In June 1956, a major four-day symposium on UFOs was held in Washington, D.C. It was unquestionably the most important UFO affair of the 1950s and was attended by leading military men, government officials, and industrialists. Men like William Lear, inventor of the Lear Jet, and assorted generals, admirals, and former CIA heads freely discussed the UFO “problem” with the press. Notably absent were Ray Palmer and Donald Keyhoe. One of the results of the meetings was the founding of the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) by a physicist named Townsend Brown. Although the symposium received extensive press coverage at the time, it was subsequently censored out of UFO history by the UFO cultists themselves – primarily because they had not participated in it.8
The American public was aware of only two flying saucer personalities, contactee George Adamski, a lovable rogue with a talent for obtaining publicity, and Donald Keyhoe, a zealot who howled “Coverup!” and was locked in mortal combat with Adamski for newspaper coverage. Since Adamski was the more colorful (he had ridden a saucer to the moon), he was usually awarded more attention. The press gave him the title of “astronomer” (he lived in a house on Mount Palomar where a great telescope was in operation), while Keyhoe attacked him as “the operator of a hamburger stand.” Ray Palmer tried to remain aloof of the warring factions, so naturally, some of them turned against him.
The year 1957 was marked by several significant developments. There was another major flying saucer wave. Townsend Brown’s NICAP floundered and Keyhoe took it over. And Ray Palmer launched a new newsstand publication called Flying Saucers From Other Worlds. In the early issues, he hinted that the knew some important “secret.” After tantalizing his readers for months, he finally revealed that UFOs came from the center of the earth and the phrase From Other Worlds was dropped from the title. His readers were variously enthralled, appalled, and galled by the revelation.
For seven years, from 1957 to 1964, ufology in the United States was in total limbo. This was the Dark Age. Keyhoe and NICAP were buried in Washington, vainly tilting at windmills and trying to initiate a congressional investigation into the UFO situation.
A few hundred UFO believers clustered around Coral Lorenzen’s Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). And about 2,000 teenagers bought Flying Saucers from newsstands each month. Palmer devoted much space to UFO clubs, information exchanges, and letters-to-the-editor. So it was Palmer, and Palmer alone, who kept the subject alive during the Dark Age and lured new youngsters into ufology. He published his strange books about Deros and ran a mail-order business selling the UFO books that had been published after various waves of the 1950s. His partners in the Fate venture bought him out, so he was able to devote his full time to his UFO enterprises.
Palmer had set up a system similar to sci-fi fandom, but with himself as the nucleus. He had come a long way since his early days and the Jules Verne Prize Club. He had been instrumental in inventing a whole system of belief, a frame of reference – the magical world of Shaverism and flying saucers – and he had set himself up as the king of that world. Once the belief system had been set up it became self-perpetuating. The people beleaguered by mysterious rays were joined by the wishful thinkers who hoped that living, compassionate beings existed out there beyond the stars. They didn’t need any real evidence. The belief itself was enough to sustain them.
When a massive new UFO wave – the biggest one in U.S. history – struck in 1964 and continued unabated until 1968, APRO and NICAP were caught unawares and unprepared to deal with the renewed public interest. Palmer increased the press run of Flying Saucers and reached out to a new audience. Then in the 1970s, a new Dark Age began. October 1973 produced a flurry of well-publicized reports and then the doldrums set in. NICAP strangled in its own confusion and dissolved in a puddle of apathy, along with scores of lesser UFO organizations.
Donald Keyhoe, a very elder statesman, lives in seclusion in Virginia. Most of the hopeful contactees and UFO investigators of the 1940s and 50s have passed away. Palmer’s Flying Saucers quietly self-destructed in 1975, but he continued with Search until his death in 1977. Richard Shaver is gone but the Shaver Mystery still has a few adherents. Yet the sad truth is that none of this might have come about if Howard Browne hadn’t scoffed at that letter in that dingy editorial office in that faraway city so long ago.
Footnotes
1. Donnelly’s book, Atlantis, published in 1882, set off a 50-year wave of Atlantean hysteria around the world. Even the characters who materialized at seances during that period claimed to be Atlanteans.
2. The author was an active sci-fi fan in the 1940s and published a fanzine called Lunarite. Here’s a quote from Lunarite dated October 26, 1946: “Amazing Stories is still trying to convince everyone that the BEMs in the caves run the world. And I was blaming it on the Democrats. ‘Great Gods and Little Termites’ was the best tale in this ish [issue]. But Shaver, author of the ‘Land of Kui,’ ought to give up writing. He’s lousy. And the editors of AS ought to joint Sgt. Saturn on the wagon and quit drinking that Xeno or the BEMs in the caves will get them.”
I clearly remember the controversy created by the Shaver Mystery and the great disdain with which the hardcore fans viewed it.
3. From Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines by Ron Goulart (published by Arlington House, New York, 1972).
4. It is interesting that so many victims of this type of phenomenon were welding or operating electrical equipment such as radios, radar, etc. when they began to hear voices.
5. The widespread “ghost rockets” of 1946 received little notice in the U.S. press. I remember carrying a tiny clipping around in my wallet describing mysterious rockets weaving through the mountains of Switzerland. But that was the only “ghost rocket” report that reached me that year.
6. I attended this meeting but my memory of it is vague after so many years. I cannot recall who sponsored it.
7. A few of the surviving science fiction magazines now pay (gasp!) three cents a word. But writing sci-fi still remains a sure way to starve to death.
8. When David Michael Jacobs wrote The UFO Controversy in America, a book generally regarded as the most complete history of the UFO maze, he chose to completely revise the history of the 1940s and 50s, carefully excising any mention of Palmer, the 1956 symposium, and many of the other important developments during that period.