Fort thought that humanity was controlled by beings beyond the Earth's atmosphere.
This was in the mid-1910s, when he was working on the manuscript that would become The Book of the Damned but was then called "X." X was the name of the force, projected from Mars, or some other distant place, that compelled us to play out our dramas. The stars are projectors, we their movies.
Tiffany Thayer twisted this notion around, finding the directors closer to home.** It wasn't Martians controlling us, it was the OSS. They were bureaucrats were the scriptwriters, we merely actors.
The paranoia is not surprising. Michael D. Gordin, in his book on Immanuel Velikovsky, argues that the Cold War injected debates over science and pseudoscience with a healthy dose of paranoia. Thayer was reflecting his times.
But the paranoia should not be dismissed, either. I reviewed Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men two years ago, and he used paranoia as a tool to productively explore the UFO sub-culture. Sure, he said, the government is interested in flying saucers--but often only to spread disinformation. They can make interest in the saucers work for them, hiding important tests or throwing off critics. It is an interesting, if not fully proved, argument.
Thayer isn't quite as straight-forward in his argument. He clearly wants to make villains of the government (as well as an establishment that is in cahoots with it). He starts off and closes his rant with the claim that the Fortean Society has no official stand on what the flying saucers are--hoaxes, hallucinations, visitors. But then clearly advances his notion that we are all the OSS's puppets.
This was in the mid-1910s, when he was working on the manuscript that would become The Book of the Damned but was then called "X." X was the name of the force, projected from Mars, or some other distant place, that compelled us to play out our dramas. The stars are projectors, we their movies.
Tiffany Thayer twisted this notion around, finding the directors closer to home.** It wasn't Martians controlling us, it was the OSS. They were bureaucrats were the scriptwriters, we merely actors.
The paranoia is not surprising. Michael D. Gordin, in his book on Immanuel Velikovsky, argues that the Cold War injected debates over science and pseudoscience with a healthy dose of paranoia. Thayer was reflecting his times.
But the paranoia should not be dismissed, either. I reviewed Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men two years ago, and he used paranoia as a tool to productively explore the UFO sub-culture. Sure, he said, the government is interested in flying saucers--but often only to spread disinformation. They can make interest in the saucers work for them, hiding important tests or throwing off critics. It is an interesting, if not fully proved, argument.
Thayer isn't quite as straight-forward in his argument. He clearly wants to make villains of the government (as well as an establishment that is in cahoots with it). He starts off and closes his rant with the claim that the Fortean Society has no official stand on what the flying saucers are--hoaxes, hallucinations, visitors. But then clearly advances his notion that we are all the OSS's puppets.