MAGONIA

At the end of the 1960’s UFOs had been adopted by the underground, alternative culture of the time lagely as a symbol of opposition to a mainstream society which it saw as being dominated by an industrial, scientific and militaristic complex. Underground magazines such as Oz, IT, Gandalf’s Garden and Albion featured artwork which combined UFO imagery with Mucha-inspired eroticism, psychedelic graphics and mystical symbolism. This article from MUFOB, volume 2, number 4, by John Rimmer describes the feelings of that era, and marks the magazine’s further move into the ‘New Ufology’…

Publication of this piece led to one of John Rimmer’s most treasured ufological mementos: a first edition of Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman’s The Unidentified, inscribed “To John Rimmer, for writing that stunning and perceptive piece ‘the UFO as an Anti-Scientific Symbol’. With much admiration, Jerome Clark”

By contrast the magazine’s cover, first of the offset-litho printed covers, shows MUFOB’s editorial team of John Harney, John Rimmer and Alan Sharp in the very old-ufology setting of their favourite Liverpool watering hole, downing pints of Higson’s bitter!

In a recent article Quentin Crewe puts forward an interesting thought on the public’s attitude to UFOs and ufologists [1]. He cites the recent appearance of FSR’s Gordon Creighton on 24 Hours [a daily current affairs programme]. Crewe cannot understand why people like Creighton should be invited to television shows, and then hardly allowed to speak, and concludes that the public half-believes in UFOs, and have to keep knocking down the guardians of their belief in a sort of propitiation ritual.

The particular discussion under review was a classic of this genre. Despite Mr Creighton’s continued assertions that he did not seriously consider that UFOs were extraterrestrial craft, Patrick Moore felt obliged to spend the greater part of the limited time proving that UFOs were not extraterrestrial craft. During this peformance Moore emerged not as an arch-sceptic, which is a perfectly understandable attitude when confronted with such a tendentious subject, but as an unscientific and emotionally prejudiced individual. The lunacy of the whole episode lay in the BBC’s naive belief that the question of UFOs was one that an astronomer could be expected to be an expert on. It would have been equally valuable – or valueless – to have had a soil analyst, etymologist or business efficient expert.

However, to return to Quentin Crewe’s suggestion. It does appear to a perceptive observer that there is a serious contradiction in the public’s attitude to the question of the UFO. Mention UFOs to a friend who is not a student of the subject, and the initial reaction is one of laughter. As an editorial in this Bulletin has indicated, ufology is an extremely mirthful subject amongst the ‘boring suburbanites’. [2] However on further investigation this attitude seems to break down. Pressed, an outsider will admit that “there could be something in it”. More times than not they will admit to having read a UFO book; ultimately may come the admission that they too have seen a UFO.

In a not-untypical encounter such as this, one can see the conflict of attitudes in an individual. At the outset is the Establishment Attitude, fostered by such media as television and the national press and their scientific pundits like Patrick Moore. One cannot blame the national media for this attitude, as it is one found only too often within the ranks of ufologists themselves. One need only mention NICAP’s attitude to contact claims, and just about everybody’s attitude to John Keel. On the other hand there is the public’s desire for novelty and surprise, and a growing anti-scientific, almost neo-Luddite movement. Concurrent with increasing scientific development and technological advances, there is a vast opposing, populist emotion. the growth of the computer atrocity story, the reaction to transplant operations, the development of pastoralism as an almost political movement amongst minority communities in the United States are all symptoms of this. [3]

These are on too large a scale to be dismissed as a few reactionaries and Peter Simples. The UFO is the one thing which under present circumstances stands almost impregnable against the scientific floodtide. It is little wonder therefore that the UFO is being adopted by many as a sort of symbol of the neo-Luddite cause. It is the last refuge of the old magic. it is seen, literally and metaphorically, as the Holy Grail, unattainable, unimaginably remote, yet always near enough to lead us on, in a hopeless chase. The ufologist is the necromancer who can cast his spells upon the scientist and lead him stumbling into the enchanted forest, blundering into trees marked ‘temperature inversion’, or ‘weather ballon’, and falling into thorns and thickets marked ‘Venus through a heat haze’.

So much for the Wagnerian imagery. However the concept of the UFO as being magical and anti-scientific is valid and important. There is nowhere on the face of the earth and never has been, any society that has existed without magic. We are, in Europe, America and some other technologically advanced nations, very close to this situation. We have driven magic underground, but we have not eliminated it. It may be a dangerous thing if we do. The UFO is a fairly pleasant, often beautiful, rarely malignant piece of magic, far preferable to the violence and ugliness of some other magical survivals in our age. perhaps we should not attempt too much to explain the UFOs, either in terms of spacecraft or unknown forms of plasma, or even pieces of detached psyche. On the face of it we shall not be able to do this anyway. the UFO may be just there, for us to marvel at, worship, chase, gape at, or get little frissons of fear from.

Jung saw the UFO as the Circle, the Mandala, a symbol of wholeness and permanency. [4] Perhaps in its permanent inaccessibility it is a symbol of purity. In a world violated and sullied by radiation, smoke, fumes, the excrement of a scientific society, the UFO is almost a Virgin image of our time. Consier the so-called occupants of these craft. What are they but the dwarfs and elves, the pastoral inabitant of unsullied hedgerow and field, and the dark northern forests that we have left behind. Here they come now from the UFOs, reminding us of our rural background. The hippie mystic sees the UFO as the Grail above Glastonbury; the French farmer sees the ‘occupants’ as small grotesque creatures of tree-root and woodland glade; the American factory worker sees the Men in Black as a re-creation of a romantic Chicago gangsterdom that never was (even their cars are from the past). Each perceives a phenomenon that is a part of their past, a movement against the Establishment’s glorification of scientific progress.

Like all effective magic the UFO is a perversion of the orthodoxy rather than something totally different from it. It is the spacecraft of the scientist, but a spacecraft that does strange and irrational things: the occupants although weird and unearthly apparently wear spacesuits not so differnt from the ones worn by those symbols of scientific progress, the astronauts. The UFO parodies the developments of science. Its essentially unscientific nature can be seen in the strange, almost obsessive interest it holds for scientists who are most vehement in denying its existence. A number of Patrick Moore,s books sudenly introduce UFOs into the discussion of some astronomical issue, only for them to be dismissed as being of no importance. [5] One is reminded of atheists who spend a disproportionate amount of time disproving the existence of the devil. Other scientists, like Hynek, perhaps Condon, act as sceptical priests, who while not accepting the positive existence of ghosts, feel that it is worthwhile going to the trouble of exorcising them.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Perhaps for every scientific advance there is an equal and opposite mystical reaction. It has been noted that a large number of UFO incidents were reported in the USA after the launching of the first Soviet satellite. This could well be viewed as the reaction to that scientific advance. It will be interesting to see if there is a comparable reaction after the moon landings [yes, but not perhaps in the simplistic way suggested here. JR, 3/99]. It would be interesting to see if any of the major flap periods over the last 23 years followed immediately upon a major scientific advance. Certainly the first flaps of ‘46 and ‘47 followed the development of nuclear weapons. If science is a mavement into the future, the UFO if it is a reaction, must be a movement into the past. We have seen above how the form of the UFO and especially its occupants are often reversions to ancient forms. If one analyses reports in more depth we can see a number of almost sentimental elements that are strongly opposed to the conventional view of the UFO as a futuristic phenomenon.

The stories told by the early contactees were apparently of journeys to incredibly advanced communities. However a closer look reveals the futurism described is already dated. it is the futurism of the 1930s, the New York World’s Fair and Amazing Stories magazine. The architecture of these advanced worlds is either that of Superman’s Krypton [6] or an idealised Graeco-Roman myth. Images perhaps of an idyllic childhood. Although the witnesses of these early contacts may not have been science fiction addicts, I doubt if anyone of them does not connect Superman with secure childhood afternoons in some American mid-western town. [See Martin Kottmeyer's article Entirely Unpredisposed - The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports]

The anti-scientific image of the UFO is now incredibly complex. Whether this is due to some fundamental change in the phenomenon itself, or an a new attitude which is being brought to bear on the study of the subject, is a matter of debate. It is clear that the UFO mystery is now one of gothic strangeness and wonder. It has retreated so far from scientific method that it is doubtful if it will ever be capable of explanation in any rational manner. The world of the UFO is peopled with a Tolkien-like collection of entities with no rational pattern of behviour. If there is an overall plan it must be infinitely more complicated than the most farcical Italian comic opera. In this at least the victory of anti-science is almost complete: nothing so incredibly irrational could be taken seriously by any scientist. The Condon Report can be seen only as a document of surrender.

The people who consciously adopt an anti-scientific stance often regard themselves as a resistance movement – the ‘underground’. Every resistance movement requires a figurehead, both as a rallying point for the committed and as an example to the uncommitted but vaguely sympathetic masses. In this movement the UFO is the Che Guevara image. Although ‘killed’ by the CIA of scientific analysis the underground is still wearing its ‘Che lives’ badges, and the UFOs are still there, and not just in the Bolivian jungle!

References 

• 1. Sunday Mirror, July 10, 1969.
• 2. MUFOB, vol.2, no.1, January-February 1969
• 3.Nordhoff, Charles.  American Utopias. Countryman Press, 1993.
• 4. Jung, C. G., Flying Saucers, a modern myth of things seen in the sky. Routlege and Kegan Paul, 1959.
• 5. Moore, Patrick. The Planet Venus (2nd ed., 1959), chapter XII, ‘The Phantom Satellite’: “During the amusing flying saucer craze of a few years back, attempts were made to revive the phantom moon, and to suggest that it was nothing more nor less than an artificial space-station which was dismantled when the ‘Venusians’ had no further use for it(!)”. For more on Moore’s interest in ufology see Magonia 23, July 1986, ‘Flying Saucers from Moore’s?’, by Christopher Allan and Steuart Campbell, exposing Moore’s involvement in the Cedric Allingham hoax contact story.
• 6. Feiffer, Jules, Great Comic Book Heroes. Fantagraphic Books, 2003

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