Newton Meade Layne was both a Fortean, and founder of a group competing with the Society, inspired to emulate Doubt and, ultimately, disappointed enough to embark on his own path.
Layne was born in Wisconsin on 8 September 1882 to Peres J. and Elvira Layne. Peres had been born in Kentucky and was a court clerk; Elvira was a native of the Badger State and Newtown was the third other children, after Malcolm and Gladys. By 1900, the family had relocated to San Diego, and only Newton was still living with his parents. His dad was then a machinist, which seems to have been a temporary blip in a career of public service. Four years later the city directory had Peres as a public administrator and Newton as attending San Diego Commercial College: this was a pragmatic institution which taught bookkeeping, stenography, typing, and commercial law, among other subjects. By 1907, Layne had married Gladys Hosler, seven years his junior and another Midwestern transplant, having come from Ohio.
Layne’s life was peripatetic over the next couple of decades. He worked for an in-law as the manager of a gas and oil company, dealt in real estate, sold office supplies, did stenography, and taught at the high school and college levels. He said that he received a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and published a couple volumes of poetry. Layne lived in Calexico, California; Tucson, Arizona; Sinaloa Mexico; and Lakeland, Florida. His parents died, Peres in 1913, Elvira at the end of 1916; he and Gladys had two children, Newton, Jr., born in 1918 and Margaret in 1922. Layne was thin and not particularly tall at five-foot seven-and-a-half, with an oval face, dark hair, and dark eyes.
By 1940, the family was back in San Diego. The census for that year has no occupation for N. Meade Layne or his wife; the two kids were clerks at something called the NVA. (Junior’s World War II draft registration listed him as a metal smith.) They were renting a home for twenty dollars a month—none of Layne’s jobs to this point had been lucrative. January 1940 was also Layne’s first mention in The Fortean Society Magazine. He was listed among those who had sent in clippings which had not been used. Layne was 58 at the time.
His interest in the outré long predates his appearance in The Fortean Society Magazine, though. As early as 1931, he was publishing on matters of psychic research (and likely his connection is longer than even this.) But he became a dedicated psychic researcher in 1945. That was the year he started “Round Robin,” a mimeographed—printing prices were otherwise too high—collection of reports, mostly written and edited by him at first, on all manner of occult, psychic, and Fortean events. He wrote in the inaugural issue,
“We want to print short articles, data, items of various kinds supplied by our ‘members’, and addresses and references and other helpful material. And perhaps a few notes, each time, of the Fortean variety. Nobody expects to make any money out of the Bulletin, but we shall have to have some help on the expense if we go ahead with the idea.”
It is clear that he was influenced by Thayer’s editorship of the Fortean Society Magazine. He requested the same type of information, for example:
“And WE WANT CLIPS of the Tares and Thistles variety—the kind of thing CORONET used to print for its Dark File, and which Charles Fort and his collaborators (genuflect here!) collected by the book-full, to the amusement, contempt, annoyance, and downright rage of ORTHODOXY, both ‘scientific’ and ‘religious.’ (Quotes, because we reverence both Science and Religion, sub aspectu spiritus Veritatis). —If or when you send them in, your clips, be sure to give name and date of publication.” (Round Robin vol. 1, no. 3, 1945, p. 14).
Layne also later opened the pages of Round Robin to other members of the Fortean Society: Harold Chibbett, Vincent Gaddis, H. T. Wilkinson. And Layne had something of Thayer’s sense of the absurd. When he heard there were reports of a cigar-shaped balloon hovering over Mexico, likely of Japanese origin, according to official sources, he quipped:
“Our guess, in a Fortean spirit, is that the Japs heard about the cigar shortage, sent the ‘cigar-shaped’ balloon in a spirit of derision, only it drifted too far south.”
Also in 1945, Layne met with trance medium Mark Probert. Layne had been involved with seances in San Diego for years, so it is no surprise that he came across Probert who, according to Probert’s own account, was naive about his powers until he met Layne. On their second meeting Layne—along with Probert’s wife—arranged a seance, during which time Probert met the first of what he was to call the Inner Plane, or the Inner Circle (a name itself that hearkens back to the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor). The spirit’s (or discarnate’s) name was Martin Latamore Lingfor and he was a New York showman who had lived around the turn of the century. This was in September 1945. Over the next three years or so, on a weekly basis, Layne and Irene Probert would witness Mark’s trances, meeting the fifteen other members of the Inner Circle who had been preparing Mark as a medium for years. The Inner Circle included Lao Tzu.
All of this might seem strange to those unacquainted with modern esotericism, but it was pretty mainline stuff within that community. Madame Blavatsky had already authorized the use of seances to communicate with teachers. And it is clear that Layne was familiar with both her Theosophy as well as other off-shoots of modern occultism. He considered himself a student of modern esoteric qabbalism, which had informed The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as well as its most famous member, Aleister Crowley.
In his years of thinking on the subject, Layne had come up with his own gloss on the subject. He did not necessarily see the discarnate as ‘ascended masters’: they knew somethings, but not everything, and their afterlife selves were shaped by psychology as much as their lived selves were. He also insisted upon a distinction between spiritualism and spiritism. Spiritualism was the religious veneer that was applied to psychic, occult, and spiritual facts—and he was sympathetic to that veneer—but it was different than spiritism, which was the dispassionate study of those facts.
Round Robin, he said, was not interested in re-hashing debates over the reality of spiritual communication, the afterlife, teleportation, and other such subjects. He accepted them as certain, and based his studies on their existence. This was the ‘New Realism,’ he called it, or the “Higher Realism.” He had no doubt about these other planes of existence—he experienced them himself: when he wrote poetry, he felt as though he were receiving a message from someone else, rather than creating. Accepting the existence of the occult and psychic offered a plan of research, and Layne saw himself as trying to answer those questions: how do we understand human psychology when humans are alive? How does that understanding translate to dead humans? How do we help the newly dead? And what is the role of Huna in all of this (The last was a question prompted by his friend Max Freedom Long, a student of the Hawaiian religion.) The tests and tools for answering these questions were not those of conventional science, but came, also, form the occult: from intuition, from channeling, from seances.
In 1946, Layne formed what he called the Borderland Sciences Research Association to more formally adopt a program of research into these areas of science—but science he acknowledged was on the borderland of respectability and likely to meet with ridicule. Layne’s understanding of the universe’s physical make up was somewhat akin to Albert Page’s (another Fortean) in that he insisted, against contemporary physics, that there was an ether, and that it was out of this ether that everything emerged. Layne take on the subject, though, seems to have owed more to his background in Theosophy, and made the case that the ether was not homogenous, but instead composed of varying levels of reality:
“Space? Space is not nothing. Space is stuff, is matter. What kind of matter? The matter which makes up ethers. More dense—not less, but more dense by far than the rarefactions of our world. The matter of the Etheric world!”
In support of this contention, he cited yet another maverick physicist and Fortean Member, Albert Crehore, as well as an old Theosophical analogy: imagine a bucket. It can be filled with large stones. But it sill isn’t full: pebbles can also be added, and then there is room for sand, and even after the sand has percolated through, one can still add water before the bucket is full. Layne’s ideas caught the attention of another Fortean publisher, Raymond A. Palmer, who had promoted the Shaver mystery, and there was some back-and-forth between them; as well, in the second volume of Palmer’s Fate Layne published a story on Probert and his communications. Later Palmer productions continued to report on Probert—even offering readers a chance to send in their own questions that Probert could then pose to his Inner Circle.
This train of thought could also be applied, easily, to the biggest media sensation of the 1940s, both in the popular press and the occult: the coming of the flying saucers. When, on June 26 1947, radio news programs reported that Kenneth Arnold had seen nine flying disks near Mount Rainier, Layne knew exactly what they were. After all, Probert had already been in communication with such a craft.
Eight months before, on the evening of 9 October 1946, a bulletish, winged structure appeared over San Diego for an hour-and-a-half. It had two red lights but was otherwise dark, moving at different speeds and strafing the ground with a light. Among those who witnessed this mysterious object was Mark Probert. He called Layne, and Layne suggested Probert establish telepathic communication—which he did. He learned:
“The strange machine is called the Kareeta. . . . It is attracted at this time because the earth is emitting a column of light which makes it easier to approach. The machine is powered by people possessing a very advanced knowledge of anti-gravity forces. It has 10,000 parts, a small but very powerful motor operating by electricity, and moving the wings, and an outer structure of light balsam wood, coated with an alloy. The people are nonagressive and have been trying to contact the earth for many years. They have very light bodies. They fear to land, but would be willing to meet a committee of scientists at an isolated spot, or on a mountain top.”
Without contradicting Probert—Layne insisted there were no contradictions among the material Probert collected, only refinements—Layne finessed this description into something more akin with his own Theosophical theories. The flying saucers and their inhabitants came from another plane of existence, a denser one, and only reached our own world by changing their vibrations. (Like Page, Layne sought to redefine the meaning of geography and space.) To avoid connotations with science fiction, he renamed the things “lokas,” a word he had picked up from his readings in Theosophy that meant place, or location. They were not crafts from outer space—or delusions, but the interpenetration of planes of existence. He wrote in 1950:
“They are NOT delusions, fantasy, or lies. They are not constructed by any foreign government, or by our own. They do not come from the depths of the sea—though some of them may enter the sea at times. They do not come from the Polar regions, or from Tibet or Java—though it is conceivable that some temporary base on our earth may be utilized. They are not contracted in the earth’s interior—though they may have some connection with underground races or be interested in them. They are not constructions of Atlanteans or other ancient peoples, preserved in caverns against a coming day of need.”
So how could the crafts be understood? Using the tools of the occult, of course. He offered a self-deprecating description of his method in Red Robin:
Having said this much, and taunted all learned men with their ignorance (ear-wig to our betters), we now present the only intelligent and intelligible comment on the saucer party so far offered by anybody. That doesn’t mean we ‘guarantee’ it in any sense; we wouldn’t ‘guarantee’ Tuesday after Monday. But it’s a point of view, and coherent end possible and probably interesting to everybody with a smattering of esoteric knowledge – which leaves most of our intelligentsia out of it, but happily lets in about fifty million lesser folk of this Pilgrims’ Pride. The commentator is our friend “Lingford”, a familiar control at the Mark P. seances. If nobody on our own plane has anything intelligent to say about saucers, why not interrogate the ghosties – get an astral viewpoint anyway, even if you don’t believe a word of it. Of course, if you think Lingford is a dissociated complex, a subconscious invention, a personalized memory, or a wholly fictional character invented the medium and the RR editor for ye sheckels sake (as RR has been credibly informed), your interest will be “O” with the rim left off. But having spent many hours in converse with this oeuf dur of the Invisibles, we consider him a very real person, and quite smart and well-posted and worth listening to."
In short, the Inner Circle confirmed his Theological speculations: The ships were from Etheria. Again from 1950:
“Etheria is here—if we know what here means! Along-side, inside, outside our world. Because our world, that is, the so-called dense matter of the objects in our world, is a rarefaction. It is spaced out like a vast net—a net with enormous meshes. Imagine, if you will, a net of wire with meshes a mile wide. Would not wind and water flow through that net as if it did not exist? A little friction, very little! On the strands of those meshes we live. That is the so-called dense matter of our world. We look out across the mesh and do not see anything in it, or hear or feel anything in it, and so call it empty space. ‘Meaningless words in the abyss of folly!”
By all accounts, Layne was sincere in his convictions. (And he was certainly a clearer writer than Page.) He published a number of pamphlets on the matter, and continued to feature discussion of his ideas in Round Robin, but it is unlikely that he ever made any real money; he dealt with doubters—including the editor of Doubt—but mostly sloughed them off, intent on his own theories. He did, though, make amends with Palmer and the Shaver mystery, arguing that underground dwellers—deros and teros—were a certainty, and some of them may have been involved with etherians, while others were ignorant of these other planes of reality. He also conceded that some of the airships may not have been etherians but cargo ships of the underground dwellers: if nothing else, Layne remained flexible and pluralistic in his outlook, willing to accommodate new occult and psychic facts.
It was imperative that everyone deal with this new higher realism—it was the only way to save the world, he thought:
“There is already apprehension in the minds of many, and if (as we expect) many more striking events should occur, there is some danger of panic. If these visiting craft are attributed to some foreign and unfriendly government, hostility and fear might develop; and if they are believed to come from some other planet of our solar system, unreasoning and superstitious fear is to be reckoned with, perhaps with a considerable degree of social disintegration.”
Layne continued to trumpet this message until 1959, when illness forced him to retire from the Borderlands Science Research Association. (Coincidentally, the same year Thayer died and the Fortean Society folded). He passed from this plane of existence in 1961, while his wife survived until 1984. Whether she ever heard from him again is not known.
Layne belonged to that group of Forteans offering new scientific laws—like Isaac Newton Vail or Albert Page—and also to those interested in questions of psychic research and Theosophy—like Vincent Gaddis, Harold Chibbet, and Frederick G. Hehr. These related interested made for a number of points of contact between his own work and the work of Thayer, sometimes congenial, sometimes not so much.
Layne sent in material on one of Thayer’s perennial fascinations, for example, the speed of light, and when he learned that fellow Fortean Don Bloch was a spelunker who had published a booklet called “Sightseeing Underground,” he ordered one from Thayer—and this was before the Shaver Mystery took off. In the first issue of Round Robin, he praised Doubt, even as he distanced himself from its politics. (His son, after all, was in the war.):
“We want to say a word for the Fortean Magazine, now called DOUBT, and for the Fortean Society and its able secretary Mr Tiffany Thayer. The Society, of course, carries on the work of Charles Fort and his collaborators (he wrote the Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo! Wild Talents). It is committed to no cult or propaganda, is the implacable enemy of the smugness and complacency of official and ‘orthodox’ science.
"By this last we mean the pronouncements (very often) of scientific bodies, learned societies and publications, university departments, their bland ignoring of a thousand strange happenings not explainable in terms of current theories—and of their own stupidities and failures.
"These are the ‘damned facts’ of which Charles Fort wrote, scattering tares in snug fields of science with a kind of wild contemptuous joy, but yet verifying and documenting with a careful hand.
"Those of us who are interested in psychical research and its allied subjects, also have a long reckoning with this ‘scientific’ ignorance and intolerance. Of course, there are now many hundreds of workers in the sciences, some of them very distinguished, who are well informed and open-minded on these matters. But as for ‘official’ science—well, the remark of Dr. Carlson, quoted on page vi of this bulletin, is sufficient commentary.
"As to the Fortean, then, we think it is doing an admirable piece of work. We’re not so much interested, personally, in its social and political iconoclasm, tho others may find it worth while. But the effort to salvage the ‘damned’ facts, hold them up for all to see and for the confusion of all orthodoxies, is a matter of very great importance.
"And once again, as to the in-and-out of the Round Robin; it’s the facts we’re after. We believe every fact is a child of God. We don’t care where it was born, or who nourished and cherished it; but we’re interested in your reasons for accepting it, and for thinking it maybe means this-or-that. We quote Gregory, that ‘in science there is no finality, there should therefore be no dogmatism’—and also Strindberg, who wrote that the whole business of man is ‘not to turn his back upon the Light.’ This Light may be a poor thing, but our business is to make the best of it, try to feed and brighten it, to make it shine into dark corners.
"We have a few copies of the last issue of the Fortean magazine DOUBT. Does anyone want one of them gratis? Or address the Fortean Society, Box 192, Grand Central Annex, New York City. Single copies .25, or $2.00 a year for DOUBT plus membership.”
Thayer reciprocated in the pages of Doubt, noting of Round Robin:
“It speaks highly of us. It also speaks highly of ‘the Creator,’ asserting that ‘we believe every fact is a child of god.’ Don’t let that scare you away. There’s meat on that Robin.”
But there was also more than a little tension. Thayer printed a letter by Fortean Jack Campbell which lightly poked fun at Layne’s theories Thayer also ignored the Kareeta incident before gently mocking it:
“Probably the busiest observer of all that night, was MFS Layne of San Diego, publisher of the spiritualist paper Round Robin, but he was not watching meteors. Beginning at 7:45 that evening, Round Robin subscribers began seeing a ‘spaceship’ silhouetted against the moon. Thirteen eye-witnesses are named. All in San Diego. Each describes the object differently. One man, called a psychic sensitive (which is current lingo for what we used to mean by ‘medium’ in the days of Anna Eva Fay), gave Layne a message purporting to have been received ‘clairaudiently,’ in which the object was identified as ‘a mechanical bird called Careeta.’ It came from a planet a considerable way off and the folks in it were afraid to land . . . If you want any more of that, send 35 cents to Round Robin, 3615 Alexia Place, San Diego, Calif. The story is given in detail in issue No. 10 of volume 2.
"MFS Hehr (who knows people from Venus) told Layne his space-ship was a condor, and broke up a beautiful friendship.” “Sizzling Zinner, Doubt 17 (March 1947): 251-252.)"
About the snub, Layne first wrote in Round Robin:
"DOUBT, official organ of the Fortean Society (to which this editor is proud to belong), didn’t give Kareeta a single line. RR refrains from complaint, but its readers do not—for example:
‘“I’m not surprised at Thayer’s attitude on the spaceship. He would have given two pages to some big bear tracks, however. And if you could prove there wasn’t a God he would bring out a special issue and a book, It’s damned funny to me, that some people think that to be a Fortean you have to be an atheist.’
J.T.
And ‘J. T.,’ well known to many RR readers is comparatively mild in his comment; the postoffice wouldn’t let us print the other letters about this. J.T.’s last point is well taken, too, tho we have no concern with it at this moment.” (Abominable Snowman, Round Robin, Volum 3, no. 2 (February 1947): 5; JT was likely Jack Tate.)
Layne responded in Round Robin’s April 1947 issue (p. 10):
“Fortean magazine DOUBT, current issue, gibes at RR as a ‘spiritualist magazine’—to which we reply, Yes, No, and Maybe. The editor is a spiritualist in the sense of regarding survival and communication as verifiable facts, but does not belong to any religious organization—and spiritualism is a religion, spiritism is not. Gibe number 2 was at the ‘Kareeta’ (Corrida?) story, which was merely a factual reporting of accounts of some 35 observers (slightly better verification the 3-ft. rats and similar Doubt items ever had, and conceivably more important). Gibe No. 3 was at Mark Probert, an honest and unpaid medium, who likewise merely reported an experience in this connection . . . The RR editor belongs to the Fortean Society, thinks it does a fine service by undermining scientific pretenses. But it never seems to dawn on most Forteans, that psychic and spiritistic methods reveal facts as startling as anything in the Book of the Damned, including ‘explanation’ which can at least be used as hypotheses//11//and points of departure. Strange as it may seem, we actually find these more worthwhile than columns devoted to fire balls, fish impaled on telegraph poles, and mysterious rumblings within the earth. Fortean data are certainly disturbing and important, but just how to turn them to account remains unsolved. Apart from saying Oh my Gawd! most of the Forteans seem to make very little progress. DOUBT is published by the Fortean Society, Box 192 Grand Central Annex, N.Y.C.”
But the issue still clearly bothered him, as in an article from the July-August issue he drops in the following paragraph, which really does not fit the flow of the piece:
"The Fortean Society (to which this writer belongs) is undergoing a most painful parturition, under the midwifery of Secretary Tiffany Thayer; so far the only issue has been an apparition of Charles Fort (to whom be honor), gabbling “I told you so” . Fort was a mighty hunter-out and collector of weird and science-damned happenings, of which strange sky-craft were not the least. The problem is right up the avenue for Vincent Gaddis also, who lately sent us some 20 instances of similar mysteries of the skies. The most incredible and outrageous things happen, and always have been happening, and students of such matters know about them; the most incredible fact of all is that there actually are people who think we live in a sane, orderly, intelligible and well-understood world, where “science” has explained everything or is about to do so,, and that these ignoramuses include about nine-tenths of our so-called intellectuals… Recurring to Secretary T.T. mentioned above, and while we think of it, it was he who gibed more than once at the Round Robin Corrida (Kareeta) story of last November, not because of its extraordinary nature but because it “stinked” of the “occult”. The “occult” got into because we printed a statement, for what it was worth, received clairaudiently by a most honest and non-professional medium. “Let Austin have his swink (or stink) to him reserved!” — We’re all for the Forteans, be it understood, in their war on scientism and smugism, but otherwise they get no forwarder with their hunting simply because most of them are nauseated by the mere mention of anything occult or spiritualistic."
But despite the rift, Layne continued sending in clippings, the last one appearing in June 1957.
Layne was born in Wisconsin on 8 September 1882 to Peres J. and Elvira Layne. Peres had been born in Kentucky and was a court clerk; Elvira was a native of the Badger State and Newtown was the third other children, after Malcolm and Gladys. By 1900, the family had relocated to San Diego, and only Newton was still living with his parents. His dad was then a machinist, which seems to have been a temporary blip in a career of public service. Four years later the city directory had Peres as a public administrator and Newton as attending San Diego Commercial College: this was a pragmatic institution which taught bookkeeping, stenography, typing, and commercial law, among other subjects. By 1907, Layne had married Gladys Hosler, seven years his junior and another Midwestern transplant, having come from Ohio.
Layne’s life was peripatetic over the next couple of decades. He worked for an in-law as the manager of a gas and oil company, dealt in real estate, sold office supplies, did stenography, and taught at the high school and college levels. He said that he received a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and published a couple volumes of poetry. Layne lived in Calexico, California; Tucson, Arizona; Sinaloa Mexico; and Lakeland, Florida. His parents died, Peres in 1913, Elvira at the end of 1916; he and Gladys had two children, Newton, Jr., born in 1918 and Margaret in 1922. Layne was thin and not particularly tall at five-foot seven-and-a-half, with an oval face, dark hair, and dark eyes.
By 1940, the family was back in San Diego. The census for that year has no occupation for N. Meade Layne or his wife; the two kids were clerks at something called the NVA. (Junior’s World War II draft registration listed him as a metal smith.) They were renting a home for twenty dollars a month—none of Layne’s jobs to this point had been lucrative. January 1940 was also Layne’s first mention in The Fortean Society Magazine. He was listed among those who had sent in clippings which had not been used. Layne was 58 at the time.
His interest in the outré long predates his appearance in The Fortean Society Magazine, though. As early as 1931, he was publishing on matters of psychic research (and likely his connection is longer than even this.) But he became a dedicated psychic researcher in 1945. That was the year he started “Round Robin,” a mimeographed—printing prices were otherwise too high—collection of reports, mostly written and edited by him at first, on all manner of occult, psychic, and Fortean events. He wrote in the inaugural issue,
“We want to print short articles, data, items of various kinds supplied by our ‘members’, and addresses and references and other helpful material. And perhaps a few notes, each time, of the Fortean variety. Nobody expects to make any money out of the Bulletin, but we shall have to have some help on the expense if we go ahead with the idea.”
It is clear that he was influenced by Thayer’s editorship of the Fortean Society Magazine. He requested the same type of information, for example:
“And WE WANT CLIPS of the Tares and Thistles variety—the kind of thing CORONET used to print for its Dark File, and which Charles Fort and his collaborators (genuflect here!) collected by the book-full, to the amusement, contempt, annoyance, and downright rage of ORTHODOXY, both ‘scientific’ and ‘religious.’ (Quotes, because we reverence both Science and Religion, sub aspectu spiritus Veritatis). —If or when you send them in, your clips, be sure to give name and date of publication.” (Round Robin vol. 1, no. 3, 1945, p. 14).
Layne also later opened the pages of Round Robin to other members of the Fortean Society: Harold Chibbett, Vincent Gaddis, H. T. Wilkinson. And Layne had something of Thayer’s sense of the absurd. When he heard there were reports of a cigar-shaped balloon hovering over Mexico, likely of Japanese origin, according to official sources, he quipped:
“Our guess, in a Fortean spirit, is that the Japs heard about the cigar shortage, sent the ‘cigar-shaped’ balloon in a spirit of derision, only it drifted too far south.”
Also in 1945, Layne met with trance medium Mark Probert. Layne had been involved with seances in San Diego for years, so it is no surprise that he came across Probert who, according to Probert’s own account, was naive about his powers until he met Layne. On their second meeting Layne—along with Probert’s wife—arranged a seance, during which time Probert met the first of what he was to call the Inner Plane, or the Inner Circle (a name itself that hearkens back to the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor). The spirit’s (or discarnate’s) name was Martin Latamore Lingfor and he was a New York showman who had lived around the turn of the century. This was in September 1945. Over the next three years or so, on a weekly basis, Layne and Irene Probert would witness Mark’s trances, meeting the fifteen other members of the Inner Circle who had been preparing Mark as a medium for years. The Inner Circle included Lao Tzu.
All of this might seem strange to those unacquainted with modern esotericism, but it was pretty mainline stuff within that community. Madame Blavatsky had already authorized the use of seances to communicate with teachers. And it is clear that Layne was familiar with both her Theosophy as well as other off-shoots of modern occultism. He considered himself a student of modern esoteric qabbalism, which had informed The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as well as its most famous member, Aleister Crowley.
In his years of thinking on the subject, Layne had come up with his own gloss on the subject. He did not necessarily see the discarnate as ‘ascended masters’: they knew somethings, but not everything, and their afterlife selves were shaped by psychology as much as their lived selves were. He also insisted upon a distinction between spiritualism and spiritism. Spiritualism was the religious veneer that was applied to psychic, occult, and spiritual facts—and he was sympathetic to that veneer—but it was different than spiritism, which was the dispassionate study of those facts.
Round Robin, he said, was not interested in re-hashing debates over the reality of spiritual communication, the afterlife, teleportation, and other such subjects. He accepted them as certain, and based his studies on their existence. This was the ‘New Realism,’ he called it, or the “Higher Realism.” He had no doubt about these other planes of existence—he experienced them himself: when he wrote poetry, he felt as though he were receiving a message from someone else, rather than creating. Accepting the existence of the occult and psychic offered a plan of research, and Layne saw himself as trying to answer those questions: how do we understand human psychology when humans are alive? How does that understanding translate to dead humans? How do we help the newly dead? And what is the role of Huna in all of this (The last was a question prompted by his friend Max Freedom Long, a student of the Hawaiian religion.) The tests and tools for answering these questions were not those of conventional science, but came, also, form the occult: from intuition, from channeling, from seances.
In 1946, Layne formed what he called the Borderland Sciences Research Association to more formally adopt a program of research into these areas of science—but science he acknowledged was on the borderland of respectability and likely to meet with ridicule. Layne’s understanding of the universe’s physical make up was somewhat akin to Albert Page’s (another Fortean) in that he insisted, against contemporary physics, that there was an ether, and that it was out of this ether that everything emerged. Layne take on the subject, though, seems to have owed more to his background in Theosophy, and made the case that the ether was not homogenous, but instead composed of varying levels of reality:
“Space? Space is not nothing. Space is stuff, is matter. What kind of matter? The matter which makes up ethers. More dense—not less, but more dense by far than the rarefactions of our world. The matter of the Etheric world!”
In support of this contention, he cited yet another maverick physicist and Fortean Member, Albert Crehore, as well as an old Theosophical analogy: imagine a bucket. It can be filled with large stones. But it sill isn’t full: pebbles can also be added, and then there is room for sand, and even after the sand has percolated through, one can still add water before the bucket is full. Layne’s ideas caught the attention of another Fortean publisher, Raymond A. Palmer, who had promoted the Shaver mystery, and there was some back-and-forth between them; as well, in the second volume of Palmer’s Fate Layne published a story on Probert and his communications. Later Palmer productions continued to report on Probert—even offering readers a chance to send in their own questions that Probert could then pose to his Inner Circle.
This train of thought could also be applied, easily, to the biggest media sensation of the 1940s, both in the popular press and the occult: the coming of the flying saucers. When, on June 26 1947, radio news programs reported that Kenneth Arnold had seen nine flying disks near Mount Rainier, Layne knew exactly what they were. After all, Probert had already been in communication with such a craft.
Eight months before, on the evening of 9 October 1946, a bulletish, winged structure appeared over San Diego for an hour-and-a-half. It had two red lights but was otherwise dark, moving at different speeds and strafing the ground with a light. Among those who witnessed this mysterious object was Mark Probert. He called Layne, and Layne suggested Probert establish telepathic communication—which he did. He learned:
“The strange machine is called the Kareeta. . . . It is attracted at this time because the earth is emitting a column of light which makes it easier to approach. The machine is powered by people possessing a very advanced knowledge of anti-gravity forces. It has 10,000 parts, a small but very powerful motor operating by electricity, and moving the wings, and an outer structure of light balsam wood, coated with an alloy. The people are nonagressive and have been trying to contact the earth for many years. They have very light bodies. They fear to land, but would be willing to meet a committee of scientists at an isolated spot, or on a mountain top.”
Without contradicting Probert—Layne insisted there were no contradictions among the material Probert collected, only refinements—Layne finessed this description into something more akin with his own Theosophical theories. The flying saucers and their inhabitants came from another plane of existence, a denser one, and only reached our own world by changing their vibrations. (Like Page, Layne sought to redefine the meaning of geography and space.) To avoid connotations with science fiction, he renamed the things “lokas,” a word he had picked up from his readings in Theosophy that meant place, or location. They were not crafts from outer space—or delusions, but the interpenetration of planes of existence. He wrote in 1950:
“They are NOT delusions, fantasy, or lies. They are not constructed by any foreign government, or by our own. They do not come from the depths of the sea—though some of them may enter the sea at times. They do not come from the Polar regions, or from Tibet or Java—though it is conceivable that some temporary base on our earth may be utilized. They are not contracted in the earth’s interior—though they may have some connection with underground races or be interested in them. They are not constructions of Atlanteans or other ancient peoples, preserved in caverns against a coming day of need.”
So how could the crafts be understood? Using the tools of the occult, of course. He offered a self-deprecating description of his method in Red Robin:
Having said this much, and taunted all learned men with their ignorance (ear-wig to our betters), we now present the only intelligent and intelligible comment on the saucer party so far offered by anybody. That doesn’t mean we ‘guarantee’ it in any sense; we wouldn’t ‘guarantee’ Tuesday after Monday. But it’s a point of view, and coherent end possible and probably interesting to everybody with a smattering of esoteric knowledge – which leaves most of our intelligentsia out of it, but happily lets in about fifty million lesser folk of this Pilgrims’ Pride. The commentator is our friend “Lingford”, a familiar control at the Mark P. seances. If nobody on our own plane has anything intelligent to say about saucers, why not interrogate the ghosties – get an astral viewpoint anyway, even if you don’t believe a word of it. Of course, if you think Lingford is a dissociated complex, a subconscious invention, a personalized memory, or a wholly fictional character invented the medium and the RR editor for ye sheckels sake (as RR has been credibly informed), your interest will be “O” with the rim left off. But having spent many hours in converse with this oeuf dur of the Invisibles, we consider him a very real person, and quite smart and well-posted and worth listening to."
In short, the Inner Circle confirmed his Theological speculations: The ships were from Etheria. Again from 1950:
“Etheria is here—if we know what here means! Along-side, inside, outside our world. Because our world, that is, the so-called dense matter of the objects in our world, is a rarefaction. It is spaced out like a vast net—a net with enormous meshes. Imagine, if you will, a net of wire with meshes a mile wide. Would not wind and water flow through that net as if it did not exist? A little friction, very little! On the strands of those meshes we live. That is the so-called dense matter of our world. We look out across the mesh and do not see anything in it, or hear or feel anything in it, and so call it empty space. ‘Meaningless words in the abyss of folly!”
By all accounts, Layne was sincere in his convictions. (And he was certainly a clearer writer than Page.) He published a number of pamphlets on the matter, and continued to feature discussion of his ideas in Round Robin, but it is unlikely that he ever made any real money; he dealt with doubters—including the editor of Doubt—but mostly sloughed them off, intent on his own theories. He did, though, make amends with Palmer and the Shaver mystery, arguing that underground dwellers—deros and teros—were a certainty, and some of them may have been involved with etherians, while others were ignorant of these other planes of reality. He also conceded that some of the airships may not have been etherians but cargo ships of the underground dwellers: if nothing else, Layne remained flexible and pluralistic in his outlook, willing to accommodate new occult and psychic facts.
It was imperative that everyone deal with this new higher realism—it was the only way to save the world, he thought:
“There is already apprehension in the minds of many, and if (as we expect) many more striking events should occur, there is some danger of panic. If these visiting craft are attributed to some foreign and unfriendly government, hostility and fear might develop; and if they are believed to come from some other planet of our solar system, unreasoning and superstitious fear is to be reckoned with, perhaps with a considerable degree of social disintegration.”
Layne continued to trumpet this message until 1959, when illness forced him to retire from the Borderlands Science Research Association. (Coincidentally, the same year Thayer died and the Fortean Society folded). He passed from this plane of existence in 1961, while his wife survived until 1984. Whether she ever heard from him again is not known.
Layne belonged to that group of Forteans offering new scientific laws—like Isaac Newton Vail or Albert Page—and also to those interested in questions of psychic research and Theosophy—like Vincent Gaddis, Harold Chibbet, and Frederick G. Hehr. These related interested made for a number of points of contact between his own work and the work of Thayer, sometimes congenial, sometimes not so much.
Layne sent in material on one of Thayer’s perennial fascinations, for example, the speed of light, and when he learned that fellow Fortean Don Bloch was a spelunker who had published a booklet called “Sightseeing Underground,” he ordered one from Thayer—and this was before the Shaver Mystery took off. In the first issue of Round Robin, he praised Doubt, even as he distanced himself from its politics. (His son, after all, was in the war.):
“We want to say a word for the Fortean Magazine, now called DOUBT, and for the Fortean Society and its able secretary Mr Tiffany Thayer. The Society, of course, carries on the work of Charles Fort and his collaborators (he wrote the Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo! Wild Talents). It is committed to no cult or propaganda, is the implacable enemy of the smugness and complacency of official and ‘orthodox’ science.
"By this last we mean the pronouncements (very often) of scientific bodies, learned societies and publications, university departments, their bland ignoring of a thousand strange happenings not explainable in terms of current theories—and of their own stupidities and failures.
"These are the ‘damned facts’ of which Charles Fort wrote, scattering tares in snug fields of science with a kind of wild contemptuous joy, but yet verifying and documenting with a careful hand.
"Those of us who are interested in psychical research and its allied subjects, also have a long reckoning with this ‘scientific’ ignorance and intolerance. Of course, there are now many hundreds of workers in the sciences, some of them very distinguished, who are well informed and open-minded on these matters. But as for ‘official’ science—well, the remark of Dr. Carlson, quoted on page vi of this bulletin, is sufficient commentary.
"As to the Fortean, then, we think it is doing an admirable piece of work. We’re not so much interested, personally, in its social and political iconoclasm, tho others may find it worth while. But the effort to salvage the ‘damned’ facts, hold them up for all to see and for the confusion of all orthodoxies, is a matter of very great importance.
"And once again, as to the in-and-out of the Round Robin; it’s the facts we’re after. We believe every fact is a child of God. We don’t care where it was born, or who nourished and cherished it; but we’re interested in your reasons for accepting it, and for thinking it maybe means this-or-that. We quote Gregory, that ‘in science there is no finality, there should therefore be no dogmatism’—and also Strindberg, who wrote that the whole business of man is ‘not to turn his back upon the Light.’ This Light may be a poor thing, but our business is to make the best of it, try to feed and brighten it, to make it shine into dark corners.
"We have a few copies of the last issue of the Fortean magazine DOUBT. Does anyone want one of them gratis? Or address the Fortean Society, Box 192, Grand Central Annex, New York City. Single copies .25, or $2.00 a year for DOUBT plus membership.”
Thayer reciprocated in the pages of Doubt, noting of Round Robin:
“It speaks highly of us. It also speaks highly of ‘the Creator,’ asserting that ‘we believe every fact is a child of god.’ Don’t let that scare you away. There’s meat on that Robin.”
But there was also more than a little tension. Thayer printed a letter by Fortean Jack Campbell which lightly poked fun at Layne’s theories Thayer also ignored the Kareeta incident before gently mocking it:
“Probably the busiest observer of all that night, was MFS Layne of San Diego, publisher of the spiritualist paper Round Robin, but he was not watching meteors. Beginning at 7:45 that evening, Round Robin subscribers began seeing a ‘spaceship’ silhouetted against the moon. Thirteen eye-witnesses are named. All in San Diego. Each describes the object differently. One man, called a psychic sensitive (which is current lingo for what we used to mean by ‘medium’ in the days of Anna Eva Fay), gave Layne a message purporting to have been received ‘clairaudiently,’ in which the object was identified as ‘a mechanical bird called Careeta.’ It came from a planet a considerable way off and the folks in it were afraid to land . . . If you want any more of that, send 35 cents to Round Robin, 3615 Alexia Place, San Diego, Calif. The story is given in detail in issue No. 10 of volume 2.
"MFS Hehr (who knows people from Venus) told Layne his space-ship was a condor, and broke up a beautiful friendship.” “Sizzling Zinner, Doubt 17 (March 1947): 251-252.)"
About the snub, Layne first wrote in Round Robin:
"DOUBT, official organ of the Fortean Society (to which this editor is proud to belong), didn’t give Kareeta a single line. RR refrains from complaint, but its readers do not—for example:
‘“I’m not surprised at Thayer’s attitude on the spaceship. He would have given two pages to some big bear tracks, however. And if you could prove there wasn’t a God he would bring out a special issue and a book, It’s damned funny to me, that some people think that to be a Fortean you have to be an atheist.’
J.T.
And ‘J. T.,’ well known to many RR readers is comparatively mild in his comment; the postoffice wouldn’t let us print the other letters about this. J.T.’s last point is well taken, too, tho we have no concern with it at this moment.” (Abominable Snowman, Round Robin, Volum 3, no. 2 (February 1947): 5; JT was likely Jack Tate.)
Layne responded in Round Robin’s April 1947 issue (p. 10):
“Fortean magazine DOUBT, current issue, gibes at RR as a ‘spiritualist magazine’—to which we reply, Yes, No, and Maybe. The editor is a spiritualist in the sense of regarding survival and communication as verifiable facts, but does not belong to any religious organization—and spiritualism is a religion, spiritism is not. Gibe number 2 was at the ‘Kareeta’ (Corrida?) story, which was merely a factual reporting of accounts of some 35 observers (slightly better verification the 3-ft. rats and similar Doubt items ever had, and conceivably more important). Gibe No. 3 was at Mark Probert, an honest and unpaid medium, who likewise merely reported an experience in this connection . . . The RR editor belongs to the Fortean Society, thinks it does a fine service by undermining scientific pretenses. But it never seems to dawn on most Forteans, that psychic and spiritistic methods reveal facts as startling as anything in the Book of the Damned, including ‘explanation’ which can at least be used as hypotheses//11//and points of departure. Strange as it may seem, we actually find these more worthwhile than columns devoted to fire balls, fish impaled on telegraph poles, and mysterious rumblings within the earth. Fortean data are certainly disturbing and important, but just how to turn them to account remains unsolved. Apart from saying Oh my Gawd! most of the Forteans seem to make very little progress. DOUBT is published by the Fortean Society, Box 192 Grand Central Annex, N.Y.C.”
But the issue still clearly bothered him, as in an article from the July-August issue he drops in the following paragraph, which really does not fit the flow of the piece:
"The Fortean Society (to which this writer belongs) is undergoing a most painful parturition, under the midwifery of Secretary Tiffany Thayer; so far the only issue has been an apparition of Charles Fort (to whom be honor), gabbling “I told you so” . Fort was a mighty hunter-out and collector of weird and science-damned happenings, of which strange sky-craft were not the least. The problem is right up the avenue for Vincent Gaddis also, who lately sent us some 20 instances of similar mysteries of the skies. The most incredible and outrageous things happen, and always have been happening, and students of such matters know about them; the most incredible fact of all is that there actually are people who think we live in a sane, orderly, intelligible and well-understood world, where “science” has explained everything or is about to do so,, and that these ignoramuses include about nine-tenths of our so-called intellectuals… Recurring to Secretary T.T. mentioned above, and while we think of it, it was he who gibed more than once at the Round Robin Corrida (Kareeta) story of last November, not because of its extraordinary nature but because it “stinked” of the “occult”. The “occult” got into because we printed a statement, for what it was worth, received clairaudiently by a most honest and non-professional medium. “Let Austin have his swink (or stink) to him reserved!” — We’re all for the Forteans, be it understood, in their war on scientism and smugism, but otherwise they get no forwarder with their hunting simply because most of them are nauseated by the mere mention of anything occult or spiritualistic."
But despite the rift, Layne continued sending in clippings, the last one appearing in June 1957.
