A long tale about a worrisome Fortean.
Frederick G. Hehr came into this world 11 April 1890 in Germany. Later, he would say he was an “iconoclast and born Fortean who never took anything on somebodies say-so. Of which ample proof at age 3.” He traveled a lot—“more than a Limey sailor or official of the Colonial Office in the good old days”—and there are records of him in Mexico, Cuba, New Orleans, and New York City during the 1920s. Hehr says he visited Liverpool in 1912, where he found the women soap and water shy. He “acquired a knowledge of a number of languages to dispense with translators”—and those same records from the 1920s have him able to read and write English. Dutch, he thought, was the most useful language—one of his opinions on many, many items: “THE language for correct pronunciation, not only of Spanish, but of Arabic, Turkish, Russian and a dozen other assorted languages is, Holland Dutch. The German ch is as different from the Spanish j as the German and English w’s and th’s. For one who has to learn many languages, learning Dutch really is a timesaver as it contains all the vowels and combinations of consonants used anywhere.”
Working as a seaman, he learned engineering and, in 1928, moved to Hempstead New York, taking work at the Aerol Engine Corporation. The following year, he was joined by his wife, Elizabeth, and their two children (also Elizabeth, born around 1922, and Frederick, born around 1926. Seriously). The elder Frederick and Elizabeth had been married around 1920. Their lives in Germany are unknown. The family were still on Long Island in 1934, though 30 miles away in Sayville, and seemed to be still working for Aerol. He may have been in Missoula, Montana in 1935. (There’s a letter written to Liberty magazine, volume 12, issue 2, page 57, arguing for more scanty dress, which reads like something from Hehr and gives Missoula as his address.) By 1937, he and Elizabeth (and presumably their children) lived in Los Angeles, according to the city directory, where he worked as a machinist. His life seems to have undergone some turmoil on the West Coast. After 1942, the city directory no longer lists Frederick and Elizabeth together. (Rather, it seems the two Elizabeths lived together.) In 1944, the directory linked him to Dorothy Hehr, a housewife. And after 1952, he was listed alone. Frederick G. Hehr stayed in the area until his death in 1970.
Frederick G. Hehr came into this world 11 April 1890 in Germany. Later, he would say he was an “iconoclast and born Fortean who never took anything on somebodies say-so. Of which ample proof at age 3.” He traveled a lot—“more than a Limey sailor or official of the Colonial Office in the good old days”—and there are records of him in Mexico, Cuba, New Orleans, and New York City during the 1920s. Hehr says he visited Liverpool in 1912, where he found the women soap and water shy. He “acquired a knowledge of a number of languages to dispense with translators”—and those same records from the 1920s have him able to read and write English. Dutch, he thought, was the most useful language—one of his opinions on many, many items: “THE language for correct pronunciation, not only of Spanish, but of Arabic, Turkish, Russian and a dozen other assorted languages is, Holland Dutch. The German ch is as different from the Spanish j as the German and English w’s and th’s. For one who has to learn many languages, learning Dutch really is a timesaver as it contains all the vowels and combinations of consonants used anywhere.”
Working as a seaman, he learned engineering and, in 1928, moved to Hempstead New York, taking work at the Aerol Engine Corporation. The following year, he was joined by his wife, Elizabeth, and their two children (also Elizabeth, born around 1922, and Frederick, born around 1926. Seriously). The elder Frederick and Elizabeth had been married around 1920. Their lives in Germany are unknown. The family were still on Long Island in 1934, though 30 miles away in Sayville, and seemed to be still working for Aerol. He may have been in Missoula, Montana in 1935. (There’s a letter written to Liberty magazine, volume 12, issue 2, page 57, arguing for more scanty dress, which reads like something from Hehr and gives Missoula as his address.) By 1937, he and Elizabeth (and presumably their children) lived in Los Angeles, according to the city directory, where he worked as a machinist. His life seems to have undergone some turmoil on the West Coast. After 1942, the city directory no longer lists Frederick and Elizabeth together. (Rather, it seems the two Elizabeths lived together.) In 1944, the directory linked him to Dorothy Hehr, a housewife. And after 1952, he was listed alone. Frederick G. Hehr stayed in the area until his death in 1970.
Hehr took his engineering seriously. His work at Aerol was patented in both Canada and the United States. Later, in 1951, he took out a patent on a sound recording device. He offered opinions to the Los Angeles Times on heating orchards, and when, in the letter column, he was accused of ‘colossal ignorance,’ he pointed out that he was anything but: “I am a combustion engineer,” he said. Hehr told the same newspaper that he was the unacknowledged father of the diesel locomotive engine, having given the idea to a railroad superintendent while looking for a job in the late 1920s. While tinkering, he then innovated a rotor that allowed for the train to run without ‘bugs.’ He lamented, “The curious thing is I have never ridden behind one of those Diesel locomotives and never received the slightest direct benefit from them.”
The engineering anecdotes point to something about Hehr’s character. He had a firm belief in secret knowledge—of which he possessed much—and a worry that the incompetents in charge of the world were ignoring him and his knowledge. In 1954, he lectured the Times, “Being a motor engineer of 50 yard standing, I know were the smog comes from and how to ameliorate it. All I would need is one secretary and access to the means of publicity to educate the people what to do to reduce the production by 75% at no cost to themselves. Simple alterations and adjustment would reduce gas waste, and so smog production, by at least 75%. Teaching the people how to keep incinerators smokeless would improve maters in that field very much. Urging the oil companies to make a special gasoline for city use is another angle to be covered, All could be done in six months. Clubbing the people with another set of laws, regulations and the inherent fines and harassments will accomplish nothing.” Hehr had been worrying over smog in L.A. since at least 1944, when he sent in a clipping to Thayer’s Doubt (11, winter), about “eye-smarting ‘fumes’ of no determinable origin.” More generally, he was quick to offer opinions on matters as diverse as good ways to mulch leaves and the political history of the twentieth century. He bitched about bright lights at night. He wrote the physicist Niels Bohr to tell him that his peace plan would never work. He told Life magazine that while many people move in their sleep, he never does.
Hehr pushed the belief in his own special intellect in occult directions. He had an interest in that unusual phenomenon, gal lightning (which he had witnessed himself, once). He told the Times that since 1919 he’d used a pendulum to ascertain the sex of unborn children, never making a mistake, even when he swung the pendulum above a photograph of Princess Elizabeth. Photographs could also tell him if a person was live or dead. Eventually, he gave up engineering and machining and became a dowser—earning in a day, he told fellow Fortean Eric Frank Russell, what it had taken him a year of engineering to eke out. He discussed dowsing in a 1948 letter to the Times, but did not admit having that wild talent. By 1955, when he was billing himself as one of the most competent water-witchers in the Southwest, he recommended to the newspaper that fire departments use water diviners to find sources away from main pipelines, which would allow them to quickly put out fires there. Two years later, he said he was tired of legal harassment and was turning his attention to the locating of oil and minerals.
Some time in the mid-1940s, he traveled north to Gold Hill, Oregon, where John Lister owned a place where the laws of physics as we know them were suspended—a place like what would become The Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, Ca. Thayer was certain it was all a trick—he’d seen similar places at carnivals—but the Fortean Albert Page had visited and concluded it was home to a vortex. And Hehr’s engineering background led him to a startling conclusion: He found “a force which does affect gravity, but as a secondary or even tertiary effect,” he told Thayer. The place was the “focus of a rice which I have reason to suspect emanates from a machine or instrument buried at this place in pre-historic time, perhaps [of] Atlantean or even extra-terrestrial origins.” In passing, Thayer noted to the readers of Doubt that Hehr was also in communication with Venusians.
Such conclusions are outré, no doubt, but well within the norm for Forteans and others who had been influenced by the growth of esoteric Christianity, especially Theosophy, since the middle of the nineteenth century. And Hehr seems to have been acquainted with some of this literature, at least in popular form: science fiction, and its paranormal accomplices. He’d written an essay for Amazing Stories in 1933 (on acceleration); he had an article in Ray Palmer’s Mystic magazine (October 1955), and in the late N. Meade Layne’s Round Robin (June 1961). He told Russell he was a regular reader of science fiction. And like other Forteans, he accepted the existence of certain forms of magic. In 1948, when there was a rash of mysterious deaths among young male Filipinos in Hawaii, Hehr suggested the cause might by Hawaiian magic, Huna, used to bring ruin to men who had had illicit relations with Hawaiian women” (Doubt 23, December 1948, p. 350).
It’s no surprise, then, that Hehr would be a member of the Fortean Society, home to many science fiction fans, paranormalists, and various species of Theosophists. Indeed, he was an extraordinarily active Fortean. His name first appeared in the Society’s 7th issue (June 1943), as having sent in material which could not be used. The followed his clipping about the biter smog in Los Angeles. By the next spring, he was integrated enough that Thayer was helping him send material to other Forteans—the nature of that material is unknown. All told, Hehr appeared in the pages of Doubt 22 times, the last in number 54, June 1957. Eight of the appearances were general credits, without being tagged to a specific clipping.
Hehr seemed to believe in wild talents—hence his own skills as prognosticator and dowser. He, along with other readers, watched the unfolding story of a girl who seemingly started fires telepathically in 1948 (Doubt 23, December 1948). Perhaps he also thought magic was some kind of wild talent. “Anyone who has witnessed tests of [dowsing] cannot deny the existence of such powers,” he said. “Some have it, others do not. The same with many other strange powers.”
Hehr also seemed to share the general Fortean distrust of science—the sine qua non of the Society. Some people “are fooled by arguments put forth for prohibition, daylight ‘saving’ time, political platforms promising a sudden heaven and the claims put forth for such politicians as the Roosevelts and their coattail riders. Or even such vague claims that ‘science,’ whatever that is, knows it all and anything not stamped by science’s approval, past, present and future, just does not exist and is a lot of imagination,” he wrote the Times in June 1949. “Science declares” many “things as ‘nonsense!’ but science either doesn’t know it all or has the wrong spokesman.” Clippings on anomalies made his point: a beast, the mosasaur, supposedly extinct for one hundred and thirty million years was leaving tracks and scaring people in South Dakota (Doubt 16, 1946); an actor line was tied while a boat was docked (Doubt 18, July 1947); theater roofs in Monterey, Mexico, and Kansas City, KS, collapsing on the same night (Ibid.); a mysterious glow that appeared shortly after an earthquake (Doubt 27).
In July 1944, the German merchant Waldemar Julsrud found a bunch of figurines in Mexico. They seemed to look like dinosaurs, and suggested to Julsrud that an ancient society had known dinosaurs. Hehr railed against Thayer for ignoring the discovery: ‘Amongst the over 25,000 figurines are many of giants and pseudo humans of tremendous size. Why not note this in DOUBT? Even, or because, the experts nix the whole story and try to explain the findings away by suggesting that someone planted them to play a hoax on Mr. Julsrud. Just about ten tons of terra cotta and stamen sculptures! Yet!”
Hehr, however, was not just a Fortean by birth, but by experience. One of his unattached credits appeared in the flying saucer issue of Doubt and, in time, he saw a disk himself. (Not to mention that he communicated with Venusians.) In June 1953, he saw a squadron of flying saucers performing maneuvers for ten minutes while he was at a park talking to a woman. Unfortunately, his camera had no film. He estimated that one flew around 7,500 miles per hour. He could also see that they were material; control gravity, allowing them to hover motionless; had no inertia; may have used magnetic energy as power source; and were controlled by intelligent beings: for all that they moved quickly and impressively, they made small errors that needed correction. It was one of twenty sightings he’d had to that point, along with a collection of eyewitness accounts he’d gathered from friends. (Wilkinson, Flying Saucers on the Attack, 284-6). On 6 May 1954, Hehr saw a “curious celestial object” in Arizona. “It was low on the southern horizon, and looked like a nebula, perfectly circular with bright center. Just like a nova after it begins to cool.” (Wilkinson, Flying Saucers Uncensored, 234).
Hehr’s view of flying saucers as physical craft, some of which came from outer space, put him at odds with other Forteans, who saw them as inter-dimensional, or parts of the Ether. In particular, Thayer reported that Hehr attributed the craft over San Diego that was sometimes known as Kareeta, and that Layne attributed to Etherians phasing into our reality, Hehr said was actually a condor, causing a fall-out between the two of them. (Hehr did not appear in Round Robin unti a month after Layne's death.) Both Hehr and Layne were influenced by esoteric Christianity and accepted heterodox scientific concepts—ether in Layne’s case, anti-gravity in Hehr’s—but they still saw the world differently. The Fortean Society had its diversity.
And Hehr seemed to share at least some of Thayer’s social-political views—generally speaking, he was a left-leaning anarchist, no friend of the Roosevelts, a wary supporter of Henry Wallace—until he sussed out that Wallace, too, would be a war-monger—and worried about the plight of everyday people under the boot-hell of government—hence his complaint about new laws and regulations promulgated to stop smog in Los Angeles. “It’s an old story that only those in need themselves really will help the unfortunate. A hungry beggar will always get a meal amongst the poor, but nothing but kicks from the butler. A stomach which knows hunger is the real fertilizer for a live conscience. Only those who have been kicked around by a gestapo or goon squad and sneered at by a fat judge can appreciate civil liberties and decent government. A fat belly is the worst narcotic for both brain and conscience,” he said (Saturday Review 15 Nov. 1947, 21).
Hehr sent in at least two clippings of socio-political concern, both of which Thayer discussed in
Doubt 13 (winter 1945). The first related the story of a marine veteran who had been picked up by the Los Angeles police for evading the draft; he was died in custody, and his parents thought he had been killed by the police. Thayer added Los Angeles to his tally of towns—the others were St. Louis and Buffalo—where the police were dangerous. Hehr also contributed a story about a patient in the psyche ward died while institutionalized but was denied an investigation—even though the cause of death was the closing of the larynx, which might be understood as strangulation. Thayer added Los Angeles to New York City on his list of places where psych patients might die without an inquiry into the cause. In December 1948, Thayer awarded Hehr first prize in his regular contest for best clipping—Hehr reported on a boy who had somehow come across a 40 mm shell front of an Oxnard grocery and blown himself to smithereens. The war machine had its innocent victims.
Fortean events, flying saucers, and Theosophical-inflected myth-making formed the basis of a Hehr-y theology that went beyond the scope of the Fortean Society—as was the case with other Forteans influenced by the mystical and theosophical. According to him, the break through came in 1903, when he met an old man who told him fantastic things. The day would come, the man said, when there would be miraculous inventions, what Hehr later came to recognize as radio and television, airplanes and submarines. And wars. Terrible, bloody wars, three of them in all: The Great War, World War II, and what was for him, in the mid-1950s, the coming storm. He told him of the flying saucers, too, and now that they had come, he saw something about Lister’s Gold Hill mystery place that he had missed in 1946:
“Here, on the west coast of the U.S., are certain ‘mystery spots’ in which gravity and light are distorted. They appear to be aligned in a straight path, having an average distance of around 50 miles. I know of other cases of this phenomenon in many other states of the U.S., and there are at least two in England. Now a curious fact emerges: Saucers and space craft seem to follow the lines of these mystery spots, as if they were beacons! They also often make right-angle turns where such lines intersect.”
Whether Hehr still thought those mystery spots had been created by Atlanteans is unknown—or maybe it was even Richard Shaver’s Deros—but it is clear that he thought they had been in place for a long time. Like Theosophy, and its bastard child Dianetics, Hehr believed the earth had a long, long, history with higher intelligences as humans and human-like creatures evolved through different stages.
Here is what Hehr confessed to believe in 1955 and 1956:
Five hundred million years ago an incorrigibly evil race was banished to the far end of the universe as “the general tenor of the Cosmos is peace and coöperation.” Hehr doesn’t name this race, but let’s call them the Evils, because the story gets complex and names will help. The Evils colonized the planet that once existed between Mars and Jupiter (a planet that fascinated Theosophists, including Arthur Louis Joquel). The planet was then-inhabited by human-like creatures easily subdued by the evils. At the time, another race also inhabited the system—call them the Goods—and they became aware of the Evils machinations when the planet beyond Mars began exploding atomic weaponry. (Atomic weapons are the pivot-point in Hehr’s galactic history.) The Goods became alarmed when the Evils developed space craft, and destroyed their planet—this is the origin of the asteroid belt that exists beyond Mars.
But a few of the Evils escaped, and returned much later, when human life evolved on Earth. The Goods were aware of humanity’s recent arrival, and the two races—Evil and Good—competed for control of humans, one to welcome humans into cosmic society, the other as tools for the conquest of the solar system an, later, the galaxy. The battle waged on over the centuries, until an atomic bomb was exploded, accidentally setting off an entire arsenal buried beneath a bad continent—the history, then, touching on both the Shaver mystery and theories about lost continents such as Atlantis. A new civilization arose—seemingly in the manner that Madame Helena Blavatsky, originator of Theosophy, saw the coming of different root races of humanity—and the battle continued.
Fed up with continually being thwarted, the Evils left the planet, petulantly sending a comet to destroy Earth. The Goods, unfortunately, were away at the time—on the other side of the sun—so could not intervene. They only had time to rescue a few humans, in part by selecting the best of humanity and squirreling it away in underground caverns—Shaver, again—where they had the benefit of the most advanced technologies. The comet altered the earth’s tilt and—shades of both Isaac Newton Vail and Drayson—caused the seas to boil, then come down as hard rains and start a series of ice ages. As the planet became habitable, these seeds of a new civilization re-emerged. Knowing they were yet a young species, and naive, these humans banned advanced technology. But the Evils corrupted some of them, enticed them with tools, and hence followed the rise and fall of empires, as the Evils continually tried to take over the world, in the process polluting the good seeds.
These battles culminated in two world wars. At this time, earth was inhabited by seven intelligent races—but only humanity was cursed to learn through trial and error, and so only humanity was the object of the Evil’s manipulations. (Hehr is silent on the identity of the other six races.) The Evils took over the bodies of some humans and conspired to st the world aflame. It was the Deterding-DeBeers “crowd,” he said, who were responsible for the Great War, along with the “400 families of France and the bankrupt Russian aristocracy.” War, then, as Thayer had been saying all along, was a racket, a conspiracy. The goal was to take control of the oil fields in the Middle East. The Great War did not end the Evil’s ambitions, but allowed them to further consolidate their power. As early as 1948, Hehr was writing in to the Times that World War II had been a fraud organized by the elites, particularly Robert Vansittart, who was an especial object of hatred for Hehr. He was a senior British diplomat who could have prevented World War II, but chose instead to foment it. Vansittart was joined by the Churchill family and a group of Jews grown rich on the Great War. It was a coordinated “masterplan of world domination.” The old man whom Hehr met in 1903 had told prophesied the whole ugly history.
And now, now in the 1950s, ten years after the last war and the explosion of the first atomic weapon in centuries, now, the planet was on the verge of its third and final war—just as that old man had said. The Evils were marshaling their forces. As were the Goods. Hehr never explicitly said, but his extant writing indicates he thought that the Goods came the planet Venus. They were organizing to help humanity overcome the Evils—that explained the appearance of flying saucers and their arrangement along the Mystery Spots. The war would come in 1960, and end five years later, the intervening years not marked by planetary conflict so much as restiveness, civil wars, and racial strife. The Venusians would try to preserve what was good from humanity and start the race again, on its highest plane yet, in hopes that its violent nature could be subdued and it would allowed into the cosmic community. Until humanity proved itself peaceful, interplanetary travel would be out, earthlings ostracized. Hehr was working as a dowser, saving his money, in hopes that he could be part of the battle against the Evils.
This story seems baroque, and when Hehr told it to Eric Frank Russell, he suggested that Russell write it up, only as science fiction, instead of actual history. But again, it was within the realm of acceptable discourse as established in communities of esoteric Christianity, New Age-ism and New Thought, as well as paranormal-inflected science fiction. I have taken pains to point out the parallel, Thayer recognized them, and even Hehr saw them, thinking his history not unlike Russell’s Fortean science fiction novel Sinister Barrier. Scientology and Mormonism, two other products of esoteric’s fermentation since the middle of the nineteenth century, also had incredibly complex cosmographies, even as they were very different in other ways. Beliefs in secret knowledge, hidden histories—these are a common part of the tradition. One could dismiss Hehr as a crank, certainly, a kook; or more sympathetically see him as profoundly, religiously moved by the creation of the atomic bomb. But there’s nothing necessarily pathological about what he’s saying. I’ve trie dot avoid labeling any of the Fortean ideas I’ve encountered as crazy—or paranoid, in the clinical sense—seeing psychological terms as a cheap way to circumvent understanding.
But there are some parts of Hehr’s history that makes me worry for his sanity.
First, the ideas mostly seem to have come to him later, after he was no longer with Elizabeth of Dorothy. He says that he heard this secret history in 1903, but there’s no indication in any of his earlier writings that he lived with this knowledge for that long. Strands of his theology are present in his earlier thought, but no sense that the world was on the edge of apocalypse. For all that we can tell, Hehr did not have this concept of history, and his particular role in it, until the mid-1950s, after the outbreak of flying saucers and after he came into contact with Ufo researchers such as Harold T. Wilkins.
Even that reason, though, is not compelling. Lots of people synthesize their thoughts into grand visions, and why not do it after the appearance of new events, such as flying saucers. Maybe he had listened to some old man drone on in 1903 and didn’t think much of it until later. Maybe he had witnessed flying saucers performing maneuvers off the coast of California, and saw them not as existential threats—intimations of a new war with Japan—but salvation. Who can say? Maybe Hehr was write when he said that most people in the park that day were so unobservant as to not notice what was going on in the sky above them. Maybe people were narrow-sighted even before the advent of cell phones and laptops. Maybe, maybe, maybe. One need not believe, but can sill admit that such speculations, however odd they might sound, are still part of the acceptable vocabulary, as the sociologist C. W. Mills would have it.
But there is one more disturbing part of Hehr’s theology, and that is how he makes it immanent in the quotidian—that is, how it works on everyday life.
Hehr had learned to identify people who had been possessed by the Evils. They had a sort of “blank blackness, as distinct from ordinary human eyes as Cornish blue from other blue eyes.” Or, alternatively, they had no pupils, but a glistening black disc. He told Russell too look around for these aliens.
It is unnerving to imagine Hehr walking the streets of Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles—wherever—staring at people’s eyes, categorizing them as human or alien. Fortean ideas allow people to play with the structures of reality, but forcing other people into the role of cosmic villains without their consent or even their knowledge—that why lies danger.
Fortunately, nothing seemed to happen. I can find no information on Frederick Hehr after 1955, except for his death. One wonders how he experienced the 1960s, their upheaval and racial conflict. Did he take it as confirmation that he was witnessing—and the old man had correctly predicted—the coming of the New Age?
The engineering anecdotes point to something about Hehr’s character. He had a firm belief in secret knowledge—of which he possessed much—and a worry that the incompetents in charge of the world were ignoring him and his knowledge. In 1954, he lectured the Times, “Being a motor engineer of 50 yard standing, I know were the smog comes from and how to ameliorate it. All I would need is one secretary and access to the means of publicity to educate the people what to do to reduce the production by 75% at no cost to themselves. Simple alterations and adjustment would reduce gas waste, and so smog production, by at least 75%. Teaching the people how to keep incinerators smokeless would improve maters in that field very much. Urging the oil companies to make a special gasoline for city use is another angle to be covered, All could be done in six months. Clubbing the people with another set of laws, regulations and the inherent fines and harassments will accomplish nothing.” Hehr had been worrying over smog in L.A. since at least 1944, when he sent in a clipping to Thayer’s Doubt (11, winter), about “eye-smarting ‘fumes’ of no determinable origin.” More generally, he was quick to offer opinions on matters as diverse as good ways to mulch leaves and the political history of the twentieth century. He bitched about bright lights at night. He wrote the physicist Niels Bohr to tell him that his peace plan would never work. He told Life magazine that while many people move in their sleep, he never does.
Hehr pushed the belief in his own special intellect in occult directions. He had an interest in that unusual phenomenon, gal lightning (which he had witnessed himself, once). He told the Times that since 1919 he’d used a pendulum to ascertain the sex of unborn children, never making a mistake, even when he swung the pendulum above a photograph of Princess Elizabeth. Photographs could also tell him if a person was live or dead. Eventually, he gave up engineering and machining and became a dowser—earning in a day, he told fellow Fortean Eric Frank Russell, what it had taken him a year of engineering to eke out. He discussed dowsing in a 1948 letter to the Times, but did not admit having that wild talent. By 1955, when he was billing himself as one of the most competent water-witchers in the Southwest, he recommended to the newspaper that fire departments use water diviners to find sources away from main pipelines, which would allow them to quickly put out fires there. Two years later, he said he was tired of legal harassment and was turning his attention to the locating of oil and minerals.
Some time in the mid-1940s, he traveled north to Gold Hill, Oregon, where John Lister owned a place where the laws of physics as we know them were suspended—a place like what would become The Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, Ca. Thayer was certain it was all a trick—he’d seen similar places at carnivals—but the Fortean Albert Page had visited and concluded it was home to a vortex. And Hehr’s engineering background led him to a startling conclusion: He found “a force which does affect gravity, but as a secondary or even tertiary effect,” he told Thayer. The place was the “focus of a rice which I have reason to suspect emanates from a machine or instrument buried at this place in pre-historic time, perhaps [of] Atlantean or even extra-terrestrial origins.” In passing, Thayer noted to the readers of Doubt that Hehr was also in communication with Venusians.
Such conclusions are outré, no doubt, but well within the norm for Forteans and others who had been influenced by the growth of esoteric Christianity, especially Theosophy, since the middle of the nineteenth century. And Hehr seems to have been acquainted with some of this literature, at least in popular form: science fiction, and its paranormal accomplices. He’d written an essay for Amazing Stories in 1933 (on acceleration); he had an article in Ray Palmer’s Mystic magazine (October 1955), and in the late N. Meade Layne’s Round Robin (June 1961). He told Russell he was a regular reader of science fiction. And like other Forteans, he accepted the existence of certain forms of magic. In 1948, when there was a rash of mysterious deaths among young male Filipinos in Hawaii, Hehr suggested the cause might by Hawaiian magic, Huna, used to bring ruin to men who had had illicit relations with Hawaiian women” (Doubt 23, December 1948, p. 350).
It’s no surprise, then, that Hehr would be a member of the Fortean Society, home to many science fiction fans, paranormalists, and various species of Theosophists. Indeed, he was an extraordinarily active Fortean. His name first appeared in the Society’s 7th issue (June 1943), as having sent in material which could not be used. The followed his clipping about the biter smog in Los Angeles. By the next spring, he was integrated enough that Thayer was helping him send material to other Forteans—the nature of that material is unknown. All told, Hehr appeared in the pages of Doubt 22 times, the last in number 54, June 1957. Eight of the appearances were general credits, without being tagged to a specific clipping.
Hehr seemed to believe in wild talents—hence his own skills as prognosticator and dowser. He, along with other readers, watched the unfolding story of a girl who seemingly started fires telepathically in 1948 (Doubt 23, December 1948). Perhaps he also thought magic was some kind of wild talent. “Anyone who has witnessed tests of [dowsing] cannot deny the existence of such powers,” he said. “Some have it, others do not. The same with many other strange powers.”
Hehr also seemed to share the general Fortean distrust of science—the sine qua non of the Society. Some people “are fooled by arguments put forth for prohibition, daylight ‘saving’ time, political platforms promising a sudden heaven and the claims put forth for such politicians as the Roosevelts and their coattail riders. Or even such vague claims that ‘science,’ whatever that is, knows it all and anything not stamped by science’s approval, past, present and future, just does not exist and is a lot of imagination,” he wrote the Times in June 1949. “Science declares” many “things as ‘nonsense!’ but science either doesn’t know it all or has the wrong spokesman.” Clippings on anomalies made his point: a beast, the mosasaur, supposedly extinct for one hundred and thirty million years was leaving tracks and scaring people in South Dakota (Doubt 16, 1946); an actor line was tied while a boat was docked (Doubt 18, July 1947); theater roofs in Monterey, Mexico, and Kansas City, KS, collapsing on the same night (Ibid.); a mysterious glow that appeared shortly after an earthquake (Doubt 27).
In July 1944, the German merchant Waldemar Julsrud found a bunch of figurines in Mexico. They seemed to look like dinosaurs, and suggested to Julsrud that an ancient society had known dinosaurs. Hehr railed against Thayer for ignoring the discovery: ‘Amongst the over 25,000 figurines are many of giants and pseudo humans of tremendous size. Why not note this in DOUBT? Even, or because, the experts nix the whole story and try to explain the findings away by suggesting that someone planted them to play a hoax on Mr. Julsrud. Just about ten tons of terra cotta and stamen sculptures! Yet!”
Hehr, however, was not just a Fortean by birth, but by experience. One of his unattached credits appeared in the flying saucer issue of Doubt and, in time, he saw a disk himself. (Not to mention that he communicated with Venusians.) In June 1953, he saw a squadron of flying saucers performing maneuvers for ten minutes while he was at a park talking to a woman. Unfortunately, his camera had no film. He estimated that one flew around 7,500 miles per hour. He could also see that they were material; control gravity, allowing them to hover motionless; had no inertia; may have used magnetic energy as power source; and were controlled by intelligent beings: for all that they moved quickly and impressively, they made small errors that needed correction. It was one of twenty sightings he’d had to that point, along with a collection of eyewitness accounts he’d gathered from friends. (Wilkinson, Flying Saucers on the Attack, 284-6). On 6 May 1954, Hehr saw a “curious celestial object” in Arizona. “It was low on the southern horizon, and looked like a nebula, perfectly circular with bright center. Just like a nova after it begins to cool.” (Wilkinson, Flying Saucers Uncensored, 234).
Hehr’s view of flying saucers as physical craft, some of which came from outer space, put him at odds with other Forteans, who saw them as inter-dimensional, or parts of the Ether. In particular, Thayer reported that Hehr attributed the craft over San Diego that was sometimes known as Kareeta, and that Layne attributed to Etherians phasing into our reality, Hehr said was actually a condor, causing a fall-out between the two of them. (Hehr did not appear in Round Robin unti a month after Layne's death.) Both Hehr and Layne were influenced by esoteric Christianity and accepted heterodox scientific concepts—ether in Layne’s case, anti-gravity in Hehr’s—but they still saw the world differently. The Fortean Society had its diversity.
And Hehr seemed to share at least some of Thayer’s social-political views—generally speaking, he was a left-leaning anarchist, no friend of the Roosevelts, a wary supporter of Henry Wallace—until he sussed out that Wallace, too, would be a war-monger—and worried about the plight of everyday people under the boot-hell of government—hence his complaint about new laws and regulations promulgated to stop smog in Los Angeles. “It’s an old story that only those in need themselves really will help the unfortunate. A hungry beggar will always get a meal amongst the poor, but nothing but kicks from the butler. A stomach which knows hunger is the real fertilizer for a live conscience. Only those who have been kicked around by a gestapo or goon squad and sneered at by a fat judge can appreciate civil liberties and decent government. A fat belly is the worst narcotic for both brain and conscience,” he said (Saturday Review 15 Nov. 1947, 21).
Hehr sent in at least two clippings of socio-political concern, both of which Thayer discussed in
Doubt 13 (winter 1945). The first related the story of a marine veteran who had been picked up by the Los Angeles police for evading the draft; he was died in custody, and his parents thought he had been killed by the police. Thayer added Los Angeles to his tally of towns—the others were St. Louis and Buffalo—where the police were dangerous. Hehr also contributed a story about a patient in the psyche ward died while institutionalized but was denied an investigation—even though the cause of death was the closing of the larynx, which might be understood as strangulation. Thayer added Los Angeles to New York City on his list of places where psych patients might die without an inquiry into the cause. In December 1948, Thayer awarded Hehr first prize in his regular contest for best clipping—Hehr reported on a boy who had somehow come across a 40 mm shell front of an Oxnard grocery and blown himself to smithereens. The war machine had its innocent victims.
Fortean events, flying saucers, and Theosophical-inflected myth-making formed the basis of a Hehr-y theology that went beyond the scope of the Fortean Society—as was the case with other Forteans influenced by the mystical and theosophical. According to him, the break through came in 1903, when he met an old man who told him fantastic things. The day would come, the man said, when there would be miraculous inventions, what Hehr later came to recognize as radio and television, airplanes and submarines. And wars. Terrible, bloody wars, three of them in all: The Great War, World War II, and what was for him, in the mid-1950s, the coming storm. He told him of the flying saucers, too, and now that they had come, he saw something about Lister’s Gold Hill mystery place that he had missed in 1946:
“Here, on the west coast of the U.S., are certain ‘mystery spots’ in which gravity and light are distorted. They appear to be aligned in a straight path, having an average distance of around 50 miles. I know of other cases of this phenomenon in many other states of the U.S., and there are at least two in England. Now a curious fact emerges: Saucers and space craft seem to follow the lines of these mystery spots, as if they were beacons! They also often make right-angle turns where such lines intersect.”
Whether Hehr still thought those mystery spots had been created by Atlanteans is unknown—or maybe it was even Richard Shaver’s Deros—but it is clear that he thought they had been in place for a long time. Like Theosophy, and its bastard child Dianetics, Hehr believed the earth had a long, long, history with higher intelligences as humans and human-like creatures evolved through different stages.
Here is what Hehr confessed to believe in 1955 and 1956:
Five hundred million years ago an incorrigibly evil race was banished to the far end of the universe as “the general tenor of the Cosmos is peace and coöperation.” Hehr doesn’t name this race, but let’s call them the Evils, because the story gets complex and names will help. The Evils colonized the planet that once existed between Mars and Jupiter (a planet that fascinated Theosophists, including Arthur Louis Joquel). The planet was then-inhabited by human-like creatures easily subdued by the evils. At the time, another race also inhabited the system—call them the Goods—and they became aware of the Evils machinations when the planet beyond Mars began exploding atomic weaponry. (Atomic weapons are the pivot-point in Hehr’s galactic history.) The Goods became alarmed when the Evils developed space craft, and destroyed their planet—this is the origin of the asteroid belt that exists beyond Mars.
But a few of the Evils escaped, and returned much later, when human life evolved on Earth. The Goods were aware of humanity’s recent arrival, and the two races—Evil and Good—competed for control of humans, one to welcome humans into cosmic society, the other as tools for the conquest of the solar system an, later, the galaxy. The battle waged on over the centuries, until an atomic bomb was exploded, accidentally setting off an entire arsenal buried beneath a bad continent—the history, then, touching on both the Shaver mystery and theories about lost continents such as Atlantis. A new civilization arose—seemingly in the manner that Madame Helena Blavatsky, originator of Theosophy, saw the coming of different root races of humanity—and the battle continued.
Fed up with continually being thwarted, the Evils left the planet, petulantly sending a comet to destroy Earth. The Goods, unfortunately, were away at the time—on the other side of the sun—so could not intervene. They only had time to rescue a few humans, in part by selecting the best of humanity and squirreling it away in underground caverns—Shaver, again—where they had the benefit of the most advanced technologies. The comet altered the earth’s tilt and—shades of both Isaac Newton Vail and Drayson—caused the seas to boil, then come down as hard rains and start a series of ice ages. As the planet became habitable, these seeds of a new civilization re-emerged. Knowing they were yet a young species, and naive, these humans banned advanced technology. But the Evils corrupted some of them, enticed them with tools, and hence followed the rise and fall of empires, as the Evils continually tried to take over the world, in the process polluting the good seeds.
These battles culminated in two world wars. At this time, earth was inhabited by seven intelligent races—but only humanity was cursed to learn through trial and error, and so only humanity was the object of the Evil’s manipulations. (Hehr is silent on the identity of the other six races.) The Evils took over the bodies of some humans and conspired to st the world aflame. It was the Deterding-DeBeers “crowd,” he said, who were responsible for the Great War, along with the “400 families of France and the bankrupt Russian aristocracy.” War, then, as Thayer had been saying all along, was a racket, a conspiracy. The goal was to take control of the oil fields in the Middle East. The Great War did not end the Evil’s ambitions, but allowed them to further consolidate their power. As early as 1948, Hehr was writing in to the Times that World War II had been a fraud organized by the elites, particularly Robert Vansittart, who was an especial object of hatred for Hehr. He was a senior British diplomat who could have prevented World War II, but chose instead to foment it. Vansittart was joined by the Churchill family and a group of Jews grown rich on the Great War. It was a coordinated “masterplan of world domination.” The old man whom Hehr met in 1903 had told prophesied the whole ugly history.
And now, now in the 1950s, ten years after the last war and the explosion of the first atomic weapon in centuries, now, the planet was on the verge of its third and final war—just as that old man had said. The Evils were marshaling their forces. As were the Goods. Hehr never explicitly said, but his extant writing indicates he thought that the Goods came the planet Venus. They were organizing to help humanity overcome the Evils—that explained the appearance of flying saucers and their arrangement along the Mystery Spots. The war would come in 1960, and end five years later, the intervening years not marked by planetary conflict so much as restiveness, civil wars, and racial strife. The Venusians would try to preserve what was good from humanity and start the race again, on its highest plane yet, in hopes that its violent nature could be subdued and it would allowed into the cosmic community. Until humanity proved itself peaceful, interplanetary travel would be out, earthlings ostracized. Hehr was working as a dowser, saving his money, in hopes that he could be part of the battle against the Evils.
This story seems baroque, and when Hehr told it to Eric Frank Russell, he suggested that Russell write it up, only as science fiction, instead of actual history. But again, it was within the realm of acceptable discourse as established in communities of esoteric Christianity, New Age-ism and New Thought, as well as paranormal-inflected science fiction. I have taken pains to point out the parallel, Thayer recognized them, and even Hehr saw them, thinking his history not unlike Russell’s Fortean science fiction novel Sinister Barrier. Scientology and Mormonism, two other products of esoteric’s fermentation since the middle of the nineteenth century, also had incredibly complex cosmographies, even as they were very different in other ways. Beliefs in secret knowledge, hidden histories—these are a common part of the tradition. One could dismiss Hehr as a crank, certainly, a kook; or more sympathetically see him as profoundly, religiously moved by the creation of the atomic bomb. But there’s nothing necessarily pathological about what he’s saying. I’ve trie dot avoid labeling any of the Fortean ideas I’ve encountered as crazy—or paranoid, in the clinical sense—seeing psychological terms as a cheap way to circumvent understanding.
But there are some parts of Hehr’s history that makes me worry for his sanity.
First, the ideas mostly seem to have come to him later, after he was no longer with Elizabeth of Dorothy. He says that he heard this secret history in 1903, but there’s no indication in any of his earlier writings that he lived with this knowledge for that long. Strands of his theology are present in his earlier thought, but no sense that the world was on the edge of apocalypse. For all that we can tell, Hehr did not have this concept of history, and his particular role in it, until the mid-1950s, after the outbreak of flying saucers and after he came into contact with Ufo researchers such as Harold T. Wilkins.
Even that reason, though, is not compelling. Lots of people synthesize their thoughts into grand visions, and why not do it after the appearance of new events, such as flying saucers. Maybe he had listened to some old man drone on in 1903 and didn’t think much of it until later. Maybe he had witnessed flying saucers performing maneuvers off the coast of California, and saw them not as existential threats—intimations of a new war with Japan—but salvation. Who can say? Maybe Hehr was write when he said that most people in the park that day were so unobservant as to not notice what was going on in the sky above them. Maybe people were narrow-sighted even before the advent of cell phones and laptops. Maybe, maybe, maybe. One need not believe, but can sill admit that such speculations, however odd they might sound, are still part of the acceptable vocabulary, as the sociologist C. W. Mills would have it.
But there is one more disturbing part of Hehr’s theology, and that is how he makes it immanent in the quotidian—that is, how it works on everyday life.
Hehr had learned to identify people who had been possessed by the Evils. They had a sort of “blank blackness, as distinct from ordinary human eyes as Cornish blue from other blue eyes.” Or, alternatively, they had no pupils, but a glistening black disc. He told Russell too look around for these aliens.
It is unnerving to imagine Hehr walking the streets of Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles—wherever—staring at people’s eyes, categorizing them as human or alien. Fortean ideas allow people to play with the structures of reality, but forcing other people into the role of cosmic villains without their consent or even their knowledge—that why lies danger.
Fortunately, nothing seemed to happen. I can find no information on Frederick Hehr after 1955, except for his death. One wonders how he experienced the 1960s, their upheaval and racial conflict. Did he take it as confirmation that he was witnessing—and the old man had correctly predicted—the coming of the New Age?
