Invisibility and the Power of Madness

 “Power, I said! Power! Power to walk into the gold vaults of nations, into the secrets of kings, into the Holy of Holies; power to make the multitudes run squealing in terror at the touch of my little invisible finger. Even the moon’s frightened of me! Frightened to death! The whole world’s frightened to death!”

(NOTE: this piece includes examples from true crime, including rape and murder- if you are sensitive to such things take this under consideration)

Dr. Jack Griffin, in the 1933 movie The Invisible Man, revels in the terror he can cultivate while at the same time overestimating his abilities. Such are the risks one takes on when using experimental serums to gain the power of invisibility; the side effects, namely madness and megalomania, undermine the usefulness of such an otherworldly talent. Surely there are more noble uses for such a power, although the required nudity for the full effect would again undermine non-creepy aspirations. It seems that the very existence of imperceptible forces- particularly ones with agency and equally undetectable motives- is inherently terror-inducing. Ghosts are an obvious example of this; while full-bodied apparitions are reported, more commonly they are not seen but rather felt, heard, recorded as electronic voice phenomena, or in the case of poltergeists, seen only through their effect on material objects. All of this can be unnerving to someone living in a haunted house. Seeing is believing, they say- but sometimes the unseen opens the mind to previously unknown heights of fear.

We see this often in the realms of the highly weird. In various streams of folklore, beings such as elves and boggarts can be invisible; UFOs seem to disappear and reappear at will, and some suggest that Bigfoot can dip in and out of our plane of reality. John Keel proposed the idea of ultraterrestrials, beings existing alongside us but on a wavelength of tangible reality that doesn’t translate in our limited human view of the world. Ghost hunters of the Warren school of paranormal investigation would have you believe that invisible demons are hiding in every corner, waiting for a chance to possess or obsess you. In recent years we see more reports of Shadow Men, including the Hat Man, which can easily hide in the dark- and podcasts such as Monsters Among Us bring us reports of the Glimmer Man, a being who is almost entirely invisible but for a shimmering outline, like the effect used in the Predator movies. These sound very much like what is described in Robert Guffey’s book Chameleo, and said book contains a patent for the technology needed to accomplish such a feat. Incidentally, in conversation with the author, it seems entirely likely that the writers of The Invisible Man remake in 2020 used his book as a reference. We are brought around, as if by unseen forces, full circle.

The thing about ghosts, bigfoot, and whatever other weird entities people report having encountered is that no one can really definitively prove their existence. When something spooky happens in your home, you can always shrug and say “well, there must be a rational explanation.” Paranormal events are fleeting, unexpected and ephemeral; while they can be traumatic or terrifying, and often have lasting impact on the experiencer. A large part of this lingering effect seems to be exploration of the mystery. The quest for answers, for definitions, for an adequate understanding of the mechanisms behind a high strangeness event can last a lifetime- or longer, as the stories live on through written accounts in the paranormal literature. Uncertainty isn’t comforting, and can cause all manner of strife, but certain kinds of certainty are much more upsetting. Suppose you hear a sound in your kitchen in the middle of the night, and when you go to see what it was you find only an empty room. It’s puzzling, but chances are you’d go back to bed. But suppose there’s a flesh and blood man you’ve never seen before standing at your kitchen sink- that’s scary! I’ve heard many paranormal investigators say this, and this writer is inclined to agree- other people are scarier than most spooks, goblins, cryptids, and what-have-yous.

In a practical sense, for investigators, this often comes up when discussing the etiquette around boots-on-the-ground research on public and private property. There are places in the United States where people will be less than subtle in response to trespassers. It’s good to keep in mind when permission is needed to visit a place, and in the case of wooded areas it is best to be aware of when hunting season is to avoid becoming an accidental target. There’s loads of practical considerations to be taken under advisement, should you pursue the paranormal out in the wild, but such is not the purpose of this meditation. Our focus here, as we adjust our night vision goggles, is on those who often go unseen- despite being very much real people.

For starters, the human mind is only capable of taking in so much at any given time. Walking down a busy city street, you’re more apt to notice a crowd of people than several hundred individuals. It would be impossible and pointless to notice each one, so the mind tends to pay attention only to ones who stand out or to ones it might be steering you into collision with. If you want to take an extra step into the weird, you could consider that some percentage of those people aren’t really people at all. How would you know if some of them were ghosts, or something else entirely? This little thought experiment  has so far neglected the animal and plant life you might pass by on such a walk, and inanimate objects, structures, and physical accoutrement. Much of it is effectively invisible, hidden in plain sight.

This is particularly true of people in positions of physical labor. As a former master of the custodial arts, this writer can affirm that the janitor is the most innocuous fly on the wall at any company. Where there is road work, or utility work on a roadway, workers wear bright orange or yellow to make them stand out and paradoxically we fail to see them as people when we drive by- they are more like walking road obstructions. More to the point, when someone is dressed for work in some manner of uniform and appears to be doing something work related, we ignore them because they’re probably supposed to be doing that. No alarms are set off. They basically aren’t really seen at all.

There’s a whole digression one might attempt to convey about how this reflects on us all in regard to class, capitalism, and so on, but the point here is that most people have their blinders on because they have better things to worry about. A lineman up on a utility pole is supposed to be up there doing something probably beneficial, and warrants no more than a passing notice which will be forgotten once the percipient looks at the time and realizes with dread that they might be a couple of minutes late for work again. But what if the lineman isn’t supposed to be there? What if he’s up to no good?

A perfect illustration of paranoia in this respect can be found in the episode “Wetwired”, from the third season of The X-Files. Mulder and Scully investigate a series of baffling murders by average people with no criminal backgrounds. It’s revealed (spoiler alert) that their TV signals are being tampered with, and the subliminal effect of said tampering is that they imagine objects of their personal fears and hatred superimposed over the people they see. Scully even falls victim to it, imagining a clandestine meeting between Mulder and the mysterious Smoking Man in a car, which causes her to unravel and think the worst about her partner. As it happens, the lineman who installed this mind control device was working for The Smoking Man, in one of the many experiments under his purview that occur in the show’s run. The Smoking Man himself is an invisible man, with no discernable history or even a name; he is one of many government workers, unquestioned as he goes from one federal building to the next, but is also pulling the strings or observing in a darkened corner while puffing on a Morley. The X-Files at its best was exceptional in its menacing and often subtle glimpses of the paranoiac mindset, of the impulses that drive one to conspiracy theory and aluminum foil hats. The idea that the man on the utility pole is casually and brazenly installing a mind control device on the cable line, in broad daylight, is very unsettling. 

The classic show from the 1990s of course also used the UFOlogical trope of Men in Black, but the thread we’re now pulling on is a class of “men” (although gender need not really be considered) altogether different. There are likely endless variations on the idea of invisible people, phantom strangers and the like which never get reported because they don’t fit a profile- or perhaps are never noticed at all. It’s such a nebulous subject that one wonders whether it's worth following up on- but, if you’ve read this far, we can assume you’re interested enough to consider it. While Men in Black are menacing in their assumed authority, often posing as or suggesting a government assignment, the phantoms we set our sights on today are quite the opposite. These invisible people very much come out of the woodwork, and vanish again, leaving behind a vague unease and concerns of intrusion and violation.

In fiction, particularly horror and mystery, we see these figures as red herrings often enough. The groundskeeper or some other form of “help” is a focus of our attention in the narrative just to throw us off, and having a mystery resolve with the butler as the killer has been a considered hackneyed device since the 1930s. Still, in these instances, the characters are known. They have names, and are trusted by their employers. All the same, they can be terrifying for reasons that are difficult to understand; take the chauffeur in Burnt Offerings, for example. There is no real explanation for him in the movie and he plays no role in the events that unfold, yet his appearance is one of the more unsettling elements in the film. 

Urban legends and folklore more broadly present us with other variations on the theme. Take, for instance, Owen Davies' look at folklore around ice cream vans and the sinister narratives they engender. From rumors of drug trafficking to phantom ice cream truck jingles in remote places, it shows how the mundane can become the extremely weird with just a slight alteration in perception. There are also reports, mostly considered urban legend, of such things as phantom social workers, or roving cults posing as legitimate companies for hire. The trouble is, real people do use fake credentials to win confidence with their victims, and there are and have been very real cults flying under the radar as “volunteer organizations”. Virtually anywhere you look, you can find sinister motives if you squint hard enough or apply the right light- but doing so is the very essence of paranoia. Perhaps it’s best to simply keep in mind that just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. 

Years ago I stumbled upon an obscure bit of such strangeness from none other than Betty and Barney Hill, known as the first high-profile abductees in American UFOlogy. The story, as printed in an issue of Flying Saucer Review from the 1970s, is about a trio of Men in Green. While less menacing, perhaps, than the black clad variety, these men are nevertheless baffling and eerie in their appearance. Barney’s sister had made a surprise visit, and let herself into the Hills’ home one day when a man came to check the gas meter in the basement. He looked like he was supposed to be there doing that very thing, clad in a green work uniform, so she let him in. Before long another man dressed the same way came to the door for the same reason. Rationalizing that the man was supposed to be there, perhaps following up on the first guy having taken the reading incorrectly, she let him in. The third man who showed up made mention of the fact that Barney had told him she’d be there to let him in, at which point she realized that something untoward was going on. Barney didn’t know she was there. She slammed the door in his face and spent the afternoon terrified, anxiously awaiting her brother’s return. 

It’s unsettling and seemingly pointless- what could the men have been up to in the Hills’ basement? Even stranger, Betty found the story familiar. In August of 1975 the same series of events happened to her, except the third man arrived a few weeks after the first two. She only realized something was up when the gas bill arrived and the cost was labelled as “estimated’, and upon calling the gas company to complain that three men had come to read her meter without apparently having done so, she was informed that the actual workers for the utility wore blue uniforms, not green. Betty was mystified, as I’m sure the reader is, about who or what those Men in Green were and what possible business they got up to in the basement. If it weren’t for her status as an abductee who people frequently interviewed, we may never have gotten the story at all.

The story brings to mind The Mad Gasser of Mattoon, which is considered by many to have been a case of mass hysteria. Was it? The connection here is tenuous, it seems, but in 1944 a series of attacks were reported in Mattoon Illinois involving sudden illnesses thought to be caused by a mystery gas. Reports came in about the culprit, a shadowy figure wearing black and using some strange device to pump gas into the homes of unsuspecting women and make them ill. The Mad Anesthetist, as he was also called, seemed to be a strange phantom cat burglar except for the fact that the crimes appeared to be pointless and nothing was ever stolen. The police eventually concluded that there was no Mad Gasser, and the variations in witness descriptions of the attacker didn’t help matters. In some cases, the Gasser was thought to be a woman, and in one event a tube of lipstick was found left behind. Others claimed that the culprit wasn’t human at all, some even saying it was some form of ape man. But suppose that the gas was time-released by Green Men weeks before the events in the summer of ‘44, flying under the radar and falling out of conscious memory by the time people noticed the effects? To follow the line of thought to its most paranoid extreme, the phantom “Gasser” might have just been the red herring, or there to measure the effects… and possibly, to aid in the cover-up. 

To make this strange line of thought even more sobering and plausible, Fortean writer Loren Coleman had an odd experience in researching the case back in the 1970s when he wrote for FATE Magazine. He was tracking the crimes of Michael Hubert Kenyon, who at the time hadn’t been caught and was known as the Illinois Enema Bandit. Coleman thought that there might be a worthwhile comparison between the inexplicable Mad Gasser crimes and the then-current bizarre sexual assaults perpetrated by the Bandit. Kenyon would abduct women in order to administer enemas to them against their will. Coleman wrote inquiries to newspapers and police departments to get the facts of the case, and was visited one day at his Decatur home by a man in dark clothing calling himself Lieutenant Detective Applegate. He strongly suggested Coleman cease his questioning of the Enema Bandit case, which he eventually did- but later, when he called the local police department, he found that no such detective was in their employ. The tall, thin, dark-suited man who arrived one night to question the investigator of anomalies turned out to be one himself. He vanished into the night like the Mad Gasser or so many reported Men in Black. 

A famous Men in Black encounter comes to mind, that of Dr. Herbert Hopkins in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. The mystery man was reported to have been pale and seemingly wearing lipstick, which has resonance with one of the few clues left by the Gasser; he also told Hopkins, after causing a coin to disappear, that Barney Hill had died because he had no heart- “just as you no longer have a coin”. The implied threat is chilling, and although the event itself is believed by many to have been completely fabricated by Hopkins, it has nevertheless been very influential in our conception of MiB. The references to lipstick and Barney Hill make it worth mentioning here, and brings us back on track to examine his mystery Men in Green.

The attire of the mysterious trio visiting the Hills’ New Hampshire home brings to mind an infamous killer who terrorized nearby Massachusetts, over a decade prior. The Boston Strangler had everyone in the state on edge, while he was at large, and people began to suspect members of their own communities. People who had never been regarded before now came under scrutiny. Much of what I say here is anecdotal, from people who remember hearing about the grotesque murders on the news and how others behaved- even if they lived nowhere near Boston. Eventually, an inmate at Bridgewater State Hospital admitted to the killings. The man in question was Albert DeSalvo, who had previously been known as The Measuring Man and… the Green Man. His crimes started with convincing young women that he had been sent by a modeling agency, on a tip from someone the victim knew, to take their measurements in order to secure a job as a clothing model. He gained their trust through innocuous seeming means. He was dubbed the Green Man for a series of rapes committed throughout Connecticut, because of his tendency to wear green work pants. He claimed to have committed 300 such crimes over four states, though authorities doubt those figures. Many believe now that he had nothing to do with the murders attributed to The Strangler, and it’s possible those crimes were committed by more than one person. It’s worth noting that his coworkers found him to be a likeable guy, a family man. As is the case with many serial killers or sex criminals, they pass the test of normalcy in their day to day lives. By all appearances, they seem average and harmless.

“An invisible man can rule the world. Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go. He can hear every secret. He can rob, rape, and kill!”

DeSalvo was killed in prison in 1973. Clearly he had nothing to do with the Hills and their basement in the years that followed, but the workwear description is eerie. Even if he didn’t kill anyone during the wave of Strangler murders, his known crimes are quite bad enough- and if he admitted to crimes he didn’t commit, that can only mean the real Strangler got off scot free, roaming invisibly among the population. One might consider what it means to be a Green Man, and consider the popular decorative motif down through the ages of a foliate face emerging from a stone structure, blended in with the wall. A Green Man blending in with vegetation, some primordial entity typifying the grandeur and terror of nature, the scope of which is often seen as a whole with the distinct particulars beyond our ability to see and identify clearly. The invisible is all around us, and can be seen if one knows how to look- but looking too hard can have you jumping at shadows. 

The fact is that although we see each other everyday, we, unlike another famous fictional invisible man, don’t know what evil lurks inside the hearts of men. Our age has allowed unprecedented insights into how people think, and one would be forgiven for thinking it was better when everyone didn’t broadcast their weird views into the ether of the internet for all to see. This may distance us even further from the physical acknowledgment of being seen out in the world, but the point here is that criminals and monsters of all kinds have their own unknowable motives- and if you add mind control narratives into the mix, those motives may not even be their own. It’s worth noting that Barney Hill was a postal worker, and had he been a victim of MK Ultra, as some claim, could himself have been an invisible man. A Manchurian Candidate, delivering the mail, unquestioned and unfettered, with purposes unknown to just about everyone least of all himself. By the 90s, when The X-Files brought this kind of paranoia into focus, mailmen were in the news for workplace shootings and the trope of “disgruntled postal workers” became common. Sadly, mass shootings are so common now that such events would barely register in the cultural zeitgeist. 

Looking for unseen forces controlling the apparent chaos that unfolds daily can be seen as a fool’s errand. There may or may not be a Smoking Man in a dark room watching his plans unfold, but either way knowing about it isn’t terribly helpful. Perhaps it's best to accept that everyone to some degree is quietly crazy in their own way, and that the apparent chaos is exactly what it seems to be. The invisible people around us, both the human variety and the other, interlock with one another in a clockwork current of madness in a way that is perceived as normal right up until the moment it is seen for what it is. What’s scary is that we are part of it as well. We are all the Invisible Man, ruling and terrifying the world.

Flim Flam, Fables, and the Phenomenon

 

The study and pursuit of something so nebulous as UFO phenomena, especially when you are open enough to include tangential phenomena as part of what is often now referred to simply as "The Phenomenon", can feel like a maddening and foolish endeavor. One can investigate UFOs in any number of ways, or some combination of various ways. UFOs have been looked as a sociological phenomenon, and from a psychological perspective. They have been studied in varying types of scientific methodologies, from the astronomical to the statistical. They can be fodder for B-movies and tabloid headlines, or they can be viewed through mystical and occult perspectives. All of these combine in a view of UFOs as modern folklore and myth-making, where the stories themselves are the important part and proof of their veracity or physical reality is secondary. After all, physical evidence is in short supply; it could be that the paradigms we have for determining "reality" of something so strange as UFOs is ill-equipped to contend with how malleable reality really is, that the physical realm isn't the only one, and that the truth tends to be found in unexpected places beyond the grasp of measurable data. 

Even when we consider the folkloric, mythic narratives of high strangeness, we are forced to contend with the old chestnut of reliability of the witness. I have tackled this subject before here on this blog, but for our purposes now I want to explore how witness testimony tends to be handled. A lot of the classic UFO stories were heralded by researchers because of the supposed reliability of the witness to the event; for instance, the Lonnie Zamora encounter- as a policeman he was thought to be trustworthy and a "trained observer". Many other incidents reported by law enforcement are held up as more reliable, and the same treatment gets applied to those serving in the armed forces or to those in academia. We gravitate towards authority when facing the unknown, even if the unknown by definition has no attendant authority figure. It seems that some amount of UFO enthusiasts have turned away from this mindset, and are more likely to consider cases like that of Joe Simonton and his flying saucer flapjacks. Of course, old Joe did have some physical evidence in the form of the pancake, which was tested and found to be composed of mundane, earthly elements- which would seem to discredit his story. It would seem that way, perhaps, but the story still persists, even though Simonton was not a "trained observer". 

Using too many specific examples may bog down the point being made here, but as a general rule most well-known UFO encounter stories, and personalities attached to them, become controversial in one way or another. Retellings of events, attempts at debunking (up to and including character assassination), profiteering, and sensationalism all play a part in weakening the credibility of a story. Sometimes the tales buckle under the weight of a little bit of scrutiny, only to be bolstered by further scrutiny of the sources scrutinizing them. Ultimately, they may fall down completely, or stand tall as a tale of mystery. If my way of writing about this seems absurdly repetitive, that's intentional- the idiosyncratic use of language here illustrates well the distortions caused by the feedback loop in looking closely at the highly strange. The caution here would be not to throw out the proverbial babies with the tubs of proverbial bath water. When scrutiny reveals inconsistencies, it may simply mean that the story is too weird to be related any other way.

UFOlogists have classically hated a hoaxer. Anyone caught in a lie (as a witness, at least) is subject to being written off entirely by some amount of what can loosely be called "the field" of UFOlogy. The major investigation groups abhorred "repeaters" back in the day; it was thought that the odds were against even a singular sighting, and that anyone with multiple such stories was likely to be a liar or mentally ill. If such a person also dabbled in magic, or lived in a haunted house, or once saw Bigfoot, the credibility meter would drop much further. Sometimes you would have what sounded like a "normal" UFO sighting, and the attendant other phenomena would be omitted from the report for fear that it would undermine the legitimacy of the primary story. In the service of presenting a palatable truth, only a half-truth was presented- and lies of omission are still lies, which then undermines the investigator... resulting in more proverbial babies being lost in the flood of discarded bath water.

We all know that lying is wrong, even though all of us do it all of the time in small ways. Even back in the days of Aesop tales were told about the dangers of lies, and the boy who cried "wolf" served as a cautionary tale. On the other hand, as noted by Aristotle, the liar can tell the truth without having to worry about being taken at his word. Maybe the UFOs, whatever they may actually be, understand this aspect of narrative and choose to visit liars simply because no one will believe them. We can extrapolate from this that they might be more likely to appear in front of someone who is under the influence of drugs, or to a comedian who no-one would take seriously. To mix fables here, perhaps the wolf is really a UFO in wolf's clothing, and no matter how much the shepherd boy cries it won't prove a thing about the reality of wolves or UFOs.

In the interest of reinforcing this unconventional idea, by way of truth-finding via unlikely source material in our own peculiar idiosyncratic fashion, let us look at the Phenomenon as Flim Flam and Fable through two obscure sources from the 1960s. 

A 1960 Mexican movie, La Nave de los Monstruos (Ship of Monsters) becomes an unlikely candidate for illustrating the nature of the Phenomenon. It stars a popular actor, comedian, and singer / songwriter of Mexico during that era named Eulalio González, often called "Piporro". He is a singing cowboy who tells all manner of fish tales to his friends, all of whom rightly dismiss his stories. It's only natural that when a pair of buxom space ladies from Venus land the titular ship of monsters in search of a male earth specimen, they find Piporro's character Lauriano.

It would be easy to dismiss the movie as B-movie balderdash, even if, like your humble writer you are a fan of the genre. La nave de monstruos has in spades everything one could want from a B-movie; monsters, a cheesy robot, pin-up beauties, and even a vampire and some musical numbers. It also does not take itself too seriously, and its the very playfulness of the movie that makes it so profoundly appropriate in relation to the Phenomenon. When no one believes Lauriano about his experiences at the end of the movie, he is able to laugh about it and go on living his best singing cowboy life. And although the assemblage of elements in the story are absurd, they all have corollaries in the annals of UFO testimony. The creature on the poster, for instance, bears a passing resemblance to the humanoids reported in the Pascagoula abduction event, which occurred over a decade after the movie's release. The Venusian woman aren't very different from the alleged flying saucer occupants contactees like Truman Bethurum or Orfeo Angelucci wrote about. The movie also has a scene in which a cow is reduced to a skeleton in an instant, at a time well before cattle mutilation became associated with UFOs. 

The purpose for the Venusian mission is to find specimens to help repopulate Venus, hence the monsters which range from a cyclopean named Uk to a Martian prince, vaguely in the form of a grey alien, named Tagual. This fits in with the famous Antonio Villas-Boas case, in which he is forced to copulate with an alien, and also later narratives about genetic and reproductive motives behind abductions that became popular in the 1980s. It's worth mentioning as well that Villas-Boas was often characterized as a farmer, less reliable and respectable than one might prefer in a witness, but this is not true. He went on to lead a normal life, and became a successful lawyer. 

Ultimately, the movie is a fun romp and well worthy of a viewing. It may interest those who are interested in UFO lore, as it were, to look at it as an allegory for the Phenomenon more broadly.

Similarly, we see this kind of narrative play out in an episode of Twilight Zone called "Hocus Pocus and Frisby". It's certainly one of the sillier episodes of the Zone, and doesn't often rate on most lists of episodes that defined the series. However, the silliness of it mirrors the absurdity of UFO stories, replete with an unreliable narrator and an incredulous audience for his recounting of events. Rod Serling introduces Frisby in his inimitable way thusly:

He has all the drive of a broken camshaft and the aggressive vinegar of a corpse. As you've no doubt gathered, his big stock in trade is the tall tale. Now, what he doesn't know is that the visitors out front are a very special breed, destined to change his life beyond anything even his fertile imagination could manufacture.

Frisby is a shopkeeper, regaling his customers with whoppers so big Abe Simpson would blush at the telling. He is played by Andy Devine, known for his work in westerns and his whistling, wavering voice. The townsfolk balk at Frisby's grandiose lies of valor and genius, but he is unperturbed and keeps telling them. No one believes him, but, as we come to learn, they love hearing his stories even if they are visibly unconvinced.

As he is closing up for the day, a pair of well dressed men in a black car pull up outside looking for fuel. Frisby can't resist his impulses, and tells them all about his inventions in automotive history and his ingenious innovations in science. The two men are impressed, and say they will see him again very soon. The Men in Black phenomenon has a very obvious resonance here. The men act strangely, seem unfamiliar with very mundane things, and cryptically tell Frisby they will see him again soon. 

It turns out that these MiB are aliens, who have landed their craft somewhere nearby. They act unfamiliar with mundane things because they are visitors from another planet, and such mundane things are exotic to them. Also alien to their perspective is the concept of dishonesty. They take Frisby at his word, and decide he is an exemplary specimen to collect and bring back to their home planet. They selected him purely because of his lies, and when he tells the truth- that he is full of hot air and just enjoys spinning a yarn, it has no effect against their decision. He manages to escape by playing his harmonica badly. For some reason the sound of the musical instrument is incredibly painful to the aliens and messes up their technology. Naturally, the teller of insane tales finds himself in an insane situation, escaping because of an unbelievable weakness these extraterrestrial visitors have.

He arrives back at his shop to find his friends have set up a surprise 63rd birthday party for him, and they present him with a trophy for The World's Greatest Liar. Of course they don't believe their old pal, and never will- but they love the stories and celebrate him specifically for his tremendous yarns. Tell us another one, Frisby, we all want to hear it... Going from one group who wants him because they believe his lies to be true, back to the safety of those who feel a sense of truth to the certainty of his lies, we have an approximation of the way the lore in UFO history goes. 

Perhaps we also have an idea about the inherent mechanisms in the behaviors and motivations of these crafts and their reported occupants. At the very least, I am led to believe we have a rough guide on the best way to proceed- with a laugh, a song and dance, or a tall tale with good cheer and friendship. After all, that's really what it's all about.

A Very Contactee Christmas

 

Children the world over spend Christmas Eve dreaming of gifts delivered by air, of a man landing from on high spreading joy and mirth. Some even scan the skies, hoping to catch a glimpse of a flying sleigh or reindeer traversing the clouds. Gift giving involving aerial beings is not a foreign concept for the holiday season, but flying saucer occupants receiving gifts from earthlings is alien to our expectations.

Such was the case, however, one Christmas Day in 1955. At the home of contactee Buck Nelson, a special guest was among the celebrants- Buck’s flying saucer friend Bucky the Spaceman. Bucky had taken Buck on a round-trip space journey a few months prior, to Mars, the Moon, and Venus, the story of which can be found in Buck’s appropriately titled book “My Trip to Mars, the Moon and Venus”. Buck was even allowed to drive the saucer at one point. He learned much about our brothers from space, and their pets- notably, a 385 lb dog called Bo had accompanied Bucky and the landing party. It was also revealed that Bucky was actually an expatriate earthling, who was in fact related to Buck- and this Christmas, he came to visit his terrestrial cousin and then his parents before heading back to Venus.

A friend of Buck's, Fanny Lowery, had anticipated Bucky’s return. In the hope that he'd visit for the holidays, Fannie had mailed a special gift to Buck's ranch, to be delivered to Bucky.  At 1:30 a.m., we're told, on Christmas Day of 1955, Bucky arrived and was presented with an envelope which contained Mrs. Lowery’s gift: an advertisement for Prestone antifreeze.

“Bucky laughed like an eight-year-old kid when he saw the picture on his card.” Reports Buck Nelson, “...it had a picture of 8 or 9 monkeys doing all sorts of wrong things to a car… beneath the picture, it said, “Don't Let Anyone Monkey Around Your Car.” Written between the lines of advertising was the question “Does anyone monkey around Saucers like this?””

According to Bucky, this funny little card was “The first gift which had ever been knowingly sent by mail to a person from another planet from a person on earth.” Quite the distinction!

Bucky then proceeded to record a Christmas Message to the World on tape. He began by thanking Fanny for the gift, and answering her question. “Yes, it has happened to our ships, torn apart for souvenirs.”

His Christmas Message continued with a wish for peace on earth, as only a Space Brother could deliver it- he implored humanity to give up atomic weapons, and forecast certain doom for civilization if the warning went unheeded. He then hung around and mingled with Buck's other guests throughout the day, one of whom tried to sell him insurance. Later he pontificated aloud about canned pork and beans, before finally departing to visit his folks.

This charming vignette is an example of the wonderful ephemera to be found in the history of UFOlogy; these silly little moments in the stories of contactees, these slices of life are almost too mundane, too human, while are the same time too fantastic and absurd for their context to be forgotten about. So this Christmas season, know that somewhere in a museum on Venus there is probably a glass case where sits that historic “first gift” which Bucky treasured so much. As you put out cookies and milk for Santa, think about clipping an ad for a Spaceman; and for goodness sake, give up those nukes!

*** This article was originally published in 2022 on a website that no longer exists

Plantoids!

 

Back in the 1950s, when Flying Saucers were all the rage, people began claiming communications from the occupants of these otherworldly craft- and one commonality between the alleged messages to these so-called "contactees" was a message of environmentalism. The abandonment of nuclear weapons, and care for the lifeforms on planet Earth seemed to have been a top priority for these planet-hopping Space Brothers. One wonders what difference it made to those living on Venus, Saturn, or Mars? Was it a message of fraternity and altruism, or did it benefit them in some way? There have been a variety of answers, ranging from Theosophically informed New Age explanations about balancing life energies to more mundane but equally fantastical ones seemingly culled from the pages of pulp sci-fi mags. 

It may seem a strange question to even pose, as most people don't consider the claims of the contactees to be worthy of consideration. UFOlogy has long had a large schism between the more esoteric types of sky watchers and the "nuts and bolts" ET hunters, but either school of thought tends toward the idea that these craft (and by extension, the entities controlling them) come from another planet. There has always been some amount of thinkers who are inclined toward the idea that the source of these strange visitors might be much more terrestrial indeed. Still others have long contended that there were more metaphysical sources for these phenomena; Meade Layne, for instance, and others in the Borderland Sciences Research Associates, promoted the idea of Etherships from neighboring dimensions of reality. When we entertain the less-than-physical theories of UFOs, we open the door for everything from hallucinations to thought projections, from the unsatisfying mundane to the extremity of psychical weirdness. We always assume, however, that these entities are here for us or extensions of us; us humans, the top lifeforms of Planet Earth. We sometimes consider the mutilated cow or the scared dog, but rarely do we think about the variety of flora in the world. 

 Forteana more broadly has classically approached plants more skeptically, as evidenced by this clipping from a December 1950 issue of FATE Magazine. It's not all too often that the stories in their pages contains a disclaimer, but the tale of the Man-Eating Trees appears to have been too tall even for the editors there. Carnivorous plants are well-documented, and though somewhat exotic aren't necessarily weird. Something about the idea of a meat-eating plant, though, seems to spark a connection and allow us to anthropomorphize plant life, to imbue it with some level of sentience that we understand. We see it in fiction, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way, in films such as Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors and variations thereof. The carnivorous plant in the movie is actually an alien, which can talk, and demand blood. The vampiric plant being has precedent as well in The Thing From Another World, in which a frozen plant-based humanoid is thawed out from its apparent icy grave and sustains itself on plasma.

There aren't very many UFOlogical examples of this sort of thing, but one was recorded by Gray Barker in the 1960s- the case of Jennings Frederick, whose "Veggie Man" encounter culminated in the entity apparently latching on with suction cup fingers to draw blood. The creature, whatever it was, telepathically conveyed its need for medical assistance to the terrified Frederick, and it was implied that the being was an extraterrestrial. 

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Plant beings from outer space is a fun concept to consider, but it still relies on the idea of interplanetary or interstellar travel. It also implies the very human idea that the most superior forms of sentient being would be technologically adept and probably humanoid in appearance. The more magically inclined among us have, for centuries, accepted that plants have intendant spirit forms. Nature spirits and fairy entities from cultures around the world are intimately connected with plants, or are spiritual emanations from them in some cases. We tend also to anthropomorphize these, as in practices with plants such as the mandrake.

Less magical but still on the fringe, there has long been an argument that plants have a type of sentience- and, one imagines, such sentience would be nearly inconceivable to our monkey brains. The 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird popularized the idea, relying heavily on the "Backster Effect"- a series of findings by a man named Cleve Backster, who used a polygraph machine to test plant responses to stimuli. An episode of the popular TV series In Search of...  also focused on these ideas in the 70s, and L. Ron Hubbard claimed to confirm some of these results through the use of the same "E-Meter" he used in auditing members of his Church of Scientology. (Hubbard claimed that tomatoes "screamed" when sliced or pierced. One imagines he grinned ghoulishly while saying this.) Needless to say, the jury is still way out and plant intelligence is far from proven. Most, if not all of the ideas posed in the aforementioned media has been lambasted by scientists and disregarded as fiction. Fiction, however, provides a useful means of conjecture. Further, "sentience", "consciousness", and "intelligence" are ill-defined abstract terms using only the human mind as a baseline. Hungarian born botanist Raoul H. Francé argued for "True Botany" in his 1905 book Germs of Mind in Plants, saying that the endless categorization and study of dried plant "mummies" neglected the life, the important part of plant studies. Though useful, he felt that focusing on the minutiae of plant parts ignored the fact that humanity and plants of all types had a common bond; a will to live, that they had sensation, and a purpose. Through our animal eyes, we view other forms of sentience- if we see them at all- as either inferior or equivalent in some way to our own. It seems more likely that a non-human sentience and indeed a non-animal one would be so different from ours we may never see it at all.

There are quite a few unknowns in regard to human consciousness, and much controversy involved in investigating them. We don't quite know what happens to consciousness after the death of the body, for instance- nor do we really know the limits of the perceptions our minds can obtain. Extrasensory Perception has been studied for ages, and still unproven in the minds of many. It's worth noting that J. B. Rhine, who started the parapsychology lab at Duke University with his wife Louisa, had a degree in botany. If there are unknown borders to confine what we experience as human consciousness, who is to say whether there are overlapping borders with the neighboring lifeforms, those that sustain us through exchanges of oxygen and carbon dioxide? Further, can we really discount the mystics, the folk tales, and the magical history of nature spirits? And, if we entertain discarnate entities as emanations from the flora, how is that different from the parapsychological apport or the mystical tulpa? Can plants manifest psychic apparitions, or solid objects? Can we?

This may seem to be an insane line of inquiry, but to the mind of this writer it all sounds more plausible than flesh and blood visitors from another planet on a nuts and bolts craft. It has a degree of unreality to it which is so weird it just might be true. Bringing us back to the contactees, it resolves the ecological mission of the Space Brothers. If Orthon or Aura Rhanes were actually plantmind phantasms, it would make a lot of sense. It was jokingly suggested before on this blog that Nessie might be a sentient blob of peat moss, and as the years have gone by I have warmed up to the idea as a real possibility.  As we consider the muck monster form, it is perhaps advisable to refer once again the our fictions as a basis for speculation...

The fictional character Swamp Thing first appeared in 1971, created by Len Wein for the DC Comic House of Secrets. The story of a scientist through misadventure transforming into a monstrous version of his former self saw several changes over the years, culminating in a movie version and a sequel, and several television shows. The "muck monster" idea had precedent in the Theodore Sturgeon story "It! The Thing that Couldn't Die!" and in a comic book called Air Fighters from the 1940s, featuring a monster called The Heap. In "It!", the monster seems to be an animated human skeleton at its core, killing purely out of curiosity; its sentience is unformed and basic. The Heap was animated through the indomitable will to live of a crashed pilot. For our purposes here, we'll stick with Swamp Thing, and more specifically the Saga of the Swamp Thing series written by Alan Moore.

In Moore's story, a lesser DC villain Jason Woodrue is given conditional release from prison to examine the corpse of Swamp Thing. He discovers that all of the organs one might expect to find in a human are there, but none of them fulfill the function they would in a human body- they are replicas, approximations of what human anatomy looks like. They are flora assuming the form of man, and there is actually nothing left of the scientist Alec Holland. So what consciousness drives the Thing? Woodrue's villain persona, the Fluoronic Man, manages to tap into plant consciousness and discovers a worldwide network that operates as one functional mind. He and Swamp Thing refer to it simply as "The Green", a cosmic life force that permeates all of the non-animal life on the planet. So foreign is this manner of sentience, it drives Woodrue mad and he becomes megalomaniacal. 

Our diversion into comic book reality may bear some relevance to a reality we all fail to recognize, though it surrounds us every day. Our houseplant, the denizens of our crisper drawer, or even the Christmas tree we cut down and plant in our living room may have a mind all its own- or, it may be tapped into a network of mind, a cosmic and ethereal energy inextricable from our habitable material realm. Perhaps Plantoids can manifest, as UFOs or lake monsters, as phantoms or fairies; perhaps they can use organic material to build a form or can solidify purely psychic ones. Perhaps the reader assumes that these are the idle thoughts of a human mind under the influence of particular kinds of plants. But maybe, just maybe, the reader is afraid to know that they are not the authority on sentience.

Attack of the Mummies! Assorted Mummy Weirdness and a New-ish Short Story

 Friends and assorted weirdos, I'm happy to share that my short story Otherworldly Rewards is now available for your reading pleasure at a pay-what-you-wanna price. Originally published in HighStrange Magazine last year, I've made it available for your eyeballs in a downloadable format- a story about greed, dirty dealing, and the results of such actions involving murder, mystery, and of course, mummies!

Mummies have been a long running theme between at least myself and my Holy Donut Revival Hour co-host and bestie SJ. It probably began with pestering John E. L. Tenney about fighting mummies, which culminated in a short story we collaborated on for his birthday one year. Over time, I've found plenty of extra weird mummy-related things, some of them falling under the umbrella of the paranormal and others just plain strange. Otherworldly Rewards, for instance, was inspired by the use of mummified remains in the production of paint- a practice with a relatively brief and murky history. For the record, and as should be evident in the story itself, I have a great respect for the sanctity of human remains and a belief in honoring the lives of the very real people who inhabited those bodies- but such obviously wasn't always the prevailing belief, and in some cases, still isn't.

As evidenced by the exploits of Mexican UFOlogist Jaime Maussan in recent years, mummified remains of nebulous origin are still being showcased publicly as evidence of alien lifeforms. While the carnival barker-esque hucksterism of such exploitation is perhaps rightfully mocked and derided online, it's easy to lose sight of what very may well constitute abuses of sacred or significant cultural artifacts. Ethical scrutiny should be applied whenever one delves into the "ancient astronaut" type of speculation, and the history of UFOlogy is rife with examples of a disregard for such thought.

A particularly wacky, and likely less problematic example of the old "Alien Mummy" trope is that of Ralph Lael's, which he exhibited in his Outer Space Rock Shop Museum near Brown Mountain, in North Carolina. According to Lael, he was directed to take the mummified creature as proof of alien life by sentient "ghost lights" in a Brown Mountain cave... after a quick trip to Venus and a sexy encounter with a Venusian lady named Noma. Even the Venusians didn't really know precisely what kind of extraterrestrial remains had been mummified in the cave, but Lael showcased it in his shop until his death when the place was demolished. The current whereabouts of the mummy are unknown.

While unidentifiable "ET" mummy remains vary from the wacky to the offensive, they are only part of the equation in UFO / mummy related weirdness. After all, horror movies have led us to believe that mummies can be reanimated, a theme which, as I alluded to in my post about the Universal Movie Monsters last Halloween, has no real basis in Egyptian mythology. Be that as it may, there have been humanoid sightings related to UFOs which feature mummy-like entities, interactive and mobile.

One such case was recorded by APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization) investigator Richard Greenwell. The witness, only identified as "C.A.V.", reported being abducted in Peru by flying saucer occupants in 1949, which he described as nude and mummy-like. One supposes he meant that the beings had the appearance of unwrapped mummies, as his description more closely matches that of the gray alien which would become more prevalent decades later. He also noted that the beings had claw-like hands, with the top four fingers stuck together and a protruding thumb, and that they seemed to either only have one leg or that both legs were bound together. These particulars draw a comparison to the entities reported in the Pascagoula abduction case, although I never considered them to sound very mummy-like. A similarly "unwrapped" mummy alien encounter is recorded reportedly happened as recently as 1988 in Denmark, with much smaller humanoids invoking the description alongside a public road.

For the fully wrapped and animated UFOnaut Mummy experience, I take you now to November of 1973 in Goffstown, New Hampshire- the home of one Mrs. Florence Dow. At around 8:30 that night, her attention was directed to the front of her house where the sound of a loud thump had emanated. When she looked outside in an attempt to discover the sources of the thud, she came face to face with a weird entity that was peering inside. This alien mummy must have had the same tailor as the Men in Black, because he wore a black suit and wide brimmed black hat- and, notably, its face was wrapped in white fabric as a mummy's would be!

The being motioned for her to come outside, which she wisely did not; but when she chained the door and opened it enough to look out where the Mummy in Black had been, it was gone. This was the initial event that kicked off a flap of sightings in the Goffstown area, investigated by Raymond E. Fowler- but the only one to involve such an entity. The others were more elf-like, silver-suited and more interested in soil samples than pestering the locals...

  An even more bizarre and unnerving alien mummy story returns to the abduction scenario. The details of the encounter were retrieved through hypnosis by Leo Sprinkle, and it has the hallmarks of such abduction accounts- missing time, memory wiping, and apparent medical examination. The twist with this one, however, is the entity itself, which seemed to be some kind of mummy space robot. In late August of 1975, Sandra Larson, her daughter, and a friend were driving on I-94 in North Dakota when the car they were traveling in stopped dead by itself as 8-10 UFOs hovered overhead and nearby. In her later recounting of events, the "attending doctor" of the craft they were brought aboard was wrapped in bandages, never blinked, had metallic, mechanical arms and seemed to give off an eerie light. While all of this is terrifying, Sandy was apparently cured of a sinus condition by the Robo-Mummy- so one supposes it could have gone much worse.

Alien mummies are more plentiful than one might think, whether they are upwardly mobile or otherwise. In either case, though, they deftly avoid proof of their existence as extraterrestrial beings. So we gently come back down to earth for some more grounded, mundane mummy weirdness, albeit with a little bit more UFOlogical lore to soften our landing:

Hobo Mummy and Airship Pilot

Article from May 24, 1973 The Record (Hackensack, New Jersey)

 One wonders- in what state of preservation the Airship Pilot would have been found, had he been exhumed? Perhaps we will never know. It seems, though, that it must have been fairly common to "mummify" a corpse and set it up in a shop window, or parade it around in carnivals, leaving it for future generations to discover as was the case with Elmer McCurdy, McCurdy was only discovered to be a legitimate corpse, and not a funhouse prop, during the filming of an episode of The Six-Million Dollar Man in 1977. Sometimes mummies, when kept in the home, provide some semblance of home security; a collector of curiosities named William Small, of New Jersey, found this out in 1951 when a break-in was halted by the grinning visage of the mummy in Smalls' closet. It seemed the burglars abandoned their scurrilous enterprise and stole nothing in their haste to get out of the house of horror- but a few years later, when a fire broke out there, the firefighters on the scene received a similar scare.

I would be remiss in not mentioning the crème de la crème of oddball mummies, that of Achile Chatouilleu, Shriner, "French Tickler", and... Clown Mummy.

Achile is a rare example of an exhibited corpse for whom it was a dying wish. Well known in his time and locale, he participated in the first Shriners parade- and apparently hoped that even in death, he could inspire smiles. He was preserved with toxic materials like mercury and arsenic, and was kept behind glass for public viewing at the California Institute of Abnormalarts in North Hollywood. The venue closed its doors permanently in 2022, and the clown prince of mummies was sold to an anonymous buyer- as so often is the case, the mysteries surround the mummified.

In closing, I'll share a few of the mummies I've met in person.

The first such mummy item from my travels is the mysterious mummy hand that can be found in the Caldwell Library at Lake George, in New York. Cattycorner from The House of Frankenstein Wax Museum, which features a recreation of the Karloff Mummy, is the unassuming and quiet local library. In stark contrast to the shops and tourist traps, restaurants and boat tour docks along the strip the small library is very much what one would expect in a town library; that is, unless one knows about the mysterious mummy hand. I anticipated an awkward exchange with the young librarian on duty when I dropped in, but she was overjoyed at the chance to 'lend me a hand'. The story goes that the hand was donated from the personal collection of the former head librarian, and was at some point stolen. No one knows how Hubbell, the librarian, acquired it; nor is the identity of the thief known, but the hand was discovered at an estate sale and mailed back to its current home on Lake George. It's a very small hand, and a significantly weird item to casually view while on vacation...

Synchronicity led me to another mummy, this time in Belfast, Maine. At the time I was reading Jadoo by John Keel, his first book about traveling around the Middle East and India in search of magic and mysticism. My ratty old paperback edition of the book came with me on the trip to Maine, and I was worried it would fall apart from being in my away bag. I had dreamed of trying to catch a snake one night, and when I began the book, it was about catching snakes; later that summer I did have to catch a snake which had hitched a ride inside of our camper. At one of the only used book shops I managed to find up there, I was surprised to find a hardcover first edition of Jadoo for a very reasonable price- reducing my concern over the fate of my old mass market copy. Then, as I sat to read the chapter of the book about mummy dealers, I got a tip from Twitter mutual Brad Knight that there was a mummy to be found in Belfast.

So off we went to the charming roadside candy and curiosity shop known as Perry's Nut House. They specialize in gag gifts, fudge, mixed nuts, and campy home decor, and among the taxidermy apes and large sections of snakeskin adorning the walls you can find Jay, the mummy. Jay had a history with libraries as well; brought to the U. S. by an adventurer named Jack Williamson, who ended up writing a book about Egyptian mummification processes. Jay the Mummy was stored along with other artifacts long after Williamson passed away in 1945, and forgotten about. When they were discovered, the artifacts were returned to Williamson's descendants- but no one wanted to take poor Jay. No one, that is, except the proprietor of Perry's Nut House at the time. 

To refer back to my introductory thoughts, I have mixed feelings about the mummies I've met. I'm not sure what the right thing to do is. I'm certainly glad to have met them- and I use the word "met" because these are not "things", they are human remains. Just as Osiris was made complete by Isis, and the wrappings of the mummy culminated in his apotheosis as the ruler of the underworld, the spirits of these long deceased Egyptians have a life outside of the one they lived thousands of years ago. They are remembered and in a strange way, cared for. While the unwilling recent examples such as McCurdy have been committed to burial, and others like Achile the Clown chose to be showcased, the true history of the Hand of the Caldwell-Lake George Library and of Jay can't be known. I can only hope their souls found peace in a bygone age, and that they are treated with dignity in their respective residences.

Oh, and I hope Lael's alien mummy pops up somewhere, someday...