Starting the mid-1990s, I was part of a new, web-based publishing effort known as ParaScope. ParaScope was the brainchild of Charles Overbeck (my old compadre from Forbidden Lines). This was the heyday of the original "X Files" TV show, the alien abduction craze, and wacky conspiracy theories were as common as lines of coke in a disco men's room. Into this mix came America Online, the brash new service that aspired to be everyone's access point to the Internet. Those of us above a certain age remember the ubiquitous AOL CD-ROMs that flooded the mail, filled newspaper inserts, and at times seemed to rain down from heaven.
It was one thing to get people to tune in to the Net via AOL, but AOL wanted to keep users on their site, to better track their interests and expose them to paid advertising. Someone at AOL came up with the "Greenhouse" program, whereby AOL would pay third parties to supply exclusive content. Charles and Ruffin Prevost, another University of North Carolina journalism veteran, pitched ParaScope as an online magazine of weirdness. AOL bought it, and ParaScope was launched.
The timing was impeccable. 'X Files' was peaking, and interest in UFOs, Fortean phenomena, and government conspiracies was white hot. Before long, an entertainment studio (I think it was New World Pictures?) offered to buy ParaScope. I'm not sure how that would have worked, but it didn't happen. I was editing a portion of the site and not involved in the business end of things.
ParaScope had four basic areas, each with its own editor. "Nebula" was my domain, devoted to UFOs. "Enigma" was where Fortean phenomena was catalogued, along with general weirdness. Donald Trull edited "Enigma." Charles Overbeck oversaw "Matrix," dealing with conspiracies, and "Dossier," which featured actual conspiracy relevant documents, was edited by Jon Elliston.
ParaScope had a good run, but as AOL's fortunes declined, so did ours. "X Files" became tiresome, UFOs were moribund, and endless conspiracy mongering numbed the audience to insensibility. AOL pulled the plug on all the Greenhouse sites. Charles kept ParaScope going for a while as an indie website, but there was no livelihood in it, so it passed into history.
Much of the content from ParaScope is still available on archive.org. Nebula pages can be found at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020601143200/www.parascope.com/nebula.htm
The following is a sample of my Nebula writing, in this case an historical piece on the origins of the UFO cover-up paradigm.
The original text has been lightly edited. Modern comments are in red italics.
They Came from New Jersey
Or, How an English Socialist and a 20-Something Wiz Kid Scared the Pants off the Nation and Helped Create the UFO Cover-up Paradigmby Paul B. Thompson
[My old ParaScope email address deleted]
One of the most common arguments in the off-center world of UFOlogy is the Cover-up Paradigm. It usually goes like this: the government knows the Truth about UFOs, but is keeping it from the public because the Truth would lead to panic in the streets, the collapse of capitalism and all world religions, and generally be the end of the world as we know it. There are refinements to this theory, of course; that the government's motives are selfish (they want to preserve the Military-Industrial Complex power structure) or altruistic (they want to preserve Human Culture in the face of advanced alien technology), but the basic assumptions have been the same since the late 1940s.
Some of the names and players have changed over the succeeding decades. Once the UFOlogists' bugaboo was the U.S. Air Force and the scientific establishment. Later, under the influence of post-Watergate revelations regarding the foreign and domestic abuses of the intelligence community, UFO researchers blamed the cover-up on the CIA, NSA, and FBI. Some still do, but the current bete noir of UFOdom is an even more shadowy organization (which probably doesn't exist), characterized by fanciful code names like Majestic 12 or the Aviary. [Here I'm being disingenuous. "Probably doesn't exist" should be "definitely does not not exist"!]
In this case, the Who is not so much in question as the Why. Why cover-up UFO reports? There is ample evidence to suggest that those most concerned with researching life beyond our planet are eager for attention -- the recent news conferences about the possibility of Martian microbes [link added, not in original text.] being the best and latest example. Radio signals [link added] and fossilized bacteria are one thing, but extraterrestrial spacecraft are another. Would the government really want to suppress information about ET contact as the Paradigm says? Is there any credible reason to think the panic scenario would actually happen? The usual answer cited took place almost sixty years ago, a remains a classic case of mass hysteria.
It was just a Halloween spook story, really. In 1938 Orson Welles was the boy genius of American theater. Everything he did caused a stir, both in intellectual and popular circles. His Mercury Theater of the Air [link added] adapted great works of literature to radio format weekly. On October 30, 1938 the scheduled play was Howard Koch's adaptation of H. G. Wells' 1897 novel, The War of the Worlds.
Wells, an idealistic socialist appalled at the cavalier conquest of indigenous peoples by Europeans, wrote his novel as an object lesson on how it felt to be on the receiving end of hostile technology. Koch updated the late Victorian setting by placing the principle action of the story in contemporary America. Instead of the green pastures of suburban England, Koch has his Martian invaders land in rural New Jersey. The Martians emerge in monstrous mechanical fighting machines, kill thousands with Heat Rays and poison gas, and advance on New York with irresistible force. Orson Welles played Professor Pierson, a Princeton astronomer who early on supplies "scientific" commentary to the unfolding story of life on Mars. Gradually Welles/Pierson assumes the narrator's voice (as in Wells' original novel) and describes the ruin of human civilization. The Martians eventually fail, though not by any action mankind takes; native microorganism kill the Martians, and humanity is saved. The radio play follows the basic form of the novel, but utilized the new sensation of immediateness gained from presenting the story in the fashion of news flashes and expert interviews.
That was all very bright and innovative, just the sort of thing Orson Welles was known for. The kicker was, many people listening to The War of the Worlds on the CBS radio network didn't realize they were hearing a fictional story. All across the country people panicked, or fell into passively fatal stupors upon hearing how the Martians were slaughtering their way toward New York. Subsequently studies (see Hadley Cantril's The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic,[link added] Princeton University Press, 1940, Harper Torchbooks, 1966) showed that of the six million people who listened to War of the Worlds, about one in six -- one million people -- thought it was a real news broadcast!
Those who believed came from varied economic and educational backgrounds, though it was generally true that more educated people were likely to doubt the authenticity of what they heard. But in the ensuing panic, many people ran wildly into the night, shooting at street lights and water towers. A very small number even attempted suicide rather than face death at the hands of the ruthless Martians. But no generalized rioting occurred, and many of the panic-stricken were brought back to reality when they encountered no further signs of Martian attack.
So far, the War of the Worlds hysteria seems like a good prop to the Cover-up Paradigm, but the story is more complex than most UFO enthusiasts realize. The majority of the panic-stricken on October 30, 1938 were not terrified of Martians, but of Nazis. There had been months of war-scares emanating from Europe (Hitler and [British Prime Minister Neville] Chamberlain had met in Munich to avert war in March), and shortly before the Mercury Theater broadcast President Roosevelt had issued a warning to Hitler to stop making territorial demands on his neighbors. A great many Americans who heard only part of the War of the Worlds broadcast thought the Germans had attacked New Jersey!
Even when the radio identified the fictional enemy as Martians, people didn't believe it. One man said afterward, "I knew it was some Germans trying to gas all of us. When the announcer kept calling them people from Mars, I just thought he was ignorant and didn't know yet that Hitler had sent them all." Americans in 1938 were fearful of war, but not from outer space. They knew where the real threat came from: the Third Reich.
Ten years later, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union had crushed fascism, but a new struggle was developing between democracy and communism. This was the Cold War -- a time of constant strain, of move and countermove, like chess played on a global scale with real nations and real people as pawns. Into this tense situation came the first modern UFO reports, and the U.S. military quickly decided that real or not (and they weren't sure) UFOs needed to be downplayed as much as possible. It would not do to have the civil population living in fear of an alien invasion at a time when Communist invasion or subversion was a genuine threat.
Fifty-eight years after Orson Welles turned H. G. Wells' anti-imperialist fantasy into a modern paradigm, there are many people in this country and others who think the "Martian" scare is still a potent threat to peace and social stability. I for one am not so sure. Despite the prevalence of monster movies and dances of mega-death like the recent "Independence Day," [link added] I have strong doubts that human civilization would collapse after genuine contact with an extraterrestrial race. Given the vast distances and impossibly enormous logistics of interstellar travel, it's hard to imagine a real War of the Worlds. Moreover, we have had seventy years of science fiction in pop culture to insulate our senses to the concept of ET life. When Captain Kirk stood on the bridge of the Enterprise with a friendly alien -- Mr. Spock -- a whole generation learned that beings from another world did not have to arrive in tripod fighting machines wielding death rays and poison gas. The positive, even religious aspects of alien contact are a strong undercurrent in both science fiction and UFO lore. They may come to wipe us out, or they may come in peace and teach us how to end war, disease, and suffering. [In the 1950s, this was the common message of the 'contactees,' those cultists who claim to have met benevolent, human-like aliens.]
In the end, the truer paradigm of UFOs in western culture may not be Wells' War of the Worlds, but the Cargo Cults [link added] of the Pacific Islanders. The people of Micronesia lived simple lives before 1941, aware of Asian and European traders and explorers, but indifferent to them. Then, during America's war with Japan, thousands of sailors, marines, and soldiers descended on the sleepy archipelagos with concrete, bulldozers, airplanes, and beer. Here was the dazzling "cargo" the islanders had never dreamed off, and they turned their delight into a folk religion. For decades after the war they built "airfields" lined with bamboo and palm frond "airplanes" in hopes of luring back the wonderful foreigners and their cargo.
Perhaps that's what UFOlogy really is -- a cargo cult for the First World. We don't build bamboo saucers to lure them to us, but beam "Star Trek" into space daily. One day they may notice us and save us from ourselves.
(c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc.
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