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 |  by Paul B. Thompson Nebula Editor [out of date email address deleted] For many years before the words "flying saucers" or "UFOs" were created, there existed an extensive body of literature about contact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:
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. |
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