Colin Bennet, Charles Fort, and the Contactees

This talk, given by Colin Bennett at the Fortean Unconvention on April 6th 2002 at the Commonwealth Institute London, forms Appendix 1 of Bennett’s book on Charles Fort, Politics of the Imagination. (Thanks to www.combat-diaries.co.uk)

Sceptism as Mystique

There are two kinds of scepticism: local and cultural. Local scepticism is wholly healthy. Charles Fort was a sound believer in this. It shields us from the statements of politicians as it protects us from the claims of the second-hand car salesmen and the bovine simplicities of The News At Ten, or whenever. Chronic cultural scepticism on the other hand is a dangerous intellectual allergy, and it is this kind of scepticism that we meet in the claims that UFO sightings are psychosocial fantasies, and that all experience of the paranormal or the anomalous is an illusion. On this level, sceptics question our mystical and religious beliefs, our intuitions, our dreams and our visions. They question every single human insight that is not founded on those historically arriveste imposters called facts, and would like to leave alternative cultures with outright denial as their own only political weapon. But these facts are things that are rather new and callow arrivals on the historical scene, and are cultural screens that succor little more than the gross deterministic materialism of cellular corporatism, resulting in death by a million car parks.
Despite its protests to the contrary, scepticism usually allies itself with established Authority, and as a tradition, it has a long history. In the 19th century, there arose fear in the upper strata of British society that the clever but dirty folk of industry and technology somehow disturbed the status quo, if not in a communist sense, then certainly in a social democratic sense. Nearly two hundred years later this cultural fear is still very much with us, and it is the emotional force behind traditional British scepticism. Britain has traditionally had always an uncertain and rather schizoid relationship with its very own individual creation, the Industrial Revolution, a revolution that changed the world utterly. Even in modern times, British culture still takes good care that its beloved liberal arts are well preserved from such an influence.
This native scepticism is often used as an implicit political tool in the broadest sense. In its most potent form, it can cause doubt and uncertainty and therefore can destroy inspiration and enterprise, not to say original genius.
Many British men and women of undoubted genius have been unfortunate in being born in a country where brains and innovation (particularly technological innovation) are regarded traditionally with an almost religious fear. Even in the times of greatest peril, when the British nation was within days of being destroyed, sceptical fear nearly lost us the tank, radar, and the Spitfire, never mind the entire British Army stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk.
Of the many folk who were ritually crucified in the name of scepticism, the name Alan Turing stands out. Turing, whose first code-cracking digital computer was absolutely vital to victory in the Second World War, was given aversion therapy in 1947 because he was a homosexual. Instead of a knighthood, a blank cheque, and the resources of a great university, he was drugged and tortured to death by electric shocks when shown pictures of male genitalia. The result was that one of our greatest scientific geniuses killed himself by biting into an apple laced with cyanide. Turing was given this concentration camp treatment not by Nazis, but by the British Medical Establishment supported by certain departments of His Majesties Government.
D.H. Lawrence, perhaps our greatest novelist, was crucified in a similar way because he was, on the contrary, heterosexual. Even those geniuses with sexuality between Lawrence and Turing didn’t get away. Our greatest soldier-intellectual, Lawrence of Arabia, had great difficulty after WW1 in getting into the Royal Air Force as mere recruit. The hackneyed phrase “no sex please, we’re British” seems to fit this situation.
From the Fortean point of view, there is something most odd about the very nature of the high level of sceptical fear aroused by such people. The fear aroused by such characters can result in a kind of sceptical panic. Even though the very life of the nation is in danger, it appears that these people must be put down, nevertheless. General Hobart, the genius who formed the British pre-war tank force, was, on the eve of World War 2 dismissed as commander of 7th Armoured Division in Egypt for his outrageous technological enthusiasms. Back home he joined up as a corporal in the Home Guard. The horse-mounted British Generals of First World War certainly fought the tank pioneers with almost as much mistaken energy as they fought the German armed forces. Such characters and such innovations appear to excite some hidden switch in nature; individuals don’t act again them so much as a Thou Shalt Not command deep within nature and human forces both. Thus though indeed the people I have mentioned do indeed use facts, they do things with facts that apparently should not be done. It is this, and not their mere use of facts alone that appears to organize forces against them. Charles Fort called such powers era forces. These era forces are destructive, negative sceptical emanations that can destroy lives, discoveries, and reputations and all creative visions and inspirations. Sceptical forces can destroy intellectual life, restrict knowledge, and cause national decline. In that they restrict imagination, sceptical forces can cause that economic and political inertia called decadence. Scepticism is therefore essential the mystique of reaction: it produces nothing but hesitancy and timidity in the broad fields of manufacturing, technology, and national enterprise. It fills us with fear about our own capabilities, it destroys our faith that we can change ourselves and the condition of our lives. We can only change if our imagination is in a healthy state ready to take the enormous risks that national and individual progress demand. With scepticism triumphant, we squat on the ground as existential prisoners, blindfolded, tied, and shivering with mental fear.

II
The life of the aerodynamicist Leonard Cramp is illustrative of this very Fortean idea of skepticism on the attack. Like the makers of perpetual motion machines and fuel less motors, Cramp produced fairy things - half-forms almost from another world - that hopped, skipped, jumped, and sometimes even flew, often in apparent defiance of the laws of Faraday and Newton. Sceptical prophets of mechanical certainty, who happened to be standing near, were frequently astonished when some impossible thing swooped and maneuvered.
But any hero who makes claims for “paranormally related aerospace technological developments” and writes four books about a kind of technological mysticism is bound to run into Anglo-Saxon trouble very quickly. Cramp, like Barnes Wallace the designer of the bouncing bomb, suffered vicious put-downs from far lesser men. Both Cramp and Wallace were ignored whilst the modern equivalents to Leonardo’s futuristic drawings poured from their head. The engineer Eric Laithwaite and Professor Hastead both of Imperial College, and also the Cold Fusion physicists experienced a similar opposition by sceptics certainly equivalent to a mediaeval witch-hunt.
Like the Cold Fusion devices, some of Cramp’s “damned” devices were what might be termed knife-edge systems. This means that some worked, some did not, and some worked only partially, earning a visit from our old Fortean friend, the partial explanation. Others, like John Worrell Keely’s machines, earned no explanation at all. To add to his problems, Cramp, like George Adamski before him, had a mind that ignored small-time distinctions between small-time facts and equally small-time fictions. Like Uri Geller and indeed like Lee Harvey Oswald, Cramp’s wild talents enabled him to walk through 20th century walls on occasion with no problems at all. It goes almost without saying that Cramp, like Adamski was a UFO contactee.
Such destructive cultural scepticism as almost destroyed both Leonard Cramp and Barnes Wallace smacks strongly almost of national self-hatred. People like Cramp and Wallace could have got us into space ahead of the Americans without the help of scores of evil Nazi SS scientists, but they were ignored almost completely, as were the brilliant designers of the revolutionary TSR2 fighter of the 1960s. This was an aircraft that nearly half a century later could still be in squadron service and still be ahead of anything in the skies.
III
Of late, organised scepticism has been evident in books, magazines and articles that have launched a co-ordinated attack on all aspects of New Age thinking. In particular, the icons of ufology have one by one been consistently ridiculed in magazines and books to the extent that one is justified in using the word conspiracy. The Betty and Barney Hill abduction, Travis Walton’s experience, the Roswell affair, the incident in Britain’s Rendlesham forest, all these have all been the targets of attempts by sceptics to try and show such incredible events to be the results of self-deception, hallucination, and disinformation, often coupled with outright fraud and hoaxing. There has even been an attempt, organised and published by people who should perhaps have known better, to trash the original Kenneth Arnold sighting. This particular author in the Fortean Times, attempted to transform the crescent-shaped discs Arnold saw in 1947 into supersonic high-flying Pelicans. One author has attempted to reduce the Roswell event to crashed box-kites, and another has attributed the Rendlesham Forest incident to mistaken observation of a local lighthouse. Whilst these things might indeed be good one-frame jokes and cartoons for the prep-school common room, the mental level they represent as plausible analysis is appalling. Such silly claims remind us of the days of the “swamp-gas” UFOs. If sceptics think they earn credibility by perpetrating such nonsense, they are wrong.
Thus the debate between believer and sceptic is no longer a friendly liberal free-for-all. A violent and sometimes often vicious struggle is now taking place. Often those who say they represent so-called “objective factual truth” have been guilty of the most extraordinary underhand chicanery in order to try and destroy reputations. For example, there have been many attempts to destroy the reputation of those leading American academics such as John Mack and David Jacobs who have examined abduction claims and found them to be quite genuine experiences. Even the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies and the Mothman film have been criticized for turning young folk to occultism, fantastic mythology, and Pagan beliefs.
From this desperate rejection of all wonder and magic on any and every level, we conclude that sceptics, like the Communists and English Puritans before them, can be defined as people who have a terrible psychological problem with wonder. They hate things that don’t fit, but unfortunately for them, as Charles Fort reminds us, there are always bits that don’t fit in life, experience, and the external world.
Anything extraordinary, or even curious, anything transcendental, odd, or anomalous, all these things tend to irritate sceptics to death. It is as if some deep alarms are set off within them when confronted with the extraordinary. An automatic call goes out along the tribal lines of rationalism to level off all that could be labelled as fantastic, radically different, creative, or new. Sceptics appear to react to new ideas as the early 20th century reacted to surrealistic painting. Indeed many sceptics look upon the UFO experience as a First World War cavalry General looked with horror upon the first tanks.
Thus we have a battle not between easily separable old industrial fact and fiction, but a battle between different kinds of socially transforming mystique. Often the debate reaches such a level of demoniac intensity that we have the impression not of a search for some mythical “truth”, but of a war between various levels of counter-ritualisation. This is a war indeed at times that quite transcends anything in Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings.
Effectively, we have in ufology versus scepticism, not the old industrial real versus the unreal, or fact versus fiction, but a war between belief-systems. Horse-mad Generals in clean smart clean uniforms and shiny boots who refused to climb into the driver’s seats of greasy tanks were completely symbolic of opposition to new paradigms. Their cultural fear that their entire social group was doomed is the same fear that is aroused by a claim of having met a man from the planet Venus. Such claims trigger very deep alarms in certain parts of a common culture. Often, mundane violence and ordinary criminality can be quickly rationalized, but the man from Venus claim arouses anger, fear and ridicule out of all proportion to its physical threat, or even its physical substance.
Most sceptics want to stay in their first simple world as First World War Generals wanted to stay with their horses and their idea of old-fashioned romantic military chivalry in the face of gas and machine guns. Perhaps sceptics even believe that what we see is what we get. Perhaps they believe what the Generals of Wind in the Willows England believed: that governments govern, policeman protect, doctors cure, and that we all the finite sum of our finite parts.
Sceptics are fond of talking all too easily about what they term reality, which is certainly their favourite word. According to sceptics, this reality is as easy to find as a packet of sweets hidden behind a cushion at a children’s party. As mechanicals, their technique has not advanced much beyond good old Sherlock Holmes: follow the clues, go to the Public Records Office, and discover the “real” information. The idea of the real is, as I have said, relatively modern. Charles Fort certainly showed that the real is a piece of clapboard philosophical fakery used to construct those metaphysical harpies called “accuracy”, “objectivity”, and “precision”. By means of such concepts we are supposed to measure the infinities of being human.
Such factual innocence is highly dangerous. On the way to rational enlightenment, sceptics and rationalists might just get rid of the nut cases and the bits that don’t fit, throw them into trucks and sealed trains and pack them off to the outer regions of a conceptual inferno inhabited by people who say they have met men from Venus. Next, they might get rid of what they call lies and deceptions, hoaxes and fantasies. Straightening out of the twists and turns of the human character, and there is the shining truth: a clean and pure thing as terrifying as monolithic Nazi architecture.

IV
The French writer Jean Paul Sartre tells of how as a young man before World War 2, when after writing all night, he ventured out in the early morning to a nearby bistro for coffee. Some dozen men came into the café in an absolutely filthy state. They sat down and ordered breakfast. Sartre was told by the patron that these men were sewer cleaners and they always came in at exactly this time early in the morning after having finished a shift of work. Sartre asked the patron how he could possibly tolerate such filthy men in his café. The proprietor replied: “ah, but you see monsieur, they are honest men…”
We imagine an astonished Sartre, in the middle of developing his ideas about existentialism, seeing the coffee and rolls put before him in a totally new light. Thus one of the greatest French philosophers of the 20th century was left with the somewhat pre-molecular thought of how a truly honest man was incapable of giving infection though his hands were soiled with merde.
This edifying example of a direct connection between moral worth and what any sceptics would call external reality is a surprisingly late remnant of what was once a magical connection between Cause and Effect. It demonstrates perfectly how even in the middle of the so-called “scientific” twentieth century the stage constructs of fact and reality can easily collapse. When they do so, they reveal far older systems of knowledge and experience that are still very much in dynamic action in this case based on the principle that there is no necessary connection at all between dirt and possible infection.
The idea of the real must have come central to Sartre’s mind as he gazed at his early breakfast. He would have known of course that the idea of the real is a late and rather callow arrival on the European stage. Whilst eating his rolls with some hesitancy, Sartre might have had the thought that Shakespeare for example would have found the scientific idea of the “objective real” almost meaningless, and he didn’t do too badly without it.
Shakespeare might well have asked: are we really the sum of our finite parts? Is what we see what we getting? The British writer Andrew Darlington, in his book I Was Elvis Presley’s Bastard Love-Child gives a good example of a vital connection between belief, moral worth, and mystical inspiration:
“My biological father died on Sunday, November 28th, 1993, after falling downstairs drunk and never regaining consciousness. My real father was discovered on the bathroom floor of Graceland, August 16th 1977, and was pronounced dead at 3.30 pm having never regained consciousness.”
Rationally, the assumption that his father was Elvis Presley could be seen as ridiculous a claim as having met a man from Venus. Both such claims are valid examples of trying to construct a magical relationship with consciousness, experience, and external events in place of a merely mechanical connection. In Andrew Darlington’s terms, what we call fantasies are not the pathological things of the sceptics. They are attempts to reconstruct an older and more creative transcendent relationship between Mind and Nature. In this relationship, there is no necessary connection between dirt and disease, if only because the molecule and the cell, like the real indeed, have not yet arrived or shall we say have not yet been created.
But of course, as rejected assumptions, both the stories of Sartre and Darlington represent somewhat unstable and unpredictable world-models compared with the objective-mechanical. Of course it must be admitted of course that the objective-mechanical has won the historical round. For a short time in history, the objective mechanical experience has battled successful to occupy the prime time advertisements within consciousness.
This victory of course is temporary. To maintain and secure the prime advertising time of full consciousness, an appropriately ritualised vocabulary must be safeguarded. Thus we have the voodoo-chant words such as “solid”, “cold”, and “realistic” which must be securely attached to the ideas of truth and reality. In the sceptical vocabulary, there are whole Christmas trees aglow such metaphors as “waking up” from “dreamland”, and “the thinker must come out of his fantasy”. These trees must be trimmed and watered by a whole process of cultural intimidation. Clichéd phrases are repeated in the manner of a mystical ritual: “imagination” must give way to “fact”, and “myth” must be separated from “lies”. The “truth must be faced up to” as if the truth were some mortal enemy and not a companion, a light in a techno-scientific dark age that is destroying all sea, air, and land. That the scientific “truth” as “revealed” is also contaminating breast milk, affecting the male sperm count, and lowering the intelligence quotient of the soap-watching young is not mentioned. Help to destroy the world, humanity and all else, and you get the Nobel Prize. But say you met a man from Venus, or claim that Elvis Presley was your real father, and the whole world will try and make sure you are never seen or heard of again. Within these networks of “truth” and “reality” and “fact” no wonder we just can’t wait for the benefits of human cloning, genetically treated food, and the results from the next Super Collider or whatever cloned monster may next emerge from the scientific dark.
This “objectivising”, or “clearing of fantasy and illusion” of the sceptics is the rationalist equivalent to ideas of psychoanalytic “deprogramming”, and the old communist idea of brainwashing. For the sceptics, in these terms, the “truth” is almost nearly always “terrible”; it is also vicious, destructive, and cruel. Like the rationalist view of outer of space, the truth is dark and empty. The “truth” within these systems of coercion is not seen as friend and guide; nor is it seen as a thing wonderful, lovely, or magical; rather is the truth conceived as a great mental prison house from which there can be no escape.
In the time of Margaret Thatcher, BSc, the only Prime Minister who has ever had any kind of knowledge of science or technology, the common phrase used to be Thou Shalt Not Go On Strike. Now, in a much later development of our consumer society, it is Thou Shalt Not See Intelligently Controlled Flying Discs in the Atmosphere of Mother Earth. It sounds familiar: such a systems-blindfold was not only applied to witches, it was applied with vastly more terrible effect in Mao’s villages, and in the prisons and concentration camps of Stalin and Hitler.
In this sense, scepticism in its purest form is an intellectual allergy. It is a condition that reacts violently to anything that is in the least way out of the ordinary.
The sceptical condition enters perception as a virus that mounts a powerful attack on that infinite capacity for wonder that defines human beings. When the virus acts, the truth is seen not as a blessing, protector, and saviour, but a tyrannical scourging after which we stand naked and ashamed, “stripped” of all our “illusions” that Elvis Presley was our true father or that we have met a man from Venus. Once so isolated, an individual is cut off from all sources of occult and spiritual inspiration. Therefore scepticism is a powerful attempt to achieve the very deepest political alienation without reference to wages, social class, or economics.
The one target of all cultural scepticism is the human imagination. As the military saying goes, once you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. This negative bias as regards all transcendent thought is pure root and branch communism, whose roots stretch way before Marx to Martin Luther. Such a highly organised attack on fantasy, dream, and imagination is an attack on the individual as a sacred institution. We need men and women from Venus, Christ walking the water, UFO contactees, and Elvis as a father as we need the rain forest and the Great Barn Owl. Lacking such things, the brain, like the planet, will become a televised car park of infinite episodes. Sceptics simply do not understand the function of the claims of George Adamski, Sartre’s filthy workmen, or Andrew Darlington’s extra-curricular father within a healthy psychic ecology. The sceptical fear is not that “wishes” are so much untrue but that such things as intense desires might leave something of themselves behind in their swift passage. If we replace old industrial True and False by a battle of cultural allowances, we have a classical Fortean world-picture.
When a thread is put through the eye of all the “nasty little truths” of the sceptics, it would appears that a great “no” has been massively engineered through all the interstices of our mental reference systems. It has taken generations to do this, and the conspiracy is implicit as well as explicit. The sceptics are the mere semi-automated managers of a process generated by a deep control-system within both language and consciousness, and the culture of industrialisation and technology.
Therefore Coleridge’s “shaping spirit” of imagination is still political dynamite. Sceptics, like communists and scientists, priests and psychoanalysts, hate the great human Imagination. It is messy, imprecise, and fundamentally unstable, and its transcendental freedoms are politically dangerous. It is not that sceptics are right or wrong, so much that they are not going to allow certain claims to come about. “Objectivity” has performed its trick in screening out what can be described as the implicit conspiracy as distinct from the explicit one. Therefore “facts” are not about honest demystification. They are part of the propaganda technique of that black art of the North European middle-class called Rationalism.
But Sceptical Rationalism is not about Truth. At its best, it is a defence against what prowls beyond the outer rim of the cave-mouth fire. This is the single idea that unites all the many themes that run through the books of Charles Fort. The quest is to try and rediscover the universe as a live animal. That this idea has been stolen, falsified, curtailed, and restricted is behind his implicit political anger. This is the force creating the raw emotional energy running about in a Fortean world-model, which is a structure in which feelings can disembody themselves, effect whatever areas are convenient or accessible as symbolic foci of resentment:
“I feel the relatability of two scenes:
In Hyde Park, London, an orator shouts: “What we want is no king and no law! How we’ll get it will be, not with ballots, but with bullets!”
Far away in Gloucestershire, a house that dates back to Elizabethan times bursts into flames.”
V
The heart of Rationalism as a philosophy is the idea of mechanical “progress”. Yet there is something very odd about this clean-limbed “upwards” ascent from a pit of fools and madmen who were not “scientifically enlightened”. In this sense, the one thing that betrays sceptics is the universally mundane nature of their “explanations”. Whether sceptics replaces UFOs with spots before eyes, supersonic Pelicans, or marsh gas, they show that the one thing Explanation does is make you go away. This process does not produce new knowledge; it is a means of inducing sleep, of diverting attention from the original target. Sceptics man this semi-automated doubt-machine. They oil it and clean it, improve and develop it. They are slaves of this machine, and worshipping slaves at that. As such they are part of the machine itself of Doubt itself. It is this image-making power that is the target of all sceptics. Like those other control freaks, the Priests, the sceptics know, if only unconsciously that the making of images is the first Alchemical stage of creation. They are not against “untruths” so much as “possibilities”. Those oddballs, cranks and eccentrics who just happen to think that the truth is not only wonderful but thankfully scandalous beyond all belief, have on many occasions found themselves the very first to be put into sealed trains en route to places to face the “reality” of forced labour with the additionally “reality” of death as wages. Thus armed terrorists are often Public Enemy Number 2 as compared to those who think of strange new possibilities.
How threadbare this view is when compared with Renaissance thinking. Certainly Shakespeare had no concept of “objective fact”. For him, Mind and Nature were a seamless robe. In this, he would have had no problems with UFOs, or such a concept as the “paranormal”. He had a number of far classier options. He had the entire Bible plus his own fragmented national history. He had also the whole apparatus of Greek Tragedy, which included such ideas as the transmigration of souls, the musical harmony of the heavens, and all kinds of mystical ideas about destiny, and character, thought and action implied by Andrew Darlington’s selection of a surrogate mythological father.
For many aboriginal natives and Carlo Castenada’s “sorcerer” Don Juan, thinking never ceases to be a form of dreaming. The principle behind many Eastern philosophies is the idea that we are never fully “awake”. Hamlet himself could be described by his attempts to try and wake more fully. For Shakespeare again, Mind and Nature are one entity. This is identical to that symbiotic process which Jung called “participation mystique” in which all matter becomes peopled again, and in becoming so matter can be regarded as a form of life, rather like the active imagination. In the Shakespearean machinery, the non-human world of pure idea and external matter are just as much dramatis personae as the characters themselves. In Shakespeare’s sense, matter of all forms (and we can extend this to Hardy’s Egdon Heath, Forster’s Marabar caves, or Kafka’s Prague) has their own weather, mood, their own eco-systems, ambitions, and desires.
Shakespeare’s idea of individual personality was that it was a system of ideas whose quasi-material structure interfaced with the animal, vegetable, and mineral elements of the “outer” cosmos. Therefore a human being had a super-body whose makeup was the more “airy” (or thinned out) elements of character. The great examples of this are Hamlet and King Lear. These plays show that that a dialogue between these inner and outer states. In the latter play, just prior to the storm scene, we have the “real” madness of Lear played against the “false” madness of Edgar, played against the “sanity” of Kent, all played against the inanities of the Fool. Similarly, Goneril and Regan become more animal than human because they invoke metaphors of animalism throughout their language and being. Thus there was traffic between non-human and human elements. This connection also included the non-animate world. Indeed our very own Mothman could have been from either Macbeth or A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Try matching all this with the sceptic’s impoverished theorising about “factual objectivity”! Our culture simplifies states of very complex affairs until we get the equations to work, and we call this simplification “reality”. Science for example reduces a 52 bus full drunks, fighting skinheads and an ecstasy-head trying to leave by the luggage compartment to a mass moving down an inclined plane. It cannot describe the spew on the floor, the piss-sodden photo of a Tellytubby in The Sun, the hag trying to assault the driver, the smell of curry and chips, and the racist screams from Milwall supporters slashing the upstairs seats, all to the wail of pursuing sirens.
But all these images of our modern Inferno are reduced by science to a point in space moving under the action of those historically arriveste harpies of mass, force, and acceleration. This vanishing of images and information by ignoring them to get a pet theory to work leads of course to one big scientific hoax after another. The joke is that the amount of information about the 52 bus event is decreased by science rather than increased.
If that isn’t political, nothing is.
In the post-modern equations of Entertainment State the billiard-ball atoms of fact and fiction will be replaced certainly with planes of war-gaming information. Our coming Web world will be based on our re-invention of Plato’s concept of the real as shadow play of matter and essence, ideology and quasi-material manifestations.


VI
The books of Charles Fort endorse these concepts. He shows that the subjective-objective stance gives us so many philosophic difficulties we have to hoax our way around the problems. But the hoax re-assures us. We know we are being tricked, if only by ourselves, but we need oversimplifications in order to get some sleep at night. George Adamski told some lies. Most reassuring. Interpret a man in terms of the lowest levels he falls to, and we can sleep tight. Accusing someone of being a fantasist is an old tribal way of vanishing or controlling fantasies themselves. This is fantasy-management more than truth versus falsehood. Perhaps we should ask the question of why we even bothered at all to accuse Adamski then, and why we still bother a half-century later. Yet early contactees such as Adamski, Howard Menger and Truman Bethurum still make sceptics angry. They still cause losses of temper, supercilious laughter, denials, and accusations of imposture. Adamski in particular is still seen as a ridiculous figure, a clown, someone to be despised, a permanent embarrassment, a person who showed just how silly and devious human beings can be.
Yet there is something very odd about our anger. Hurts of the deep past (infinitely more vast than those inflicted by the harmless Adamski) have gone with the world of Adamski. We no longer get angry about the Korean War or Pearl Harbour. Yet Adamski’s wound does not heal. Something within us has been profoundly disturbed by his claims. They still frighten and amuse. He entered the unconscious and he went deep. He (amidst others) is a permanent reminder that the world is not a stable place. To go deeper than Pearl Harbour in American consciousness is quite an achievement. Even 10-year-olds relate to Adamski’s pan-shaped flying saucers seen on the side of their cornflake packs. Certainly no other single joke remains from the 1950s. Quite an achievement that. Far more clever men have achieved far less. His hoaxes (if indeed they were hoaxes) do not appear to be going stale, as distinct from the hoaxes of science, such as psychoanalysis, particle physics, health care, or environmental “improvement”.
As we know, history picks the most unlikely heroes. There has to be a fulcrum for change and perhaps Adamski’s mind was the focal point Truman Bethurum was too simple-minded, and Howard Menger too limp. Only Adamski had the proper hunger, was in the right place at the right time. His mind was a kind of metaphor bomb, trying to reverse the automatic denial-bacillus of mental colonisation. In this sense his simple bourgeois worth in terms of “solid” achievement is irrelevant. Adamski was able to penetrate high-powered cultural levels (on many continents) with his new metaphors. There is now emerging the post-modern view that such interpenetrating metaphors are alien life forms in themselves in that they represent invading systems of new kinds of reference. Within the framework of such arguments, the old-fashioned “real” versus “false” arguments become somewhat irrelevant as compared to the idea of systems trying to out-advertise themselves. Most human problems are not actually “solved” so much as engineered around, re-programmed, or re-imaged. We need the aliens if only to provide the superb Anglo-Saxon comedy of a great number of Miss Marples on bicycles going around the country taking notes on searchlights and ball lightning.
VII

The going of the Fool from Western culture was a great loss. The function of Shakespeare’s Fool as he sits at the feet of the mad Lear is to remind us that the world as Thought and Idea is never complete, and that the hoax as a system of deception is part of a very early psychology of a shamanistic technique of reaching and understanding the unconscious. The joke comes back to us as a reminder that the mind reasons by hoaxing itself. This is a healthy process. It enables us to handle danger, and is a vital element in the learning process, which is largely a process of self-deception. By convincing ourselves that can master formidable problems, we eventually master them. Thus the “concrete” solution comes from an utter fantasy, as do most “solutions” in science and technology, these being the results more often than not of what Arthur Koestler call for instance Kepler’s “fantasy prone intellect”. Koestler showed in The Sleepwalkers that so-called “falsehoods” are an essentially part of any reasoning process. In great genius in particular, the degree of self-deception may be enormous. We live in a culture so commercially brutalised and with such a simple-minded media that such subtleties have been lost to us in any communal sense. Facts are the ultimate conspiracy. Look at a so-called “fact”, and it will split into a thousand elements like the landscapes of Jonathan Downes or Doc. Shiels. Those elements in turn will split again like a Fractal. In a trice, we are gazing into infinity and falling through space pass shelves on which are stand jars of orange marmalade. The “isolated” fact is like the idea of the lone assassin. Few believe it, nobody likes it, and even fewer want it. The “facts” about a person tell us as much about that person as our mass moving down an inclined plane tells us about our 52 bus. Being part of a highly developed apparatus of mental control, they represent a deep negative politicisation of all thinking. Like the much-vaunted digital process, “facts” are not found in nature. They are manufactured screens, a fraudulent convenience to enable us to reason in yet more fraudulent terms, for this according to Fort, is how the mind reasons:
“There is something of ultra-pathos - of cosmic sadness - in this universal search for a standard, and in belief that one has been revealed by either inspiration or analysis, then the dogged clinging to a poor sham of a thing long after its insufficiency has been shown.”
The loss of the idea of the Fool has caused many people, sceptics amongst them, to have a very simple-minded idea of hoaxing and imposture. A hoax is an enactment of some thing; as such, it is not “false” but a kind of rehearsal. For a minute, a new “reality” (or rather part of a new world) comes about. True, this is a transient bubble-world, a kind of virtual construct, but nevertheless the hoax is powerful enough to change totally the entire complex of a deep-rooted group identity.
If “reality” is the favourite word of the sceptics, then the word hoax is certainly their second) A number of reasonably well-adjusted people, say, are in a room talking quite naturally in a relaxed atmosphere. One of the group leaves the room, only to rush back and announce that the entire building is on fire. Before it is quickly discovered that this person has a juvenile sense of humour, the group will momentarily have changed its fundamental identity. True, this new act will be only a very temporary one, but it will be sufficient to change social and personal masks forever. Within the new performance schedule, weak people will become strong, the strong weak. Leaders will emerge as well as equally unsuspected cowards. Though these new roles will appear not to last, memories of the changes will be permanent; the collapse of the strong will be remembered, as will the new found confidence of the weak. The old positions then will have been undermined, and those leaders who try to regain their original position in the hierarchy will have lost face irrevocably.
For a moment a “fantasy” has had just as much effect as “actual” smoke and flames. True, perhaps it did not last very long, but that it lasted at all shows that here we are not dealing with iron-age “truth” versus “falsehood”, but frequency and duration. In all likelihood, the more fantasy-prone members of the target-group will admit that they smelt smoke, and the even more fantasy-prone may well swear that they glimpsed a flame, if only a small one.
J. P. Chaplin, in his 1959 book, Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Crowds, comments on the notorious broadcast of Orson Wells:
“There were some in New York who “saw” or “heard” the battle of the Martians and Earthmen that was being waged in the neighbouring state. A man equipped with binoculars could “see” the flames of the holocaust from his vantage point on top of a tall office building. One “heard” the bombs from aircraft fall on New Jersey, and was convinced they were heading for Times Square. Another “heard” the swish of the Martian machines as they plummeted through the atmosphere to earth. In Brooklyn, a man called the police demanding that he be issued a gas mask; he had “heard” the distant sounds of the battle going on over in Jersey and believed a gas attack imminent. When informed it was a play, he shouted, “We can hear the firing all the way here, and I want a gas mask. I’m a taxpayer.”
It is difficult here to avoid the idea that both our hoaxed fire and the suggested Martian invasion were not “false” or “true”, things at all, but things that were almost fully created in the Fortean sense. Science, with its absolute insistence of on or off switches, its distinctions between real and false, yes and no, alive or dead, does not recognise as meaningful the idea of there being intermediate states between hard and soft separations.
This is part of the psychosocial equation sceptics never talk about. The appearance of small fires say along the line of the dreaming. Systems such as witchcraft and indeed great world religions on occasion, are rejected and persecuted not because they are theologically incorrect, scientifically invalid, or considered evil, or immoral, but like fuel-less motors, they might just work for a time. Thus we have to replace the idea that the fire previously mentioned was almost created. An increase in the strength of the suggestion and perhaps even small fires may well appear along with stigmata and “paranormal” effects in quite different contexts to imagined fires. Fort gives many examples of mysterious deaths where the scene is as if imagined. By this he means that if the socks are left perfect on a body that has been burnt by spontaneous combustion, this is because when we imagine killing a person by such a means, we harbour no resentment against their socks!
Thus we have to replace working not/working paradigm with “not working very well” paradigm. In other words Darlington’s umbilical to his Presley super-self is a noisy channel, as is the connection between dirt and infection as regards Sartre’s sewer-workers.
Darlington’s world is not an objective world. This means that it represents a system that can be entered. The only possible way we can learn something is to enter a system as ourselves. In Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois is a ruined woman of transcendent beauty. Low-key, practical, mundane, simple-minded characters who are sceptical about anything and every thing surround her. Stanley Kowalsky (played by Marlon Brando in the film) sarcastically asks Blanche what is her use in the world: she cannot cook, sew, or do anything practical. Blanche replies that the only reason for her existence is to provide magic. She has done this almost as a vocation. Brando’s face is a mask of astonishment: this cynical, sceptical, world-weary materialist mask of a face drops as if Blanche had hit him on the jaw.
Blanche’s last piece of magic has worked.
Stanley Kowalsky has learned something.
Perhaps Darlington’s counterfeit father serves as our only true intimation of immortality, and perhaps the UFO contactees and visionaries are like Blanche Dubois, the broken poets of our time. Provision of magic is a holy thing, a sacred act, for without magic and poetry we all enter the great infernos of the utterly damned.
Colin Bennett April, 2002