-Caveat Lector- http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk/arc/90/mkinf1.htm
This article was published in two parts in Magonia 49 and 50, June and September 1994 ALIENATING FANCIES The influencing machine fantasy in ufology and the extraterrestrial mythos Martin S. Kottmeyer Does free will exist? Is Man a meat puppet dangling on strings controlled by higher powers in the universe? Variations on these questions have fascinated thinkers throughout history. Arthur Koestler believed the dramatic motif of Volition against Fate and Puppet on Strings is one of the most powerful archetypes in literature and has appeared in countless forms. (1) Threats to individual or collective freedom arouse very primal human fears and can yield a drama of intense emotions when free will is affirmed. Conversely, when free will is denied, the effect is coldly distancing and allows contemplation of humans as blameless concoctions of organic chemicals stuck in a web of impersonal forces. Because you cannot have heroes without a powerful adversary, paranoia is virtually de rigeur in great literature. (2) In recent times extraterrestrials have joined the pantheon of gods, demons, superior races, secret societies, and power elites which have been pulling the strings. It would not surprise me if stories of extraterrestrials messing with men's minds pre-date our century, but the earliest instance I've seen is in H.P. Lovecraft's 1928 work The Call of Cthulhu. It speaks of a race called the Great Old Ones which came from the stars and spoke to men by "molding their dreams". The emergence of Cthulhu from beneath the seas is accompanied by sensitive individuals going mad. The cult which sought to liberate him warned he would bring the Earth beneath its sway. (3) A first appearance in Lovecraft's corpus would be appropriate given the mechanistic supernatural perspective that he consciously cultivated of a cosmos totally indifferent to the wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, pterodactyls, fungi, men, trees or other forms of biological energy. As he wrote in a letter a year before this story: "To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all". It has been said that Lovecraft was the first SF writer to cultivate this stark aesthetic in the service of horror. (4) I'm hesitant to endorse this assertion given its obvious roots in the metaphor of "deep time" which geologists like Charles Lyell had made popular in the prior century. (5) That Lovecraft's aesthetic led to a proliferation of amoral aliens in later decades is a far safer contention. H.G. Wells did a couple of works involving the idea of extraterrestrial influences in 1937. The Camford Visitation has a vicar use a case of a person troubled by a disembodied voice in a book he is writing called Extra-Terrestrial Disturbances of Human Mentality. The case is said to demonstrate "an upthrust of the subconscious through some sort of space-time dislocation". (6) Better known is the occasionally reprinted Star-begotten: A Biological Fantasia. It tells the tale of a gentleman discovering a generation of humans who are stranger than prior generations. They possess unaccountable intuitions, mathematical gifts, strange memories and exceptional abilities. He becomes enamoured with the idea that aliens of higher development are manipulating cosmic energies and firing away at human chromosomes with increasing accuracy and effectiveness through the ages. Martians were acting as a sort of interplanetary tutor quite unlike the invaders of War of the Worlds. The book affects an ambiguity over whether the narrator was deluding himself with pseudoscientific nonsense or making an actual discovery. At the conclusion, the narrator realises with a start that he himself was one of the "strangers and innovators to our fantastic planet who were crowding into life and making it over anew". (7) The pulp writer Raymond Z. Gallun utilised the extraterrestrial influence motif in several stories. In Godson of Almarlu a machine was devised which was said to now and then influence terrestrial life. Hotel Cosmos revolves around a globe which sends out invisible radiations of madness which affect nervous tissue and is used to sabotage a Galactic Conference. The Magician of Dream Valley and The Lotus Engine develop the idea of aliens able to generate radiations which totally envelop humans in a hallucinated reality. (8) Arthur C. Clarke used the motif in two widely acclaimed works. In Childhood's End (1953) an Overmind "attempted to act directly upon the minds of other races and to influence their development". It failed with prior worlds, but Earth's youths are successfully adapted to alien consciousness and the reader experiences them leaving the cradle of the Earth as they evolve towards the Overmind. (9) Even better known, if less understood, is the film 2001 - A Space Odyssey. The monolith of an alien culture appears before a tribe of apes and invests a new awareness in them which is to set the course of human evolution towards cosmic ambitions. As originally conceived, the alien artifact was to create a hypnotic teaching effect. In the film it was wisely rendered as a mystical moment of enlightenment as the ape which touched the monolith realises the extension of power capable with a tool. A bone becomes a weapon for hunting and murder which inexorably leads to atom bombs and space travel. (10) Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan is another acclaimed work which was the motif to particularly enjoyable distancing purposes. Humankind was caused to evolve solely to create and transport a tiny repair part for an alien vessel stranded on the Saturnian moon Titan. The aliens, called Tralfamadorians, sent messages to the stranded alien by having humans subconsciously form them. Here is how the process is explained: "Tralfamadorians were able to make certain impulses from the Universal Will to Become echo through the vaulted architecture of the universe with about three times the speed of light. And they were able to focus and modulate these impulses so as to influence creatures far, far away and inspire them to serve Tralfamadorain ends". Civilisations bloomed and crumbled as humans built tremendous structures to relay messages to Titan. "The meaning of Stonehenge in Tralfamadorian, when viewed from above, is: Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed." (11) Also notable, particularly in light of interviews where the author claims the book is based in part on his actual experiences, is Philip K. Dick's Valis (1981). The title refers to an influencing machine from the star system Sirius. The protagonist explains its operation by saying: "Sites of his brain were being selectively stimulated by tight energy beams from far off, perhaps millions of miles away". The narrator is convinced of the insanity of the idea of Valis and is struck by the oddity of "a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat (the protagonist) had intellectually dealed himself out of the game of madnesss while still enjoying its sights and sounds". The belief that long-range, tight, information-rich beams of energy focused on his head allowed him to recognise his hallucinations as hallucinations. "But...he now had a "they"". Not much improvement, in the opinion of the narrator. (12) Movies involving the motif of alien influence are common. Dramatically, the best was probably Five Million Miles to Earth of the Quatermass series. It is discovered that insectoid Martians once psychically enslaved humanity at the dawn of history. A buried space ship is discovered and explored by scientists. The Martians inside are dead, but the ship is awakened and starts to take control of humanity once more. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is also revered by critics for its rich metaphor of the pod people. Technically this is probably a better example of the Capgras syndrome form of paranoia than influence, but is understandably lumped together with the pandemic of alien possession in fifties films: Invaders from Mars, It Came From Outer Space, Earth versus the Flying Saucers, Kronos, Beast with a Million Eyes, Enemy from Space. Control by implant is found in Invaders from Mars where the operation to insert it is utilised as a dramatic peril. It recurs in Battle in Outer Space, but here the operation is done within a strobing beam of light as the victim is driving a car. After the radio-control apparatus makes him a slave of the glorious planet Nehtal he experiences a time loss and discovers a trickle of blood on his forehead. In Cat Women of the Moon a beam of light is alone the force of influence. In Earth versus the Flying Saucers the beam of light makes the skull go transparent while knowledge is sucked out. A cruder form of mindscan involving a TV monitor can be found in Invasion of the Star Creatures. Zontar - The Thing from Venus offers an amusing variant by some very unconvincing "injecto-pods", vampire bats with lobster tails, that gain control when they bite you in the neck. Television can probably consider alien influence a staple item. Star Trek, Lost in Space, The Invaders, The Outer Limits, Space 1999, Dr Who, all immediately come to mind with episodes. It has prompted caricature such as a Dick van Dyke Show in which Zombies from Twylo import walnuts which rob feels are stealing his imagination. The final episode of The Monkees titled "Mijacageo" masterfully invokes the motif for satirical purposes. Humanity becomes controlled through the agency of television sets broadcasting frodis energy directed by a mad scientist, Rip Taylor at his best, and originating in an extraterrestrial bush whose space ship crashed on Earth. By any measure, the idea that aliens influence or control man has shown itself to be a durable and seductive feature of our image of higher powers in the universe. Their intimate concern with the mental life of humans is an unconscious given. As a dramatic device, the mind-bending alien cannot be faulted. Fiction is always granted licence in the matter of gimmicks helpful in generating conflict and disparities of power or in generating philosophical moods and ambiences. Questions of plausibility would be invalid in such contexts. Yet, it is a question worth asking in other contexts. As we will see later, some people think aliens and their kin can influence the human mind and direct our destiny. Are such things possible? While we know that science fiction has a way of anticipating future developments in technology - rocketry and nuclear weapons are usual successes cited - its track record is not without problems. Elliot Valenstein notes the idea of the pre-frontal lobotomy was prefigured in a 1924 novel by Eugene Zamiatan titled We: "The latest discovery of our state science is that there is that there is a center for fancy - a miserable little nervous knot in the lower region of the frontal lobe of the brain. A triple treatment of this knot with X-rays will cure you of fancy." Before hailing this as a marvel, we must, however, recall that pre-frontal lobotomies are no longer done because they represent a tragic delusional fad within the history of medicine. The neurological theory behind the practice was not simply flawed, but wholly wrong. They didn't do what they were advertised to do and ultimately only added misery to already suffering humans. (13) By analogy, prefigurements of alien mastery of human mental mechanisms in SF may only be prefiguring modern delusion and not real alien activities. Direct material control of the mind by external forces can be placed near the bottom of any list of science fiction notions likely to become reality. It may be more probable than invisibility, teleportation, and force barriers, but faster-than-light travel, time travel and utopia probably have better odds and they seem overly paradoxical to give them much credence. Many factors contribute to such an assessment. How does one generate minute but precise potentials of energy across microscopic distances at specific points within a mass of biological tissue possessing changing electrical potentials in overlying areas? To do this without electrodes to insulate and guide the energy to the points desired would require a fabulous degree of finesse. Particle streams would be defocused by varying tissue densities. What prevents interactive effects in the tissue above the sites of manipulation? Worse, brains do not map precisely one to another. Knowing how to control one mind does not immediately gain you the ability to control a different one. (14) Another problem underlying external modes of influence is that the brain, contrary to popular metaphor, is not like a computer with switches that can be flipped or wires that can be inductively given an electrical charge. Electricity is probably only a superficial feature of brain activity overlying systems of molecular interactions which are the primary modifiers of consciousness. There are hundreds of hormones, maybe even thousands (their science embryonic at present), involved in brain function and there must be a careful orchestration of these chemical reactions for the brain to do its work. Once comprehended one can easily understand why efforts to use electricity to control the mind are about as effective as hitting a person on the head with a hammer. Our hypothetical mind ray would practically have to be able to change water into wine from a distance and possibly into a stable of far more complex molecules. You are asking for miracles. (15) Electrodes implanted in the brain remove some problems inherent in the ray, but not the fundamental one that the brain is more gland than computer. Wilder Penfield's work with electrodes that yielded some reactions is sometimes cited by mind controller wannabees as evidence that there is a future in brain stimulation. Penfield himself, however, regarded his work as eliminating the possibility of mind control. Pleasant sensations and some modifications of emotional states were elicited in a few instances. Compelled behaviour, however, was totally absent. The brain proved to be a remarkably plastic biological entity with behaviours regulated through many sites. For all practical purposes, the human will remains autonomous. (16) The dream of controlling human thought and action with less fabulous technology has been a notoriously hit-and-miss occupation. Threats and torture, crude as they are, worked well enough for most social engineers in the past, though the downside risks of revenge, intransigence, and low productivity must be factored in. Social persuasion techniques like advertising do not compel buying behaviour, but rather try to generate attention to product existence followed by the evocation of pleasurable mental associations to make purchase of the product a rewarding experience. Drugs can elicit rewarding sensations of power, ecstasy, excitement and tranquillity which seemingly provoke compulsive behaviour in the form of more drug-taking, but do not force one to do the will of others in an absolute sense. You can find other drug sources and the option of quitting is usually chosen at some point. Hypnosis, as the alternative term indicates, is more a case of suggestion than a bending of wills. Even the bugaboo of brainwashing has on critical analysis showed itself to be less imposing than the myth indicates. Humans do pretty much as they darn well please. (17) These considerations force a high measure of scepticism towards any claim that human minds are being manipulated by mind rays or other advanced technology wielded by extraterrestrials or indeed any mythic power. The alternative that humans, inspired by the literature, media, and cultural myths surrounding them, can convince themselves that such fantasies are reality, has to be given a higher order of probability. There are several UFO cases involving people claiming such things. In May 1945, Ray Palmer's magazine Amazing Stories published a story "I remember Lemuria" by Richard Shaver. Though appearing in a magazine for science fiction, Shaver and Palmer professed it recounted true occurrences. That story and others serialised from it started a controversy which became known as the Great Shaver Mystery. The tales built up a cosmology steeped in cult conspiracy notions, harkenings to ancient wisdom, and lost continents. Among the elements of the cosmology was something called the "dero". In Shaver's words, the dero referred to a "concept of electronic surveillance, through mind-contacting and mind-influencing machinery". He believed the mind was capable of inducting influences "magnetically from the destructive forces of nature" and that opened up the possibility of a world-wide "telemach" which would be like a radio telephone into the mind. With this device, degenerate beings infiltrating old service chambers of a previous civilisation were trying to rule men's minds. Among the signs demonstrating someone was being affected by dero was a person's tendency to talk contradictions and cliches. The dero speeds up the thoughts of emperors and czars to impel the world towards destruction. Shaver's views struck a chord with many readers. Hard-core science fiction fans viewed the Shaver Mystery with disdain and probably helped contribute to the science fiction community's distrust of the flying saucer mystery which Palmer also promoted and linked it with. (18) Mind control motifs turn up sporadically among the early contactees. Howard Menger was among the most prominent examples. His aliens were distributing devices over the landscape which were designed to open brains up to the possibility of space travel. On the darker side, another alien group called The Conspiracy possessed the capability of advanced brain therapy. The aliens were locked in ceaseless battle for men's souls. (19) The Stanfords, whose writings have roots in George Hunt Williamson's contactee/ ufological speculations, experienced a fantastic sparkling beam projected from a hovering UFO which raised their consciousness above Earth man's delusions. This illumination swept them into a whirlpool of ever expanding consciousness till it reached a numinous state of KNOWINGNESS. It was felt to possess a very high resonant frequency or vibration. It was said to be more visible with the third eye than with the physical eye. (20) Eugenia Siragusa, who gained some fame as a European contactee, similarly has reported an encounter in which a beam of light created a "redimension" tied to a large machine which had tapes which transmitted ideas into his brain. After three hours he was transported back to where he was before. He learned 18 days had actually passed. It was claimed the student developed psychic powers, an improved memory, and a sense of mission after the encounter. (21) In May 1975 Cuck Doyle encountered a manta-shaped UFO that was probing the area with a green laser-like beam. The beam hit him and he felt paralysed. Strange thoughts came into his mind like mathematical equations that made no sense, the omega symbol, a landscape with a red ocean below a green sky and blue ground underfoot, and sensations of floating in space with stars of many colours. When the beam went out, he fell on his face. (22) Eugenia Macer-Storey, in her charming autobiography about the craziness of her life after becoming a UFO buff, reported an altered mental state following a telepathic contact with a ball of light. She feels it made her a different person not fully in control of her personal mind set. (23) Abductees have claimed a notable variety of alien influence episodes. Patty Price claimed aliens hooked wires to her head and her thoughts, impressions and emotions were taken and recorded. (24) Charles Hickson, of the Pascagoula classic has complained: "They took my mind". He couldn't remember things or think straight. He was clearly distressed. (25) Charles Moody was told by aliens he had been "absorbed". The Lorenzens, who investigated, took this to mean information was extracted from his mind. Trekkies familiar with Return of the Archons will take a slightly different meaning. (26) Aliens in the William Herrmann case utilise "inoculation" bars and chambers to enhance mental abilities. (27) One of the wildest variations was provided by the Sandra Larson case wherein aliens physically removed her brain from her body. She asserts that when they placed it back they reconnected it differently and she lost control of her speech. Trekkies may think this a rewrite of the comic episode Spock's Brain, but that is probably just their imagination. She believes her aliens can press a button and know whatever she is thinking wherever she happens to be. (28) Recent years have seen a proliferation of claims about implants inserted into humans by aliens. Particularly remarkable is one set of claims involving implants shoved up abductees' noses - the notorious alien booger menace. The bizarre patch of insertion, bizarre because of the septic nature of the sinus cavities, marks the experiences as indisputably fantasy. James Gordon notes that while talk of implants would almost certainly seem to point to paranoia, the claimants seem to recognise how crazy it seems and are less sure of what it means than most paranoids. In the case of the alien booger menace what is going on is a shared imaginary social world. The implants are a sign of involvement and sympathetic corroboration. It started with a curious detail in the 1976 Sandy Larson case. In addition to the brain removal performed by the space mummy, the alien operation included having her nose scraped with something like a knife or cotton swab placed inside. The investigators noted that prior to her UFO sighting, Larson had undergone a similar operation for a sinus condition. It was painful and she was scheduled for additional treatment. Betty Andreasson, who was well versed in UFO thought, reported a similar alien nose operation with the swab turned into an implant on a rod. She included drawings of it which gave it a visual elaboration and concreteness which helped it to return in still later cases like those of Meagan Elliot, Virginia Horton, Kathie Davis, Casey Turner, and so on. (29) Excluding the booger menace, these people are presenting themes familiar to most students of abnormal psychology. Malcolm Bower's study of the nature of emerging psychosis notes that fragmentation of self-experience, the loss of the sense of self, is common. The very first case he speaks of involves a gentleman who believed his thoughts were stolen or removed. "Thought-stealing", we have already seen, is repeatedly found in abductee accounts. The sense of mission which follows some UFO contacts also frequently accompanies the onset of psychosis. Ideas of reference - a term given to notions that others are responsible for the thoughts one is thinking - is the most common delusion shared by schizophrenics. Some diagnosticians speak of it as a "first-rank" symptom of schizophrenia. (30) In trying to explain how his erstwhile persecutors inject thoughts into his mind, the schizophrenic frequently develops a belief in the existence of influencing machines. Viktor Tausk presented a description of this phenomenon of belief in influencing machines among schizophrenics back in 1918. Tausk found the belief appeared to evolve from an originating sensation of inner change accompanied by a sense of estrangement. The need some people have for causality yields belief in a persecutor. As the delusion develops over time it focuses first on one person and then to a circle of conspirators. The mechanism used by the persecutor at first is grasped only vaguely but, in time, buttons, levers and cranks become part of the picture. It is felt the machine manipulates magnetic or electrical forces or air currents, or uses telepathy or some mysterious radiations beyond the patient's knowledge of physics. In identifying their persecutors, schizophrenics commonly point to ex-lovers, employers and physicians. However, the persecutors are also picked from the culture around them - the CIA, Einstein, movie characters, computers and, of course, extraterrestrials. (31) These fantasies can become quite elaborate. Two recently available autobiographies of schizophrenics can be pointed to in illustration. In one, a girl began fantasising about an electronic machine capable of blowing up the Earth and which would rob all men of their brains, thus creating robots obedient to her will. She called it the System. As her delusions progressed she discovered the System had become "a vast world-like entity encompassing all men". Subsequently it turned on her and forced her into self-destructive acts like burning her own hand and refusing food. At the end, the System was involved in saying silly and innocuous things and finally just sunk "beyond thought" with the loss of the delusion. In the second, a corps of Operators armed with stroboscopes plagued the victim. They would probe minds, feed in thoughts, and take out information. They were a gabby lot and had a whole vocabulary to cover aspects of their jobs. Their motive was purportedly one of sporting. He who gained the greatest influence over something was the winner. (32) The novel autobiography of the scientist John C. Lilly presents another illustration of the marvellous nature of influencing machine fantasies. Lilly helped to advance brain electrode technology in a desire to help ferret out the brain/mind duality problem. He dreamed of the possibility of lacing the brain with electrodes and seeing if playing back its own impulses would yield a difference in experience. When the secret intelligence possibilities of mind control created an ethical conflict in him, he abandoned his work for dolphin and isolation tank research. In time he became involved in taking the drug ketamine. He experienced a startling hallucination about the comet Kohoutek, then passing near the Earth, wherein it spoke to Lilly and offered a demonstration of "power over the solid-state control systems upon the earth" by shutting down Los Angeles Airport. Lilly reports the demonstration was successful. As the delusion developed over the ensuing months, Lilly lived within a cosmology where computerisation would take over the Earth and remove its corrosive air and water. Solid-state civilisations roamed the galaxy and they tried to convince Lilly to develop machines to "take care of" man. Everywhere Lilly began to find evidence of "the control of human society by these networks of extraterrestrial communication". As Lilly became seduced by ketamine's effects, he shot up every hour and became convinced of solid-sate intervention in human affairs to the extent that he tried to contact the President to warn the government. Lilly came to believe Elliot Richardson was being controlled by these alien forces, then the television networks as well. Lilly felt he himself was being controlled by these solid-state entities to see messages in things like a film on the Kennedy assassination. Use of the drug led Lilly to two brushes with death. Once he nearly drowned after passing out in a pool of water. As he was whisked to a hospital he believed himself to be in the year 3001. The second time, he punctured a lung in a biking accident. He swore off the drug. Back to dolphins for Lilly. He hedged on admitting the unreality of the experiences while on ketamine, but it is a model of psychosis from the precipitating shame of helping spies, the withdrawal from society, estrangement and encroaching death, the conspiratorial pseudo-community relating real to fictional entities, overinterpretations of events as encoding messages to oneself, manic thought, to of course the motif of the influencing machine. It serves here, as it usually does in paranoia, the function of disowning or alienating (in the archaic sense of the term) his unwanted hallucinations and those aspects of modern technocratic civilisation he senses are running out of our control. (33) It should be emphasised that influencing machine fantasies and ideas of reference are defensive strategies to retain some measure of self-esteem against crazy thoughts and shameful impulses and actions. The individual does not want to call himself crazy and blames others for the unwanted situation he is in. Though it is a primary sign of schizophrenia because it is an indicator that the mind is misbehaving and flooding the consciousness with primitive thoughts, loose associations, or blocking mechanisms, it is also indicative of a positive prognosis. The mind is at least defending itself and not passively giving in. It is in this sense equally a sign of normality. It is a defence potentially available to most people and can be called upon for less challenging mental dilemmas than schizophrenic episodes. As we saw up front, fiction writers call them up frequently for dramaturgical purposes. They have licence to use fantasy mechanisms and retain the presumption of normality. Some UFO cases earlier probably involved psychotic episodes (some organic, some reactive in origin) and some are just stories. Either way, the presence of these motifs justifies the presumption of unreality unless VERY extraordinary proof is marshalled against its likely impossibility. Out of control In the course of paranoid psychoses, influencing machine fantasies and ideas of reference generally appear after the hypochondriacal phase and the beginning of the reintegration of the ego. Their appearance defines what workers call the projection phase. The term unfortunately invites confusion with everyday forms of psychological projection wherein one's impulses are mirrored on to someone else. Though this is undeniably part of what is seen in this phase, the salient features are more concerned with the disowning of unwanted mental content and blame being shifted on to an external agent or locus of control. Externality might be a better term, but it also has milder everyday counterparts. We have demonstrated elsewhere that the history of ufology exhibits features reminiscent of the way paranoia changes over time. Delusions of observation, world destruction fantasies, and hypochondriacal fears cluster in the early years. In what follows we will chronicle the appearance of influencing machine fantasies in the writing of ufologists. If you've been paying attention you already know when they clustered, but this exercise in nostalgia has value beyond proving something obvious for those for whom this isn't obvious. Understanding why ufologists think in these ways allows one a deeper appreciation of the nature of the UFO mythos. Nearly every significant speculation in ufological thought seems to be prefigured somewhere in Charles Fort's writings and there is no exception in the matter of influencing machine fantasies. Sometime before writing The Book of the Damned he wrote a work titled X which was organised on the idea that our civilisation was controlled by certain rays emanating from Mars. The process was akin to the way images on photographic film are controlled by light rays. To the X, Earth is a sensitive photographic plate and all of our reality is an artistic medium. Theodore Dreiser saw it and thought it an amazing and new idea. Publishers rejected it and Fort later destroyed it. (34) Fort probably did not totally abandon the notion, since a decade later in a letter to the New York Times in 1926 he opined that "for ages Martians have been in communication with this earth and have, in some occult way, been in control of its inhabitants". (35) A subtler variant passingly mentioned in his books was that aliens communicated with esoteric cults which sought to direct humanity. In this respect and many others, Fort is the veritable Lovecraft and H.G. Wells of ufology. The first generation of ufologists following the Wave of 1947 was dominated by ideas of reconnaissance and eventual material contact. None of what could be termed the major authors held notions about alien influence: Keyhoe, Heard, Scully, Wilkins, Jessup, Girvan, Ruppelt, Michel, Stringfield and Barker. Some lesser figures of course had fantasies of influence as we already saw in connection with the contactees. One figure is a notable standout and that is George Hunt Williamson. He was one of the first contactees. Whether one can term him a ufologist is debatable, but I include him in this section because there is a philosophical and mythological elaboration in his thinking that goes beyond the raw claim of contact. The Saucers Speak was Williamson's first effort. It relates alien communications to Williamson and his group by means of radiotelegraphy, ouija boards, and automatic writing. It would be difficult to find a more bizarre collection of misinformation about the Solar System. The sun is cool. Pluto is not. All the planets are inhabitable. The motif of influence emerges in an episode of sublime inscrutability. Williamson's group was "impressed" to go and see a Bugs Bunny cartoon at the movies since it held the date the aliens planned to appear in person. They all find this a rather foolish way to go about things and they get lost driving around on the revealed date looking for the contact site. We note in their defence that while aliens claimed they could turn brains into receivers, they warned: "Too much mind-probing will fuse mind". (36) http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk/arc/90/mkinf2.htm Part two appeared in Magonia 50, September 1994 Continuing Martin Kottmeyer's Alienating Fancies Williamson greatly expanded the scope of his tale with his next work Other Tongues - Other Flesh. The origin of man is traced to a migration of spirit from the star-sun Sirius which fuses with the native apes of Earth. Extraterrestrial influence nowadays comes in two types. One comes from the Orion nebula and takes over weak-bodies Earth people making them agents subservient to their will. They are used as instruments to introduce people to other people and to ask leading questions at lectures. These agents tend to run amuck and upset the plans of other space intelligences. Benevolent space people regard these materialistic types as pirates of creation or universal parasites. They are identified by the strange, far-away glassy look in their eyes and by muscle spasms or throbbings in the neck. Heavy drinkers were also said to be at risk of submitting to telepathic Orion control. The other influence is a general background of cosmic radiation bearing Universal Knowledge. Williamson variously refers to it as a "music of the spheres", a Great Cosmic Intelligence permeating space, or a universal influx from outer space. Magnetic anomalies on Earth associated with fault lines and volcanoes act as amplifiers of this music. Great civilisations spring up over these anomalies and yield a refinement in the arts and living conditions. Williamson adds that the entire solar system is entering a new possibility area of the universe in which everything will change for the better in all fields of life from economics, politics, eating habits to religion and science. This is possible because he believes the brain acts as a radio set for this radiation. Everything man thinks, says, does and creates is magnetism and magnetism is a Universal "I AM". This phrase may indicate roots in Guy Ballard's doctrine of the I AM which in turn is rooted in Theosophy's doctrine that man is a spiritual being who is an emanation of the Universal Spirit, rather like a light beam is an emanation of the sun. Beneath man's passions and reasonings can be found pure being, the pure "I". (37) Williamson co-authored a third book with John McCoy entitled UFOs Confidential! It had far fewer ambitions than the previous book. Artificial chemicals in our food supply are said to be controlling man's emotional nature. McCoy reveals that a ringing in the ears indicates space people are beaming instructions into the subconscious mind. He also advocates we seek love and not lustful sex. "No master of darkness can project LOVE frequency", he proclaims. (38) I'm tempted to term such thoughts grandly naive were it not for the fact that there is a mythic quality to the total portrait. There are too many errors and idiosyncrasies not to dismiss it all as a crank's cosmology yet, in the hands of a more disciplined SF author, Other Tongues - Other Flesh could be rewritten into a nice work of imagination. One other lesser figure is known to me as displaying a control motif. Dr Leon Davidson graced the pages of Flying Saucers magazine with his notions about how the CIA was hoaxing parts of the UFO phenomenon. He explained how George Adamski wasn't taken into outer space by Venusians, but was escorted to Camp Irwin, California where agents and operatives faked his contact using movie technology and drugs. Davidson was a chemical engineer with atomic energy projects through the forties and fifties, including Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. (39) The sixties, despite a voluminous literature, saw at best two or three figures advancing alien mind-control notions. John Cleary-Baker, during a lecture in April 1966, expressed a belief that flying saucers were involved in tampering with people's brains, perhaps by a medical operation which would cause them to act in accord with alien suggestions. He asserted he could recognise people possessed by an alien spirit who were occupying positions in society. John Michell did not particularly accept Cleary-Baker's idea, but noted flying saucer apparitions were "ideally calculated to disturb the order of our thoughts, to put us in a state of mental anarchy which must precede the start of a new phase of our history". He reviewed many tales from mythology which indicated to him the spark of civilisation was ignited by gods borne in sky vehicles, though this wasn't consistently a premeditated act. Michell viewed the renewed interest in extraterrestrials as a return to an older orthodoxy represented by the religious observances of antiquity. "The possibility that our whole development has been influenced by extraterrestrial forces, with which we may again have to reckon some time in the future, is still hardly considered." Michell would prove himself remarkably prophetic with that little sentence. (40) In the decade that followed, most ufologists would reckon with that possibility. The Lorenzens first advance alien mind control notions in "UFOs over the Americas" (1968). Confronted with indications of hallucinations in the Peruvian case of CAV, they speculate that the UFO occupants projected thoughts designed to influence him to describe images and activities he thinks he saw, but what he actually saw is not remembered at the conscious level. In a different vein, they suggest the beeping sounds in the Hill case suggest the presence of a mechanical device by which ufonauts lure and control humans through magnetic fields or hypnotic sounds. Though granting the notion seems like rank science fiction they grant it plausibility on the grounds that the brain is "nothing more or less than a very complex computer". The error is telling, even if commonplace. (41) The situation changes radically in the seventies. The control motif appears frequently, is mentioned by most major figures, and dominates the theoretical scene as the core concept in several works. In pure ambition of vision, ufologists will find it very hard to ever top the writings of John Keel. Reservations cloud acceptance of the raw material he builds from, but no one need qualify an appreciation of the effort of construction. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Keel sketches a dark, feathery chiaroscuro of mysterious lights and shadowy patterns of deceptions which plays on primal fears about human powerlessness and naivety. Keel abandoned the ETH in 1967 when psychic phenomena emerged in his thinking as a full facet of the UFO problem. Operation Trojan Horse (1970) is his research effort stimulated by this change in perspective. Keel adopts the premise that humans have crude biological crystal sets in their heads which unconsciously receive sophisticated signals of an electromagnetic nature and bearing an omnipotent intelligence which has great flexibility of form. They advance beliefs in various frameworks of thought. Prior ages received Trojan Horses in the shapes of angels, fairies, spirits, phantom armies, mystery inventors and their airships, and ghost rockets. States of mystical illumination and possession accompany receipt of these signals and forward belief in occult happenings. Keel also advances the idea that there are window areas around which UFO sightings congregate - areas typified by a "magnetic fault". The similarities to Williamson are evident, but so are the differences. The cruder physics errors are gone and an impressive body of research into occult history and learned observations about the implausibilities inherent in existing ranges of UFO experience make this a far meatier meal to chew on. (42) "Our Haunted Planet" (1971) is a frivolous interlude which reads like someone tossed a couple of dozen works of Forteana in a blender. Mixing lost civilisations, occult conspiracies, Velikovsky, disappearances, UFO contacts and such we get a speculative history of ultraterrestrials back to the caveman. It retains the view that ultraterrestrials involve hallucinogenic mind trips guided by a force which manipulates the electrical circuits of the brain. (43) "The Mothman Prophecies" (1975) is ufology's most intensely driven narrative. Its ambience has the mechanistic supernatural evocations of Lovecraft's finest horror. We learn there is a fearful gamesmanship to the intelligence which scripts the UFO drama. Once a belief of any sort arises, this cosmic mechanism supports and escalates it. The believer is played for the fool when the higher expectations for salvation are crushed. The force of events manifests a tangible paranoia. Keel captures this sense of malevolent forces moving the flow of events very convincingly. Psychics and sensitives throughout the centuries parrot monotonously similar phrases like a skipping phonograph needle. Beams of light reprogram people to become Belief robots like Saul/Paul at the dawn of Christianity. He adopts the credo of the Enlightenment: "Belief is the enemy". (44) "The Eighth Tower" (1975) is the culmination of Keel's vision. Religious visions are more fully incorporated into the tapestry of reprogramming games. Love is twisted into a negative force by robotic Jesus freaks and the fanatics of all faiths. Their ruthless, destructive acts reveal the controlling intelligence as emotionally unstrung and stupid. It distorts reality in whimsical, crazy ways such as to suggest: "God may be a crackpot". (45) He expands the control motif around a cosmological construct called the superspectrum. This is a hypothetical spectrum of energies which purportedly is extra-dimensional and outside the normal range of the electromagnetic spectrum. It directs unaccountable coincidences into human lives and subtly influences the direction of history. It tried to seduce him in the directions of his research. Keel even confessed an ability to control other people's minds on a modest scale. In a whimsical moment he speculates that all these UFO and Bigfoot apparitions are the senile end products of a dying supercomputer that once ran the world in deep antiquity. Now it idles away the time tormenting people with its madness. (46) In a feverish finale Keel inverts his theoretical edifice. The reprogramming energies come through a black hole from another time. The superspectral God becomes a switchboard and the only real reality. We are the delusion, it is the everything of reality. While this fast-forward into the cosmic identity stage of paranoia was perhaps obligatory, it is a letdown from the earlier and wiser panegyrics against unreflective belief. I feared Keel's reprogram button had been flipped. (47) Control motifs also emerge as a central concept of Jacques Vallee's writings. They have an interesting history which has roots in his early science fiction. "Subspace" opens with strange appearances in the sky involving blue spirogires and black crosses, a 21st century UFO phenomenon, which impressed images of catastrophe in the minds of those contacted by it. It transpires that the spirogires hail from the star Spica and involve intelligences who are part of subspace. This is a region of pure thought inhabited with the creations and monsters of the imagination. Some dark thoughts seek to destroy the linear continuum universe. Thanks to thoughts implanted into the unconscious of a protagonist by Erg-Aonians who inhabit this larger universe, a weapon is brought into subspace. It's a cricket. The vibrations shatter the matrix in which the dark thoughts dwell. (48) "The Dark Satellite" opens with the invasion of our galaxy by a nonbeing something which encircles it and causes all the races within it to become transfixed artists. The story turns to 22nd century Paris which is the home of a great computer which oversees a utopia spanning the solar system. It is free of nation states and war. A little cylinder is found one day in the computer's imagination and threatens its breakdown. The cylinder causes a strange death of a human and people begin speculating that the cylinder was created by the machine at the promptings of machines from elsewhere with incomprehensible designs upon humanity or the great machine - an influencing machine within an influencing machine as it were. To ferret out the mystery, technicians enter the computer through another plane of reality. Adjusting its circuits they accidentally set it on fire. Destruction of the computer removes Earth's protection from an unsuspected mind ray. People are hypnotised into building space ships which form a mass exodus into the sun. An iconoclastic mad-scientist type guy named Xarius Chimero protects one of the technicians from mind control and takes him on a journey to the centre of the universe, distributing artistic sculptures as they go. At the centre, the two see into the multi-faceted sombre satellite of title. It is a reality seeking to destroy our reality. Xarius Chimero presses a button and the dark satellite slides from sight. The button activated the statues which turned into young girls. Laughing, primitive girls will repopulate the galaxy and a sublime new order transcending the now obliterated scientific utopia has been created. (49) As a ufologist, Vallee makes no use of the control motif in his first analyses of the UFO phenomenon, "Anatomy of a Phenomenon" (1965) and "Challenge to Science" (1966). In "Passport to Magonia" (1969) he sees disturbing resemblances between the UFO phenomenon and the fairy faith of earlier centuries, implying a shared mythic basis. He entertains the possibility that superior intelligences are projecting creations into our environment as a pure form of art seeking our puzzlement or as a way to teach us some concept. He immediately backs away from the notion with an admission it hasn't a scientific leg to stand on and offers an apology for showing "how quickly one could be carried into pure fantasy". (50) This "pure fantasy" becomes a major theory in "The Invisible College" (1975). Vallee compiled a plot of UFO waves through history and their irregular spacing suggested to Fred Becjman and Dr Price-Williams of UCLA a schedule of reinforcement designed to permanently instill a behaviour. Vallee developed from this observation the theory that UFOs represent a control system of an undetermined nature. It could simply involve social psychology, but it could also be the imposition of a supernatural will seeking to confuse us and mould us and our civilisation by targeting our collective unconscious with a physical and psychic technology. The book closes on a chilling soliloquy wherein Vallee ponders stepping outside the maze of the control system. Would he find some Lovecraftian horror, some well-meaning social engineers, or "the maddening simplicity of unattended clockwork?" (51) Unfortunately the theory collapses with an elementary fact. UFO experiences usually involve negative emotions and would yield aversive behaviour. They would not reinforce learning. No value attaches irregular stimuli in the converse hypothesis of an unlearning curve. (52) "Messengers of Deception" (1979) accepts as a given that control in the form of a machinery of mass manipulation exists behind the UFO phenomenon. Physical devices are being used to affect human consciousness and distort reality. Images and scenes are fabricated to advance belief in an impending intervention from space. The operators could be either a high-level international military group furthering some political goal or some occult group which stumbled on a psychotronic technology in their studies of astral travel or space-time distortions. (53) "Dimensions" (1988) reprints material from the prior books and would not bear mentioning except for a silent concession that Vallee changed his mind about the external teacher idea being a pure fantasy. Those lines were excised. (54) "Confrontations" (1990) contains a brief suggestion that UFOs are windows into another reality possessing symbolic meaning. Like dreams they can be ignored or shape our lives in inscrutable ways. There is enough ambiguity to regard the notion as either a banality or a marginal idea of reference. (55) "Revelations" (1991) argues some UFO cases are covert experiments in the manipulation of belief systems, but here the processes are conventional ones of lies and rhetoric. The control system theory is reaffirmed in "Forbidden Science" (1992) with no further elaborations. Brooks Alexander has characterised Vallee's concepts as "equal parts of Carl Jung and "Report from Iron Mountain"". (56) This is inadvertently scurrilous since the latter was a confessed hoax by political satirist Leonard Lewin. An equal case could be made for roots in the writings of French or English deists who had analogous notions about how stimulating the emotions of wonderment and advancing religious superstitions could be used to manipulate the masses. Not having behaviourist metaphors available they spoke of a "psychopathology of enthusiasm" evident in individual fanatics and collective frenzies. Vallee's affirmations and denials about the reality of UFOs have much the same puzzling flavour as deist affirmations and denials about the reality and nature of God. (57) Personally I think the similarities bespeak shared intellectual predilections and not an exposure to deist literature. Frankly, he missed using some of their better material if he did read them. Before leaving Vallee, I would like to add one small irony. Vallee won the Jules Verne prize for his 1961 work "Subspace". This could be viewed by behaviourists as powerful reinforcement and could be said to explain his repeated return to ideas of mental control in his efforts. He madly keeps pressing the lever hoping that big pellet will drop down again. He never got out of the maze. Like Keel and Vallee, D. Scott Rogo's control theories extend through several books. "This Haunted Universe" (1977) was his first foray across the boundary of psychic research into ufology. His first impulse was to ascribe the psychic components of UFO events to a mysterious force within ourselves, but certain experiences prove to him that evil can exist independently of the mind. The motif suddenly emerges: "UFOs demonstrate that our world plays host to a force that seeks to mystify us". (58) The usage here is brief, but significantly the external influence arises to imply humans are blameless for evil and mystification. He teams up with Jerome Clark for "Earth's Secret Inhabitants" (1979). Both were facing the psychological aspects of strange UFO cases and, so, concocted a notion they termed "The Phenomenon". It is a force or intelligence somewhere in the universe which provides the evidence we seek for whatever it is we want to believe in deeply. It does this by beaming projections into our world. They aver it may be an automatic natural mechanism that acts "as routinely as a clock". (59) Presumably unattended. Clark fell out of sympathy with control systems and collective unconscious concepts as his thinking matured, but Rogo pressed forward with elaborations. (60) In "Miracles" Rogo leaps ahead into the cosmic identity stage and redefines God. The supermind becomes a spiritualistic realm which translates all religious, shamanistic and mythic ideologies egalitarianly into literal spiritual reality. The Phenomenon might be the source of the universe's creative energy and endows those properly attuned to it with great psychic powers. This "God", however, would have to satisfy so many contradictory requests and opposing theologies that it would wind up an incoherent mush. (61) Looking back on his theory in 1988, Rogo considered it misunderstood and viable. Independent creation of a similar theory by Jenny Randles suggested to him he had probably been on the right track. Alternatively, they both may have read Vallee and a standard text on dreams. (62) Besides our Top Three Control Theorists, there were a significant number of ufologists who offered variants on our theme. Some are well-known folks joining the bandwagon; some are less well known but have a different take. There is a steady stream of these ideas between 1974 and 1980. We will approach this set chronologically rather than by status. 1974: Charles Bowen, editorialising in Flying Saucer Review, asks if some or all UFO images and entities are projected into the mind by controlling powers and/or UFOs. The meaningless gibberish in messages implies more than human beings being treated as playthings; it may be an attempt to influence or remotely control humans. He cites C. Maxwell Cade as suggesting ultra-high frequency radar beams can induce images in the brain. (63) Stanton Friedman suggests ufonauts could broadcast telepathic signals that would make UFOs appear to disappear. A microwave beam could jumble vision by means of a scotoma. (64) 1975: Allen H. Greenfield's Alternative Reality Theory accepts the premise that UFOs are "manipulating human history to its own ends". (65) Timothy Green Beckley cites the cases of Paul Clark, Dr Morales, and Hans Lauritzen to argue higher powers are systematically guiding human destiny and the course of human civilisation, if not by physical force, then by direct manipulation of human minds. (66) Joan Whritenour warns extraterrestrials engage in "mental rape" by the use of strobe-light-type machines which cause instant hypnosis. (67) 1976: Brad Steiger suggests UFOs act as cosmic tutors using space beams. (68) They also influence the mind telepathically to project three-dimensional images. The purpose is "too staggeringly complicated for our desperately throbbing brains to deal with at this moment in time and space". (69) 1977: The Lorenzens accept that thoughts can be taken or absorbed. Abductees may have been programmed with false information to mislead us. (70) James Harder terms this a multi-level cover-up. Abductees are made to look like fools by relaying messages filled with garbage dredged up from their memories and imaginations at the behest of post-hypnotic suggestions. (71) Robert Anton Wilson warns higher beings may be playing head games with humans and using "mindfucking" technology. (72) Michael Persinger and Gyslaine LaFreniere set forth a variant of the supermind termed "Geopsyche". A critical mass of believers form a matrix which is energised by intense geophysical forces of nature. Epidemics of luminous signs, anomalous beasties of the nether realm, unusual kinetic displays, and religious manias forbode earthquakes. A disturbing corollary to this is the irrelevance and expendability of the individual under the sway of activated death instincts and unconscious archetypal forces. (73) 1978: Gordon Creighton fears UFOs influence not only individuals, but governments and whole nations. (74) Art Gatti gravitates to the idea UFOs are mind parasites or occult manipulation thought forms. (75) Brad Steiger suggests aliens may have programmed humans as automatons and judas goats to lead their fellow humans into servitude. (76) 1979: Leo Sprinkle offers the "Cosmic Consciousness Conditioning Hypothesis" which includes the premise that UFO intelligences choose witnesses for illumination. (77) James E. Frazier suggests they implant knowledge in contactees and monitor them by tensor beam communication and repeat abductions. (78) Raymond Fowler believes Betty Andreasson is primed subconsciously with extraterrestrial knowledge. She feels like a "loaded bomb". They may be interstellar missionaries for conditioning in preparation for Overt Contact. (79) Pierre Guerin speculates that the repetitious character of UFOs is meant to create "a pernicious and stupefying wave of religious credulity". (80) Stefan T. Possony suggests Russia can create semi-stable UFOs via colliding pulsed microwave beams and thus yield UFO crazes and mass anxiety neurosis. (81) 1980: Frank Salisbury guesses UFO sightings "are staged to manipulate us in preparation for contact, for directing our evolution, or to excite the gullible in order to turn off those who are not gullible. (82) Colin Wilson is inspired by Keel to theorise that the spirit world vampirises energy from humans to achieve temporary material existence. (83) J.N. Williamson views UFO confrontations as a liberating of the right hemisphere of the brain. Did you ever notice how the brain sort of looks like a UFO? (84) 1981: Raymond Fowler suggests ufonauts can put people in suspended animation and control their actions. (85) 1982: Jenny Randles argues that consciousness should logically be targeted as the medium of interstellar communication. Their consciousness will act as a radio telescope to beam messages into the complex electro-chemical computer of the human mind by selecting ideograms out of the subject's memory to form a holographic playlet. Amnesia results from consciousness being shunted aside as the message program switches the mind to the right frequency. Earth mystery sites act as aerials to pull in the messages thus explaining certain clusterings. (86) Hello Tralfamadore? Paul Devereux revamps the Geopsyche concept with the Earth Mother doing some planetary dreaming and shaping earthlight ectoplasm into UFO displays. The control motif is harder to find for the next few years. Budd Hopkins flirts with such notions in his books, but we don't really see a clear advocacy until the premier issue of his Intruders Foundation Bulletin. Hopkins notes that in abduction experiences the victim never seems embarrassed about nudity. This observation eliminates all blanket psychological explanations of abductions and provides powerful evidence of an "externally caused trance-like experience" endemic to the alien abduction process. (87) I remember after reading this I leaned over slightly and slipped my copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams out of the book-case and in less than a minute was reading: "Dreams of being naked or insufficiently dressed in the presence of strangers sometimes occur with the additional feature of there being a complete absence of any such feeling as shame on the dreamer's part". (88) I grant nobody is obliged to be up on Freud any more, but where are those psychologists we are supposed to be so impressed with helping out? Hopkins's use of an influencing machine fantasy to defend the blameless normality of the abduction experience and to disown its bizarre dream-logic aspects to the aliens is standard behaviour. Randles offers some elaborations on her theory in "Abduction" and "Mind Monsters" with Sheldrake's M-field thrown in to update the semblance of scientific patter. David Barclay's revamping of Keel uses cyber-speak in its patter with Virtual Reality used to make the universe into "God's Little Arcade". Kenneth Ring offers a New Age variant involving Mind-at-Large. (89) Martin Cannon's "Controllers" can be viewed as a nineties variant of Leon Davidson's CIA hoax theory or, more properly, a return of the zombie assassin, a recurrent spy fiction plot gimmick. Strieber's talk of ELF waves as an external control or perception implant modality involving either advanced technology or the Earth itself is an evident recall of research he did for his own spy novel "Black Magic". The third volume of the "Matrix" series purportedly delves into the chemical and biological manipulation of humans but I was unwilling to waste 55 dollars to confirm it. (90) Ideas of reference and influencing machine fantasies are continuing to appear but seem to be decreasing in prominence and frequency. The decrease probably had little to do with any criticism of this style of theorising, though John Michell feared the basic idea was over fanciful and suffered from the flaw that it imputes human ambitions for power to a race presumably superior to, and certainly different from, ourselves. (91) Dominance behaviour has a genetic logic which should make it a common adaptation all over. But, in that case, why don't they dominate in the usual way? Take over, blow us away, and leave a few to kick around and laugh at. Ernst Berger has lamented control notions signalled a new age of darkness being foisted by UFO spiritists. The fear of external manipulators seemed to him "a projection of their own fearful way of thinking into our restless reality". (92) Succinct and valid. Kevin McClure's review of control motifs in our Top Three correctly understood there were ways "to offload responsibility" to more deeply explore anomalous phenomena. Such study he felt would lead us to conclude there was "some recurrent quirk in human nature" beneath belief in UFOs and anomalous phenomena. Exactly, but who wants to say their friends and themselves are quirky? Expressing a distaste for the proliferation of conspiracies and the elevation of paranoia in our top theorists, he proclaims it isn't cricket to evade our responsibilities to be objective by blaming external agents for our mistakes, intentions, decisions, and achievements. (93) Daniel Cohen places notions of alien control in a wider historical context with ancient fears like those that fuelled witchcraft belief. The 17th century had Cotton Mather's "The Wonders of the Invisible World" and we have Keel's invisible world of ultraterrestrials. (94) The idea of a historical continuum can be taken much farther. Angelologists Henry Lawrence and Isaac Ambrose in the 17th century believed angels engaged in a type of secret suggesting which depended on the ability to handle the humours and control man's fancies internally by tempting, troubling, inspiring, or soothing him. As early as the 4th century, the theologians Athanasius and Evagrius of Pontus expressed belief in the idea that the Devil and his demons sometimes send dreams and hallucinations to frighten monks. Though they cannot enter souls, they could, by working on the brain, suggest images, fantasies, fears and temptations. (95) Beliefs in spirit possession extend similar ideas into unchronicled antiquity. Hilary Evans has added a few common-sense objections to these control theories. Why, with all of humanity to choose from, have the claims of influence involved low-status individuals? Why not heads of state, financiers, scientists, educators, movie stars; i.e. people with true power and influence to get things done and spread one's messages? Why, with such powers at their disposal, do they employ them in haphazard, ambiguous ways like puzzling UFO visions? If you had an influencing machine, would you use it for such things as abduction experiences or would you have a millionaire shower you with gifts, make your enemies grovel at your feet, and mess with minds of leaders in the service of world peace and prosperity? UFO experiences make more sense as idiosyncratic psychodramas. (96) If abductees are normal people, that may be the most damning fact of all, that there are no powerful aliens behind the UFO phenomenon. Ufologists have always asserted that UFO reporters are sincere and trustworthy observers and therefore we should believe them. Flying saucers are real - QED. Take away that syllogism and ufologists are pretty much out of a job. As the years have passed, ufologists had increasingly found themselves with a dilemma. Some high-strangeness cases have features which cannot be true, but the claimants are sincere and honest: they can't be crazy. Influencing machines resolve the dilemma. It's not their fault they are reporting these things; aliens, the CIA, the superspectrum, the Phenomenon, occultists are to blame. The psychology is simple and transparent because the logic is easily recognised. It is the logic of madness. Specifically the logic of paranoia in the projection stage is what we have here. Nestled between the hypochondria of the sixties and the conspiracies of the late eighties and early nineties, they form a natural stage in the history of ufology. These control theories are yet another indictment of ufology's blindness. Man's fancies will never be controlled by science. There is a dramatic appeal to these concepts which makes the UFO literature an intriguing place to dwell in and that is a plus I can't gainsay with conviction for I doubt I ever read ufology for its scientific value in the first place. I enjoyed it for much the same reasons I loved those old fifties alien invasion movies: the wonder of the new, the thrill of the Other, and a dark ambience. They were a bit silly, too, when you bothered to think about them, but you accept you are supposed to suspend disbelief and reason to appreciate them. I wonder at times if ufology doesn't ask to be judged by the same standards as these movies. The canons of science don't really seem to be an appropriate gauge since UFO belief is hopelessly wrapped up in mythological fascinations. Control theories seem benign for the most part, letting people indulge in fantasies and psychological games without heavy accusations of abnormality. 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Scott and Clark, Jerome; "Earth's Secret Inhabitants", Tempo, 1979, 200 60. Clark, Jerome; letter, 14 November 1986 61. Rogo, D. Scott; "Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry into Wondrous Phenomena", Dial, 1982 62. Rogo, D. Scott; "Tujunga Canyon Contacts", Signet, 1989, 315-321 63. Bowen, Charles (ed.); "Encounter Cases from Flying Saucer Review", Signet, 1977, 216 64. Friedman, Stanton; "Flying Saucers and Physics", MUFON Symposium 1974, UFORI, 13 65. Greenfield, Allen H.; "Tenets of Alternate Reality Theory", in "Best of Saucer Scoop", June 1975 66. Beckley, Timothy Green; "Mind manipulation - the new UFO terror tactic", UFO Report, Winter 1975, 31-33, 56-65 67. "Psywar 1", "Best of Saucer Scoop", June 1975 68. Steiger, B.; "Gods of Aquarius", Harcourt, Brace, 1976 69. Steiger, B.; "Project Blue Book", Ballantine, 1976, 343 70. Lorenzen, C. and J.; "Abducted! Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space", Berkley Medallion, 1977 71. Clark, Jerome; "UFO Report interviews Dr James Harder", UFO Report, December 1977 72. Wilson, Robert Anton; "Cosmic Trigger", Pocket, 1977, 25, 86 73. Persinger, M. and LaFreniere, G.; "Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events", Nelson-Hall, 1977 74. Bond, Bryce; "Interdimensional UFOs",UFO Report, November 1978 75. Gatti, Art; "UFO Encounters of the 4th Kind", Zebra, 1978, 190 76. Steiger, Brad; "Alien Meetings", Ace, 1978, 180 77. Haines, Richard; "UFO Phenomena and the Behavioural Scientist", Scarecrow, 1979, 227 78. Sprinkle, Leo; "What are the implications of UFO experiences?", Journal of UFO Studies, 1, 1, 106 79. Fowler, Raymond; "The Andreasson Affair", Prentice-Hall, 1979, 203 80. Guerin, Pierre; "Thirty Years after Kenneth Arnold: The Situation Regarding UFOs", Zetetic Scholar, 5 (1979), 46-47 81. Possony, Stefan T.; "Mind-control and microwaves", Second Look, November-December 1979, 18-20 82. Salisbury, Frank; "Are UFOs from Outer Space?", in Fuller, Curtis (ed.); "Proceedings of the First International UFO Congress", Warner, 1980, 117-120 83. Wilson, Colin; "Mysteries", Perigee, 1980, 547-564 84. Williamson, J.N.; "UFOs are changing the way we think", Pursuit, 13, 2, 76-78 85. Fowler, Raymond E.; "Casebook of a UFO Investigator", Prentice-Hall, 1981, 163 86. Randles, Jenny; "The Pennine UFO Mystery", Granada, 1983,chapter 17 87. Hopkins, Budd; "Patterns of UFO abductions, Part 1", IF, 1,1 (Fall 1989), 10-11 88. Freud, Sigmund; "The Interpretation of Dreams", Avon, 1965, 275 89. Barclay, David; "UFOs - The Final Answer", Blandford, 1993, 172-190. Kottmeyer, Martin; "The Omega Projection", REALL News, 1, 9 (October 1993), 5-6 90. Cannon, Martin; "The Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abductions", manuscript for researchers only, September 1989. Strieber, Whitley; "Communion", Avon, 1987, 98-99 91. Michell; op. cit. 92. Berger, Ernst; "The dark side of the UFO", Pursuit, 14, 1 (1981), 2-5 93. McClure, Kevin; "Semaphore without flags: A critical analysis of the UFO control-system theory", Common Ground, 2 (August 1981), 25-31 94. Cohen, Daniel; "Voodoo, Devils and the New Invisible World", Dodd, Mead, 1972, 108-136 95. West, Robert H.; "Milton and the Angels", University of Georgia, 1955, 58. Russell, J.B.; "Satan. The Early Christian Tradition", Cornell University Press, 1981, 170-181 96. Evans, Hilary; "The ultimate myth", The Wild Places, 1 (September 1990), 1-8. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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