Scandrett, top left, in 1949. More questions than answers about this Fortean, who seems to have been forgotten like so many other Forteans—but the forgetting, and dwindling away of his works, is especially frustrating because he was somewhat prominent.
Jay Johnson Morrow Scandrett was born 16 October 1895 in Pittsburgh, PA to Richard (an attorney) and Agnes. He had an older brother, also named Richard, and sister, named Rebekah. Both his mother and father’s family had come from the Mid-Atlantic States. The Morrows were well off, in 1900 employing three servants. Whether the family hit hard times, or—more likely—the kids’ growing up meant the need for fewer hands, by 1910, the servants were all gone, but there was a lodger. Richard was the first to leave the family home, some time after 1910, establishing himself as a lawyer. Other members of the extended family included Senator Dwight Morrow.
Jay attended Amherst College, in Massachusetts, where he played basketball, edited the yearbook, acted, and was the class prophet—apparently there was something of a fad among turn-of-the-twentieth-century colleges to have one student predict the futures of the others. He graduated in 1917, and as of 1 June was employed by the US Army and in officer training. on 1 May 1918 he became a 2nd Lieutenant in the Infantry Corps. That same year, he became engaged to—or, in the Quaker formalities of her religion, announced their marriage of intention—to Marion Willis Satherwaite. He was dismissed from service 30 March 1919, and apparently went back to live with his family—his widowed mother and Rebekah, both now in Tenafly, NJ, where Rebekah was a teacher. He went to Columbia Law School, graduating in 1924. His studies were interrupted by a trip he and his mother took to the Canal Zone—a relative, John Jay Morrow, was Governor of the zone between 1924 and 1927—and capped by another voyage, this one in 1926, which had him in Cuba, at least. He joined the faculty at Georgetown University. In 1928, Marian graduated from Columbia’s Library Science program. They married 3 June 1929.
Jay Johnson Morrow Scandrett was born 16 October 1895 in Pittsburgh, PA to Richard (an attorney) and Agnes. He had an older brother, also named Richard, and sister, named Rebekah. Both his mother and father’s family had come from the Mid-Atlantic States. The Morrows were well off, in 1900 employing three servants. Whether the family hit hard times, or—more likely—the kids’ growing up meant the need for fewer hands, by 1910, the servants were all gone, but there was a lodger. Richard was the first to leave the family home, some time after 1910, establishing himself as a lawyer. Other members of the extended family included Senator Dwight Morrow.
Jay attended Amherst College, in Massachusetts, where he played basketball, edited the yearbook, acted, and was the class prophet—apparently there was something of a fad among turn-of-the-twentieth-century colleges to have one student predict the futures of the others. He graduated in 1917, and as of 1 June was employed by the US Army and in officer training. on 1 May 1918 he became a 2nd Lieutenant in the Infantry Corps. That same year, he became engaged to—or, in the Quaker formalities of her religion, announced their marriage of intention—to Marion Willis Satherwaite. He was dismissed from service 30 March 1919, and apparently went back to live with his family—his widowed mother and Rebekah, both now in Tenafly, NJ, where Rebekah was a teacher. He went to Columbia Law School, graduating in 1924. His studies were interrupted by a trip he and his mother took to the Canal Zone—a relative, John Jay Morrow, was Governor of the zone between 1924 and 1927—and capped by another voyage, this one in 1926, which had him in Cuba, at least. He joined the faculty at Georgetown University. In 1928, Marian graduated from Columbia’s Library Science program. They married 3 June 1929.
The engagement lasted longer than the marriage. Scandrett was the cousin of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, celebrated writer and wife of the aviator. She saw him in 1928, and wrote her diary that he had a mark of sophistication, but also an aloofness and inability to really love: “He has been cheated—by his own unyielding and brave and dear and foolish defiance—of what was his due: love and people who loved him, all ties and home. But love, mostly.” [Lindbergh, Bring Me a Unicorn, 162.] Maybe that diagnosis was right, maybe it was wrong—certainly it seems prophetic. Scandrett became a professor at Emory University in 1929. The 1930 census does not have him in it at all; Marian is a lodger with the Barfields. She was working as a librarian. The 1932 City Directory had both of them listed, but at separate addresses, and Marian was parenthesized (wid Jay). She was a librarian at Atlanta University, and he was still with Emory. In July 1933, Scandrett married Ernestine Cooper, a Georgian. The following year, he and she and Scandrett’s mother sailed to Naples (at least). Marian later married Leon Carnovsky of Chicago.
Within a year of their return from Naples, the Scandretts moved to Los Angeles, and Jay entered a Master’s Program at the University of Southern California. He graduated in 1937 with the presentation of his thesis, The foundations of the social principles of national socialists in the traditional social values and attitudes of the German people. The South beckoned him, though, and by 1940 he and Ernestine were in Pinellas, Florida, and he was a professor of political science at St. Petersburg College. Incidentally, Clearwater, Florida, is nearby, and this is where Ivan Sanderson would investigate some mysterious footprints on a sandy beach in 1948.
In the meantime, Scandrett embarked on his pamphleteering. on 4 April 1939, Christopher Publishing House released Scandrett’s The Nazi Disease. Based on his master’s thesis, the book argued that Germany’s turn to Hitler was not based on Der Führer’s charisma, but the social and economic woes of the nation. The book was slight (133 pages) and Christopher had a history of releasing odd projects—the House put out Graydon’s scientific work the year before—marking Scandrett’s publication as something of the fringe. It nonetheless received a fair amount of positive commentary in the press. He followed The Nazi Disease six years later with What Goes On, a 47-page self-published blast at the authoritarian state. (Note: I have not read it.)
Scandrett’s life in the late 1940s seems a bit disordered, before he settled down. Documents from 1948 have him both teaching at the University of Virginia’s extension school and at Alfred University, in New York. At some point, he divorced Ernestine, ending up back in the South—Savannah, Georgia—married to Mary Burroughs. Her family had come from Pennsylvania, where her father was principal of the Boys Industrial School in Pittsburgh before relocating to Savannah, where he became director of the Bethesda Boys School. Mary had been born in 1904—making her about a decade younger than Scandrett—and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1932. Scandrett listed his occupation in the City Directory as writer. And in 1960 he published another pamphlet Commonsense Economics. I have not seen it either, though it begins with n encomium to skepticism (but no mention of Fort). That’s a lot of the frustration: his pamphlets—The Nazi Disease, What Goes On, and Commonsense Economics are almost impossible to get ahold of without making long trips to the few distant libraries that own them.
Scandrett died 9 April 1963. His first wife, Marian, passed in 1965. Ernestine died in 1983, Mary in 1990.
How he came to Forteanism is not known exactly, but there are some suggestions. In 1944, the Fortean member Milton Subotsky sent Scandrett’s pamphlet What Goes On to Thayer, who approved of it. He wrote in Doubt 11, “A clear-sighted pamphlet about today. By all means read it.” Scandrett was not mentioned again the pages of Doubt until 1950, when he was included among those who attended a dinner in honor of Garry Davis’s joining the Society. Apparently, Thayer had been impressed enough by the pamphlet to approach Morrow, get him to join the Society, and become friendly enough to agree to meet in person. Remember, Scandrett was teaching at Alfred University, and so could make a dinner in New York City without too much difficulty. They seemed to have continued a correspondence for a while, but the extent is unknown, as are most of the contents. Unlike many others who came to the Society in the mid- to late-forties, he did not end his association with the dawn of the next decade but continued on for quite some time.
Despite the frustrations of obtaining his writings—and hence getting a sense of his thought, his writing style, his sensibility—there are some ways to understand his Forteanism: Thayer printed some long pieces by him. The next mention of him—Doubt 36, April 1952—had an excerpt from a letter he’d written Thayer: “Altho I can plainly see that the King has no pance on, the million-voiced cheers for the exquisite quality of the King’s Royal Pance make me appreciate your antistrophe ‘The King has no pance on.’” The letter was dated 2 February 1952, and came from New Jersey. It may have been generic praise for Thayer’s social and political opinions—or it may have referred more specifically to Thayer’s attacks on Civil Air Patrol. Either way, the excerpt indicates that Scandrett was broadly sympathetic to Thayer’s left-libertarianism.
Scandrett also contributed items of a more conventionally Fortean character. He was credited with several different contributions to Thayer’s digest of flying saucer reports—although the exact nature of those contributions, for the most part, is lost. And along with several others, he sent in a piece featured in Doubt 50 (November 1955) about a storefront glass that was broken by lightning—and then seemingly healed itself before the glaziers arrived. At the time, Scandrett was in Savannah, either married to his third wife, or soon to marry her. His interest int he Fortean Society had withstood the travails of life, the changing jobs, careers, and spouses. Indeed, his final contribution to the magazine would come in issue 57, dated July 1958, only a year before Thayer died and the Society closed shop.
But, at least from what’s available, it doesn’t seem that Scandrett took the anomalies too seriously—they were matters for playful recombination into critiques of society’s real ills: its social, political, and economic institutions. He does not seem to have been among those Theosophical Forteans who were looking for a scientifically-sanctioned transcendence. Hence, in Doubt 38 (October 1952), he offered a mock solution to the problem of flying saucers:
“Ole Massa Hugo had the explanation of your flying saucers. They’re the jellyfish of the air (Toilers of the Sea Ch VII, p. 45). A hundred years ago, of course, they were continuously invisible, Fort’s clean ozone having not yet been befouled and disrupted by atomic blasts and jet-rockets, or even by those flying coffins popularly referred to as aircraft. In those days the jellyfish were permitted to stay near the surface of the air-envelope--their normal habitat.”
Scandrett seems to be referring to the following passage:
“Creation abounds in monstrous forms of life. The wherefore of this perplexes and affrights the religious thinker.
….
The jelly-fish of the Mediterranean is repulsive. Contact with that animated gelatinous substance which envelopes the bather, in which the hands sink, and the nails scratch ineffectively; which can be torn without killing it, and which can be plucked off without entirely removing it—that fluid and yet tenacious creature which slips through the fingers, is disgusting; but no horror can equal the sudden apparition of the devil-fish, that Medusa with its eight serpents.
No grasp is like the sudden strain of the cephaloptera.
It is with the sucking apparatus that it attacks. The victim is oppressed by a vacuum drawing at numberless points: it is not a clawing or a biting, but an indescribable scarification. A tearing of the flesh is terrible, but less terrible than a sucking of the blood. Claws are harmless compared with the horrible action of these natural air-cups. The talons of the wild beast enter into your flesh; but with the cephaloptera it is you who enter into the creature. The muscles swell, the fibres of the body are contorted, the skin cracks under the loathsome oppression, the blood spurts out and mingles horribly with the lymph of the monster, which clings to its victim by innumerable hideous mouths. The hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man becomes one with the hydra. The spectre lies upon you: the tiger can only devour you; the devil-fish, horrible, sucks your life-blood away. He draws you to him, and into himself; while bound down, glued to the ground, powerless, you feel yourself gradually emptied into this horrible pouch, which is the monster itself.
These strange animals, Science, in accordance with its habit of excessive caution even in the face of facts, at first rejects as fabulous; then she decides to observe them; then she dissects, classifies, catalogues, and labels; then procures specimens, and exhibits them in glass cases in museums. They enter then into her nomenclature; are designated mollusks, invertebrata, radiata: she determines their position in the animal world a little above the calamaries, a little below the cuttle-fish; she finds for these hydras of the sea an analogous creature in fresh water called the argyronecte: she divides them into great, medium, and small kinds; she admits more readily the existence of the small than of the large species, which is, however, the tendency of science in all countries, for she is by nature more microscopic than telescopic. She regards them from the point of view of their construction, and calls them Cephaloptera; counts their antennæ, and calls them Octopedes. This done,[Pg 295] she leaves them. Where science drops them, philosophy takes them up.
Philosophy in her turn studies these creatures. She goes both less far and further. She does not dissect, but meditate. Where the scalpel has laboured, she plunges the hypothesis. She seeks the final cause. Eternal perplexity of the thinker. These creatures disturb his ideas of the Creator. They are hideous surprises. They are the death's-head at the feast of contemplation. The philosopher determines their characteristics in dread. They are the concrete forms of evil. What attitude can he take towards this treason of creation against herself? To whom can he look for the solution of these riddles? The Possible is a terrible matrix. Monsters are mysteries in their concrete form. Portions of shade issue from the mass, and something within detaches itself, rolls, floats, condenses, borrows elements from the ambient darkness, becomes subject to unknown polarisations, assumes a kind of life, furnishes itself with some unimagined form from the obscurity, and with some terrible spirit from the miasma, and wanders ghostlike among living things. It is as if night itself assumed the forms of animals. But for what good? with what object? Thus we come again to the eternal questioning.
These animals are indeed phantoms as much as monsters. They are proved and yet improbable. Their fate is to exist in spite of à priori reasonings. They are the amphibia of the shore which separates life from death. Their unreality makes their existence puzzling. They touch the frontier of man's domain and people the region of chimeras. We deny the possibility of the vampire, and the cephaloptera appears. Their swarming is a certainty which disconcerts our confidence. Optimism, which is nevertheless in the right, becomes silenced in their presence. They form the visible extremity of the dark circles. They mark the transition of our reality into another. They seem to belong to that commencement of terrible life which the dreamer sees confusedly through the loophole of the night.
That multiplication of monsters, first in the Invisible, then in the Possible, has been suspected, perhaps perceived by magi and philosophers in their austere ecstasies and profound contemplations. Hence the conjecture of a material hell. The demon is simply the invisible tiger. The wild beast which devours souls has been presented to the eyes of human beings by St. John, and by Dante in his vision of Hell.
If, in truth, the invisible circles of creation continue inde[Pg 296]finitely, if after one there is yet another, and so forth in illimitable progression; if that chain, which for our part we are resolved to doubt, really exist, the cephaloptera at one extremity proves Satan at the other. It is certain that the wrongdoer at one end proves the existence of wrong at the other.
Every malignant creature, like every perverted intelligence, is a sphinx. A terrible sphinx propounding a terrible riddle; the riddle of the existence of Evil.”
The point seems to be not that flying saucers were literally made visible by the befouling of the air: but that they are a sphinx which raises the question of Evil. And the Evil is the state; the evil are the big organizations that control the lives of the little people. “The Giant Business Corporation is the Image of God: Immortal, Inhuman, Inexorable, and the Giver of Every Good and Perfect Gift; and it is altogether sweet and proper for us jackasses to be killed in far distant places unto the uttermost reaches of the globe, or even chez nous-meme, that the Blessed Privileges of such Reverend and God-like Creatures may continue uninterrupted and burgeoning: (‘If I should die, say only this of me:/There is some corner of a foreign field/That is forever asinine.’)”
Scandrett wrote that declamation for the Fortean Society, and it appeared in Doubt 50 (November 1955). Thayer had been vaguely looking for volunteers to take over the compilation of certain Fortean departments—pyrotics, Wonettes, falls, for instance—and Scandrett took him up, setting the standard for what Thayer desired from others who offered their services. Scandrett’s primary interest was in the intersection between the military and big business: what Eisenhower had not yet named the military-industrial complex. Scandrett—“that old pamphleteer and kicker,” Thayer called him—organized the various reports he had—and presumably others Thayer provided—into a modern declaration of the state’s intention: not independence, but dependence—and wasteful spending. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he began, and then listed ten points over a couple of pages, some of them quite trenchant, others prophetic—as his college peers had known him to be:
That government serves big business
That agricultural conglomerates and the labor movement are also in control.
That everyone else should be grateful for what they have: “Youse and me:/The booboise//And the yokelry,/Must think we’re free.”
That anyone who opposes this arrangement is a “pinko, a security risk, a fellow-traveler, a creeping socialist, a subversive, an anarchist, a filthy bastard, and a communist, deserving nothing better than extermination.”
That Big Business is—as noted above—the image of God.
That “whatever is good for General Motors is good for the United States” and the universe.
That the military is necessary as a consumer of big business’s products.
That politicians stay loyal because they get a cut of the money, too.
That military leaders keep the system in place
“That, nevertheless, it is deemed prudent not to stress the fact that waste of the essence of the procedure, but rather to pretend that the waste is but incidental, like the fleas on the dog, and to be vigilantly deprecated.”
He concluded the declaration, “The following items are merely a few sample drippings from the capacious tank; and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is strictly fortuitous.” There followed a long list of reports, on the leaving behind of material in war areas, the wasting of ships, and atomic bombs, and guided missiles and tanks, and surplus equipment, and miscellaneous waste, agricultural waste, and other instances of extravagant government spending, the whole piece running seven double-columned pages. Scandrett titled it, “Down the Drain.”
The politics displayed in the declaration are congruent with those of Thayer, demonstrating a distrust of the powers that be, a frustration at the state’s growing power, and at the way those at the top deployed political labels to shut up dissenters. Thayer was certainly no socialist or communist, and Scandrett doesn’t seem to have been—at least based on what appeared in Doubt—but they felt themselves lumped in with the other pinkos and reds for preferring peace and standing for human dignity. If there’s any doubting—ha!—that Thayer and Scandrett shared a similar outlook on both matters Fortean and matters sociopolitical (indeed, there was no difference between the two categories in their thought), then that should be dispelled by Scandrett’s writing of a Fortean prayer. It was his last contribution to Doubt and summed up his Forteanism as well as anything else: rescuing the damned, the anomalous, was not just standing against science, but necessary to combatting the evils of nationalism, militarism, and the state:
“Lift up your heads, O wie gehts, and the KEEING of GLEAURY shall come in! Who is this KEEING of GLEAURY? The Sputnik Bitchevich, she is the KEEING of GLEAURY! Everlasting unto everlasting! The eternally ineffable and inscrutable! SHE is the KEEING of GLEAURY! For this our beloved stockmarket that was defunct shall rise again! The bellowing voice of the Babylonian Baal Bear Hoover no more shall be heard in the land! Hysteria, praise the Lard, hath been restarred! The ugly visage of peaceful co-existence hath been pressed into the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust! Hallelujah! All existing armament can now be conscientiously cast upon the scrap-pile! Hence, loathed melancholic disemployment! Praise Obsolescence, from Whom all blessings flow! And Lockheed too, but Boeing the Most! Let us sing the hymn: Number 37, ‘Come All Ye Fortniks, Joyous and Triumphant!’ And may the Grace of Ike the Intellect, the Love of John Foster Cato, and the Communion of Holy Ignorance be and abide with ye forever! Amen.”
Within a year of their return from Naples, the Scandretts moved to Los Angeles, and Jay entered a Master’s Program at the University of Southern California. He graduated in 1937 with the presentation of his thesis, The foundations of the social principles of national socialists in the traditional social values and attitudes of the German people. The South beckoned him, though, and by 1940 he and Ernestine were in Pinellas, Florida, and he was a professor of political science at St. Petersburg College. Incidentally, Clearwater, Florida, is nearby, and this is where Ivan Sanderson would investigate some mysterious footprints on a sandy beach in 1948.
In the meantime, Scandrett embarked on his pamphleteering. on 4 April 1939, Christopher Publishing House released Scandrett’s The Nazi Disease. Based on his master’s thesis, the book argued that Germany’s turn to Hitler was not based on Der Führer’s charisma, but the social and economic woes of the nation. The book was slight (133 pages) and Christopher had a history of releasing odd projects—the House put out Graydon’s scientific work the year before—marking Scandrett’s publication as something of the fringe. It nonetheless received a fair amount of positive commentary in the press. He followed The Nazi Disease six years later with What Goes On, a 47-page self-published blast at the authoritarian state. (Note: I have not read it.)
Scandrett’s life in the late 1940s seems a bit disordered, before he settled down. Documents from 1948 have him both teaching at the University of Virginia’s extension school and at Alfred University, in New York. At some point, he divorced Ernestine, ending up back in the South—Savannah, Georgia—married to Mary Burroughs. Her family had come from Pennsylvania, where her father was principal of the Boys Industrial School in Pittsburgh before relocating to Savannah, where he became director of the Bethesda Boys School. Mary had been born in 1904—making her about a decade younger than Scandrett—and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1932. Scandrett listed his occupation in the City Directory as writer. And in 1960 he published another pamphlet Commonsense Economics. I have not seen it either, though it begins with n encomium to skepticism (but no mention of Fort). That’s a lot of the frustration: his pamphlets—The Nazi Disease, What Goes On, and Commonsense Economics are almost impossible to get ahold of without making long trips to the few distant libraries that own them.
Scandrett died 9 April 1963. His first wife, Marian, passed in 1965. Ernestine died in 1983, Mary in 1990.
How he came to Forteanism is not known exactly, but there are some suggestions. In 1944, the Fortean member Milton Subotsky sent Scandrett’s pamphlet What Goes On to Thayer, who approved of it. He wrote in Doubt 11, “A clear-sighted pamphlet about today. By all means read it.” Scandrett was not mentioned again the pages of Doubt until 1950, when he was included among those who attended a dinner in honor of Garry Davis’s joining the Society. Apparently, Thayer had been impressed enough by the pamphlet to approach Morrow, get him to join the Society, and become friendly enough to agree to meet in person. Remember, Scandrett was teaching at Alfred University, and so could make a dinner in New York City without too much difficulty. They seemed to have continued a correspondence for a while, but the extent is unknown, as are most of the contents. Unlike many others who came to the Society in the mid- to late-forties, he did not end his association with the dawn of the next decade but continued on for quite some time.
Despite the frustrations of obtaining his writings—and hence getting a sense of his thought, his writing style, his sensibility—there are some ways to understand his Forteanism: Thayer printed some long pieces by him. The next mention of him—Doubt 36, April 1952—had an excerpt from a letter he’d written Thayer: “Altho I can plainly see that the King has no pance on, the million-voiced cheers for the exquisite quality of the King’s Royal Pance make me appreciate your antistrophe ‘The King has no pance on.’” The letter was dated 2 February 1952, and came from New Jersey. It may have been generic praise for Thayer’s social and political opinions—or it may have referred more specifically to Thayer’s attacks on Civil Air Patrol. Either way, the excerpt indicates that Scandrett was broadly sympathetic to Thayer’s left-libertarianism.
Scandrett also contributed items of a more conventionally Fortean character. He was credited with several different contributions to Thayer’s digest of flying saucer reports—although the exact nature of those contributions, for the most part, is lost. And along with several others, he sent in a piece featured in Doubt 50 (November 1955) about a storefront glass that was broken by lightning—and then seemingly healed itself before the glaziers arrived. At the time, Scandrett was in Savannah, either married to his third wife, or soon to marry her. His interest int he Fortean Society had withstood the travails of life, the changing jobs, careers, and spouses. Indeed, his final contribution to the magazine would come in issue 57, dated July 1958, only a year before Thayer died and the Society closed shop.
But, at least from what’s available, it doesn’t seem that Scandrett took the anomalies too seriously—they were matters for playful recombination into critiques of society’s real ills: its social, political, and economic institutions. He does not seem to have been among those Theosophical Forteans who were looking for a scientifically-sanctioned transcendence. Hence, in Doubt 38 (October 1952), he offered a mock solution to the problem of flying saucers:
“Ole Massa Hugo had the explanation of your flying saucers. They’re the jellyfish of the air (Toilers of the Sea Ch VII, p. 45). A hundred years ago, of course, they were continuously invisible, Fort’s clean ozone having not yet been befouled and disrupted by atomic blasts and jet-rockets, or even by those flying coffins popularly referred to as aircraft. In those days the jellyfish were permitted to stay near the surface of the air-envelope--their normal habitat.”
Scandrett seems to be referring to the following passage:
“Creation abounds in monstrous forms of life. The wherefore of this perplexes and affrights the religious thinker.
….
The jelly-fish of the Mediterranean is repulsive. Contact with that animated gelatinous substance which envelopes the bather, in which the hands sink, and the nails scratch ineffectively; which can be torn without killing it, and which can be plucked off without entirely removing it—that fluid and yet tenacious creature which slips through the fingers, is disgusting; but no horror can equal the sudden apparition of the devil-fish, that Medusa with its eight serpents.
No grasp is like the sudden strain of the cephaloptera.
It is with the sucking apparatus that it attacks. The victim is oppressed by a vacuum drawing at numberless points: it is not a clawing or a biting, but an indescribable scarification. A tearing of the flesh is terrible, but less terrible than a sucking of the blood. Claws are harmless compared with the horrible action of these natural air-cups. The talons of the wild beast enter into your flesh; but with the cephaloptera it is you who enter into the creature. The muscles swell, the fibres of the body are contorted, the skin cracks under the loathsome oppression, the blood spurts out and mingles horribly with the lymph of the monster, which clings to its victim by innumerable hideous mouths. The hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man becomes one with the hydra. The spectre lies upon you: the tiger can only devour you; the devil-fish, horrible, sucks your life-blood away. He draws you to him, and into himself; while bound down, glued to the ground, powerless, you feel yourself gradually emptied into this horrible pouch, which is the monster itself.
These strange animals, Science, in accordance with its habit of excessive caution even in the face of facts, at first rejects as fabulous; then she decides to observe them; then she dissects, classifies, catalogues, and labels; then procures specimens, and exhibits them in glass cases in museums. They enter then into her nomenclature; are designated mollusks, invertebrata, radiata: she determines their position in the animal world a little above the calamaries, a little below the cuttle-fish; she finds for these hydras of the sea an analogous creature in fresh water called the argyronecte: she divides them into great, medium, and small kinds; she admits more readily the existence of the small than of the large species, which is, however, the tendency of science in all countries, for she is by nature more microscopic than telescopic. She regards them from the point of view of their construction, and calls them Cephaloptera; counts their antennæ, and calls them Octopedes. This done,[Pg 295] she leaves them. Where science drops them, philosophy takes them up.
Philosophy in her turn studies these creatures. She goes both less far and further. She does not dissect, but meditate. Where the scalpel has laboured, she plunges the hypothesis. She seeks the final cause. Eternal perplexity of the thinker. These creatures disturb his ideas of the Creator. They are hideous surprises. They are the death's-head at the feast of contemplation. The philosopher determines their characteristics in dread. They are the concrete forms of evil. What attitude can he take towards this treason of creation against herself? To whom can he look for the solution of these riddles? The Possible is a terrible matrix. Monsters are mysteries in their concrete form. Portions of shade issue from the mass, and something within detaches itself, rolls, floats, condenses, borrows elements from the ambient darkness, becomes subject to unknown polarisations, assumes a kind of life, furnishes itself with some unimagined form from the obscurity, and with some terrible spirit from the miasma, and wanders ghostlike among living things. It is as if night itself assumed the forms of animals. But for what good? with what object? Thus we come again to the eternal questioning.
These animals are indeed phantoms as much as monsters. They are proved and yet improbable. Their fate is to exist in spite of à priori reasonings. They are the amphibia of the shore which separates life from death. Their unreality makes their existence puzzling. They touch the frontier of man's domain and people the region of chimeras. We deny the possibility of the vampire, and the cephaloptera appears. Their swarming is a certainty which disconcerts our confidence. Optimism, which is nevertheless in the right, becomes silenced in their presence. They form the visible extremity of the dark circles. They mark the transition of our reality into another. They seem to belong to that commencement of terrible life which the dreamer sees confusedly through the loophole of the night.
That multiplication of monsters, first in the Invisible, then in the Possible, has been suspected, perhaps perceived by magi and philosophers in their austere ecstasies and profound contemplations. Hence the conjecture of a material hell. The demon is simply the invisible tiger. The wild beast which devours souls has been presented to the eyes of human beings by St. John, and by Dante in his vision of Hell.
If, in truth, the invisible circles of creation continue inde[Pg 296]finitely, if after one there is yet another, and so forth in illimitable progression; if that chain, which for our part we are resolved to doubt, really exist, the cephaloptera at one extremity proves Satan at the other. It is certain that the wrongdoer at one end proves the existence of wrong at the other.
Every malignant creature, like every perverted intelligence, is a sphinx. A terrible sphinx propounding a terrible riddle; the riddle of the existence of Evil.”
The point seems to be not that flying saucers were literally made visible by the befouling of the air: but that they are a sphinx which raises the question of Evil. And the Evil is the state; the evil are the big organizations that control the lives of the little people. “The Giant Business Corporation is the Image of God: Immortal, Inhuman, Inexorable, and the Giver of Every Good and Perfect Gift; and it is altogether sweet and proper for us jackasses to be killed in far distant places unto the uttermost reaches of the globe, or even chez nous-meme, that the Blessed Privileges of such Reverend and God-like Creatures may continue uninterrupted and burgeoning: (‘If I should die, say only this of me:/There is some corner of a foreign field/That is forever asinine.’)”
Scandrett wrote that declamation for the Fortean Society, and it appeared in Doubt 50 (November 1955). Thayer had been vaguely looking for volunteers to take over the compilation of certain Fortean departments—pyrotics, Wonettes, falls, for instance—and Scandrett took him up, setting the standard for what Thayer desired from others who offered their services. Scandrett’s primary interest was in the intersection between the military and big business: what Eisenhower had not yet named the military-industrial complex. Scandrett—“that old pamphleteer and kicker,” Thayer called him—organized the various reports he had—and presumably others Thayer provided—into a modern declaration of the state’s intention: not independence, but dependence—and wasteful spending. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he began, and then listed ten points over a couple of pages, some of them quite trenchant, others prophetic—as his college peers had known him to be:
That government serves big business
That agricultural conglomerates and the labor movement are also in control.
That everyone else should be grateful for what they have: “Youse and me:/The booboise//And the yokelry,/Must think we’re free.”
That anyone who opposes this arrangement is a “pinko, a security risk, a fellow-traveler, a creeping socialist, a subversive, an anarchist, a filthy bastard, and a communist, deserving nothing better than extermination.”
That Big Business is—as noted above—the image of God.
That “whatever is good for General Motors is good for the United States” and the universe.
That the military is necessary as a consumer of big business’s products.
That politicians stay loyal because they get a cut of the money, too.
That military leaders keep the system in place
“That, nevertheless, it is deemed prudent not to stress the fact that waste of the essence of the procedure, but rather to pretend that the waste is but incidental, like the fleas on the dog, and to be vigilantly deprecated.”
He concluded the declaration, “The following items are merely a few sample drippings from the capacious tank; and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is strictly fortuitous.” There followed a long list of reports, on the leaving behind of material in war areas, the wasting of ships, and atomic bombs, and guided missiles and tanks, and surplus equipment, and miscellaneous waste, agricultural waste, and other instances of extravagant government spending, the whole piece running seven double-columned pages. Scandrett titled it, “Down the Drain.”
The politics displayed in the declaration are congruent with those of Thayer, demonstrating a distrust of the powers that be, a frustration at the state’s growing power, and at the way those at the top deployed political labels to shut up dissenters. Thayer was certainly no socialist or communist, and Scandrett doesn’t seem to have been—at least based on what appeared in Doubt—but they felt themselves lumped in with the other pinkos and reds for preferring peace and standing for human dignity. If there’s any doubting—ha!—that Thayer and Scandrett shared a similar outlook on both matters Fortean and matters sociopolitical (indeed, there was no difference between the two categories in their thought), then that should be dispelled by Scandrett’s writing of a Fortean prayer. It was his last contribution to Doubt and summed up his Forteanism as well as anything else: rescuing the damned, the anomalous, was not just standing against science, but necessary to combatting the evils of nationalism, militarism, and the state:
“Lift up your heads, O wie gehts, and the KEEING of GLEAURY shall come in! Who is this KEEING of GLEAURY? The Sputnik Bitchevich, she is the KEEING of GLEAURY! Everlasting unto everlasting! The eternally ineffable and inscrutable! SHE is the KEEING of GLEAURY! For this our beloved stockmarket that was defunct shall rise again! The bellowing voice of the Babylonian Baal Bear Hoover no more shall be heard in the land! Hysteria, praise the Lard, hath been restarred! The ugly visage of peaceful co-existence hath been pressed into the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust! Hallelujah! All existing armament can now be conscientiously cast upon the scrap-pile! Hence, loathed melancholic disemployment! Praise Obsolescence, from Whom all blessings flow! And Lockheed too, but Boeing the Most! Let us sing the hymn: Number 37, ‘Come All Ye Fortniks, Joyous and Triumphant!’ And may the Grace of Ike the Intellect, the Love of John Foster Cato, and the Communion of Holy Ignorance be and abide with ye forever! Amen.”
