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Entirely Unpredisposed
The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports
copyright (c) 1990 by Martin S. Kottmeyer
[Reprinted from "Magonia" Magazine, Jan. 1990, by
permission of the author]
Culture is an admixture of repetition and variation, convention
and creativity, signals and noise. It is ever new and forever old
as humanity relives old dreams and nightmares or forgets and
forges new ones. Part of the delight of history is the
recognition that however new a given event appears, traces of the
past can generally be discerned.
If the UFO phenomenon is an artifact of culture one would
reasonably expect that cultural antecedents could be recognized
for the major features it presents. Extraterrestrials, however,
should be independent of culture and if they are newly arrived
their characteristics should represent a discontinuity with the
past. Abduction phenomenon students have recently offered some
provocative claims that such discontinuities exist. Implicitly
they are claims for the weakness of the sociopsychological
paradigm ant the converse power of the ETH.
David Jacobs argues that the imagery of the UFO phenomenon sprang
up _ex nihilo_ in 1947. Budd Hpkins states that the complex,
controlling, physically frail beings of abduction reports bear no
simimariuy to "traditional sci-fi gods and devils". Thomas E.
Bullard makes the rather more modest claim that the keystone of
the abduction mystery, the interrupted journey of Betty and
Barney Hill, had no cultural sources from which to derive the
experience they reported. They were, to quote him, "entirely
unpredisposed" since they were the first. These are forceful
challenges to the proponent of the cultural origin of UFO
phenomena. They have "Falsify me, I dare you" plastered on them.
Can it be demonstrated that culture predisposed people to have
these experiences?
The boldest claim is the one by UFO historian David Jacobs.
Jacobs states "there was no precedent for the appearance or the
configuration of the objects in 1947" in popular science fiction
films, popular science fiction or popular culture in general.
They did not resemble the fanciful rocketships or earthly space
travel contraptions in the SF literature. [1]
There is a trivial sense in which this is simply wrong. Disc-
shaped spaceships have a number of precedents in popular
culture. They appear in Buck Rogers as far back as 1930. [2]
They appear in a Flash Gordon comic strip in 1934.[3] The
science fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul was drawing
saucer-like craft as early as 1931 and did so repeatedly.[4]
Other SF illustrators also utilized the disc form long before
1947.[5] But these are inevitable coincidences in a large body
of artistic creativity. The saucer form was not the dominant
shape of spaceships in the culture; it was the rocket. In this
larger sense Jacobs is correct that one would expect an outbreak
of ghost rockets over America if the images of SF were the
determinant of what people should be imagining. They weren't.
The cultural source of the UFO lies in a journalistic error.
Kenneth Arnold's report of mysterious supersonic objects flying
near Mount Rainier was a sensation that made front-page news
across the nation. The speed was far beyond that of the planes of
the era and no one publicized the flight in advance. It was an
exciting puzzle.
The shape of the objects Arnold saw is hard to describe in a word
or two. It wasn't like a plane or rocket, or even a disc. When
the newsman Bill Bequette wrote the story up for the news
services he recalled Arnold's describing the motion of the
objects as like a saucer if you skip it across the water.
Jumbling the metaphorical intent of the description, Bequette
labeled the objects "flying* saucers", Arnold said the term
arose from "a great deal of misunderstanding". The public,
however, did not know that. No drawing accompanied the story.
People started looking for flying saucers and that is exactly
what they found. They reported flat, circular objects that look
like flying saucers sound like they should look like. Equally
important: no one reported objects like the drawing in Arnold's
report to the Air Force.[6] The implications of this journalistic
error are staggering in the extreme. Not only does it unambigu-
ously point to a cultural origin of the whole flying saucer
phenomenon, it erects a first-order paradox into any attempt to
interpret the phenomenon in extraterrestrial terms: Why
would extraterrestrials redesign their craft to conform to
Bequette's error?
This paradox is especially bad news for abduction reports. By
Bullard's tally 82% of craft descriptions fit the flying saucer
stereotype.[7] This is far in excess of the approximately one-
third portion saucers and discs make up in a more general
population of UFO reports.[8] If imagination and cultural
expectations play a larger role in abductions than in more
reality-constrained misinterpretations of mundane stimuli, then
this fact makes sense. The flying saucer mythos perfectly
predisposes us to include flying saucers in our fantasies and
nightmares about extraterrestrials.
This takes care of the craft, but what of the entities? Budd
Hopkins emphasizes that they are complex, controlling, physically
frail beings who are forced by survival needs to search out and
abduct earthlings. This is quite unlike the godly aliens of
_Close Encounters of the Third Kind_, the kindly, spiritual alien
of _The Day The Earth Stood Still_, or the aliens of _War of The
Worlds_ who "mindlessly devour and conquer us", as Hopkins sees
it. Nothing by his abductees "in any way suggests traditional
sci-fi gods and devils", he wants us to know.[9]
Hopkins's descriptions leave something to be desired. The godly
aliens of CE3K trash the home of the little boy Barry and they
terrorize his mother as they abduct him. The disrupt the life and
mind of Neary. Kindly and spiritual Klaatu happens to have a
robot with him who is all business. His offer to leave a police
force is eminently pragmatic. The comparison is frivolous in
either case since any UFO aliens matching these descriptions go
into the contactee file. Hopkins professes it is instructive that
his abductees are not devoured like in War of the Worlds, but how
would a myth devour a person?
That Hopkins is ignorant of science fiction would be apparent to
any fan by the fact that he used the repellent phrase "sci-fi' -
a sure sign of an outsider to the genre.[10] War of the Worlds is
one of the recognized masterpieces, yet it is grossly evident
Hopkins never read it or he would be co-opting Wells as an
unconscious abductee. Far from "mindlessly" devouring us, Wells
endowed his aliens with "intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic.
The did not devour people but took the fresh and living blood of
other creatures and injected it into their own bodies. His aliens
had "no extensive muscular mechanism". The invaders also brought
along for provisions bipeds with flimsy siliceous skeletons and
feeble musculature.[11]
There are multiple similarities to other abduction narratives -
an immense pair of dark eyes possessing an extraordinary
intensity, a mouth without lips, greyish colour of skin, the skin
glistening like wet leather, telepathy. They are also "absolutely
without sex". Add to this that the alien craft was circular, made
a peculiar humming sound, and when they flew the sky would be
alive with their lights. In fact Wells's aliens more resemble
Hopkins's abducting aliens than most abduction reports,
Hopkins further errs in thinking the Wells aliens are mere
"satanic monsters".[12] Their motivation is survival. Their world
is dying and Earth is their only escape. Ironically, just a
couple of pages before Hopkins mangles War of the Worlds he
quotes the impressions of an abductee that the aliens are from a
society millions of years old that is dying. They desperately
need to survive. This places UFO aliens squarely in the main
tradition of aliens in SF films.
Dying worlds are commonplace in alien invasion movies. It leads
the aliens in "This Island Earth" to borrow Earth scientists for
their expertise in atomic energy. It motivates the aliens in "The
27th Day" to give Earth people the means of destroying human
life. It motivates the "Killers from Space" to operate on a man,
extract information from his mind, and compel him to become a spy
saboteur. It leads the "Devil Girl from Mars" to abduct healthy
males. It similarly motivates the aliens in "I Married a Monster
from Outer Space", "The Mysterians", and "Mars Needs Women" to
procure females for breeding stock. An astronomer in "Invaders
from Mars" theorises the secret operations aliens engage in are
motivated by the fact that Mars is a dying world. The aliens in
the popular TV series "The Invaders" were also escaping a dying
world.[13]
The fact is most film aliens have some implicit motivation to
their activities. One of the few exceptions I could find was the
"so thin - so fragile" aliens of "Target Earth!" and even they
don't seem particularly satanic or monstrous.[14] It seems more
sensible to flip Hopkins's allegation around. He says nothing
about the aliens of UFO abductions resembling "sci-fi". I ask, is
there anything about UFO aliens that does not resemble science
fiction?
An abductee in the 1954 movie "Killers from Space" has a strange
scar and a missing memory of the alien encounter that caused it.
The mysterious impregnation of women, including virgins, and the
subsequent birth of intelligent hybrid children is the theme of
the 1960 film "Village of the Damned". Brain implants are
featured in the 1953 movie "Invaders from Mars"[15]
Take a look at the creatures of the 1957 movie "Invasion of The
Saucer Men". The bald, bulgy-brained, googly-eyed, no-nosed
invaders match the stereotype of UFO aliens delineated by Bullard
to an uncanny extent. It prompts worries that abductees are not
only plagiarists, but have bad taste as well.[16]
"Earth versus the Flying Saucers" (1956) also precedes UFO lore
in featuring an abduction in which thoughts are taken. Saucerians
abduct a general, make his head transparent, and suck out the
knowledge to store it in an Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank.
Though the frequency of the motif in abduction narratives can be
laid to psychological factors in the personalities of abductees,
one cannot rule out the movie enculturating the association.
Years from now we may have an epidemic of implanted parasites,
potential chest-bursters, due to the influence of the movie
"Alien" starting such an association. Presently such a report
would be too suspect, but eventually some puzzling medical oddity
might be associated with such a delusion and the UFO lore would
evolve in new directions. It could just as easily never happen
because of the vagaries of social factors.
In a more esoteric vein even abduction narrative structure has
science fiction predecessors. Thomas Bullard has discovered a
consistent structural order to events within abduction reports.
There are eight types of events and they are preferentially
ordered in this manner: (i) capture, (ii) examination, (iii)
conference, (iv) tour, (v) otherworldly journey, (vi) theophany,
(vii) return, (viii) aftermath.
No abduction has every event, but events avoid appearing out of
this sequence. Abductees aren't generally given a tour of the
ship before examination or conference and so forth. Bullard
considers the arrangement occasionally arbitrary from a rational
standpoint. The fidelity of reports to this arrangement seems, to
Bullard, to indicate these are real experiences. He would expect
the elements of the story to get jumbled if they were
subjective.[17]
What, then, are we to make of the 1930 comic strip story "Tiger
Men of Mars" in the series "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century"?
It adheres to Bullard's structure most excellently. Wilma
experiences:
(i) capture by a giant clamp leading into a spherical alien
spaceship,
(ii) examination while lying on a table in an electro-
hypnotic trance,
(iii)conference with a subordinate and then a leader,
(vi) theophany while gazing at the Earth from an off-world
vantage point,
(vii)return,
In the aftermath there is an instance of what Bullard calls
"networking" in the aliens abducting Wilma's sister, Sally.
There is also an apocalyptic finale in which the Martian moon
Phobos crashes on Mars.[18]
Some idea of the structural impressiveness of this narrative can
be gained from observing that only one abduction in the UFO
literature has a greater number of these elements in the correct
order. Two abductions have the same number of elements. The other
163 correctly ordered abductions have 5 or fewer elements in
them.[19]
Obviously the presence of structure does not prove the cartoon is
objectively real, and it must be granted that a long-forgotten
cartoon is not a credible influence on present-day abductions. It
is more likely they share an intuitive ordering principle
subconsciously acquired from exposure to drama. A relabeling of
Bullard's elements should make the logic clearer: (i) character
introduced, (ii) peril and conflict, (iii) explanation and
insight, (iv) good will and attempt to impress, (v) excitement,
(vi) climax, (vii) closure, (viii) sequel.
Examination, as the peril, is the downer part of the story and
would ruin a happy ending if sequenced late. Even in deviant
cases the examination is never put near the end. Pragmatically,
putting theophany before examination might instill trust in the
abductee and make testing go better. Dramaturgically, however,
such an order would be stupid since it ruins the intensity of the
peril and spoils the joy of the ending and the sense of closure.
Faceless terror makes for more primordial fear. Dramatically it
would be unwise to reduce the alienness before the peril by
conferring with the aliens or have them host a tour. It is also
bad behaviourism to place aversive stimuli after sending one's
signal - the message and information in the conference, tour
and theophany.
The otherworldly journey is a form of excitement and can appear
any place between the capture and climax. Most of Bullard's
deviant cases involve the otherworldly journey not staying in the
place he deemed correct, To put it simply, Bullard's correct
order is the right way to tell a story. At the very least, his
evaluation that "Objectivity wins a big one" on the issue of
structure is problematic.[20]
The capture event in "Tiger Men of Mars" features an incredible
kid-inventor-type gizmo - a giant mechanical clamp which grabs
the whole body of the victim. It's a grand cartoony contraption
appropriate to its venue in a Buck Rogers situation. How odd,
then, to note that such a thing appears in the Steven Kilburn
abduction in "Missing Time". It seems such a ridiculously
impractical thing for a technologically superior culture to
bother with, yet Hopkins includes it with not an indication of
amusement. One can understand it in a 1930s cartoon, or even in
an early script draft of "War of the Worlds". At least someone
realised it should be deleted. But in a real abduction? Lawson's
suggestion that Kilburn was reliving a forceps-aided birth makes
tons more sense.[21]
I could have more fun demolishing Hopkins's claim, but it really
doesn't deserve more attention than this. Time to turn to the
last of our three historical allegations.
Thomas E. Bullard opens his massively impressive study of
the abduction mystery with a discussion of the
legendary status of the "interrupted journey" of Betty and
Barney Hill. It was the most sensational UFO story of
its time; a nasty little horror story which engraved itself
on the unconscious of a generation. The growth of UFO
abduction reports subsequent to their appearance on the
cultural scene is unsurprising. The thing that puzzles
Bullard is how _they_ got the idea. He points out that
occupant reports were obscure items known only to the
initiated in 1961. He believes the Hills had no knowledge they
could construct a nightmare of this sort from, so he
asserts "the odds are strong that the Hills went to their
interrupted journey entirely unpredisposed." It is a "continuing
mystery" how they originated it and as long as it is unaccounted
for "the cultural tradition explanation starts off
handicapped."[22]
Part of the mystery is solved by a careful reading of
"The Interrupted Journey." It is on record that Betty Hill
had read Donald Keyhoe's book "The Flying Saucer
Conspiracy" shortly before she be an having nightmares of
abduction. Keyhoe's book cites nearly a dozen occupant cases.
Most of them are outright rejected by Keyhoe. These include such
farces as zebra-striped spacemen, an elephant-faced entity, 6-
armed, 13-ft tall entities, space-man monster tales and contactee
hoaxes. Keyhoe practically endorses, however, a Pearl Harbor
report of a flyer who frightfully proclaimed "I actually saw him"
- the saucer pilot. Note the pronoun is him, not it. No doubt
this would have impressed Betty as similar to Barney's experience
of seeing the saucer's occupants.[23]
Keyhoe also expresses a measure of acceptance of a series of UFO
stories from Venezuela involving hairy dwarfs. One of these
serves as a closer starting point of Betty Hill's nightmares. Two
peasants first spot a bright light like a car on the nearby road.
Hovering a few feet from the ground is a round machine with a
brilliant glow coming from the underside. "Four little men" come
out and try to drag Jesus Gomez toward the object. There is a
struggle and the evidence of that struggle gives it a special
credibility in Keyhoe's eyes. Keyhoe next cites the experience of
Jesus Paz who was found unconscious after being set upon by a
hairy dwarf. He follows this with Jose Parra's sighting of six
small hairy creatures by a saucer and their transfixing him with
a bright light. [24]
In Betty Hill's nightmare she must fight for consciousness and
she finds herself surrounded by four short men. Barney is
unconscious and is being dragged by another group of men. They
numbered eight to eleven when standing in the middle of the road.
They are taken from the car to a glowing saucer-shaped craft. The
behaviour of the aliens is very professional and businesslike and
they are dressed in somewhat military style. They are not
frightening per se. This is very much in keeping in tone with
Keyhoe's speculations that aliens were making a scientific study
of the planet out of "neutral curiosity' or as a prelude to a
mass landing.[25]
This takes us up to the saucer, but it doesn't give us much idea
what should take place inside. Neutral curiosity would probably
lead to some sort of examination or questioning and this pretty
much does happen. Yet there is that terror of the needle in the
navel and the business with the star map. Nothing in Keyhoe
predisposes one to those sorts of things.
Movies provide another cultural source of expectations and
imagery. Bullard himself notes a pair of movies from the fifties
have medical motifs in an alien abduction setting: "Invaders from
Mars" (1953) and "Killers from Space" (1954). Though he
understands the significance of the second one on some abduction
cases subsequent to the Hills, he overlooked the significance of
"Invaders From Mars".[26]
Near the climax of the film a woman and a boy are abducted by
mutants from Mars and taken to a room within a saucer. The woman
is placed on a rectangular table which slides into the scene. She
struggles briefly till a light shines on her face which causes
her to relax and lose consciousness. A needle surrounded for part
of its length by a clear plastic sheath is aimed at the back of
her neck. A device at the end of the needle is going to be
surgically implanted there.[27]
In "The Interrupted Journey" we are dealing with a woman and a
man abducted by aliens described as mongoloid - itself a type of
mutation. In the original nightmare Betty compares the noses of
the aliens to Jimmy Durante. This is a very apt description of
the noses of the mutants in "Invaders From Mars". Barney, oddly,
didn't see the Durante noses of the aliens. Perhaps it was in
deference to Barney's on-the-scene memories that this detail was
edited out by Betty in her hypnosis sessions. It may also be that
the big nose prompted jokes after the speeches she gave and her
unconscious took the opportunity to remove the annoying detail
when Benjamin Simon unleashed it.[28]
There are some preliminary tests of a routine sort. Betty then
lies down on an examining table. Needles are placed on various
parts of her body including the back of the neck. Then appears a
very long needle, longer than any needle she's seen before, and
it is placed into her navel. She experiences great pain. The
examiner puts his hand over her eyes, rubs, and the pain stops.
The parallel to the calming light in "Invaders from Mars" is
readily apparent.
I am indebted to Al Lawson for calling attention to the fact that
the needle-in-the-navel motif owes its origin to imagery
appearing during the Martian operating room episode. Shortly
after the operation begins, the camera cuts to a high-angle view
of the surgical theatre. At least, that is what it is supposed to
be. The image has an ambiguous character in terms of scale and
content. You are supposed to interpret it as a view of the
architecture of the interior of the saucer with the dominant
structure being a tubular metal beam or conduit connecting
ceiling to floor. It bears a stylistic similarity to the neck
implanter in having a clear plastic sheath surrounding the upper
half of its length. The ambiguity of the image, however, admits
an alternative interpretation. The tubular metal beam and plastic
sheath becomes a hypodermic needle. Lighting of the floor
suggests the curvature of an abdomen. The place where the floor
and tube intersects is surrounded by a round indentation. It's
the navel. In the brief snatch of time the image is seen, some
people will miss the intended interpretation and see a huge
hypodermic needle has been thrust into the woman's navel.
Some have seen Betty Hill's needle-in-the-navel incident as
revealing a medical procedure that did not exist at the time of
the encounter. In fact the aliens' reference to the procedure as
a pregnancy test is quite contemporary for the period.
Amniocentesis has existed as a medical procedure since the late
l9th century. Back then the needle was inserted in the abdomen to
draw off amniotic fluid when there was too much pressure during a
pregnancy. In the late 1950s, however, it became a testing
procedure to monitor preganacies of women with Rh-negative blood
who might have blood group incompatibility. Subsequent to 1966
amniocentesis became a genetic screening procedure. Comparison of
Mrs. Hill's ordeal to laparoscopy procedures suffers in the
details.[29]
There is no conference with the aliens in "Invaders from Mars"
and you might not expect the star map scene to originate there,
but dreams have an odd penchant for distortion and condensation
of memory materials. Earlier in the movie the boy and woman have
a meeting with a scientist at an observatory. This character, Dr.
Kelson, has a large star map on the wall behind him. He points at
the map during this meeting and discusses the proximity of Mars
to Earth. The most striking thing about this discussion, to the
alert movie-goer, is that, while he points to the map as though
these two planets are represented on it, in fact there is nothing
there where the Earth should be. Kelson is faking it.
Any similarity between Kelston's star map and Betty Hill's is
almost purely accidental. The paradox they share, however, is
not. Betty's sketch has the two planets Kelston's lacks.
(Marjorie Fish treats them as stars, ironically. Stars don't have
terminators.) But when the alien asks Betty where on the map the
Earth is, she relives the movie-goer's puzzlement. She has no
idea. The sizes of the planets bear comparison to the planets in
the star field in the credits of the film, incidentally.
Parenthetically, the script of "Invaders From Mars" has Kelston
present a large scrapbook with newspaper columns about saucer
activities to the boy before the star map discussion. This was
not in the 78-minute video I saw, but an 82-minute "European"
version exists that has a longer observatory scene. Does anyone
know if this scene was filmed? It might explain the presentation
of the large book in Betty's account.[30] [When this film was
shown in Britain several years ago there was indeed a scene
showing Kelston's UFO scrapbook - J R]
The match between "Invaders from Mars" and Betty Hill's
nightmares is imperfect and obviously has none of the rigor of a
mathematical equation. Dreams and nightmares by their nature are
almost never veridical memories. Even if Betty Hill was really
abducted, it would be unusual for her nightmares to be a
photographic reply of her trauma. The felt emotions would
resurface, but it would bear only a metaphoric similarity in its
dramatic content. The most one would generally expect is snatches
of unique imagery to help in piecing together of the sources the
dream spun off from. It is something of a wonder that enough
elements exist of this character - the Durante noses, and the
navel-needle, and the optical tranquilization idea, and the star
map - to make an identification that can be called convincing.
Barney's version of events probably owes much to what Betty said
in her speeches, but there is one facet which was clearly
Barney`s own contribution - the long wraparound eyes of the
aliens. Donald Keyhoe emphasised it was "the worst feature" of
their ugly faces. It gave them a sinister look. Their hideousness
prompted Keyhoe to wonder what could have caused the Hills to
imagine such creatures. It was "never fully explained".[31]
Wraparound eyes are an extreme rarity in science fiction films. I
know of only one instance. They appeared on the alien of an
episode of an old TV series "The Outer Limits" entitled "The
Bellero Shield". A person familiar with Barney's sketch in "The
Interrupted Journey" and the sketch done in collaboration with
the artist David Baker will find a "frisson" of "deja vu"
creeping up his spine when seeing this episode. The resemblance
is much abetted by an absence of ears, hair, and nose on both
aliens. Could it be by chance? Consider this: Barney first
described and drew the wraparound eyes during the hypnosis
session dated 22 February 1964. "The Bellero Shield" was first
broadcast on "10 February 1964. Only twelve days separate
the two instances. If the identification is admitted, the
commonness of wraparound eyes in the abduction literature falls
to cultural forces.[32]
Wilder Penfield once proclaimed, "It is far better to be wrong
than to bc without an opinion." Penfield showed himself to be a
wise scientist in formulating that maxim. Errors are much more
fruitful than silence. They goad one into research and discovery.
Had Jacobs, Hopkins, and Bullard been cautious and reserved, some
of the surprises in this paper would never have surfaced. There
are things here about the cultural nature of the UFO phenomenon I
would never have suspected. The origin of flying saucers in a
journalistic error, especially, is the most deeply cosmic joke to
have ever fallen into my life. It may not be the ultimate
refutation of the ETH in the minds of everyone, but it will do
for me. For that am forever indebted to these fellows.
It is my opinion that culture predisposes people to have the
sorts of UFO experiences they do to a degree we have yet to fully
appreciate. If I'm wrong, my pontifications still won't be in
vain.
NOTES:
1. Jacobs, David M., "The New Era of UFO Research", _Pursuit_ ,
no. 78, 1987, p. 50
2. Dille, Robert C. (ed), "The Collected Works of Buck Rogers
in the 25th Century", Chelsea House Publishers, 1969, p.
159.
3. Lundwall, Sam J., "Science Fiction: An Illustrated History",
Grosset & Dunlap, 1977, p. 107
4. Sadoul, Jacques, "2000 AD: Illustrations from the Golden Age
of Science Fiction Pulps", Henry Regnery, 1973, pp. 63, 66,
148.
5. Ibid, pp. 69, 70
6. Steiger, Brad, "Project Blue Book", Ballantine, 1976.
Arnold, Kenneth, "How it All Began", in Fuller, Curtis G.,
"Proceedings of the First International UFO Conference",
Warner, 1980
7. Bullard, Thomas E., "UFO Abductions: The Measure of a
Mystery. Volume 1: Comparative Study of Abduction Reports."
Fund for UFO Research, 1987, p. 196.
8. Story, Ronald D., "Encyclopedia of UFOs", Dolphin, 1980, pp.
330-4
9. Hopkins, Budd, "Intruders", Random, 1987, p. 192.
10. Nicholls, Peter, "The Science Fiction Encyclopedia",
Dolphin, 1979, p. 207.
11. Wells, H. "The War of the Worlds"
12. Hopkins, op. cit., pp. 189-90.
13. Warren, Bill, "Keep Watching the Skies: American Science
Fiction Movies of the Fifties" (2 vols), McFarland, 1982.
Naha, Ed., "The Science Fictionary", Wideview, 1980; Hardy,
Phil, "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies",
Woodbury, 1984, p. 180
14. Warren, op. cit. p. 187.
15. Bullard, op. cit., p. 14. Naha, op. cit. p. 218
16. Rebello, Stephen, "Selling Nightmares: Movie Poster Artists
of the Fifties", Cinefantastique, March, 1988, p. 42
17. Bullard, op. cit., pp. 47-53, 372
18. Dille, op. cit. pp. 142-5.
19. Bullard, op. cit. pp. 54-5
20. Bullard, op. cit. p. 372
21. Hopkins, Budd: "Missing Time", Richard Marke, 1981, p. 77.
Warren, op. cit., p. 153. "Magonia", No. 10, 1982, pp. 16-7
22. Bullard, op. cit. pp. i-ii, 275, 365
23. Fuller, John G., "The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours
Aboard a Flying Saucer", Dell, 1966, pp. 45-9. Keyhoe,
Donald E., The Flying Saucer Conspiracy", Fieldcrest, 1955,
pp. 63-64, 204-5.
24. Keyhoe, op. cit., pp. 240-6.
25. Fuller, op. cit, p. 343-4. Keyhoe, op. cit., pp. 58,
65,190,208.
26. Bullard, op. cit., p. 14
27. "Invaders From Mars" (1953), video, Fox Hills Video, 1987.
28. Fuller, op. cit., p. 344. Bullard, op. cit., p. 245.
29. Friedman, Stanton and Slate, B. Ann, "UFO Star Base
Discovered", UFO Report, 2, no. 1, fall 1974, p. 61.
30. Battle, John Tucker, "Invaders From Mars", Script City, n.d.
p. 42
31. Keyhoe, Donald E., "Aliens From Space", Doubleday, 1973, p.
243-5.
32. Schow, David J. and Frentzen, Jeffrey, "The Outer Limits -
The Official Companion", Ace, 1986, pp. 170, 384. Bullard,
op. cit., p. 243.
Robert Sheaffer - Scepticus Maximus - sheaffer@netcom.com
Past Chairman, The Bay Area Skeptics - for whom I speak only when
authorized!
"In the 1970's the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions
of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs
embarked upon now ... in 1985, when it is calculated [under the most
optimistic scenario] that the major die-back will be over, ..."
Dr. Paul Ehrlich, "The Population Bomb," 1968
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