Science-Fantasy Religious Cults: The Story of Ray Palmer

Science-Fantasy Religious Cults The story of Ray Palmer, forgotten flying-saucer pioneer Martin Gardner Science-fiction fans have a long, dreary history of falling States government aircraft? Soviet planes? Spaceships from for outrageous quasi-religious, pseudoscientific cults that Mars or Venus? arise within the community of science-fiction writers and editors. L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology, first introduced as The time was ripe for a new mythology. Traditional reli- "dianetics" by John Campbell when he was editor of Astound- gions were declining, and the fundamentalist revival was yet to ing Science Fiction, is of course the prime example. This article begin. Sea serpents had long ago retired to isolated spots like will tell the story of an almost forgotten science-fiction editor, Loch Ness. Not many people were seeing visions of the Virgin Ray Palmer, and the curious roles he played in the notorious Mary or conversing with angels the way Joan of Arc did. But "Shaver hoax" and, later, in promoting the cult of UFOlogy. out there, over our heads, was dark, endless space--a region teeming with mysteries far more exotic than any in earth's Although reports of mysterious unidentified flying objects ancient seas. Were aliens from other planets watching us? Could go back to ancient times, and numerous UFO reports are scat- they be here to conquer us? To save us from self-destruction? tered through the writings of Charles Fort, the UFOmania of Add to these fears and hopes the steady deterioration of science the present century had an abrupt beginning. It was almost teaching, widespread resentment against technology for inven- exactly forty years ago, on June 24, 1947. ting the atom bomb and polluting the environment, the upsurge of enthusiasm for astrology and all things occult, and it is not Kenneth Arnold, a manufacturer of fire-fighting equipment hard to understand why the UFO craze spread so rapidly. in Boise, Idaho, was flying his three-seat cabin plane from Chehalis to Yakima, in Washington. Arnold remembers it as a I n our country's science-fiction subculture, Ray Palmer was cloudless day with the air "as smooth as silk." At about 3 P.M. the first editor to perceive the mythic potency of UFOlogy. he spotted nine crescent-shaped disks bobbing up and down "And who was Ray Palmer?" I can hear the young readers ask. "like a tail of a Chinese kite" over the peaks of Washington's We older readers remember him well. Cascade Mountains. They seemed headed for Mt. Rainier at a speed Arnold estimated to be more than 1,700 miles an hour. Raymond A. Palmer (the "A" didn't stand for anything), Later that afternoon in Pendleton, Oregon, Ken decided to born in Milwaukee in 1910, was a blue-eyed hunchback about report what he saw to the FBI. Finding its offices closed, he four feet tall.* He always claimed that his deformed back had took his story to the editor of the Eastern Oregonian. been caused by an accident when he was seven, but what sort of accident is not clear. In one version he was hit by a butcher's Whatever Arnold saw--some skeptics think it was a group truck; in another, he was hit by a streetcar. Howard Browne, of weather balloons--they seemed not to be circular. "They who for six years was editor-in-chief of all of Ziff-Davis's pulps, flew erratic," Arnold told a United Press reporter, "like a saucer told me that Ray told him the accident was a fall off a roof. if you skip it across water." In the story he sent over the wire, the reporter called the objects "flying saucers." Before a week When Hugo Gernsback started Amazing Stories in 1926, had passed, newspapers throughout the nation were having a Palmer became a lifelong fan. He edited what is said to be the field day with reports of new sightings and wild speculations first fanzine, The Comet. "The Time Ray of Jandra," in Wonder about what the mysterious "saucers' could be. Secret United Stories (June 1930), was his first published story. According to Palmer, for the next ten years he sold hundreds of tales in such Martin Gardner is the author diverse fields as SF, mystery, western, romance, and even of Science: Good, Bad and pornography. He used many pseudonyms. Bogus, and some forty other books in the fields of science, *In the sixties, science-fiction writers Gardner Fox and Jule Schwartz wrote mathematics, and literary a comic book called The Atom, about a scientist who had the power to criticism. shrink himself to a height of six inches. They named the scientist Ray Palmer. Summer 1987 31  74e below the earth's surface. But the rays still damaged them, and they were forced to abandon the planet. An inferior race of SHAVER MYSTERY humans discovered the caverns and the fantastic machines the superbeings had left behind. Alas, radiation from the machines Amazing Stories warned its readers against the psychic forces turned the humans into midgetlike idiots whom Shaver called of "evil deros." the "deros" (short for "detrimental robots"). The deros still live beneath us. All sorts of terrible disasters that occur above Young Palmer belonged to a club called "The Milwaukee ground, including great wars, are caused by psychic forces Fictioneers," which included Robert Bloch, Stanley Weinbaum, coming from the evil deros. and Ralph Milne Farley. After Weinbaum died, Palmer edited a collection of his work, Dawn of Flame and Other Stories. Palmer printed Shaver's first short novel, I Remember When Weinbaum's widow objected to Ray's introduction, he Lemuria, in the March 1945 issue of Amazing. The response substituted a new one, making the first edition of this book a from simple-minded readers was indeed amazing. After thou- rarity. sands of letters, many from persons reporting their own en- counters with deros, Palmer realized he had on his hands the Amazing Stories was in the doldrums when Ziff-Davis took making of a monstrous swindle. For the next few years he it over in 1938. It was being edited by Gernsback's friend rewrote all of Shaver's demented submissions, presenting them T. O'Conor Sloane, then eighty-six. Ziff-Davis replaced Sloane not as fiction but as sober fact. Only older SF fans can compre- with Palmer, and the magazine's character altered overnight. hend the furor that resulted. The shift was away from hard science to action and adventure. Sales of Amazing leaped upward. The next year Palmer started Little is known about Shaver, but some evidence suggests Fantastic Adventures, featuring yarns on a level even more he may really have believed he was in psychic contact with juvenile than those of Amazing. creatures of the caverns. In the July 1971 issue of Forum, Palmer revealed that for eight years, while Shaver was feeding At about this time Palmer's nose began to sniff the burning him raw data, Shaver was in a mental hospital. "He suffered fuse of the coming occult explosion. Millions of young readers, from being a tremendous psychic person," Ray wrote, "and he correctly sensed, cared little about orthodox science. They this in my belief makes him superior, mentally, to those people were hungering for far-out science. Over the transom came unable to perceive the ordinarily unseen aspects of our total some weird material of just the sort Palmer wanted. A Pennsyl- existence." A few months later Palmer reported that Shaver vania welder named Richard Sharpe Shaver claimed to be in had years earlier escaped from the mental hospital and "is at telepathic communication with a race of evil humanoids who present a fugitive." lived underground. A rsre photograph of Richard Shaver, who created "a vast, com- Let us try to capsule Shaver's vast, complex mythology. plex mythology." Long ago the earth had been the home of the Atlans and the Titans, godlike creatures who flourished on the now-sunken It was a period in which the two men seemed not on good continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. To protect themselves from terms. Palmer published a letter from Shaver that vigorously harmful solar radiation they constructed enormous caverns denied Palmer's disclosures. He had, Shaver said, been in a sanitorium for only two weeks, and only to recover from a 32 heat stroke. The two men also clashed over the nature and location of the deros. Palmer put forth the theory that they could be spiritual beings above the earth, on a higher astral plane. Shaver responded with anger: "I was in the caves. Not in the clouds overhead or in any mental world of the liar's imagination, but in actuality." How much of this debate, in the FREE INQUIRY few years preceding Shaver's death in 1975, is accurate and "At about this time Palmer's nose began to sniff how much was cooked up by the pair to keep the Shaver the burning fuse of the coming occult explosion. mystery alive is impossible at this time to say. Millions of young readers, he correctly sensed, cared little about orthodox science. They were Did Palmer ever believe in the deros? Some think he did, hungering for far-out science." or maybe half-did, but I can't buy it. Jim Wentworth, in a history of the Shaver flap that I'll return to later, tells us that restrial. In 1950 Palmer advertised and distributed Arnold's neither Palmer's wife, Marjorie, nor Shaver's third wife, pamphlet The Flying Saucer as I Saw It. Two years later he Dorothy, took the deros seriously. I met Ray on several occa- published The Coming of the Saucers, a book on which he sions in the forties, when I lived in Chicago, and I have talked collaborated with Arnold. to many people who knew him well. He impressed us all as a shy, kind, good-natured, gentle, energetic little man with the Arnold, by the way, was a great admirer of Charles Fort. personality of a professional con artist. He may have been Like so many Forteans who seem unable to comprehend that slightly paranoid in the pleasure he got from his endless flim- the Fortean Society was a joke, Arnold was inclined to take flams, but I think his primary motive was simply to create seriously every published UFO story, no matter how outlandish, uproars that would sell magazines. including tales of little men seen coming out of saucers. "I realize it's the 'data of the damned,' " he told a newspaper in Sell they did. It is said that at the beginning of the Shaver 1950, quoting one of Fort's famous phrases. "Who's to deter- flap Amazing reached a circulation higher than any other SF mine what is and isn't real?" he asked. magazine up to that time. Mature readers, however, were strongly disturbed by what came to be called the Great Shaver It would be foolish to suppose that UFOmania would never Hoax. It was immoral, they thought, to deceive gullible readers have gathered steam without Palmer's aid; yet no one can deny into thinking Shaver's delusions were true. The hoax was giving that he played an enormous role, now almost forgotten, in SF a bad name. The management of Ziff-Davis stood it as tirelessly promoting the craze. Here are some of the pulps he long as they could. Eventually, smitten by an attack of con- edited, ostensibly to publish SF but primarily devoted to beating science, they asked Palmer to go. the drums for UFOs and other aspects of the paranormal scene: Other Worlds, Imagination, Universe, Hidden Worlds, Mystic, The time was the late forties and the occult revolution was Search, Forum, and Space World. When Other Worlds folded running full blast. Why not, Palmer decided, start a new he changed the title of Universe to Other Worlds. It was later pulp devoted entirely to the occult? His friend Curtis Fuller, changed again, to Flying Saucers from Other Worlds, and then editing the Ziff-Davis periodical Flying, agreed that this finally shortened to Flying Saucers. No one knows how many was an idea whose time had come. The pair formed Clark pseudonyms Palmer used in writing for these publications. Publishing Company--the name was taken from Chicago's North Clark Street, where the firm had its first office--and in Palmer's first mistake was pushing his Shaver hoax to early 1948 Fate was born. (Palmer has written that he suggested absurd extremes. Then he made a second, more serious blunder. the name, but Fuller recently claimed he thought of it first.) He decided to tie UFOs into his beloved underground caverns. So far as I can determine, his first article to do this was "Flying Many years later Fuller bought the magazine from Palmer Saucers from the Earth," in the December 1959 issue of Flying and has been its publisher ever since. With a current circulation Saucers. From then on, articles began to appear with increasing of about 150,000, Fate is the nation's top purveyor of psychic frequency, most of them written by Palmer, contending that garbage. Fuller's wife, Mary, is editor. The pair, both in their the earth is hollow, with enormous openings at both poles. seventies, are Unitarians who have almost as little belief in UFOs were spacecraft built inside the earth and sent through what they publish as Palmer did. "The Bermuda Triangle," the polar holes for reasons that were never too clear. (Palmer Mary told a reporter a few years ago, "is for the birds." was seldom consistent in his flimflams.) From 1960 until his death seventeen years later, Palmer seemed obsessed by the When Palmer saw the newspaper accounts of Ken Arnold's hollow-earth theory, though there is not a scintilla of evidence famous sighting, he lost no time getting in touch with Arnold he ever believed it. Indeed, he added almost nothing to the old and requesting an article for Fate. The first issue (Spring 1948) hollow-earth theories (you'll find a history of them in my book led off with "I Did See the Flying Disks!" in which Arnold Fads and Fallacies) except the Shaver mythology of subsurface gave more details about his sighting. In the same issue he creatures. But the idea of a hollow earth was new to most of reported his investigation of a later UFO sighting in Tacoma. his young readers, and Palmer was careful never to admit even "What Were the Doughnuts?"--another UFO piece in the issue to friends (were his wife and children exceptions?) that it was --was written by Fuller under the pseudonym of John C. Ross, another calculated scheme to boost magazine sales. a name he used for later articles in Fate and other magazines. Palmer wrote Fate's editorials, as well as many of its articles, The most ridiculous artifact in this mad history was the under the byline of Robert T. Webster. Several years later, June 1970 cover of Flying Saucers--a NASA photograph that when I sold Fate a manuscript, my correspondence was entirely Palmer called "the most remarkable photo ever made." It was with "Robert Webster." a composite picture of the earth, seen by a satellite above the North Pole, that seemed to show a huge black hole surrounding The first issue of Fate marked the beginning of a long the pole. Palmer knew perfectly well that the hole was nothing collaboration between Arnold and Palmer. The second issue featured Arnold's "Are Space Visitors Here?" This was possibly the first magazine piece to argue that UFOs were extrater- Summer 1987 33  THE TRUTH ABBU': Now that almost forty years have gone by without finding THE MING SAIIL S a single nut or bolt from a flying saucer, leading UFO buffs have switched to the safe, untestable view that UFOs are MAH� TWAIN AN� ghostlike things from some higher plane of reality, perhaps illusions created in our minds by alien superbeings. Ken Arnold - NA ETTS COMET himself moved with the psi flow. In an interview in UFO Review (November 1982) he recalled many UFO sightings since I, ton. a, x MW.11 1947, including one craft that kept changing in such a way that it led him to think it was a living creature, possibly a link INVISIBLE BEINGS between our life-forms and those of a spirit world. He repeated WALK THE EARTH his claim that invisible entities from UFOs once entered his home. "I was aware of their presence," he stated on an earlier TWENTY MIIIION occasion, "because I could see my rugs and furniture sink down under their weight...." MANIACS Arnold belonged to a large class of what are known in bp 11. x.1+.111 UFO circles as "repeaters." These are people who, contrary to all laws of statistics, keep seeing the same kinds of UFOs. In a The first issue of Fate, "the nation's top purveyor of psychic Seattle Times interview (June 26, 1983), shortly before his death garbage." in January 1984, Arnold speaks of seven occasions since 1947 on which he saw UFOs, always in clusters and always traveling more than the region where sunlight could not penetrate at the at fantastic speeds. Who can have confidence in such repeated time the photos were taken, but of course he didn't tell his claims? readers that. "We do not see any ice fields in the large circular area directly at the geographic pole," he wrote. "Instead, we The September 1957 issue of Fate carried an amusing ad. see--The Hole!" Arnold was selling a product called "Turn-ers," guaranteed to cure dandruff, restore hair color, and "make your scalp pink Mariner photos had also disclosed, Palmer assured his and clean as a baby's." A testimonial by Palmer says it not readers, a similar opening at the north pole of Mars. Mercury only banished his dandruff in one week but turned his father's too was hollow. Palmer printed numerous letters from readers snow-white hair back to the color it was when his dad was who raised objections, some of them written by Palmer himself. thirty. You have only to read his clever responses to get the picture-- a strange little man, chuckling to himself as he wrote, somehow Ray and Marjorie spent their later years on a large farm getting enormous kicks out of hornswoggling people bigger near Amherst, Wisconsin, where they brought up two daughters than he was. and a son. For a time, Shaver and his wife lived on a nearby farm. It was in 1977, while the Palmers were visiting a daughter Most histories of UFOlogy either do not mention Palmer in Tallahassee, Florida, that Ray died after a series of strokes. or give him only a passing glance. One exception is Robert Marjorie still lives in Amherst, where she heads Amherst Press. Sheaffer's splendid book The UFO Verdict: Examining the The firm publishes books about parascience and the occult, Evidence, published by Prometheus Books in 1981 and recently including two basic references on Palmer's life, The Secret reissued in paperback. It is the source for what I have written World (1975) by Palmer and Shaver, and James Wentworth's above about Palmer's exploitation of the NASA photograph. Giants in the Earth (1973). Marjorie continued Ray's magazine The only leading UFOlogist who didn't scoff at Palmer's holy- Search until 1981, when she sold it to another publisher. poler theory was Brinsley LePoer Trench, a member of the British House of Lords and founder of the influential Saucer The Secret World is one of Palmer's masterpieces of hokum. Review. Trench liked the hollow-earth theory so much that he Although his is the only name on the cover, only the first third wrote an entire book about it: Secret of the Ages: UFOs from of this large hardcover volume is by him. It is an autobio- Inside the Earth (Pinnacle, 1977). graphical account of his early life, filled with startling anecdotes that may or may not be true. He claims, for example, that he A book titled The Hollow Earth, by Dr. Raymond Bernard remembers seeing Halley's Comet through a window while (he claimed a Ph.D. from New York University), was first being held as a baby in his grandmother's arms, although he printed in 1963 by a New York house called Fieldcrest Publica- learned later that, when he was born, in August 1910, the tions, and later reprinted by several other firms. Because comet had passed beyond the range of being visible to unaided Bernard frequently quotes Palmer, calling him "America's eyes. greatest authority on flying saucers," and because his hollow- earth book was heavily advertised in Fate, it has been rumored Palmer devotes many pages to his discovery of Oahspe, a that Bernard and Palmer were one and the same. Not so. book he heavily promoted as a revelation that reinforces According to several informants, Bernard's real name was Shaver's claims. "The book proved itself," he writes. "To me, it Walter Siegmeister, a German crank who at one time ran a could not be a fake. It had to be authentic--because it proved health-food store in Brooklyn and who wrote many worthless the key to all the vast amount of material I had collected in my books and pamphlets on health, sex, and occult topics. I am lifetime, and especially ... the Shaver Mystery. Oahspe proved told he died in Brazil, but I have been unable to confirm this Shaver, and Shaver proved Oahspe." or to learn any more about him. FREE INQUIRY 34  For readers unfamiliar with the wild history of spiritualism, Space-Age Religion Oahspe was written by Dr. John Ballou Newbrough, a New York City dentist and psychic. He claimed he could paint pic- The quasireligious character of the UFO movement tures in total darkness, using both hands at once, that he could has been underscored recently by the publication of remote view and read any book in any library, and that while two popular UFO books: Communion, by Whitley under a spirit's control he could lift a ton of weight. Oahspe, Strieber, and Intruders, by Budd Hopkins. Both books subtitled A Kosmon Bible in the Words of Jehovah and His report stories of visitations and abductions by semi-divine, Angel Ambassadors, was published in Boston in 1882. Accord- intelligent "space aliens." Hopkins, who conducted "hyp- ing to its author, it was dictated by angels who manipulated his notic regressions" upon numerous alleged abductees, hands while he sat at his typewriter. One morning he looked paints an alarming picture of extraterrestrials performing out the window and "beheld the line of light that rested on my genetic experiments on the human race. Strieber, whose hands, extending heavenward like a telegraph wire towards the book (subtitled "A True Story") tops the nonfiction list, sky. Over my head were three pairs of hands, fully materialized; describes his odyssey as "an intense spiritual search." "The behind me stood another angel with her hands on my shoulders. universe and the works of God," he reports, have been My looking did not disturb the scene, my hands kept right on "recharged with mystery and wonder." printing ... printing. For fifty weeks this continued.... The peculiar drawings in Oahspe were made with pencil in the same The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of way." Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) has found these two books to be wholly unreliable. Strieber is well known For an excellent summary of the strange doctrines in this for his admittedly fanciful novels and screenplays in which 800-page Bible--they are funnier than the doctrines in the Book intelligent nonhumans often appear. Moreover, alternative of Mormon and almost as funny as those in the Unification and naturalistic psychological explanations can easily be Church's Bible, written by the Reverend Sun Moon--see the given for "memories" and those hypnotically induced by entry on Oahspe in the Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Hopkins; the extraterrestrial hypothesis need not be in- Ethics. Followers of the new religion called themselves "faith- voked. Both books fail to provide or document convincing ists." They were strict vegetarians and pacifists and hated all corroboration or physical evidence for their claims. forms of capitalism. In 1894 a sect of faithists actually estab- lished a colony called "Shalam" in New Mexico. The sect later But it is apparent that the transcendental religious shifted to California, where for a time they published a peri- temptation is not easily discarded by rational considera- odical, The Faithist Messenger. tions.-- Paul Kurtz Where can you obtain a copy of this great revelation? Why, James Wentworth's Giants in the Earth is a history of the all you have to do is send $19.95 to Amherst Press. Here is Shaver hoax. I have no idea how much of it should be trusted, how their catalog describes this modest work: and I have been unsuccessful in learning anything about the author--not even whether his name is a pseudonym. A history of the higher and lower heavens and of the Earth for the past 24,000 years; also a brief history of the preceding T ess than two months before his death, Ray attended the 55,000 years. An explanation of all the world's religions; the a 4 First International UFO Congress in Chicago, June 1977-- cosmogony of the universe; the creation of the planets, of man; new commandments applicable to the present day; the unseen a conference sponsored by Fate. Ken Arnold was on hand to worlds. Written in 1881, Oahspe's science is today being con- firmed by space satellites, new archaeological discoveries and give the keynote address. Both men participated in a symposium many other sources. Perhaps the most remarkable and impor- tant book in the world today! that you'll find in the hilarious Proceedings of the First Inter- Move over Bible! Move over Velikovsky! Oahspe is here! If national UFO Congress (Warner Books, 1980), edited by Ray Palmer for one moment believed the crap in this crazy volume then the man was a moron, which of course he wasn't. Palmer's old sidekick, Curtis Fuller. The last two-thirds of The Secret World carries Shaver's Calling himself "basically a science-fiction writer," Palmer byline. He describes in detail, with many color pictures, how you can obtain "rock books" by slicing a stone in half. The reminded his audience that airships were common in fiction cross-section is then photographed and magnified. If you study it carefully, turning the photo this way and that, you'll see long before a single plane had been successfully flown. Was it vague shapes of objects, animals, and people--like the shapes you see in clouds. It was Shaver's contention that before the possible, he asked, that Jules Verne's stories about airships Atlans and Titans left the earth they recorded the life-forms on our planet, before Noah's Flood, by fabricating these rocks. were based on reports that had come his way from persons Shaver sliced thousands of stones to get such pictures. The book reproduces some of Shaver's paintings, many erotic, that who had seen UFOs? Palmer closed his remarks with an he had based on rock books. unusual admission. "It's a basic weakness that we like to fool Summer 1987 ourselves. We go out and catch a big fish. It's always a big fish, and the bigger it is the more it gets away." Perhaps we have here the key to Palmer's declining years, when he faded away from both SF and UFO landscapes. Flying saucers from inside the earth was just too whopping a fish story. Palmer did his best to defend this fish that got away, but only a few kooks on the lunatic fringes of UFOlogy could believe him. � 35