To even the capaciously accepting Fortean Society, he was too outrageous—a fringe Fortean.
I know very little about Alan F. Wilson, and most of what I know comes from a remembrance. Aside from a few addresses he lived at, I have none of the usual biographical data, at least not in verifiable form. I do have a few purely speculative possibilities.
Wilson live in Cleveland, Ohio during the early 1950s, at least. Harlan Ellison, who knew him them, says he was in his thirties, but had already been married and divorced. Wilson worked for a factory—Ellison couldn’t remember which—and made a good living. Around about 1951, when Ellison was 17, Wilson hired him to be a go-fer: but one who also carried a gun. He made him deliver chemicals to different people (one case involved sodium, which Wilson later disposed of in a body of water, while Ellison watched, resulting in a huge explosion.) He had him woo a woman with a raw steak. He made him travel to another city and deliver the contents of a suitcase—the valise having been handcuffed to Ellison’s wrist—to fellow science fiction fan Don Ford.
Ellison wrote, much later: “Wilson looked like a Martian to me. At least, what I had always seen represented in sf magazines as a Martian: skinny, large head, receding hairline, big eyes. He was, to me, a weird and fascinating man.” There were signs he was very unusual—beyond, you know, hiring a 17-year old to carry a gun around Ohio and do errands. One task he gave Ellison was to, from time to time, scare him. “I didn’t ask him what he meant,” Ellison wrote. “I knew. He wanted me to feed his strangeness, whatever that was.” Thus, some nights the high school boy would climb up the outside of Wilson’s apartment and “make hideous sounds and tap on the window and scream and scare the hell out of him. Did he know it was me? Of course he knew. He’d asked me to do it, hadn’t he?”
I know very little about Alan F. Wilson, and most of what I know comes from a remembrance. Aside from a few addresses he lived at, I have none of the usual biographical data, at least not in verifiable form. I do have a few purely speculative possibilities.
Wilson live in Cleveland, Ohio during the early 1950s, at least. Harlan Ellison, who knew him them, says he was in his thirties, but had already been married and divorced. Wilson worked for a factory—Ellison couldn’t remember which—and made a good living. Around about 1951, when Ellison was 17, Wilson hired him to be a go-fer: but one who also carried a gun. He made him deliver chemicals to different people (one case involved sodium, which Wilson later disposed of in a body of water, while Ellison watched, resulting in a huge explosion.) He had him woo a woman with a raw steak. He made him travel to another city and deliver the contents of a suitcase—the valise having been handcuffed to Ellison’s wrist—to fellow science fiction fan Don Ford.
Ellison wrote, much later: “Wilson looked like a Martian to me. At least, what I had always seen represented in sf magazines as a Martian: skinny, large head, receding hairline, big eyes. He was, to me, a weird and fascinating man.” There were signs he was very unusual—beyond, you know, hiring a 17-year old to carry a gun around Ohio and do errands. One task he gave Ellison was to, from time to time, scare him. “I didn’t ask him what he meant,” Ellison wrote. “I knew. He wanted me to feed his strangeness, whatever that was.” Thus, some nights the high school boy would climb up the outside of Wilson’s apartment and “make hideous sounds and tap on the window and scream and scare the hell out of him. Did he know it was me? Of course he knew. He’d asked me to do it, hadn’t he?”