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.

From Brooklyn to Neptune: The Bugs Bunny / UFO Connection!

 On July 27, 1940, Bugs Bunny appeared for the first time in movie theaters in the Tex Avery directed cartoon A Wild Hare. Earlier versions of the cartoon rabbit had appeared before, but in Looney Tunes cannon, this cartoon is officially Bugs' debut. Eight years later, he'd become the first living thing to visit the Moon in the cartoon Haredevil Hare, and also the first to meet an extraterrestrial. One of the most popular and enduring characters of all time, with a career spanning 80 years, he leapt from the screen and into our collective psyche during World War II with his signature question "What's up, Doc?" By the end of this article, you'll be asking the same.

Haredevil Hare was released on July 24, 1948 - 13 months after Kenneth Arnold's UFO encounter that popularized the term "Flying Saucer". The saucer zeitgeist apparently had not reached Chuck Jones and his team of animators and storyboard artists, as both Bugs and Marvin Martian (in his first appearance) arriving on the Moon in rocket ships. The cartoon is memorable as Bugs arrives just in time to prevent Marvin from blowing up the Earth with a "Kaboom" using his Illudium Q36 Explosive Space Modulator. (Illudium seems to be a fascinating and versatile fictional element - In Marvin's third appearance, 1953's Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century, Daffy Duck in the title role of Duck Dodgers is sent to Planet X to obtain Illudium Phosdex - the shaving cream atom.) As such, our intrepid rabbit hero becomes the savior of our planet, thwarting our would-be destroyer. The return of the Martian menace, however, is where the story gets really weird.

Bugs Bunny is loved around the world, but how does he rate in the farther reaches of the solar system? If we're to believe the contacts via channeling, message board, and radio by George Hunt Williamson and his associates Alfred Bailey and radio man "Mr R", we can be confident that Bugs has fans at least as far as Neptune. Williamson is a problematic and controversial figure in the weird world of 1950s contactees. His association early on with the far-right fascist William Dudley Pelley should be borne in mind; his sketchy archaeology "credentials" and the dubious ancient alien theories that came as a result along with his promulgation of conspiracy theories about "International Bankers" should give anyone pause for caution. He was, however, very influential on flying saucer culture, for better or worse. He and Bailey were both present when George Adamski allegedly met Orthon, and though they had a falling out almost immediately thereafter, Williamson continued to back up Adamski's account of events with only minor variations. Adamski and Williamson differed on the value of contracting space people via channeling or radio; Adamski seemed to recognize the ambiguous and possibly trickster-ish nature of entities contacted this way while Williamson seemed to wholeheartedly accept the messages he received from virtually every known planet, although he was warned against talking to the evil beings from Orion. With that background information out of the way, viewed in isolation, the following anecdote is a fun and interesting ride. 

On September 20, 1952, at 8:30 p.m., the following message was received via 'the board' (similar to an Ouija board) from Zo, an intelligence from Neptune:

...We have impressed you from time to time, and will continue to do so. Now what I am about to tell you will seem foolish. It is the way we do things at times. This is so it will all appear in a most conventional manner. You were impressed to go and see a certain motion picture. You did not know that the cartoon was Bugs Bunny in 'The Hasty Hare'. We mentioned Bugs Bunny to you several times before, but you thought it was foolish and did not enter it into your records. We had our reasons. This cartoon was about a flying saucer and its coming to Earth. You saw the letter held in the hand of the saucer pilot and you noticed that its date was 9-27. This date is important in 1952. You will see!

The Hasty Hare had been released a few months prior, and was the second appearance of Marvin Martian, although at this time he still had no name. It has been noted by Robert Anton Wilson that Bugs is the first alien abductee, this cartoon predating the Betty and Barney Hill encounter by nearly a decade. As noted by Zo in the above message, Marvin has also traded his rocket for a nifty flying saucer!

An amusing feature of Zo's message is the recognition of how absurd the Bugs Bunny connection is. He seems to apologize upfront for the "foolishness" of it, and also seems to chide Williamson et al for not recording the prior messages about the cartoon hare. "It is the way we do things at times", he says; and that does seem to ring true of UFO stories of all kinds. The Trickster element of unbelievably silly things, things that even Williamson would be reticent to share, thrown in with messages of dire consequence has that quality of being too weird to be fake. As alluded to, the saucer contacts are capable of telepathy and are well aware of what was recorded and what wasn't. They are also capable of 'impressing' those they wish to, controlling them in a way or psychically guiding them to see a cartoon at the local theater. It all seems to be a very elaborate and silly way to convey the importance of the date 9-27-1952. 

Isabel Davis, in an article entitled Meet the Extraterrestrial (Fantastic Universe Science Ficion, Nov. 1957) makes sure to mention the Bugs Bunny connection when addressing Williamson's contacts. Davis, a highly respected Fortean and UFO researcher of that time, picks apart the various books of Williamson and other contactees in this article. "What is unquestionably revealed to the reader, with painful clarity," she says, "are the intense, tragic fears that haunt the apostles and disciples of the contact-communication stories. Many passages are an almost rhythmic see-saw between terrors- of war, of soil sterility, of strange weather, of the atom - and feverish reassurances that the space beings will somehow give protections from these dooms."  Like Bugs Bunny swiping a dangerous Illudium Q36 Explosive Space Modulator away from a Martian whose view of Venus has been obstructed, the saucer folk always seem to be arriving just in time to save us from ourselves. This is certainly true in the chronicles of Williamson's contact, recorded in his book The Saucers Speak! A Documentary Report of Interstellar Communication by Radio Telegraphy. There's an urgency from the space people that time is short, that they must act quickly if we are to be saved. But there's always time to watch a cartoon.

So what was so important about the 27th of September? For Williamson, Bailey, and "Mr R" it was the communication that arranged for them to finally meet their space contacts, face to face. At 5:30p.m. they were informed that their space friends were passing over Winslow, AZ, where the radio shack was located. At 5:55 p.m. they heard the craft fly over and saw them in the distance. It was also their "first and last contact by radiotelephony". Before and after the 27th, all radio contact was done through ham radio code that had to be transcribed by the very adept "Mr R". The one audible transmission was only barely so, according to their account. "It seemed a speech was being given in a large auditorium. The static was terrible and we could only hear a word now and then. The voice was loud and masterful and spoke perfect English. There was a reference to Germany and America and that they could no longer appeal to reason, etc." The rest of the evening was spent deliberating with the space people whether they should bring "Mr R"'s debilitated father-in-law to the saucer landing the next day, and the verdict was "No." Ultimately the meeting didn't happen, as logging trucks had kicked up a bunch of dust and separated the would be ambassadors to the stars...

Surprisingly, some notable UFO sightings did happen elsewhere that day. In Hempstead, Texas, USAF pilots reported seeing silvery, disc shaped crafts moving at speeds in excess of 600mph. Later that night in Inyokern, California, two couples viewing the night sky through a telescope witnessed a large, round object change colors as it flew on a level, straight path. If you were to go from Hempstead to Inyokern as the crow (or in this case Flying Saucer) flies, you'd pass somewhat near Winslow!

Also, relevant to the mysterious voice that mentions America and Germany - September 27, 1952 in the areas around Kiel and Hamburg Germany, a brightly lit UFO with at comet-like tail was witnessed moving irregularly through the air by personnel involved with Operation Mainbrace , the first large-scale naval exercise under NATO. 

As wacky as the entire scenario is, there does seem to be some eerie accuracy involved- and that wascally wabbit is in the middle of it... In many ways, Bugs does seem to embody the Trickster which so many equate with the high strangeness around UFOs. An NPR Segment from 2008 makes a pretty good case for Bugs-as-archetypal Trickster, the mercurial rule-breaker from whose actions we all end up benefiting. As mentioned earlier in this post, Robert Anton Wilson had an affinity for the wisecracking rabbit. He joked in The Illuminatus! Trilogy that there were hidden messages in Bugs Bunny cartoons, implanted by Illuminati agents in Hollywood, based on Adam Weishaupt's comparing of a shoggoth to a cursed rabbit -  'du Hexen Hase' - 'that wascal wabbit'. Several years later he'd feel that the joke was on him, as he pondered the synchronicity of the brief appearance of Bugs in the 1977 Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Wilson's own telepathic contacts with space intelligence was intimately entangled with Sirius, and the momentary clip of Bugs Bunny is one of him saying "Set the coordinates for the Dog Star!" "I thought I was kidding" Wilson writes in incredulity later. Beyond just Bugs, Wilson went down a 'rabbit hole', as it were, of bunnies in association with UFOs, which he referred to as Lepufology.

As previously mentioned in another entry on this blog, Bugs also makes an appearance during the 1977 ITV Broadcast Intrusion, just as the picture starts to come back under control. The cartoon Falling Hare, a WWII era story with the Fortean plot line of our favorite rabbit being terrorized by a gremlin. It's one of the few examples of Bugs not having the upper hand - a reminder that even the Trickster can sometimes be tricked. Sometimes we take a left turn in Albuquerque, and wind up way off course. Sometimes the mercurial nature of the Phenomena can make us laugh, while other times it can be scary and leave us wanting for a savior - be it Saucer or Wisecracking Leporidae. What's up, Doc? What's up, indeed.

 

Sources:

Meet the Extraterrestrial, Isabel Davis, Fantastic Universe Science Fiction

Illuminatus! Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shea

A is For Adamski, Adam Gorightly and Greg Bishop

Bugs Bunny: The Trickster, American Style, JJ Sutherland, NPR

The Saucers Speak! Calling All Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, George Hunt Williamson aka Brother Philip w/ Alfred Bailey, Timothy Green Beckley, and Sean Casteel

Operation Mainbrace Sightings, Richard Hall 

https://www.thinkaboutitdocs.com/1952-september-ufo-alien-sightings/

Coincidence or Cosmic Conspiracy, Robert Anton Wilson, in The Berkeley Barb Vol 27 issue 20, May 1978