| Scientology Rare Book Library | Dr. Christopher Evans - Cults of Unreason |
SCIENTOLOGY IS A do-it-yourself psychology course which grew into a cult and now lays claim to being a religion. Its success has largely rested on the personality and restless energy of its founder and leader, but it could never have sprung into being without the avid support of its many thousands of adherents.
The cult, or cults, that have sprung up around the phenomenon of flying saucers - or `Unidentified Flying Objects' - are based on firmer, or at any rate more defensible ground. Whereas evidence for the validity or objectivity of Scientology exists mainly in the minds of its devotees, a far more plausible case can be made out for the existence of UFOs and, more important, the active interest of their occupants in the inhabitants of earth. While the roll-call of reputable scientists, philosophers or men of academic achievement counting themselves as Scientologists would make brief reading, the list of those who have come to believe that spaceships from alien planets are whizzing around the skies of earth includes rocket experts, astronomers, politicians, military and air force leaders and some of the major personalities of our time. Those who have gone one step further and become involved in the specifically religious aspects of the matter are fewer, but a detailed inspection of the flying-saucer story and a study of the tenacity of belief in `celestial crockery' lead one quickly to the conclusion that powerful emotional factors are at work pushing human beliefs in a definite direction.
This can be summed up as follows: The God of orthodox religion has been found wanting - on a simple credibility basis - and can no longer be relied upon when Man is in dire circumstances. In his place new Gods have arisen - super-intelligent beings who are technologically and, perhaps, morally superior to mankind. They come not from some outdated Dantean Heaven, but from one or many of the myriad planets which undoubtedly exist in the vast arena of the universe. They no longer ride on clouds or chariots of fire, but in fast and manoeuvrable spaceships of a bewildering variety of designs, most commonly shaped like giant inverted saucers.
Public belief in their existence is, according to many official opinion polls, unusually high - in fact more than fifty per cent of the population have expressed belief on occasions. This suggests that people find nothing intrinsically unlikely in the idea of visitations from outer space, a point of view, no doubt, much fostered by science fiction movies and paperbacks and, more recently, by the observable achievements of many countries in space exploration.
For those who know a little astronomy, the possibility of the flying saucers being alien spaceships may seem quite high. Most astronomers now agree that the universe is sufficiently large to accommodate thousands of suns with planetary systems, and that many of these are capable of supporting intelligent life. Our own solar system appears to be in a relatively `young' part of the universe, and by now in some other galactic region there could well exist civilizations immeasurably more advanced, scientifically and technically, than our own. The argument continues on obvious lines. If, after only three or four thousand years of recorded history, homo sapiens is navigating his local astronomical space, then why should not a civilization with, say, a million years of recorded history be traversing the entire universe at will, even visiting our own little planet from time to time?
The argument is superficially attractive and is based on the reasonably sound premise that advanced civilizations probably do exist in other parts of the universe. Unfortunately when one considers the probable distribution of the planetary systems within the universe and the staggering scale of the cosmos, then the simple-minded picture of alien races commuting everywhere in flying-saucers becomes less plausible. The rather freakishly close Alpha Centauri - our nearest stellar neighbour - is about four light-years away and, as any ten-year-old schoolboy will tell you, this means that a point-to-point voyage travelling at the speed of light would take four years. For most of the stars in our part of the galaxy, one to two hundred years at such gargantuan speeds would be required. Assuming that anyone considered such trips worthwhile, and on the further doubtful assumption that speeds approaching that of light could be possible for a spaceship, one would still feel that earth might be visited once in a very long while - perhaps every ten or fifty thousand years. Advance this argument to a flying-saucer fan and you will soon be asked why you assume that the upper speed limit for space travel should be that of light; may not some super-scientific civilization have developed a method of travel which transcends our puny knowledge of the laws of space and time so that their craft can leap across the stellar wastes in the twinkling of an eye? This, of course, is conceivable in the sense that all things are theoretically possible, but here the UFO protagonist has moved from his strong ground (that other parts of the universe are probably inhabited) into the swamp of pure guesswork (that they will inevitably be able to move around at a speed greater than that of light). The second assumption is unwarranted, but is frequently passed off as something more than total speculation.
Nevertheless we have witnessed, in the last two decades in particular, an astonishing social phenomenon with literally tens of thousands of human beings reporting the sighting of mysterious flying objects in the skies, and some even reporting mental and physical contact with their occupants. This has given rise to a major system of beliefs shared by a measurable percentage of humanity - that earth is being visited by superior alien beings - and to a number of sub-beliefs which have unquestionable religious connotations.
The historical background to the flying-saucer controversy which, as the great psychologist C. G. Jung declared, was to become one of the great myths of the twentieth century, has been fully, if erratically documented in literally hundreds of books over the past two decades, and we will touch on it only briefly here. Fighter pilots on all sides during the war years had been reporting mysterious flying objects in the skies, often apparently moving at speeds quite beyond the range of normal aircraft. These, when they turned up in post-flight reports, acquired the nickname of `foo-fighters' and a minor, faintly serious legend matured about them, somewhat akin to the mythology that surrounded the `gremlins' or flying fairies which plagued battle-weary pilots with practical jokes. With the end of the war foo-fighters and gremlins seemed to vanish into spray, until on a sunny afternoon in June 1947 an Idaho businessman, Kenneth Arnold, who was piloting his own plane on a trip over the Rockies, saw a group of metallic-looking, wingless objects flying in formation at incredible speed. Questioned by newsmen Arnold described their peculiar motion as flying `like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water' - a phrase which was misquoted by the news agencies so that on the following day the world was told that `flying saucers' travelling at fantastic speeds had been seen over American territory. Despite the fact that Arnold had said nothing about their shape, other than that they appeared to be wingless, from that time on it was saucers all the way.
Something about the event - perhaps it was Arnold's matter-of-fact, honest-to-goodness manner - excited public interest to a remarkable extent, and students of sociology will not be surprised to learn that within weeks saucer reports were flooding in from all parts of the world. So widespread, and often so convincing, were these reports, that the American Air Force itself launched a full scale investigation into them. A moment's pause for reflection will allow one to see why this should have been.
At the time of the Arnold sighting the United States and Soviet Russia were plunging into the darkest depths of the Cold War. Both sides felt that at any time they might suffer a surprise nuclear strike, and immense technological effort was being poured into the development of high-flying, high-speed aircraft and the first rudimentary ICBMs. Radar networks across the whole of the USA were in a state of constant alert and ceaseless aerial patrolling by spotter aircraft was taking place. Neither side could afford anything but maximum interest in reports, no matter how far-fetched, of unidentified aircraft violating its air space.
The state of Russian aerospace technology, while thought to be creaky, was still unknown and it was not certain what contributions the tediously inventive German rocket engineers, captured by the score, might be making to the Russian air effort. American experts had found some peculiar aerial weapons under advanced stages of development as the Allied armies moved into Europe, and a saucer-shaped craft would be no odder than some of the contrivances with which the Luftwaffe had been toying. The Americans had themselves been experimenting with a craft which, with a little imagination, could be described as saucer-shaped - it was actually known as the `flying flapjack' - and while this was proving disappointing the Soviets might conceivably have gone one better. Thus the Air Force had good reason to follow the saucer `flaps' (as the waves of sightings came to be called), and took a critical interest at every stage in the game.
Much of the criticism of the USAF attitude to UFOs (the same applies to the routine but small-time interest shown by the Royal Air Force) arises from a misunderstanding of the circumstances. The late Captain Ed Ruppelt, a former director of Projects Sign and Grudge - the first official UFO inquiries under the auspices of the Air Force - states that in 1947 top-ranking officers in the Pentagon were demanding precise information on UFO sightings and at one stage believed that the Russians were testing some spectacular new weapon Public and military reports of sightings were scanned with the greatest interest, though with little coordination, and by the autumn of that year the lack of any coherent hypothesis to account for flying discs, cigars, sausages, etc., had led to press inquiries being met with ill-planned evasions, or even blank denials, that anything significant was going on. This mistaken strategy, which seems to have been adopted as the result of the genuine confusion and concern in the higher echelons of the Air Force, was later revised when formal investigations were set up - Projects Sign, Grudge, Blue Book, etc. - and realistic, considered press releases with details of numbers of explained and unexplained sightings were made at regular intervals. But by then the damage had been done and the myth that the Air Force was holding back some apocalyptic fact on flying saucers was already established.
In point of fact, the more the Air Force investigated the less it inclined to the view that the saucers were real craft of incredible performance, and the more readily they subscribed to prosaic explanations such as that the UFOs were weather balloons, meteorological phenomena, conventional aircraft whose distance and speed had been incorrectly judged, etc. A series of official Projects pronounced either neutrally or against UFOs as extra-terrestrial objects and this official view began slowly to permeate through to the public, despite a number of sensational books such as Donald Keyhoe's The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, which argued the contrary. No matter how attractive the notion that UFOs were visitors from another planet might he to newspaper headline writers, by the early fifties the public at large were bored with saucers and their elusive and recalcitrant occupants. Only science fiction fans and the chronic seekers after the miraculous remained steadfastly loyal throughout. The publication of a sensational book, Flying Saucers have landed in 1953, however, caused a dramatic resurgence of interest. This unscholarly work, purporting to be an account o[ the first person-to-person meeting between a human being and an alien life-form, hit the best-seller lists overnight and became a conversation piece across the world. It is also highly significant in another way, for it marked the beginning of a shift of emphasis in Ufology from quasi-serious science fiction to a mythology in embryo.
The book, in two sections, is an unlikely collaboration between the talented writer and electronics expert Desmond Leslie, son of the Irish novelist peer Shane Leshe, and a Polish-American of unusual ignorance, bogus astronomer and dabbler in psychics, George Adamski. Leslie was responsible for the first and longest part - a survey of the many thousands of peculiar objects which have been seen buzzing about the skies of earth since time immemorial. These range from Ezekiel's `Wheel of Fire' (a hot-shot favourite with UFO antiquarians) which comes from that well-known book of wonders, the Old Testament, to more recent peculiarities such as those eyewitness accounts of a giant airship which passed across America in 1879, its crew for some reason or another all singing Abide with Me. Ezekiel's UFO sighting contains such passages as:
I. 4: And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. 5: Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures...they had the likeness of a man. 15: Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. 19: And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. 20: ...for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.
Most readers no doubt will see the above passage as a typical piece of biblical enigma, rich in poetic imagery but low in informational content, but most UFO fans interpret it without difficulty.
Desmond Leslie, in fact, thinks that UFO sightings considerably pre-date the Bible, and seems to be sincerely convinced that flying saucers have been a highly significant part of Man's history since the year 18,617,841 B.C. when the first interplanetary vessel arrived from Venus. He makes no apology for the amazing precision of this dating which was `calculated from the ancient Brahmin tables in 1951'. The plain fact is, he tells us, that the Brahmins were exceedingly accurate people.
He has also uncovered the fact that saucers and their occupants were active during the heyday of Egypt and the Nilotic civilizations, and in England in pre-Celtic times. This neatly solves some venerable problems which have foxed archeologists for decades. We are referring, of course, to such matters as how the huge blocks which make up Stonehenge were moved from their apparent point of origin in the west of Wales to Salisbury Plain, and how the fifteen-ton casing stones of the Gizeh pyramids were lifted into place. The answer is simply that the great scientists of the time, who were as familiar with flying saucers as we are with jet aircraft, also had at their disposal a now-forgotten use of sonics to more heavy objects. Quoting from W. Kingsland's farcical book, The Great Pyramid in Fact and Theory, he reveals that to move the huge stones it was merely necessary to strike them with a rod, whereupon they would move `through the air the distance of one bowshot. In this way they came eventually to the place where the pyramids were being built'. These magic rods, Leslie believes, were `cut to precise lengths corresponding to the wavelength of the vibration required'. Whatever that might mean, it must certainly have provided an unmatched source of motive power and caused widespread redundancy among the captive slaves at the time. Hard though this idea of magic rods might be to believe, Leslie feels that `When one looks at the seventy-ton blocks of red granite roofing the so-called "King's Chamber" brought from quarries six hundred miles away, it is difficult to imagine any other way of moving, and setting them, with such incredible precision'.
These few passages should serve to convey something of the book's spicy, near-historical tone. Unfortunately Leslie's researches were not always as critical as they might have been, as witness his account of the `Ampleforth Abbey Sighting' which `took place in the year 1290'. The story of this particular historical event appeared with an acknowledgment to someone with the unusual name of Mr A. X. Chumley for supplying the original information. It is of such a superficially convincing nature that several other UFO authors have repeatedly requoted, and occasionally embellished it - without taking the precaution of checking back to the original source. This was left to the well-known photo-journalist Samuel Rosenberg, who had the entertaining job of researching the historical aspect of UFO phenomena for the American Air Force for the Condon Report in 1968. It is to him that the credit goes for this amusing but important expose.
The complete transcript, which appears on pages 22 to 23 of the original edition of the book (but is wisely omitted from the second edition published in 1970), reads as follows:
oves a Wilfredo susceptos die festo sanctissimorum Simonis atque Judae assaverunt. Cum autem Henricus abbas gratias redditurus erat, frater quidam Joannes introivit, magnam portentem foris esse referebat. Tum vero omnes ecuccurrerunt, et ecce res grandis, circumcircularis argentea, disco quodam haud dissimilis, lente et super eos volans atque maximam terrorem exitans. Quo tempore Henricus abbas exclamavit Wilfredum adulteravisse (quo) de causa impius esse de...
Latin scholars may care to amuse themselves attempting a translation, but for those less learned or with less time to spare we will quote the original translation as offered by the mysterious Mr Chumley:
took the sheep from Wilfred and roasted them on the feast of S.S. Simon and Jude. But when Henry the Abbott was about to say grace. John, one of the brethren, came in and said there was a great portent outside. Then they all ran out, and Lo! a large round silver thing like a disk flew slowly over them and excited the greatest terror. Whereat Henry the Abbot immediately cried that Wilfred was an adulterer, wherefore it was impious to ...
The important passage is, of course, that italicized reference to a flying disc, and Desmond Leslie interprets the story by suggesting that since it would be unlikely that the spacecraft arrived specifically to accuse the Monk Wilfred of adultery, it was merely a coincidence which the `astute Abbot' seized on as an opportunity of admonishing him for his behaviour and `the community for their lack of piety'.
Unfortunately for this charming tale, Rosenberg decided to do a bit of original checking himself, only to find that the entire Latin excerpt from oves a Wilfredo onward was a joyous fabrication by two schoolboys at the Ampleforth Abbey Public School who had perpetrated the myth in a letter to The Times on 9th February 1953. From there it was picked up by Desmond Leslie for his book, from which numerous other versions were duly pirated. By the time it reached Gabriel Green's totally uncritical work, Let's Face the Facts about Flying Saucers, published as recently as 1967, it had metamorphosed into something closer to a television script for the adventures of Robin Hood - `Yo Ho', quoth the good Friar, `behold the silver saucer in the sky'.
For those with the unusual hobby of collecting hoax material of this kind - there is an enormous amount of it in the literature of the occult and the psychic anecdote as well as in Ufology - Rosenberg's chapter in the Condon Report (the American Air Force's final expose of the UFO myth) is particularly recommended. He also includes an examination of spurious saucer material from the writings of the complicated mystic Madame Blavatsky and certain questionable Egyptian papyri.
Despite the unconvincing nature of much of the material amassed by Leslie, it is nevertheless important to realize that a very substantial number of people count this kind of inexact and highly selective historical research as on a par with the more scholarly, if perhaps less readable, works that come from strictly academic quarters. The fashion that Leslie set of hunting through a wide range of literature and producing evidence to push this or that theory to account for flying saucers is still with us today. Noted exponents are B. le Poer Trench (The Flying Saucer Story, The Sky People, etc.), G. Hunt Williamson (Secret Places of the Lion, Road in the Sky), and Paul Thomas (Flying Saucers through the Ages). A particularly good example of this genre is the book Chariots of the Gods? by the German author Erich von Daniken which has recently enjoyed a world-wide craze. This is an apparently serious attempt to demonstrate that the history of civilized man stretches much further back into the past than modern archaeology would have us believe. Earth has been visited on numerous occasions by alien spacemen who have been largely responsible for injecting homo sapiens with the main elements of his science and culture. The titles of one or two chapters - `Was God an Astronaut?', `Fiery Chariots from the Heavens' and `Easter Island, Land of the Bird Men' - sum up the emphasis of the work rather well.
Full of historical howlers or not, Desmond Leslie's section of the book has at any rate the merit of literary style, imagination and a suggestion that some basic research at least had been sunk into it. Adamski's account of his encounter in the Mojave desert with a long-haired Venusian wearing ski-pants with whom he engaged in telepathic contact, on the other hand, reads like a desperate travesty of the most simple-minded science fiction. We will not linger here on the details of their boring conversation, nor dwell on such matters as the unctuous expression on the Venusian's face as he warned earthlings of the displeasure that their naughty behaviour was causing to the `higher beings', etc., who were watching us from the comfort of their spaceships. We will, however, pause briefly to wonder at the world-wide success of the book when it was published, unsupported by evidence of any kind other than a `plaster cast of the Venusian's footprint' (Adamski just happened to be carrying plaster-of-Paris with him when he visited the desert that day), and a collection of photographs which have aroused considerable controversy in the past two decades, and which most experienced photographers hold to be crude fakes, being close-ups of a simple fabricated model. The most important of the pictures shows the underparts of a vaguely bell-shaped device with portholes along its sides and with three spherical objects - landing gear or table-tennis balls, as you will - below. Despite the fact that Adamski claims he had ample time to take pictures the detail is blurred and the background non-existent so that it is impossible to gauge the scale of the device. The late Frank Edwards, a pro-saucer journalist who was, however, immeasurably scornful of most contactee stories, believes that the spaceship was the `top of a canister-type vacuum cleaner, made in 1937' - a device which considers to be most unsuitable for extended space travel. Commenting at the same time on some suspicious lighting effects on the side of the object he concludes that these can be explained in one of two ways: (1) they are reflections from three floodlights used to light the model for photography, (2) that on the day Adamski took the picture, three suns were shining in the sky. A cautious man, Edwards selects the first alternative as preferable.
Adamski's adventure struck a chord of acceptance in too large a segment of the population for it to be lightly dismissed. The surge of publicity which flying saucers had had since 1947, backed by the endless speculation in magazines and newspapers as to their origin, can only have served to prepare an uncritical populace for the notion that some day contact between earthly and alien civilizations would take place. Furthermore, the vigorous attention which newspapers, etc., had paid to the saga also induced a crop of similar `contact' stories, some more fantastically embellished. A number of contactees claimed that they had actually met with aliens some time before Adamski's adventure but had been `too frightened' or `too embarrassed' to tell anyone.
Another early contactee was a Mr George Van Tassel, who has since become an important international figure - at least among the dotty fraternity of flying-saucer fans - because of his claimed ability to be in more or less regular daily contact (telepathic, of course) with alien spacemen.
It all started on 24th August 1953, when he and his wife were sleeping out in the desert `because of the heat'. At about two o'clock in the morning, Van Tassel related, he awoke to find a man standing at the foot of the bed, who immediately introduced himself as `Sol-danda' and invited him to inspect his craft. He had a good, not to say splendid, command of the English language, talking `like Ronald Colman'. Leaving his wife, who `seemed to be under some spell', Van Tassel went to inspect the spaceship, a bell-shaped craft whose dimensions he was able to measure quite precisely. After experiencing a feeling of nausea as he approached, he was levitated into its interior on an `anti-gravity beam'. The inside of the ship, with its dials, seats and various pieces of equipment either revolving or glowing, lived up to, if it did not exceed the levels of imagination reached by science fiction `B' features of the time. Van Tassel was not treated to a ride, but he was shown a number of rooms and something of the craft's motive unit which he thinks can best be described by the phrase `wheels within wheels'.
Now known as `The Sage of Giant Rock', George holds an annual convention of contactees at his home in California. By all accounts these are strange gatherings indeed. At the 1966 convention, for example, delegates heard Miss Gloria Lee, a former air hostess, tell of the messages she had been receiving regular]y from a Jupiterian. Chiefly these concern the sexual mores of our planet and it is evident that in Jovian terms we have misconceived our sexual desires. On Jupiter, Miss Lee informed the group, there is no marriage and the inhabitants lead quite uninhibited sexual lives. Also present on this glittering occasion were such remarkable characters as `Andy Sinatra, the Mystic Barber', who wears a daft-looking hat given to him by saucer men, and Mr Gabriel Green, founder of the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, Inc., who runs regularly for President of the USA on a straight flying-saucer ticket. So far the combined weight of the Republican and Democratic party machines have been too great for him to make much headway but each election time finds him soldiering on indefatigably.
To while away the time between conventions, George Van Tassel keeps his head open, metaphorically speaking, for messages from other planets. These he publishes monthly in the Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom - a journal of unparalleled interest to those who ponder the strange workings of the human mind.
We will not linger to consider the adventurers of Buck Nelson (`My Trip to Mars, the Moon and Venus'), or Orfeo Angelucci (`The Secret of the Saucers') or even of the late Truman Bethurum (`The Voice of the Planet Clarion'). All have, as do most contactee stories, a common and significant theme. Earth is in danger of destroying itself and must learn the peaceful ways of the Cosmos or perish at its own hand. The space people, who have advanced scientific skills, also have moral and ethical principles to back them, and they wish nothing but kindness and well-being to humanity. For various reasons initial contact can be made only through a `Chosen Few' whose job it is to propagate the cosmic wisdom as quickly as possible to all who will receive it. The day of a mass landing of saucers in Times Square or outside the Houses of Parliament may be a long way off, as the shock would be too great for the pig-headed autocrats of earth (probably a reasonable assumption accidentally, and initially the truth must be infiltrated rather than trumpeted.
Such is the message of most contactees whether they are favoured with rides in spacecraft, or are merely the recipients of strange telepathic signals. It forms the principal theme running through the majority of the explicitly religious groups that have sprung up in this area and we shall take a closer look at one in particular.
| From Psychotherapy to Religion | Jesus is Alive and Well and Living on Venus |