before and after his 24 June sighting. If Arnold's report was not the
catalyst, Devereux feels, it would almost certainly have been one of the
others a little sooner or slightly later than his, "because conditions
were such that the catalyst was bound to occur around the time it did,
and in the country that it did." Arnold, according to Devereux, "was in
the optimum geographical location to witness his flying discs," and "in
a more general sense, he was in the right place and at the right time
for his account of them to be taken up so swiftly and broadcast on such
a scale with such effect --post-Second World War America" (Paul
Devereux, _Earth Lights Revelation_, 1990 ed., p. 31)
Kenneth Arnold's sighting took place at the right time and
place. "In an important sense _we all saw Kenneth Arnold's flying
saucers_," Devereux feels (_Earth Lights Revelation_, p. 31). It was
"the first mass media UFO sighting," in Devereux's view (_Earth Lights
Revelation_, p. 31). America, Devereux notes, "had the resources, the
technology and the national temperament for exploiting the huge advances
in all kinds of technology, including communications technology, made
possible by the exigencies of the Second World War." While a "shattered
Europe started the slow process of repairing itself, and the Russian
bear toiled in secret," America "emerged from the war as the most
powerful nation on Earth, undamaged physically, brash". Everywhere in
the West, "there was the hope of a brave new technological future, but
that future was closest to realisation in America." Old social orders
had been "dashed virtually everywhere," and "everyone wanted a slice of
the cake." Science was "the new god," and "Germany had paved the way to
the stars with its fearsome V-weaponry."(Devereux, _Earth Lights
Revelation_, p. 31).
Peenemünde, the World War II Nazi rocket base on the Baltic
Sea, was plundered for its scientists and rocket engineers by both
Russia and America. The "revolutionary development of aerospace
technology we see today," Devereux reminds us, "was initiated
immediately after the war." (Devereux, _Earth Lights Revelation_, pp.
31-32). Space travel was to become a reality. "In America particularly,"
Devereux notes, "this was foreshadowed by an increase in published
science fiction, which in the late 1940s and the 1950s became a major
genre." (Devereux, _Earth Lights Revelation_, p. 32). Before Arnold's
1947 Cascades "saucers" sighting "there was already a strongly growing
sci-fi awareness through the agency of big-selling magazines like
_Amazing Stories_, whose editor, Raymond Palmer, was later to persuade
Kenneth Arnold to co-write a book with him, based on the Cascades event"
(Devereux, p. 32, citing Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer, _The Coming of
the Saucers_, 1952). Palmer, we may recall, had promoted Richard
Shaver's fantasies of the evil underground "dero" and their ancient
Lemurian ray-machines as "fact" in _Amazing Stories_ in the 1940's,
converted Arnold to the extraterrestrial theory of the "saucers," and
sponsored Arnold's investigation of the alleged dumping of slag and
metal from a disabled UFO over Maury Island in Puget Sound near Tacoma,
Washington on June 21, 1947, three days before Shaver's own Cascades
sighting. The "sky was the limit both metaphorically and
technologically" in 1947. "All the old certainties had died in the war,
a new world had to be built, a world fit for heroes, and heroes'
children" (Devereux, p. 32).
So the "technically mature media machine existed," the
"background of space and science fantasy had primed the motor of the
American psyche," and "technology was bursting out everywhere," so that
"the scene was set." All it now needed was a UFO wave, which duly came
along in 1947. UFOs --"foo fighters"--had been repeatedly seen by
American, English, and German airmen during the war, but the "world was
otherwise engaged" then. The 1947 wave was not even the first since the
war (recall the Scandinavian "ghost rockets" of 1946), but it was the
first in America. It was "only a minor matter of months for one report
or other actively to engage with the cogs of the media, the pseudopodia
of the American consciousness." It just "happened to be Arnold's
account." Pendleton (Ore.) _East Oregonian_ newspaperman Bill
Becquette's invocation of the phrase "saucer-like" from Arnold's
description of the unknown flying objects' movement "gave the mass media
what it needed--a simple handle." (Devereux, p. 32).Arnold's sighting,
we may recall, was actually preceded by Harold Dahl's alleged June 21
sighting of a "saucer" spewing slag and metal over Puget Sound and Maury
Island, and followed a few days later by the still mysterious and
controversial crash of a flying "something" over Roswell, New Mexico.
But Marshall McLuhan's media-linked "global village" was
"already beginning to happen," Devereux points out (p. 32), and Kenneth
Arnold's story leapt oceans. Arnold himself was staggered: "Before the
night was over I had long-distance calls from London, England, from
religious groups, from people who thought the end of the world was
coming!" _Before the night was over_, Devereux emphasizes. What Arnold
had seen over Cascade mountains was flashed around the world before the
next day came. This "run-of-the-mill sighting" had "taken on special
dimensions" like no other before it. "In total," Arnold later estimated,
"I received something like ten thousand letters from all over the world.
So many people came to visit me that for almost three years our home was
like Grand Central Station."(Devereux, _Earth Lights Revelation_, . 32).
The "mass preparedness to accept the idea of some kind of
advanced technology in the sky had arrived," and it "could be
conceptualised by a whole culture in a way not possible before." Kenneth
Arnold "represented that culture." For days and weeks after his June 24
sighting, Arnold believed that he had seen some advanced kind of
terrestrial machines-most likely either American or Russian secret
weapons. "But the time had come when travel in space, our own let alone
that of alien beings, had become a discernible reality." As it became
clear that what was being seen in the sky was not likely to be the
product of terrestrial technology, "the door was open to
extra-terrestrial interpretation." (Devereux, p. 32). Almost
imperceptibly Kenneth Arnold's "missiles from Moses Lake," an American
missile base near Yakima, Washington, became space-craft from outer
space. In a short time, the idea was simply assumed by most people: if
the "flying saucers" were real, then they obviously had to come from
outer space. The "same technological consciousness that was then
initiating the greatest cycle of human exploitation of planetary
resources and indifference to the natural environment ever seen, was the
one that designated the nature of the flying discs as alien machines."
(Devereux, pp. 32-33). It was "an interpretation that came out of an
_Earth blind_ cultural context" (Devereux, p. 33). That cultural context
blocked us from considering the possibility that the "saucers" might be
a permanent part of our own Terrestrial natural environment, generated
by geological or atmospheric processes and related to ball lightning,
"ghost lights," and will-o-the-wisps.
This process, Devereux adds, was "tied up with something
else." The Second World War, he notes, was "unlike anything that had
ever been." Global war had become a reality, where "everyone was at
risk, at least theoretically, in such a conflict." Technology underwent
unprecedented development in the war years. Nuclear power had been
"released in the most awesome weaponry," and "threw its mushroom-shaped
shadow down the post-war years." And Russia, "with its alien system of
Communism," was perceived as a rising, inimical super-power: an "Iron
Curtain was conceptualised as existing between it and the West."
(Devereux, p. 33).
The consciousness of the West in the post-war years was "in
a state of trauma." It "lived on the edge of abysses containing possible
terrors which superimposed themselves on the recent memories of war,
when inhumanity had reached depths beyond nightmares." The "brave new
world of technology" was a "desperate veneer over a seething cultural
paranoia." Science was to "elevate humanity out of its dark, organic
fears to the clean, bright light of a technological dawn." America was
the "pressure-cooker of the Western culture," and it was there "where
the extremes, positive and negative, were to show". In the late 1940s
and into the next decade, the fear of Communism and of external
infiltration or invasion was endemic in America. The CIA was formed.
McCarthyism flowered. The need for military superiority and security was
paramount. "Reds might be under the beds of the West"--as "Grays" would
be a few decades later. (Devereux, p. 33).
Kenneth Arnold' s experience was "telegraphed into this
nascent psychosocial cauldron" of "machines in the sky," "Russia,"
"extra terrestrials," "invasion," and an "extra-terrestrial
technological devil to balance the terrestrial scientific god". In the
late 1940's and early 1950's, "fear of invasion from the Red Planet Mars
(or any other planet would do) and Reds under the Beds came from the
same psychological matrix," as "interchangeable motifs." (Devereux, p.
33). Nigel Watson noticed this in his study of UFOs and the cinema:
<<The most obvious use of the contemporary interest in
strange flying objects is given away by the title of _The Flying Saucer_
(Mikel Conrad; 1950). Whereas in later science fiction films the aliens
may be seen as a metaphor for the communists, _The Flying Saucer_ has no
need for such subtleties. It clearly shows the Russians stealing a
saucer from a scientist in Alaska. Fortunately for the free-world and
the continued production of Ma's apple pie the plans of the Russians are
thwarted when the craft explodes in mid-air and the scientist gives his
secrets to the U.S. Government.>> [Nigel Watson, in _UFOS: 1947-1987_,
quoted in Devereux, _Earth Lights Revelation_, p. 33]
Film posters and book covers in the years immediately
following Kenneth Arnold's sighting showed frightened humanity running
in the streets, "looking up in desperation at flying disks appearing
like the eyeballs of some baleful demon in the sky" (Devereux, _Earth
Lights Revelation_, pp. 33-34)..
"But as the Western psyche climbed slowly out of its
post-war trauma, the extra-terrestrial motif took on softer lines."
(Devereux, p. 34). People like George Adamski. Orfeo Angellucci, Truman
Bethurum, Howard Menger, Daniel Fry, and Reinhold Schmitt emerged,
claiming to have had contact with benign, god-like extra-terrestrial
beings. These beings were long-haired, beautiful humanoid Venusians or
Saturnians. They warned of the dangers of nuclear war. UFO groups or
cults like the Aetherius Society appeared, describing the Master Jesus
as also located on Venus. He could beam his love down to Earth from an
orbiting spacecraft. "A bizarre hybrid of religion and technology had
grown out of the post-war years, and the Martian archetype became
eclipsed by that of Venus" by the mid-1950's (Devereux, _Earth Lights
Revelation_, p. 34).
"Though the world had woken up to the rumour of things seen
in the sky on an unprecedented scale," Devereux notes, "people saw UFOs
only out of dream-laden or nightmare-haunted eyes." (p. 34). What had
happened, Devereux feels, "was that an ancient phenomenon had been given
a mid-twentieth-century context," and "perceived through the cultural
filters of the period." This, Devereux believes, "is what has always
happened to UFOs, or the many other names they have been given." The
"present perception of 'UFOs' is only another manifestation of a
phenomenon as old as time." (Devereux, _Earth Lights Revelation, p. 34).
"Many sightings of aerial phenomena, the vast majority being
light phenomena, have been reported since 1947," Devereux continues a
bit further on (_Earth Lights Revelation_, p. 40). In the aftermath of
the Cascades sighting, which "occurred during a wave of sightings," many
other flying discs or "saucers" were seen, often by pilots or aircrew.
The "general context of witness and popular interpretation moved" in the
late 1940's and early 1950's "from secret terrestrial technology, to
unknown technology, to extra-terrestrial technology: our own level of
technological development made such an idea accessible to us."
(Devereux, p. 40).As the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung wrote: "The
impossibility of finding an earthly base for the UFOs and of explaining
their physical peculiarities soon led to the conjecture of an
extra-terrestrial origin." (Quoted by Devereux, p. 40). Almost every
sighting reported was put in the context of extra-terrestrial craft by
most UFO researchers, the press, and the public.
Jung, Devereux notes (p. 40), was clearly aware of the
"essentially phantom nature" of human identifications of the UFO. He saw
UFOs as _projection carriers_ that provided screens for the ideas,
hopes, and fears of the culture that perceived them in any particular
age.[C.G. Jung, -Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the
Sky- (1958), RKP edition 1959, cited by Devereux, p. 40] There was an
actual, objective phenomenon, Jung put forward as one suggestion, which
our physical eyes perceived but which was colored by an internal
projection belonging to the individual witnessing the outer phenomenon,
and thus belonging to the society, the culture, of which the individual
was the product.
Today, Devereux notess (p. 40), "many people feel the logic
of science to be arid." Science, they feel, has "exposed us to the vast
impersonal domains of the outer space surrounding our tiny planet, a
planet where our humanity seems to be threatened from so many
directions." We "seek celestial help," Devereux continues, but "God is
dead--in a dynamic, cultural sense." Extraterrestrials "now occupy the
throne of heaven." The "extra-terrestrial projection onto UFOs,"
Devereux feels, "is the scream of a lonely species" (Devereux, _Earth
Lights Revelation_, p. 40). The "extra-terrestrial hypothesis" is only
one in a list of images that have been projected onto the UFO" for
Devereux, "and does not possess any particular claim to be viewed as
more likely to be 'true' than some of the others" (Devereux, _Earth
Lights Revelation_, pp. 40-41).
Pax vobiscum,
T. Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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