The Air Torpedo of Bäckebo: or, Mein Fuehrer, one of our rockets is missing . . .

This third Cautionary Tale describes the crash of a wayward German V2 rocket in Sweden in 1944. Not only was I making an obvious comparison to all the subsequent stories of crashed UFOs, I was also trying to introduce ParaScope's readers to the less well known phenomenon of the 1946 "ghost rockets."

As usual, modern comments are in red. 

In our third UFO Cautionary Tale, we will turn back the clock to 1944, when a strange fiery object crashed in rural Sweden. The Swedish Army came and investigated, and discovered their neutral country had acquired foreign technology far in advance of anything else on earth...

by Paul B. Thompson
Nebula Editor
[out of date email address deleted]

People have always seen strange things in the sky. The insubstantial air has always been thought of as the realm of heaven, the dwelling place of clouds, birds, and the gods. What people see in the sky is reflected by what they expect to find there, and as mankind filled the air with machines of his own making, a growing contrast began between our aerial devices and everything else seen aloft. By the end of the Second World War, jets and rockets were taking wing, promising to oust noisy, propeller-driven airplanes from their supremacy. Hardly had the guns cooled from hot combat to Cold War when new objects appeared overhead. Unidentified flying objects.

The first modern UFO wave broke over Sweden in May, 1946. In those early days the bright spindle-shaped objects seen zipping overhead were dubbed "ghost rockets." They were widely assumed to be variants of the late Third Reich's V-1 and V-2 weapons, which at that time were the cutting edge of aerospace technology. Sweden had been visited by German V-weapons before. On June 13, 1944, an experimental A4 rocket (the type later dubbed Vergeltungswaffe Zwei, Retaliation Weapon Two) was launched from the secret Peenemunde testing station, on the Baltic coast of Germany. The Germans were using the A4 to test a new form of radio guidance for the highly advanced Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile, but that day the guidance system malfunctioned and the rocket veered off course. At 4:08 p.m., the A4 exploded in the air over the Grasdals Garo, Sweden, two hundred miles from Peenemunde. The bulk of the wreckage landed two hundred meters from a placid farm. According to the newspaper Svenska Dagbladgt on June 14, the rocket's impact made a crater "five meters wide and two to three meters deep. Big rocks had been thrown more than ten meters, and tree tops had been broken like sticks."

Grasdals Garo is the location mentioned in my primary source, the British book The Secret War, by Brian Johnson. In Sweden the location is known as Bäckebo, and the missile is called "the air torpedo."

Despite the news story, and some rather charming photos of Swedish farm folk posing with soldiers alongside the rocket wreckage, the Swedish military quickly recovered the remains of the German rocket and spread a veil of secrecy over the incident. The Germans knew what had happened to their wayward missile, and immediately began negotiating with the Swedes to get it back. Equally determined to get their hands on the wreck were the British.





For some time British Intelligence

had been receiving vague reports about a long-range missile Hitler planned to use against the British Isles. Spies reported the 12.7-ton rocket could fly up to 200 miles with a one-ton high explosive warhead, reaching an altitude of 100,000 feet and maximum speed of 3,600 miles per hour. Some top British scientists could not believe such claims, and firmly declared no rocket could fly so high or so far, yet the Swedes now had concrete evidence the V-2 was real and nearly operational. A strange bidding war ensued over the mangled rocket, a war the British won when they offered to trade some of their latest mobile radar sets for the smashed German missile. Off went the A4 to Britain. Within a month, the British issued a top secret report outlining the V-2's characteristics and possible operational parameters. The V-2 was no longer a secret weapon.

The objects seen over Sweden beginning in May 1946 were much like the German rockets, being described as cigar- or torpedo-shaped, sometimes with small tail fins. They flew noisily across the sky, trailing plumes of fire. By July 9, thirty reports had been logged with the authorities. That same day, at 2:30 p.m., a fiery object was seen all across the country. Two hundred fifty reports were generated by this object alone, which may have been an exceptionally bright meteor.

Whatever it was, Swedish officials were sufficiently worried by the public's alarmed reaction to begin censoring news reports, and created a special committee to study the ghost rocket sightings. This was perhaps the first UFO investigative group. Composed of military men, scientists, and government officials, the committee was headed by Colonel Bengt Jacobson, who was in charge of the Material Department of the Air Administration.

Drawing on their experience with the German A4 found at Grasdals Garo, the committee decided that the most important question about the ghost rockets was: Were they being launched by the Soviets? This question was commonly asked by Swedish newspapers as well. Though the war in Europe had been over scarcely a year, tensions between the western allies and the Soviet Union were already increasing. The Red Army had overrun the German research center at Peenemunde in 1945, and it was widely believed they had captured both scientists and prototypes of Hitler's wonder weapons. For this reason, the ghost rocket reports were taken very seriously.

In August it was learned that retired American Air Force Lt. General James H. Doolittle was going to Sweden, ostensibly on behalf of his new civilian employer, Shell Oil Company. It was reported in the papers that General Doolittle would inspect Swedish radar operations, but it quickly became clear he and electronics expert David Sarnoff would be asked to review the ghost rocket situation. Colonel C. R. S. Kempf of the Defense Ministry openly admitted he was eager to get the opinion of the world-renowned flier Jimmy Doolittle on the mysterious objects criss-crossing Sweden's airspace.

One of the best of the puzzling reports came from a meteorologist who observed an unknown object closely while he was outdoors watching cloud formations with a telescope. At first the meteorologist thought he was seeing an airplane on the horizon, brightly reflecting sunlight. The object's very high speed soon disproved this idea. In a few seconds, the observer got a clear view of the ghost rocket: It was, he judged, ninety feet long, torpedo-shaped, and had a shiny metal surface. He estimated the object was but 2,000 meters distant, but made no noticeable noise. Abruptly the ghost rocket exploded -- again without a sound (reported in the New York Times, August 13, 1946).

Not all the ghost rockets were so quiet, as many were said to be banging and crashing all over the countryside. Oddly enough, no legitimate fragments were ever found, in contrast to the case of the V-2 two years earlier. The lack of wreckage puzzled General Doolittle. Any missile, even one with a high explosive warhead, should leave debris on the ground somewhere. British radar experts, summoned to Sweden, studied readings taken on the ghost rockets in flight and returned home to issue a secret report of their findings to their own government. Just what they concluded was not revealed.

In early September the Soviet Union formally denied launching missiles over Scandinavia. Whether they were or not, what else would they say? After the U.S.S.R.'s denial the number of sightings declined, and the excitement of the summer faded with the season's heat. Denials replaced reports in the press. Swedish physicist Dr. Manne Siegbahn announced that no real evidence of foreign missiles had been found, implying the entire business was caused by rumor and supposition. The few metallic fragments offered as ghost rocket remnants proved to meteorites.

While the ghost rockets vanished, and the A4 crash at Grasdals Garo became merely a historical footnote of World War II, these events left an indelible mark on the public's imagination. The scenario established in Sweden was simple, but potent: A strange object falls blazing from the upper atmosphere. It crashes to earth in some remote spot, is found by the local inhabitants, and soon after is quickly spirited away by the military. This archetypal image would grow ever larger in the decades to come, especially once it was transplanted to the United States.

"Roswell! Roswell . . . !"


© Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc.

The crash site is still known and visited today, and the V2 incident has become part of local folklore. See "The Air Torpedo of Bäckebo."

Swedish boys sitting on the crashed V2 rocket motor!

More the 1946 Ghost Rocket flap be found here:

http://www.project1947.com/gr/grchron1.htm

The Secret Commonwealth: Fairies Among Us

More old ParaScope: This article on Robert Kirk and his famous monograph "The Secret Common-Wealth" dates from 1997. It deals with the popular idea among some UFO researchers that the phenomenon is more paraphysical and not about nuts-and-bolts craft from other worlds. This "third way" view of UFOs evolved in the late 1960s and grew more widespread in the 1980s. It never displaced the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis in the hearts of true believers, but it did offer interesting insights into the problem which, I think, indicate the true nature of so-called paranormal events--our faulty perceptions, and our very human trait of interpreting the unknown in whatever context we inhabit.

As usual, any modern comments are in red. Pictures and graphics were by Charles Overbeck.

The "Fairy Hill" at Aberfoyle, Scotland, where Rev. Kirk was said to be held eternal captive of the fairies. Rev. Robert Kirk's "Secret Commonwealth" by Paul B. Thompson Nebula Editor [out of date email address omitted] It has long been the habit of scholars to study the obscure, the strange, and the unusual. Aside from the intrinsic interest of such subjects, the fringes of human experience offer the widest scope for unexpectedly enlarging our collective knowledge. Many common scientific subjects were once "fringe:" electricity, meteors and radioactivity were all once beyond the pale of standard knowledge. No scholar worth his salt would pass up an opportunity to write their name into history as a discoverer. Robert Kirk was such a scholar. Born in 1644, Kirk came from a long line of educated men. His grandfather, John Kirk, was a notary and scrivener in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Reverend James Kirk, was appointed minister to the parish of Aberfoyle, in Perthshire, in 1639. He had a large family, of whom Robert Kirk was his seventh son. Among the Celts, this was a propitious place to be born -- seventh sons were commonly believed to have second sight. Kirk never made a reputation as a seer, but he was exceptionally gifted intellectually. He studied at Edinburgh University and at St. Andrews, receiving his master's degree at 17. Ordained as a minister, Kirk served at various parishes for the next twenty years. He married in 1678. Kirk was also a linguist. He translated the psalms into Gaelic verse, and translated other religious works into the Scots Highland dialect. His facility with Gaelic led him to be named editor of a new Irish edition of the bible. In June 1685 he was appointed to his father's old parish of Aberfoyle, and served there until his early death in 1692. Aberfoyle was, in the words of Sir Walter Scott, "[a] beautiful and wild region, comprehending so many lakes, rocks, sequestered valleys, and dim copsewoods, and not even yet quite abandoned by the fairies, who have resolutely maintained secure footing in a region so well suited to their residence." His linguistic expertise would have been enough to insure Robert Kirk a footnote in the cultural history of the British Isles, but his real fame (and interest to readers of ParaScope) lies in his study of fairy lore. He collected tales of fairy encounters by his countrymen and analyzed them in a monograph entitled "The Secret Common-Wealth." In Kirk's time, fairies were not seen as tiny, gauzy-winged creatures of children's storybooks. Far from it -- fairies were thought of as strange, powerful creatures, a paraphysical race of beings living among mankind. It was common for some of the clergy to denounce fairy folk as demons, or at least servants of Satan. Kirk wasn't so sure. He decided that they were a separate race "betwixt Man and Angel." Lacking scientific language to describe fairy attributes, Kirk resorted to poetic descriptions. Fairies were made on "congealed Air" or "condensed cloud." This ethereal composition was crucial to their ability to vanish at will, fly, or penetrate any enclosed space, no matter how tiny. Being so nebulous, fairies imbibed only the most refined of "spirituous liquors" (Scotland being a good location for such), and Kirk noted that although they had prodigious appetites, fairies never grew fat because they only used the quintessence of food and drink. Humans sometimes stumbled upon fairy banquets hidden away in the hills, but mortals should never partake of fairy food; one taste, and the luckless human was forever a captive of the Subterranean race. An especially odd detail Kirk gives is that the fairies had a special class of servant at their revels, whom he describes as "Pleasant Children" or enchanted puppets, which sounds like the fairies were tended by mechanical dolls. ["robots" in the original sense] Fairy affairs curiously mirrored the situation of their human neighbors. When men experienced a good harvest, things were poorly in the fairy realm, and vice-versa. Fairies lived in tribes and "orders" (medieval social classes), had factions, fought wars among themselves -- sometimes in the sky, to the astonishment of mortal witnesses -- and by custom had to move their homes at the beginning of each quarter of the year. These migrations were sometimes seen by psychically gifted Scots, and led to them being called "the crew that never rest." Fairy fashion echoed that of the country in which they lived. In Scotland, they wore plaid kilts, and in Ireland dressed like the Irish. Fairy women were the finest spinners and weavers in the world, making cloth as fine as cobwebs, which seems only fitting for a race made of congealed air. They had no religion, but would flee when humans invoked God or Jesus. Kirk repeats the common belief that fairies fear and hate iron, and offers an unusual reason why: Hell, it seems, is a place so hot and terrible molten iron flows like water all over the place. Being highly sensitive creatures, the fairies cannot bear even the smell of cold iron, as it reminds them of the fate that awaits them once they die . . . eternity in Hell. Fairy relations with humans are always strange and often tragic. Time passes differently among the fairies. What seems like a few days or weeks in Elfland can be decades in the mortal world. Kirk's informants told him of vast underground halls, lit by perpetual lamps, where hundreds of fairies feasted and roistered down the ages. There were also more sinister aspects to human/fairy interactions. Most people have heard of changelings, where a human baby is taken away from its parents and a defective fairy child left in its place. But the Subterraneans did not balk at taking adults away too. They particularly liked women who'd just given birth. They were kidnapped to serve as wet nurses to fairy babies. Interestingly, the fairies would leave exact doubles of their captives behind. Kirk discusses these doppelgangers, who he calls "co-walkers," in some detail. Like changeling infants, co-walkers tend to weaken, become incoherent, and eventually die. They're not human or fairy, but a sort of biological robot created by fairy magic to distract mortals away from the truth about the abduction of their loved ones. UFO lore is full of co-walker types. Many of the classic "men in black" episodes feature clumsy, muddle-mouthed visitors who don't quite seem in sync with the mundane world. MIBs, like co-walkers, perform some task, then depart -- though they don't usually die in front of puzzled witnesses. Kirk gives this account of one woman's abduction (I have modernized his spelling): "Among other instances of undoubted verity, proving in these the being of such aerial people, or species of creatures not vulgarly known, I add the subsequent relations, some whereof I have from my acquaintance with the actors and patients and the rest from the eyewitnesses to the matter of fact. The first whereof shall be of the woman taken out of her child-bed, and having a lingering image of her substituted body in her room, which resemblance decayed, died, and was buried. But the person stolen returning to her husband after two years space, he being convinced by many undeniable tokens that she was his former wife, admitted her home and had diverse children by her. Among other reports she gave her husband, this was one: that she perceived little what they [the fairies] did in the spacious house she lodged in, until she anointed one of her eyes with a certain unction that was by her; which they perceiving to have acquainted her with their actions, they fained her blind of that eye with a puff of their breath. She found the place full of light, without any fountain or lamp from whence it did spring." Kirk goes on to say the returned woman was undoubtedly the same one everyone thought had died, and that her husband, having remarried since her "death," was obliged to divorce his second wife to remarry his first. The scholarly minister's interest in the Good People (as fairies were euphemistically called) proved unhealthy. Kirk's monograph was finished in 1691. A short time later, after the minister returned from London to Aberfoyle, he went for an evening stroll in his nightshirt. Kirk's perambulations took him past a fairy mound near his home. While passing by the mound (or walking over it, according to some accounts), the 47 year-old scholar collapsed. He was found and brought home, but died soon after and was buried in the kirkyard of his own church. Kirk's death on or near a fairy mound must have made his parishioners shudder, but an even weirder postscript would be added to the case. One of Kirk's relatives was awakened in the night by the apparition of the dead minister. Kirk gave him a message for his cousin, one Graham of Duchray. I am not dead, Kirk's specter declared. The Good People had carried him off. He had one chance to escape their clutches: when Kirk's posthumous child was christened (his wife being pregnant when he died), Kirk's apparition would appear at the ceremony. Graham of Duchray was to throw an iron-bladed knife over the head of the minister's specter. Iron was a powerful counter to fairy magic, and Kirk would be released from their power by this act. (One wonders what would become of his corpse, buried securely in the Aberfoyle cemetery . . . but some folk in Aberfoyle claimed that Kirk's body was abducted, not just his soul. His coffin, it was said, was buried with nothing in it but stones.) The child was born, and duly christened. While the family dined afterward, Kirk appeared before them. Unfortunately, his cousin Graham was so thunderstruck by this vision he failed to throw his knife as directed. Kirk's spirit faded away, never to be seen again. Well into the twentieth century people in Aberfoyle maintained that Robert Kirk was not really dead, but lived as an eternal captive in fairyland. This kind of fairy lore echoes again and again through UFO literature. Strange time effects, odd, diminutive "people" with pointed features seen to occupy UFOs, traditional fairy gambits of borrowing mundane object from witnesses -- and witnesses not being able to borrow "extraterrestrial" artifacts back -- all are common facets of UFO close encounters. Sometimes the fairy connection is so obvious as to be startling -- as in the 1967 Long Island case where a contactee was given a seemingly ordinary metal disc to wear so that "they" would recognize her. Who are "they?" asked the contactee. "They are the very good people," she was told. (See John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies, chapter 15). If there is a strong link between fairy lore and UFO encounters, what does it mean? The crassly obvious view is that extraterrestrials have been visiting us for centuries, and in the past they were mistaken for elves and fairies. This is a naive concept; more probable is the notion that modern encounters with strange beings are interpreted as contact with outer space folk whereas three hundred years ago such a meeting would have been seen as a visitation by the Good People. It seems as though the phenomenon changes very little, but our perception of it changes a great deal. Our understanding of it all would be greatly enhanced if we could strip away the trappings of folklore, religion, and pseudo-science that continued to obscure the core facts. And if at some future date we can recognize these experiences unburdened by medieval superstitions or cheesy science-fiction concepts of "aliens," then perhaps we'll know our visitors for who they truly are. Maybe then they'll cease to trouble us, and cease to be "the crew that never rest." © Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc.

The Infinite Universe of the Mind: Dr. Robert Lindner's "The Jet-Propelled Couch" (ParaScope, 1998)

Twenty-three years ago I wrote the following article for the paranormal pages of AOL's online magazine "ParaScope." Some of this work is available via the Wayback Machine, but you never know when old content might become superfluous to needs and lost. I hope to reproduce various bits of my old work here on my blog. 

"Nebula" was the section I edited. It dealt with all aspects of the UFO phenomenon. I was a moderate skeptic in those days and since have become a hardcore disbeliever in alien visitors. With the recent stir over US military footage of alleged UFOs, I thought some of these old (yet valid, I hope) articles would be relevant again.

"UFO Cautionary Tales" is a series I wrote that focused on social and historical parallels to the usual paranormal UFO claims. My thinking was that events in other areas of unusual human behavior could cast valuable light on UFO belief. Modern comments and additions are in red.

The artwork is original to the ParaScope page, and was created by Charles Overbeck.

by Paul B. Thompson Nebula Editor [out of date email address deleted] For many years before the words "flying saucers" or "UFOs" were created, there existed an extensive body of literature about contact between humans and non-human beings. In the nineteenth century, spiritualists filled volumes with rambling, obtuse discourses allegedly obtained from the spirits of the dead. (Why great thinkers, from Caesar to Shakespeare, suddenly become dull, sentimental hacks after death is one mystery spiritualists have never addressed.) Some mediums went even further afield and psychically contacted inhabitants of other worlds. A Swiss woman known as Helene Smith (real name Catherine Elise Muller) visited Mars in the 1890s, met an important Martian named Astane, and learned to write and speak the "Martian" language. A New England medium named Denton visited most of the known planets in the solar system, describing for his sitters life on Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. In the 1880s a Newburgh, New York dentist named John Ballou Newbrough channeled a "new Bible" called Oahspe, dictated to him by angelic presences at that new-fangled invention, the typewriter. Oahspe set new standards for occult drivel, as it was crammed with wacky paranormal beliefs: lost continents, angels copulating with animals, beings from space, and racist "history" that explained why Caucasians were superior to darker-skinned races (Caucasians have more angelic blood in them, according to Newbrough). By the 1930s, a more sophisticated "bible" was being transmitted to humankind in the form of the Urantia Book. Different accounts exist as to the origin of this weighty tome, but the basic story is like Newbrough's: non-human entities dictated the Urantia Book to a human recipient. Its contents are of a type with other channeled works: lots of long winded religion, philosophy, guides to right-thinking, nutrition, etc. Personally I always wonder why enormously wise Space Brothers/Angels don't relate really important stuff to us, like how to cure cancer, or how to achieve space travel without costly, noisy rockets. Beginning in 1965, UFO researchers in Spain and France received contacts from persons who claimed to be extraterrestrials from the planet Ummo, which allegedly circles the star astronomers know as Wolf 424. These contacts took the form of phone calls (!) and manuscripts of considerable size and complexity, purportedly describing the science, politics, and sociology of the Ummites. Artifacts from Ummo were left for researchers -- metal, sheets of plastic -- which when analyzed proved to be advanced composites or polymers available, but not common, on earth. The Ummo affair grew larger with time as more people fell into the network of contacts made by the alleged aliens. An extensive literature built up relating the wisdom of the Ummites, which to this day is widely discussed in continental Europe. Weird, complicated tales of deception and hoaxes are also wound into the fabric of the Ummo legend. American and British UFOlogists generally regard the Ummo affair as an elaborate hoax, perhaps a social experiment perpetrated by some intelligence agency (pick your favorite candidate -- the KGB, the East German Stasi, the CIA, French military intelligence...). French and Spanish investigators who have immersed themselves in Ummo lore for decades are not so sure. Who could, or would, perpetrate such a complex hoax? There are hundreds of pages of documents extant from the alleged aliens, some of which detail the mathematical system of Ummo. This is not at all like the muddled, intellectually bankrupt writing found in Oahspe or the Urantia Book. The Ummo material is not beyond the mentality of human beings, but it does pose a serious question: who would write such lengthy tracts, and why? I'm in no position to provide an exact answer, but in the tradition of previous UFO Cautionary Tales, I can suggest a parallel phenomenon that may hold at least part of the answer. It involves that vastly underestimated human feature, the mind. The Jet-Propelled Couch Dr. Robert Lindner (1914-1955) was born in New York City. As a child his passion was science fiction, which in those days meant H. G. Wells, "Tom Swift," and pulp magazines like Amazing Stories. Lindner received his Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell in 1938. He went on to a short but intense career as Freudian analyst, and wrote several riveting books about his experiences. His first book, published in 1944, was Rebel Without a Cause, which gave its title and nothing else to the famous James Dean movie. Dr. Lindner's most enduring work was his 1955 study The Fifty Minute Hour, a collection of five psychoanalytic cases. Lindner wrote with the power and clarity of a novelist; indeed, to protect the identity of his patients he heavily fictionalized aspects of their lives. The fifth and final case in The Fifty Minute Hour is called "The Jet-Propelled Couch." Dr. Lindner got a call from a physician "at a government installation in the Southwest." One of the scientists (Lindner says a physicist) at the government lab was exhibiting signs of psychosis, claiming he was from another planet. Lindner gave this man the pseudonym "Kirk Allen." One of Allen's supervisors at the government lab noticed him writing pages and pages of hieroglyphs. When questioned about the odd symbols, Allen apologized and promised to spend more time on this planet, i.e., earth! Because of the sensitive nature of this scientist's work for the U.S. government, Dr. Lindner was asked to treat this physicist as soon as possible. Allen was sent off to Baltimore, where Dr. Lindner had his practice. He was then in his thirties, blond, and given to wearing seersucker suits and Panama hats. Lindner soon learned that Allen was born in Hawaii in 1918, the son of an American naval officer, and spent much of his childhood in Polynesia. His troubles began when he was left to the care of a governess, a weird nymphomaniacal woman who seduced Allen when he was only eleven years old. Lindner spins a classical Freudian analysis of Allen's sexual formulation, his fears of maternal incest, etc. Allen identified strongly with the Polynesian people around him and found the behavior of the white people he knew alienating. When slightly older he chanced upon the novels of (as Lindner says) "a highly imaginative and prolific writer... a famous English author," Allen felt a shock of "recognition" that the novels' hero had the same name as him. (This suggests Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian adventure novels. The hero of Burroughs' Mars novels is named John Carter. Was there a physicist at Los Alamos or White Sands in the late 1940s named John Carter? I don't know. Lindner freely fictionalizes details of his cases, making the identification of his patients problematic.) Burroughs was not English, of course, but that's possibly one of Lindner's obfuscations. Over time, Kirk Allen's psychological problems took the form of believing he was an extraterrestrial, temporarily trapped in the guise of an ordinary earthman. Using the novels he read as a starting point, he began to compile lists of planets he had visited, complete with details of their geography, flora and fauna, civilizations, and politics. This started in his teens and continued to his thirties. It didn't seem to interfere with his college education or his subsequent career as a physicist. But by his thirties, Allen's accumulated "alien" knowledge began to crowd out the mundane details of his real life, and his colleagues recognized the depths of his delusions for the first time. "Kirk Allen" wasn't simply some Burroughsian swashbuckler -- he was, in his mind, the emperor of a vast galactic realm. He traveled the cosmos surveying his conquered worlds, and recorded his findings in meticulous detail. Because of his training in math and science, Allen's phantom worlds were far more fully realized than any in ordinary science fiction, and light-years more sophisticated than anything found in Oahspe, Urantia, or the Ummo papers. When Kirk Allen "discovered" a planet, he worked out its orbital mechanics with the precision of, well, an Ivy League physicist. Once Dr. Lindner obtained Allen's confidence he was shown the following documentation of Kirk Allen's cosmos: An autobiography of Allen, 12,000 pages long, in 200 chapters. Appended to this were a further 2,000 pages of notes and annotations. Many of these notes were written in shorthand that Allen himself had devised. A glossary of names and terms, over 100 pages long. 82 maps, drawn to scale in full color, consisting of 23 planetary maps in four projections, 31 continents on these planets, the rest being maps of cities on those planets. 161 architectural drawings, to scale and extensively annotated, some in color. 12 genealogical tables. 18 pages describing the galaxy in which Kirk Allen lived, with four astronomical charts, and nine star maps. A 200 page history of the empire ruled by Kirk Allen, with 3 pages of important historical events, battles, etc. 44 file folders containing up to 20 pages each of memoranda on the different planets Kirk Allen ruled or visited. These had titles like "The Metabiology of the Valley Dwellers," "The Transportation System of Seraneb," "The Application of Unified Field Theory and the Mechanics of the Stardrive to Space Travel," "Anthropological Studies on Srom Olma I," "Plant Biology and Genetic Science of Srom Olma I," and much more. 306 drawings, some painted, of extraterrestrial machines, animals, clothing, instruments, people, plants, insects, weapons, vehicles, buildings, even furniture. How pale and shallow the wisdom of Ummo must be compared to the delusions of a single educated earthman! Dr. Lindner was almost overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Allen's delusions. He had Allen submit to extensive physical and neurological tests, all of which came back normal. Allen's problem was entirely mental, and he developed curiously familiar theories to account for his presence on earth. A reader of the works of Charles Fort, Allen decided he had been teleported to earth, and that undefined "psychic" organs in his body allowed him to return (at least astrally) to his home galaxy whenever he wished. In another context Kirk Allen might have become a famous UFO contactee, the founder of a cult, or at least the center of a large controversy. Imagine, government physicist, Ivy League graduate, the extraterrestrial among us -- what kind of impact would Kirk Allen have had if he had come to the attention the gullible public instead of Dr. Lindner? Lindner's psychoanalysis of Kirk Allen took the form of going through the myriad details of his delusion, searching for inconsistencies that might shock Allen back to reality. There weren't many. Allen's galaxy was measured in units called "ecapalim," equal to one and five-sixteenths miles. He produced calculations of orbits and planetary sizes in this bizarre fraction, converting them to miles for Dr. Lindner's benefit. Eventually the strain of such scrutiny took the escapism out of Allen's delusions, and they lost value for him. He abandoned them, but kept up the pretense for Dr. Lindner for some time, just to humor his inquisitive therapist! The ironic fact was, by the end of his treatment, Allen's fantasies had ensnared Lindner, a science fiction fan from way back. Allen eventually confessed that he no longer believed in his own delusions, and that he had pretended to for weeks just to satisfy Dr. Lindner. Kirk Allen was cured of his outer space fantasy, and his case illustrates forcefully the vast creative power of the human mind. People who believe in channeled wisdom, in the revelations of the Space Brothers, often challenge skeptics by saying, "How could an ordinary person make up such strange stuff? It must be true -- where else could such details come from?" The truth is, as Kirk Allen demonstrates, unless the alleged revelations contain knowledge totally outside the realm of human understanding (say, a breakthrough in science or medicine), they can only come from the mind of the revealer. Human imagination consists of infinite space, and many universes may exist in a single cranium. Look there for answers first, before you raise your sights to the sky. Postscript There is a persistent rumor in science fiction fan circles that "Kirk Allen" was in fact Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913-1966), who wrote science fiction under the pen name Cordwainer Smith. Dr. Linebarger was a fascinating man in his own right -- godson to Dr. Sun Yat Sen, father of the Chinese Republic. Linebarger grew up in Asia and received his Ph.D. in political science at age 23 from Johns Hopkins University. (Johns Hopkins is in Baltimore, of course, where Dr. Lindner had his practice.) He served in China as an intelligence officer during World War II. After the war he wrote a famous textbook, Psychological Warfare, and served as a colonel in the intelligence branch of the U.S. Army. He advised the British Army during their suppression of Malayan nationalists, and advised the military on psy-war matters during the Korean conflict. Later Dr. Linebarger refused to lend his expertise to the Vietnam effort, deeming American involvement there a mistake from the outset. Linebarger started writing science fiction in the 1930s, using a richly detailed future history known as "The Instrumentality of Mankind." His strange, ethereal fiction has a power all its own. He wrote two mainstream novels under the pen name "Felix C. Forrest," and a spy novel as "Carmichael Smith." All are long out of print, but his science fiction remains, well loved by connoisseurs of the genre. Was Dr. Linebarger "Kirk Allen?" There is no legitimate evidence he was, only intriguing supposition and fannish theory. © Copyright 1998 ParaScope, Inc.