A Fortean in spirit, inclination—and his very being.
Charles Fort attacked the very notion of categories. “But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.”
No surprise, then, that when chasing down Forteans I’ve found they do not always have very much respect for one of the most common categories of our lives: names. That’s especially true of this Fortean. I’ll start by saying that he—it’s a he—was consistent with his surname: Markham. And, when he used it, his middle initial, G. (which probably stood for Garrett.) First name, though, was variously David or Norman. And that change made him difficult to track.
I think I figured it out. But let’s take it step by step.
Charles Fort attacked the very notion of categories. “But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.”
No surprise, then, that when chasing down Forteans I’ve found they do not always have very much respect for one of the most common categories of our lives: names. That’s especially true of this Fortean. I’ll start by saying that he—it’s a he—was consistent with his surname: Markham. And, when he used it, his middle initial, G. (which probably stood for Garrett.) First name, though, was variously David or Norman. And that change made him difficult to track.
I think I figured it out. But let’s take it step by step.
When he first appeared in “Doubt,” in 1942, Thayer called him David G. Markham. All the rest of his mentions in the magazine referred only to his last name—except one, in June 1952, when he signed a letter “Norman G. Markham.” Correspondence continues the confusion. In 1953, Thayer wrote to another Fortean, Don Bloch, about Bloch’s recent acquaintance with “David G. Markham.” The letters that Bloch received, however, were signed “Norman G. Markham.”
That mixing, though, is somewhat helpful in making clear that we are dealing with one person, not two different Markhams. The quality of the material sent to Thayer and published in “Doubt,” and also to Bloch (and, as we’ll see, elsewhere) also clarifies this point. Markham—whether he be David or Norman—was inordinately fascinated by unexplained vanishings of ships and planes, the orbit of Venus and Mars, flying saucers, Fort, and, especially, the correlations between all these subjects. Unlikely, then, that there would be two different Markhams with such obscure interests. Later correspondence—to Eric Frank Russell, and quoted in studies of the flying saucer—specify the middle name as Garrett.
There’s a rough chronology to Markham’s use of the different Christian names, with him seeming to prefer David in public contexts until the early 1940s, then switching to Norman, but the rule is not hard and fast. Still, it gives us a starting point for tracking him through time. There were three letters written to science fiction-related magazines in the late 1930s and 1940 signed by a David G. Markham. (Three that I know of, at least.) One to “Weird Tales,” in 1937, praised H.P. Lovecraft. Even though it was later reprinted, I have not seen the letter. Two more were published in “Unknown,” sister magazine to “Astounding Science Fiction.” Both dealt with Fortean topics, and the first concerned flying saucers, Venus, and mysterious disappearances of water and air craft. The same guy who would appear in “Doubt” later then. “Unknown” magazine, nicely, provided the address of their correspondents. A letter published in February had him in Greenville, California—a town that no longer exists, but then was located in Alameda county. A letter in June has him in Sacramento, California.
We take a leap, now, and look at the 1940 census. There we find a David Markham living in Placer, California, doing relief work for the federal government. Five years before, he’d been in Anchorage, Alaska. This Markham was born in New York around 1906—he was 34 at the time the census was taken, which in this case was 17 April 1940, or between the publishing of his two letters. The frequent moving suggested by his letters fits with his being in yet a third northern California location, as well as possibly being in Anchorage before that. But all this is speculative: seems right, might not be.
Step back, then. Was there a David G. Markham born in New York around 1906. Well . . . no. But, there was a _Norman_ G. Markham born in Buffalo around 1905. Let’s follow that out a bit. This Norman appears in the 1910 federal census, the 1915 New York census, the 1920 federal census, and then he drops out of the official records, at least as far as I can tell. He’s not in the New York state census for 1925, and not in the federal census for 1930. There are other Norman G. and David G. Markhams in those years, but ones who are clearly different: they show up in earlier and later records as a different person entirely. Almost as if the Norman/David G. Markham in question went off to parts unknown and questioned his own identity. Parts, like, say, Alaska, which would not become a state until 1959, and, questioned his identity by, say, changing his name. Still, speculative.
One record, though, brings these various strands together. In 1945, the father of Norman-G.-Markham-born-in-Buffalo-around-1905, applied for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. As part of the application he of course had to trace his own ancestry back to someone who served in the Revolutionary War; in addition, he provided information on his own family. Among his descendants he listed one . . . David Garrett Markham. He further wrote that he had no idea where this David was living. Clearly, this is our Fortean. It seems inconceivable to interpret that data any other way: in 1910, George Arthur Markham was listed, in the U.S. census, as the father of Norman G. Markham. He continued to be so listed in 1915 and 1920. In 1945, he writes that this son is (also) named David Garrett Markham and has fled to who-knows-where. Just prior to this writing, we know from the census there is a David Markham living in northern California who was born in New York around 1905, just like George Arthur’s son. As it so happens, at the same moment, a David G. Markham starts writing letters that originate from the same general area where the census’s David Markham lives. And, this David G. would later use the name Norman G. It simply has to be the same man.
[Edited 24 January 2016] I just received confirmation of this train of thought from the Social Security Administration. On 24 June 1940, Norman Garrett Markham—born 26 May 1905 in New York to George Arthur Markham and Emma Edith Simmons—filed the paperwork to change his name to David Garrett Markham. He was living in Oakland, California, at the time. [End edit.]Thus, having cleared out the confusion, let’s step to the side—rather than back anymore—and tell his story as best we can, his story as a man and a Fortean. Fair warning, first: the rest of this will be very long.
Norman Garrett Markham was born to George and Emma Markham in Buffalo around 1905 (likely 26 May 1905). George, as we now know, could trace his heritage back to the Revolutionary War. Emma was born Barbara Emma Brooks, in New York or Michigan. In 1910, George worked as a probation officer. Emma had given birth to Norman, and two daughters, Virginia and Olive. Both about 35 years old, Norman’s parents had been married 20 December 1905 in Michigan (which makes Norman’s birthday a little too close to the wedding date for propriety’s sake).
Five years later, the New York state census captured the family. There had been both great tragedy, and joy. Two new daughters enlarged the family, Jean born in 1911, and Sara in 1915. But in between, Virginia, the eldest girl, had died—in 1914, when she was about 8. George was still working for the government, now with the health department. Three years later, on 12 September 1918, George registered for World War I. Now he was working as a special investigator for the Larkin Company, which made soap. Emma was listed as his nearest kin.
The next seven years would apparently be difficult for the family, though. Before 1920, Emma died—she couldn’t have been more than forty five. The girls were apparently sent to live with other family members, because in 1920 the census only had George and Norman living together. George was now doing social services for the Larkin Company—it seems to have been a pioneer in welfare capitalism, providing employees with social clubs, dentistry, gyms, and a restaurant. Norman was in school. Olive Hope Markham married Glenn Knack, then died in childbirth, on 15 June 1925, while bringing into the world Glenn Knack Jr. As of 1945, he was the only grandchild of the family; Virginia and Olve were dead, as was there mother. The two other sisters—the youngest, Jean and Sara—lived in Bristol Connecticut.
All of this might have been enough to drive Norman from his family, especially if there was any conflict with his father. At any rate, the last mention I find of him in Buffalo is a 1923 City Directory, when he would have been about 18. He was going by the name David now, working as a clerk with the Erie Railroad, but still living with his father, now a real estate supervisor with Larkin. (It may be worth noting that there were a lot of Markhams living in Buffalo at the time.)
If the 1940 census can be believed, David spent some time in Anchorage, Alaska, at least in 1935, before making his way to northern California, working his way across the state, according to the return addresses of the letters he sent to “Unknown.” He’d had some experience with railroads and was an otherwise-undescribed laborer according to the census. His two epistles give no further information on what he had been up to. The census did say that he had completed a year of college—a later letter to Doubt said he studied zoology at a junior college in Brownsville, Texas—but by that time was scraping by, doing relief work for $500 per year—about $8,500 in today’s economy.
I lose track of Markham’s biographical thread for a time after 1940. He started corresponding with Thayer and Doubt, in 1942, but I do not know where he was living at the time, or what he was doing. In early 1949, Don Bloch apparently wrote to Tiffany Thayer about Markham—at the time Bloch was in Colorado and I suppose Markham had approached him, maybe because he was also in Colorado. He seems to have been, any way, as there is a listing in the 1948 Pueblo, Colorado, city directory for a Norman G. Markham; his father had died in 1946, which may account for his switching back to Norman. Markham was listed as a telegraph operator—which makes sense, as in 1952 he noted in a later to Life magazine (but published in Doubt) that he worked as a morse telegraph operator for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, which had a connection in Pueblo. The directory lists him as living with a Doris Markham, who may have been his wife—or may have been a relative. There was also a Doris Markham living in Buffalo in 1923, for example, and she doesn’t appear in any of his correspondence or other records. In 1949, he wrote to Eric Frank Russell from that city. Three years later, in 1952 when he wrote the letter to Life, he was in Clovis, New Mexico, which also was attached the railroad line.
After 1952, Markham’s fortunes—never seemingly grand—apparently declined quite precipitously. Likely this was the result of telegraphs falling out of use, replaced by telephones. In 1953, he moved to Denver, and in 1954 reached out to Don Bloch again, complaining of having to work long hours for low pay. He washed dished at the Pig Parlor, a hamburger joint on Alameda and Federal, from 6 pm to 4 am every night but Friday. The rest of the time he was at his room in a hotel, sleeping. Markham said he didn’t like “the ways of employers in Denver” to explain his crummy job—but didn’t explain what those ways were.
Thirteen years later, in 1968, Markham was still in Denver, we know from correspondence. He seems to have come out on the other side of his hard financial times, but it is not clear how stable everything was for him. Approaching 65, he would have soon been eligible for social security—he’d applied for a social security number in Alaska, and received 574-01-5661—but he must have been working at something. I just do not know what. The question is relevant because, unlike many other Forteans of his era, he did not give up his avocation as he aged. Rather, like Sid Birchby and Harold Chibbett, his interest in the topic was reinvigorated in the late 1960s. He corresponded with Forteans again, became active with various groups.
According to the Social Security Administration, Norman Markham, resident of Denver, Colorado, died in August 1968. He was 63 years old.
Markham clearly new of Fort prior to coming to the Fortean Society, and prior to the publication of the omnibus edition of Fort’s work. His letters to “Unknown,” both published in 1940—although one was likely written in 1939—show a familiarity with Fort’s works that went back at least a few years. It seems likely that he may have first come to them through Astounding’s serialization of Lo! in 1934, though if he was reading science fiction and weird fiction widely enough at the time, he may very well have been pointed in Fort’s direction by something else—there were enough references, certainly. But those early letters, and the articles that spurred them, give some sense of Markham’s Forteanism at the time.
It’s a good baseline, because following Markham will take us pretty deep into the UFO weeds.
Markham’s public Forteanism began with an article published by Eric Frank Russell, in the September 1939 issue of “Unknown.” Russell himself had come across Fort earlier in his career, without much enthusiasm, only to rediscover him and be moved greatly. His novel “Sinister Barrier”—also 1939, also in “Unknown”—evolved from Fort’s remark, “I think we’re property.” The article in question, “Over the Border,” set aside that hypothesis; it was not fiction, but an essay—indeed, it reads like a continuation of Fort, a sequel or a pastiche. (“It is our quaint notion of logic that a thing which is not an air machine is something else.”) Over the course of 8-or-so double-columned pages, Russell developed the argument that mysterious “planes” dropping into the sea were not planes, but space craft, probably from Venus—itself an aqueous planet, it was believed at the time—in order to harvest some substance, which accounted for mysterious earthquakes and seismographic mis-readings. He went off on a tangent, a bit, to show that scientists, generally, could be quite wrong—were often guessing, as he said, and his guesses were just as good, probably better. The article ended in a way similar to his novel: the visiting Venusians, he suggested, sometimes collected humans and brought them back—over the border, as it were, or through the sinister barrier—accounting for mysteriously abandoned ships. “It is a quaint thought,” he concluded, “that the sons of the Sun may also be the stuffed monkeys of the Stars.”
Markham, in his response, commended Russell for his “basic Forteanism” but thought the article was too empirical—a hasty collection of a vast amount of material. He would have kept quiet, he said, if he hadn’t something to add—a bit of humility that seems common to Markham’s writings. As it so happened, he said, he’d been working over Fort’s data for the last three years—“I anatomized Fort’s encyclopedic lore with an eye toward attempting to riddle the secret of their origin—and after much trial and tribulation had arrived at a solution. Comparing those Fortean anomalies which might be interpreted as spacecraft and the synodic periods of Venus and Mars, he uncovered a correlation—that is to say, by comparing the dates of the Fortean anomalies with the period it took Venus and Mars to return to the same position, relative to the position of the earth and the sun, he found relationships. The correlation held not just for unusual phenomena in the sky, but mysterious ship disappearances, too—the main anomalies that interested Russell. Truly a Fortean coincidence of its own!
Markham was sympathetic towards Russell enthusiasm and “cock-sure” attitude: he himself could fall into wild flights of fancy, he admitted, until he sat down with the numbers again and disciplined himself. And that discipline led him in a different direction from Russell—though he implied their theories were similar, without giving further detail on his own ideas—in that he was disinclined to criticize scientists. Certainly, they could be wrong, or blinded by their own theories, but they were working hard at their craft—and, indeed, Markham thought that his own Fortean investigations were not a way of disproving science, but of expanding it: of finding new laws. He was more akin, then, to a Maynard Shipley, or even John W. Campbell, editor of “Unknown,” who saw in Fort data for new scientific discoveries than Thayer or Russell, or saw in Fort data to puncture their superciliousness. He concluded, “Well—until Russell’s a better scientist than he is a writer, he’d better save his guessing. I too can guess, but I don’t want to do too much of it; might guess altogether wrong some time—too loudly—and be ridiculed for my pains. Ridicule stings worst, when you realize you have it coming!”
There was no response from Russell, but later that year “Unknown” piqued Markham’s Fortean interests again, this times with a short blurb by Willy Ley. A German emigre involved with science fiction, rocketry, and Fortean themes—he wrote early examples of cryptozoology, Ley took aim at the inadequacies of newspaper reporting, and some of his shots ended up hitting Fort, too. This was in the March issue—a space-filler titled “A Few Notes on the Reliability of Newspaper Clippings without Additional Remarks about Charles Fort and Others.” Ley gave examples of newspaper articles that were based on very old events, or obscure ones—sometimes even outright hoaxes passed off as the truth. He had examples from his own life—doing rocket experiments—in which the journalist completely garbled what he had said.
In the habit of writing now, Markham posted a letter that appeared in “Unknown”’s September issue. “hardly fair to the Fortean movement,” he opened—suggesting that he had perhaps become aware of the Fortean Society, if he hadn’t been before: perhaps that letter about Russell had gotten others int he Society to notice him—maybe even Russell. At any rate, he persisted in explaining just how much time he had spent analyzing Fort’s works: he’d carefully read them all, and copied many notes. A “goodly proportion” of Fort’s citations were from books and periodicals, not only newspapers. Forteanism, he insisted, should be seen as a helpmate of science, opening up new vistas for exploration. Having gotten that off his chest, Markham then pulled back, refusing to criticize the rest of the magazine because he knew he could not do better—which suggests that he may have been contemplating writing science fiction or fantasy himself, had maybe even tried it but not been pleased with the results. The only response was a defensive one from editor John W. Campbell, who interpreted Ley to say that one needed to carefully evaluate news reports, not dispense with them.
Some time in late 1941, Markham definitively found his way to the Fortean Society, writing a long epistle to Thayer that was published in “The Fortean”—as the magazine was called then—in January 1942. This was the sixth issue, leading with Thayer’s notorious editorial “Circus Day is Over.” Between the furor caused by his so-called seditious writing and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it would have been easy enough to overlook Markham’s letter. Still, it took up the better part of two pages—5 of 6 columns—most of it in capital letters. Thayer headed it with a noted about Markham, and a request: Markham had been studying “maritime vanishments” for several years and had come to some conclusions, but was asking the Society to keep them quiet because they were “too dangerous to make public.” He was also seeking additional information on the supposed sinking of the Japanese submarine I-63 on 6 February 1939. (For what it’s worth, the submarine crashed with another Japanese submarine; most of the crew was killed, but there were a few survivors; the wreckage was salvaged in 1940.) Thereafter followed Markham’s own writings.
The letter began with several verbatim reports taken from newspapers about mysterious “ghost” planes seen near Sweden and Finland that could not be identified. Markham one ton to editorialize that the newspapers—facing a wall of silence from authorities—interviewed aviation experts, who claimed that the mysterious crafts maneuvered far better than any European pilot could hope to achieve, and that there was a suggestion these were futuristic planes being tested for a coming war. There is then a parenthetical—the reports of he ghost planes stop at about the time of the inferior conjunction of Venus, in February 1934. But during the period in question, in addition to the Scandinavian reports, there were reports of odd aircrafts in London, flying blind above a snowbound New York, of a blimp that disappeared in West Virginia, and a plane that disappeared in New Jersey.
Alone, this material doesn’t make much sense. But in conjunction with his letter and comments on Russell’s article, it became clear that Markham was collecting data that earth was being visited by inhabitants of Venus. Such a conclusion was not unknown—pun unintentional, but apposite—in the Fortean Society (which says a lot about the Fortean Society), but Markham’s ideas are still notable. A lot of the early talk about flying saucers, in general and in the Fortean Society, linked them to Theosophical ideas about ascended races and space brothers. That was even true of Frederick Hehr, the Fortean engineer who claimed dot be in contact with Venusians—who seemed to communicate mostly in Theosophical modes, such as telepathy. But Markham, like Hehr, thought that the Venusian crafts were physical objects, belonging to this dimension—unlike N. Meade Layne, who thought flying saucers phenomena of the ether, altering their density to emerge into our dimension or leave it. That Markham worried over public reaction—and was, indeed, reticent about his conclusions when he wrote “Unknown”—suggests he may have seen the Venusians not as mere looters, the way Russell had portrayed them, only marginally interested in human beings, or as saviors, the way that Hehr did, but as a distinct threat.
Of course, the United States at that time was dealing with a more obvious battle blamed on earthbound invaders.
After that initial salvo, Markham became a frequent contributor to Thayer’s publication over the next decade—so frequent, in fact, that I have not tried to record every instance of him being mentioned. There are already better ways to understand his Forteanism, and such indexing would be a real slog. It’s worth noting, though, that Markham was among those Forteans who stayed with he Society across the decadal dividing line, starting in the 1940s and continuing into the 1950s.
For all that he was deeply involved with Forteanism, there was a period of quiescence after his initial foray into the community. He sent those two letters to “Unknown,” and the long one to Thayer—and then there was nothing from him until late 1947, almost a full six years. Assuming he was in California when he sent the note to Thayer—and that’s a big assumption—this era of his life would cover his move from California to Colorado (with, perhaps, stops in other places) and likely a change from his relief work (back) to railroad employment. That the Pueblo city directory has him living with a woman named Doris might also indicate that he was ill during this period, or otherwise needed some help. The period also covers the time when he went from using David back to using Norman and his father’s death.
Markham seems to have been lured back into public activity and Forteanism with the flying saucer flap of 1947. Fittingly, the first inklings of his return are coincidental, on a couple of levels. In June 1947, (Fortean) Vincent Gaddis had an article published in (Fortean) Ray Palmer’s “Amazing Stories.” At the time, “Amazing Stories” was chock-a-block with the Shaver Mystery. Gaddis pointed in the other direction: not below the earth, but into the skies. Mostly the article was what Forteans would latter call a “seed catalog”—a list of anomalous reports, strung together, but making no larger point. What’s worth noting, though, is that the first three examples came from Markham’s article in Doubt, and explicitly cited him, the Fortean Society, and Markham’s fear that his information was too dangerous for the public.
As it happened, that very month—though Amazing was probably on newsstands before June—24 June 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw what were described in the press as flying saucers near Mt. Ranier, Washington. Thus was born the flying saucer craze. As anyone will say, the history of flying saucer’s is complex, and still being written, as new documents come to light. For this part of Markham’s story, I have relied on secondary sources, which seem legitimate, rather than digging through masses of material myself.
In the middle of September 1947, Markham—now going by Norman—wrote a letter to the Pueblo Times, which has been uncovered by UFO historian Loren E. Gross. Markham was living in Pueblo then and apparently decided that with the media on the story now was the time to unveil his theory. As quoted extensively by Gross, Markham wrote,
"Since the time of the Bolshevist revolution at the end of World War I the countries not involved in the revolution have had a tendency to look upon the Russia with suspicion. Let any strange occurrence be reported which defies ex- planation and immediately Russia is blamed--especially if this occurrence seems menacing.
"In 1921 (see New York Times index March-July 1921 under 'Accidents, Shipping') a number of ships of all nationalities vanished off the north Atlantic. One of these ships, the Albyan, was a Russian vessel. These disappearances, which took place during one short space of a few weeks, never have been explained. At the time the unproven assertion was made that Soviet ships were stealing them.
"In the winter 1933-34 (New York Times December-February 1933-34) strange aircraft were seen in northern Scandinavia. These craft flew at night and were equipped with lights. Observers were unable to identify them. They vanished or reports on them stopped near the inferior conjunction ofVenus.
"At the time of inferior conjunction, Venus is at its closest to earth for a period of 584 days.
“Russia was blamed for the ‘ghost airplanes’ of Scandinavia. She denied having dispatched them.
"It would have done Russia no good to deny the 'ghost rockets' of 1946. From some time in July 1946, until August and after, there were reports from Sweden and Norway and Denmark on spool-shaped and spindle-shaped things, vomiting fire, which streaked through the sky. In spite of the fact it was sheer foolishness for a country to be carrying on experiments in rocketry under conditions where, because of military censorship in the target countries, the result could not be known. Russia was blamed for the rockets. See papers for July and August, 1946. These rockets were heard of no more after November 17, that year.
'There are some, reading this, who will say that if this is the case then Russia was probably availing herself of the date of the inferior conjunction ofVenus in order that the appearances would be attributed to Venus. But this would not be intelligent; there are very few people on the entire earth who would look for such a periodicity and association.
"Recently we have had a host of reports on 'flying saucers.' What these things are, is unknown. Many have seen them--or at least claim to have done so.
It seems foolish to disregard the observation of Captain Smith and his pilot (United Airlines) and o f the flier Arnold o f Boise who first brought them to public notice. There are more reports than these which seem acceptable. While hysteria unquestionably added many false reports t the record nonetheless many oft he reports on the discs are doubtless upon something actually observed. Whatever these things were, they flew faster than any aircraft so far invented. They seem to have been driven by some unknown, possibly unguessable [Gross’s sic] means o f propulsion. Most reports on them indicate that they made. no sound in flight. After re- ports had been out on them for a while, there were witnesses who came forward to tell of earlier appearances of them.
“The army was investigating reports that at Manitou, Colorado, last May, some employes [sic[ of the Pikes Peak and Manitou railroad had seen at noon some object above Pikes Peak. By description it was like the 'flying saucers.' A Japanese businessman, Tomoyo Okado ofTokyo, said that during B-29 raids on Tokyo on May 23 and 25, 1945, he and others had seen something like 'flying pancakes' which had cruised at 'taxicab speed' in the sky which the bombers had vacated.
"In Denver a Belgium warbride, Mrs. Emmett Cagley, who had recently come to the United States, said that in February 1947, the discs had made their appearance in Beligium. She said the same furore had greeted them there as attended upon them in the United States-and the same doubts and attributions to hysteria and practical joking.
"(See for the Japanese account Associated Press dispatch datelined Tokyo July 12, for Mrs. Cagley's account: Rocky Mountain News July 7, 1947)
"As though following a system of some sort, we find that the Tokyo appearance of the discs fell near to the inferior conjunction ofVenus ofApril I51 1945: that in the Belgian case the appearance of the discs followed inferior conjunction ofVenus of Nov. 17, 1946.
"It is not known what the surface ofVenus may be like. The planet is covered with clouds. That Venus is some 24,000,000 miles from earth at its closest means nothing for the purposes of space travel. According to Hohmann, Richardson, Ley and others who have concerned themselves about future space the cheapest and longest trip from here to Venus would consume 146 days, with the possibility that if hyperbolic orbits were used by the craft the distance could be negotiated in as little as 12 days.
"We have only in the past forty years dreamed mathematically of reaction-driven spacecraft to the other planets. There have been accounts printed from time to time as if some other entities, living somewhere else, had beaten us to space flight.
"In the '60s of the last century there were black rains at Stains, Scotland, some of which were accompanied by enormous appearances of furnace slag washed in on the Scottish seacoast. These slag floes were so copious that in the language o f James Rust, who wrote of them: 'All the blast furnaces in the world could not have [Gross’s note: part of clipping missing] ...is these black rains accorded with the periods of close approaches ofVenus. This may predicate metallurgical work on the sea bottom.
"For the purpose of opening a speculation it might be thought that an older culture somewhere else has long depleted its own planetary natural resources and is obliged to go elsewhere to find mineral raw material, metals and the like. It would be thought the reason why we have never caught them at work on the sea bottom When one thinks of it, space craft, which would have to be hermetically sealed in order to voyage through space, could just as easily function as submersibles if rigged to do so-the use of ballast tanks would make such a usage possible to them
"In our haste to blame these things on Russia we are only overlooking a series of phenomena which may be of the most interesting character and of the highest conceivable importance to us in times to come.
"Suppose that we succeed in some day making space craft. That is, if our stupid haste to kill each other with atomic bombs and disease germs does not forever forestall such a possibility. And suppose the phenomena of ‘ghost airplanes,' 'ghost rockets,' and 'flying saucers' are the writing on the wall which tells a tale of extremely well-advanced, highly intelligent outsiders.’
“If such appearances accord so well with close approaches of Venus, it is
possible that planet has a great civilization upon it.”
Markham followed this letter with one to the Fortean Society. By his calculations, there should have been some vanishings starting around July of 1947, and he thought he’d found one. Thayer did not reprint the letter, but summarized it thusly in in Doubt 19, October of 1947:
“MFS Markham (our own Maritime Vanishment expert) was expecting to hear of an epidemic of vanishing vessels between July 5 and the next inferior conjunction of Venus. He links the discs with the expected phenomena and points with excusable self satisfaction at the burning ship off Sonoma County, Calif.,--no trace or record to be found by investigators.”
(The sinking occurred on 4 July 1947; a forest ranger on look-out duty reported what he thought was a burning tanker, but searches of the area subsequently uncovered no evidence of something that large burning or sinking in the area. The mystery was widely reported by the Associated Press.)
Over the next couple of years, Markham continued to write extensively on the subject. (Thayer told Don Bloch in January 1949, “I’ve known Markham for years. He’s harmless--but you should see his bulging folders in the archives!!!”) Aerial anomalies, and their relationship to mysterious disappearances continued to vex him. In February 1948, there was a large explosion over Norcatur, Kansas—big enough to break windows and shake buildings. The report, of course, caught the attention of many Forteans, who sent in clippings. Thayer, by this time, was already fed up with flying saucers and dealt with the subject only grudgingly. Markham was in his wheelhouse.
He wrote to the army, apparently an extensive collection of letters, though I have only seen them reported, not their contents. His first letter was dated 20 February 1920 and suggested that the event might be related to the position of the moon: perhaps there was a civilization on earth’s satellite. (This position had been abandoned by many other Forteans at this late date.) The army passed the correspondence on to the Air Force, which passed the letters to the group inside it charged with investigating flying saucers; that group worked under the name Project Sign. According to some histories, early on Sign was divided into different factions, one of which leaned turned the hypothesis that earth was being visited by beings from another planet; that may account for Markham’s letters not being thrown away.
At any rate, they found their way to meteor specialist Lincoln LaPaz. The scientist thought Markham’s theories too “fantastic,” but did concede that Markham was right in having compiled a number of unexplained incidents. (There’s also some speculation among UFO historians that Markham’s method of calculating reports against the position of nearby planets may have influenced the procedures of Project Sign.) In the end, LaPaz thought the thing exploding over Kansas was a bolide, but he couldn’t say definitively. Markham was clearly not happy with what he heard back from the military, remarking to Thayer—quoted in Doubt 21, June 1948—“Too bad when we have to depend upon the press for descriptions, the army for information, the public for reaction and science for explanation . . . It’s like a dream sequence where the urge is important but the wrong things all come up.” Markham, it seems, was becoming dyspeptic about science—a change from his views eight years before.
The month after that Doubt appeared, on 15 July 1948, Markham wrote to Eric Frank Russell. Although Markham had commented upon Russell’s article in 1940—and chastised him for anti-science views he was now developing—this seems to be the first letter between the two, a fan letter that laid out Markham’s thinking about galactic events:
“Been following with much interest your current run in ASTOUNDING (“Dreadful Sanctuary”)—and am again gaining grim satisfaction from the stuff you put into your stories. The one about Lucifer (Displaced Person) in Weird Tales was not missed either, with its ironical jibe at the stranglehold of religion over commonsense.
“I seem to get the picture of a community of interests shared by us: —I hold entirely to the acceptance that he people on this earth are planetary dejecta—but your idea of the Chinese, etc., being aboriginal stock on this earth is an angle I need thought about.
“In fact, the stories you have written—that is, that I could find—have always struck a note in me no other science-fictionist has so far been able to hit.
“Putting you on the back is not, however, the entire purpose of this letter (nor am I looking for a quarter since I already have one). What I am trying to get to is, that I believe you and I are both pretty much acceptors of this idea: this earth is visited with great regularly from without by aliens so cautious of contact that we shall never meet them face to face—and live, or return to tell about it.
“For a long time in my own blundering way I’ve been performing experiments with the timing of phenomena which to my mind have to do with outsiders, and at times I hit some results which give much to think about.
“I’ve been lining up the data with the synodic periods of Venus and Mars as yardsticks—and several hundred different reports on fundamentally relatable occurrences, though bound to develop all kinds of accidental juxtapositions, still provide a few instances which look like cut-and-dried cases of real relationship.
I am earnestly desirous of getting somewhere with this stuff of mine, and it is almost impossible for me to get into New York City for perusal of the Fortean files
“I would like to propose that we exchange correspondence, and would be glad to show you what kind of headway I’ve been making in return for any data you can give men which might be along the line of my ‘investigations.’
“Believe that if you and I could get together postally, over a long period of time we could achieve some results not possible to either one of us while we stand alone. In other words I believe I’ve got what you want, and vice versa.
“The kind of stuff you put into OVER THE BORDER, s the kind of stuff I’m talking about. I’ve changed my mind about astronomers—I’ve been privileged (if gaining that kind of education is a privilege) to meet some. I’ve never seen such a concentrated, conservative bunch in my life—And with space-travel in the offing, their blindness may be dangerous in the extreme.
“I believe I can provide you, in time, with some speculations base don the actual order of occurrence of data, which, if handled in a sober manner, a soundly convincing sort of manner, would not only startle hello out of a number of smugly complacent bastards who in order to keep their dogh [sic] coming in would turn their backs on the most vital ideas.
“Correspondence would develop the trend of the matter, however—but if I could have a personal visit with you sometime, I could show you in the space of a few hours, things it would take a month of writing to lay bare.
“At any rate, I’d really love to swap letters with you on the subject of outsiders, their maggotings—that is, if you’ve the time, the inclination, and are interested.
“Nope—this stuff ain’t ‘crystal ball’ like that Shaver ordure—I get my results from long thought and from the end products of a lot of drudgery with comparisons. There are no ‘voices’ mixed up in it.
“Nor—astrology. (which might be all right, and sometimes I think it is. But it’s not my metier.).
“Sincerely, and with a lot of respect,
“Norman Garett Markham
MFS”
Apparently, Russell put Markham off—at least, Russell’s collection of papers at the University of Liverpool gives no evidence of a correspondence developing between them. But the letter is still revelatory and important. It reveals that Markham had a science-fiction inflected (or purplish) imagination: no one sees the aliens and lives to tell about it! He’d also been influenced by Thayer, in thinking that astronomers had sacrificed a labile imagination to keep the flow of filthy lucre unimpeded. The letter is important because it marks the mid-point of his transformation as a Fortean. He started out in the mold of Roy Lavender or Maynard Shipley, thinking Fort a source of scientific data (and only a few usable theories). He ended up so closely embracing alternative modes of knowledge—not astrology, but psychic compulsions and, in his way, voices—that even though they were meant to ultimately give information for the scientific gristmill—he remained a rationalist, just using different tools—that he was quite far from what counted as a “sober manner, a soundly convincing sort of manner.” Here, in the summer of 1948, he was somewhere in between: scientists were too “smugly complacent,” but astrology and Shaver’s updated version of Theosophical voice-hearing and intuition were off-limits.
That summer, Markham also seemed to find another outlet for his views. The (Fortean) editor and writer August Derleth produced a periodical called “The Arkham Sampler,” which was rooted in Derleth’s first love—H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos. Markham, of course, was also a Lovecraft fan. The third issue of the sampler included an article by Markham called “Strangers from Hesperus.” I have not seen it, but according to the October 1948 “Fantasy Review,” in it Markham—the name, it suddenly appears to me, so much like Arkham—“plumps for Venus as the origin of the Flying Saucers.” Hesperus derives from the Greek word for the evening star: Venus.
Markham continued to deepen his theory into 1949, continuing to use Fort as a source of ideas. In Doubt 25, from May 1949, Thayer published an essay by Markham. Likely, Markham wrote his piece in response to Thayer’s recent call for the founding of a Fortean University—subtly acronymized F.U.—and his announcement that there might be degrees associated with certain courses of study, based on Fortean analyses of particular problems. By 1949, though, Thayer’s enthusiasm for a Fortean University was running a bit dry, which may account for his not tagging Markham’s essay as a contribution to the F.U. Or, perhaps, Markham had decided to write up what he was learning for some other purposes.
The essay was titled “‘The Riddle of the Monstrator’ A Fortean Speculation’” and ran for two pages. Monstrator was what Fort named—in “The Book of the Damned”—an planet-like body thought to exist between the sun and Mercury. As Fort reconstructed the history, it was first seen in the 1760s; later, Urbain Le Verrier calculated—based on eccentricities in Mercury’s orbit—that such a planet must exist and called it Vulcan. (This proposed planet would become an object of interest to Theosophists in the 20th century.) Based on the various reports cited by Fort—as well as the lack of reports from other observers—Markham deduces that Monstrator was not between Mercury and the sun, but much closer to the earth, and very large. He goes on to compare its controversial history with that of Neith, a proposed moon of Venus that had been seen a few times but could not be confirmed.
The problem, Markham said, was the observers assumed that they were looking at planets—objects without volition, following a pre-ordained course. But what if they were looking at something more temporary—that could explain why some people saw Monstrator (and Neith), and no one could now find them in the heavens. That might make sense of another anomaly: Monstrator was said to be a bit obscure, as though it had an atmosphere, even as it was much too small to maintain one. Could this have bene a tail, like a comet’s—maybe, though that would have been hard to see. More likely, then, it was the exhaust of . . . well, of a spacecraft. Neith, he suspected, was the mother-ship, Monstrator its offspring, and both may have been launched by a highly intelligent—but peaceful!—civilization that inhabited our solar system. We thought we humans were created in God’s image, but there may be others out there, too—not just in science fiction, but in fact. “If by some unbelievable miracle--something even more incredible than ‘Neith’ and ‘Monstrator,’ and all the other titanic innominata of space--we avoid the war that is coming and which carries in it the seeds of our cultural annihilation, we may grow up enough, some time, to invade space with space-ships.” And then we would meet these outsiders.
There was no doubt that, for Markham—unlike many other Theosophically-inclined Forteans and UFO enthusiasts—these extra-terrestrial beings were material. Again, he seems to have had no truck with the ehterian ideas of N. Meade Layne and his coterie. The point was made in July 1950 (Doubt 29), when Thayer was reporting on a mysterious blob that had washed up on the shores of Oregon. An expert quoted in a newspaper story said that it was whale blubber, because only whales grew to such a size. (“That’s simple enough, isn’t it?”, Thayer quipped.) Markham, Thayer noted, had his own speculation: mightn’t it be the pilot of a Venusian space craft? By his reckoning, the crafts were diving into the sea—maybe one of them had crashed. Certainly a Venusian would be unrecognizable to a wildlife expert.
Also clear from Markham’s writing is that he was quite pessimistic about the survival of the human race after World War II—the cynicism seems of a piece with his growing distrust of science as an institution. Already he had criticized humans for wasting their talents on war, rather than the exploration of space—and the meeting of our peaceful, or larcenous neighbors. By 1952, this defeatism was shining through. Doubt 35 (January 1952) published a poem by him—incidentally proving he had not given up on literary endeavors. “Too Late for Dreams,” it was called:
It’s later than we thought!
Across the shrunken world a shadow creeps
And prayers are powerless against
The frightful fear that curdles in its path.
Oh, later than we dreamed!
Mad prophets bawl puerilities abroad!--
Their jangling can all sum down to this:
The lot is cast.
Great thieves have split the swag before the crime.
Each who thought he had a precious neck
Has thought his neck more precious than all others’.
Those who survived by finding boots to lick
Can find no further service in such fawning.
The war’s been planned:
The clever lies all told.
Oh, that we had more time!
Would that we could re-write the play and change
The stupid statesmen for conclaves of men!
Would that we could
Put clamps upon all scientific zeal--
Ostracize the cunning and the vain--
Lay low all greedy schemers--
Strip off uniforms--
Kill as mad dogs the fiends who led us here!
Would that we could have ended out and slain
All those who battened on the grain of treason!
Too late—too late!
Where mankind might have walked in dignity
A pack of mean-eyed mandrills will be found;
Where liars made their fortunes telling lies,
Where immorality gave keys to power,
Where brutal selfishness grabbed up the reins
A lousy mob of frightened ape-like beasts
Will scream and lay about them right and left
Without regard to what or whom they hit.
The end! The end of all familiar things!
We rationalized this life like schizophrenes--
The sumptuous lushness of our foolish dreams
Will turn to a hard and jagged bed of stones.
Our paradises will turn into hells--
And those who cherished softness as a drug
Will fall and be trampled by the grinding boots
Of simpletons driven to panic by the fear
Of death lose on us by our vapid Great!
A few months later, in Doubt 37 (June 1952), Markham tied his pessimism to his Forteanism: Forteans were clear-eyed enough to see the world’s possible destruction, while those in charge dismissed such apocalyptic yammering even as though steered the world toward oblivion. Thayer quoted him—probably from a longer missive: “For my own good, and for everyone’s, I nominate Mount Pelee as the official symbol of the Fortean Society. It is a terrible symbol of the unpredictable. It is a concrete emblem of those things we know in our hearts to be true, though others may reason them away. It should serve to remind us that dogmatic assumption is just as deadly for those who prate it, as for those who servilely accept. The people of St. Pierre were terrified of the noises and the shocks, but the scientists KNEW Pelee would never explode! Mount Pelee is a monument to Charles Fort!”
It is doubtful that Thayer was particularly fond of Markham’s poem. It is not very good. It was clearer than his more recent essays, though, and expressed, in simple form, ideas that were consonant with Thayer’s—the stupidity of people, and particularly their leaders. But he said later that he did it mostly to spur Forteanism in new directions. After he lost interest in the Fortean University, he had a brief flirtation with promoting the Fortean arts. Science fiction was one form of it, he acknowledged, but there could be others, too, and he hoped that Markham’s poems—as well as some other pieces he published in that issue—would show the way. Nothing really came of this endeavor, either, besides giving Markham a chance to vent his anger—an anger that had led him to out and out ridicule of science. In Doubt 43 (February 1954), he sent in a clipping about a can of tomato juice that was heard ticking, and authorities who buried, dug, shot, and hatcheted it, only to find . . . regular tomato juice. Markham simply wrote, “Scientific Method!”
Not that Markham had yet given up on convincing the world of his theories—though he was perhaps losing a sense of what counted as a good argument. In Doubt 41 (July 1953), he linked a rain of mud over Long Island to the inferior conjunction of Venus. And the same June 1952 issue of Doubt carried the letter that Markham sent to “Life” magazine about a remarkable photograph he took in Clovis, New Mexico, where he was living. A full version of the letter follows, but the short version is this: Markham was psychically compelled to take some photographs during an electrical storm, during which time he saw something that was not lightning, and that blinked the Morse Code for “Hi” to him—an event he could not explain away as a coincidence, and which his reputation and graphological analysis of his handwriting would prove was not a hoax. It was the psychic data, the reliance on handwriting analysis, and the raising of a minor coincidence—lights blinking during an electrical storm!—to the level of world-historical importance that suggest most strongly Markham had drifted far, far from his 1940-concern that Forteans too easily dismissed scientists.
“Dear Sir:--
“The enclosed photograph is not a fake as can be easily determined by anyone who knows my reputation as an amateur photographer.
“At about 4:30 a.m., April 21, I had the hunch to go up on the ridgepole of the house to photograph a minor electrical storm then in progress.
During the time I was up there I had the impulse to make a time exposure photograph toward the Clovis Hotel which is approximately SW x S of the house.
“At about the time of the enclosed time-exposure, something shot out of a cloud to the southward, traveling east. The cloud from which it emerged was highly charged. There were occasional bright, diffuse flashes of lightning inside it. The thing that emerged went horizontally at tremendous velocity--perhaps something like 15 degrees in one tenth of a second.
“When this photograph was developed, a streak turned up in it, visible toward the top of the picture. Just above this streak there is a sequence of dots, 4-2. This sequence is almost exactly in the center of the picture. This was not a scratch on the film: inspection of the negative reveals a dark streak.
“Now here is a series of coincidences which may be significant.
“I am a member of the Fortean Society, NYC. For about fifteen years I have concerned myself with investigation of the possibility that things comes here from outside space. I am also a morse telegrapher. That is my trade. No one pays money for the kind of investigations that are my hobby so, by working for a railroad--the ATSF--I make my living.
“Does it not strike you as odd, that at the time I had my camera open--the exposure is about 1 minute--I had to pick that precise time when something, conceivably NOT an airplane, should shoot past the instrument, and ‘blink’ me an ‘HI,’ which in Morse argot is either a sign for amusement, or a greeting.
“I have had articles published on the subject of possible outsiders. Very few to be sure. Most appeared in DOUBT, published by the Fortean Society.
“The thing that shot out from under the cloud, as before mentioned, may have been one of several objects in the sky at the time.
“My impression is that something from somewhere else, knowing I am who I am, either wigwagged me a friendly or derisive greeting and passed on.
“Data:”
description of camera
430 am april 21
his apartment at 501 pile st., clovis NM
too fast for a plane
too cloudy for meteor
“I have what is termed a psychic nature. The enclosed example of my writing, when submitted to a competent graphologist, will assure you of that. I had the impulse, obeyed it, and this is the result.
“Take it or leave it.
“Yours, Norman G. Markham
“In a postscript to YS, the writer adds:
“Neglected to mention that, whatever this thing was that left the streak, it was invisible to my eyes--or at least I did not see it. It made no sound that I can remember. There was a pretty complete silence at time [sic], broken only by occasional mutters of thunder.”
Markham continued working with Fortean data, correlating it to an increasing number of astronomical markers. In August 1953, he wrote to Thayer from Denver about a new set of connections he had discovered. (Published in Doubt 44, April 1954.) The letter is a bit hard to parse, but it seems that Markham had become interested in the motion of Jupiter, and was creating tables of its synodic period as well as of other orbital relationships between it and the earth. Some of these he could correlate with material that had been in Fort’s notes—reprinted in Doubt—about odd things appearing in the craters of the moon. Others he correlated with a different datum from Doubt, about black, three-legged worms founding living in the Russian snows back in October 1827. That date was right about the time Jupiter made one type of approach to earth, and Markham speculated “Joveans, pestered, belike, by bugs native to their planet, and which pullulated threateningly during the 311 days it took their ultravelocity craft to get here, decided, soft-hearted people, to kick them off into Russia (it was winter and they’d live a while longer in any case) and swept them out of a hatch.”
Thayer, who seems to have been receiving a steady stream of letters from Markham, recognized the change. When Markham moved to Colorado, around 1953, Thayer warned fellow Colorado Fortean Don Bloch that he might be approached—though Thayer was also interested to hear back about a man whom he only knew through the mail: “Perhaps screwy David G Markham, who has appeared in DOUBT, is now in Denver. Sooner or later he will look you up. Aside from letters, he is an unknown quantity. Let me know what you think of him.”
Apparently, Bloch liked Markham; at least, that was the impression that Markham got. In September 1954, he approached Bloch about co-authoring a book with him. He had a lot of data, but not the time to pull it altogether—he’d lost his railroad job and was washing dishes now. “I’m writing you,” he told Bloch, “because, like Thayer, you’ve got somewhat of an insight into my ‘soul’ and know me better than do any of these people who surround me. To them I’m an enigmatic if not nutty sort, but I think you know better.” Bloch seems to have put him off, but nicely. More than a year later, in December 1955, Markham wrote again. (They’d met in person at times, too.) He said that, at Bloch’s suggestion, he was going full-bore writing a book, in the course of which he had indexed the three thousand reports he’d collected over the years. Some of his time, too, was being sent trying to support J. G. Graham, who’d been accused of blowing up an airplane. Markham thought him innocent—he doesn’t say why in the letter, but one expects that it has something to do with his theories of space visitors, perhaps attributing the explosion to Venusians or Jovians rather than a human. Graham’s trial was held in Colorado, so Markham could have followed it easily.
Markham mentioned to Bloch that some of his time, too, was being spent keeping Thayer up-to-date on his work—and apparently he was doing so at a frenzied pace by the middle of the 1950s. In Doubt 50, November 1955, Thayer admitted to being overwhelmed. Under the title “Markham erupts,” he wrote, “Out of Denver comes a flow of Forteana, 17 epistles wide, 73 pages long, and depth beyond sounding, all from MFS Markham whose contributions you have admired here before. All this is original stuff and does not count the body of press clips which came along in between.
“You will have the opportunity to read a good part of Markham’s cogitations in future issues, but in this cramped space we can only touch the high spots of his gleanings from the news.”
There followed a long list of articles, laced with Thayer’s commentary: Markham sent a clip about mentally retarded children being ignored by society; Thayer responded that those in charge of the country weren’t ignoring them—they were causing the retardation. Markham sent a clip about the military making room for the “sub-normal”; Thayer responded, they better, that’s all who will be left. Markham sent in a clip about a Pueblo man, found dead in Los Angeles; the coroner there ruled the cause a heart attack, but once the body was sent to Colorado, the Pueblo coroner found a wound in the gut and bullet. Markham sent in a clip about a Denver principal asking parents to prevent their kids from bringing guns and knives to school; Thayer quipped it must be to “keep the students’ pockets from bulging. (I don’t get it either.) Markham sent in two clippings that Thayer chose to pair: one in which a North Carolina Representative said the USA would only defeat communism if it had a strong ideology based on absolute morality; another in which the army was organizing college courses to make killing as efficient as possible. Another clipping noted that Russia did not have the equivalent of civil defense; Thayer said that now would seem the time to invade. There was also a clipping about someone putting needles in asparagus sold near a U.S. air base in Morocco, and a fantastic increase in childhood ulcers right after Colorado Springs got television.
Thayer came back to Markham’s (continuing) flood of material two issues later, Doubt 52 (May 1956). He only sampled one piece, though—about an engineer who said planes may someday have to be designed to last only for a few hours. (All the better to sell more, Thayer must have thought.) Thayer said he was trying to find space for the rest of Markham’s out-put, but that doesn’t seem fully convincing. The issue had some filler—a long piece on the Cook-Peary controversy over who reached the North Pole first, for example. He would never get around to publishing long excerpts from Markham—even as he continued to hold him up as an exemplar of Forteanism for specializing in one particular area. (Toward the end of Thayer’s run, he was getting so much material that he was looking for people to specialize in some particular area so that they could handle all the clippings on the subject and wrote up a summary. Jay Scandrett had done just that for government fraud, waste, and abuse.)
Markham was still contributing, though, as late as 1958, a year before the Fortean Society, and perhaps to its bitter end. Indeed, Markham continued in his Fortean vein beyond the Fortean Society and into new periodicals for weird tales and Forteanism.
American Forteanism had no institutional home after Thayer’s death. There was some talk that his wife might keep the Fortean Society afloat, but that went nowhere. Then, in the mid-1960s, there were a couple of different attempts to establish large Fortean organizations. One was by Ivan Sanderson; another was by a pair of brothers, Ronald and Paul Willis. Originally, they thought of calling their magazine Question, but opted, in the end, to go with International Fortean Organization Journal, or INFO Journal. The first issue came out in the summer of 1966; shortly thereafter, they purchased printing equipment and established their own press—The Golden Goblin Press. In the autumn of that year, they also started printing a weird fiction ‘zine called Anubis—Weird Tales itself, like the Fortean Society, defunct. There was some overlap in the two—and one of the points of overlap was Markham.
I’m not sure how the Willis brothers came in contact with Markham, but he was present in both the early issues of INFO and Anubis. I do not have access to the first issues of INFO right now—I looked at them many years ago—but online sources indicate that Markham kept the brothers up-to-date with a rash of material. They also put him in touch with Damon Knight, who was putting together a biography of Charles Fort and had been intrigued by Markham’s letter in Doubt 44, as well as his general approach of looking for correlations and periodicity in Fortean data. In a letter to Knight, Markham mad it clear that he was starting his Forteanism from scratch—he’d lost his issues of Doubt and the many (many) letters he’d sent to Thayer were also lost: at least, no one knew where they were after Thayer’s death, despite plenty of speculation. Markham had received very few letters back from Thayer, and these, too, had apparently been lost.
The first issue of Anubis contained two poems by Markham, as well as a short story—he’d not given up on literary Forteanism. The poems were in a similar style to the one he had published in Doubt. The first was called “Realism”:
I see gnawed horrors passing by
In one unending stream--
I see with blinding clarity,
And know it is no dream:
From Hell they come
Through Hell they move
To final Hell supreme.
The second, “Last Words,’ was much longer—73 lines. It developed out Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and told the story of a man who’d wandered into some kind of cursed area, where he was haunted but he voices of the Old Ones, on their way to steal his soul. The short story—“The Effigy”—also riffed on the Mythos, though combining it with Markham’s own obsession: a Russian astronaut visited Venus, then returned to the earth with some of that culture’s books and an effigy that was a monstrous Venusian. The books were such that those who read them were driven insane.
The next issue, copyrighted in 1967, contained only one piece by Markham. (There was also a Fortean article by Vincent Gaddis.) “Tit for Tat” was the longest story yet published by Markham. It started as a combination of Fortean anomalies and Biercian structure: a man uses the hunting season as a cover for his murderous sprees. Only this time, the rifle he used mysteriously—anomalously—appears in his home, twice. The man imagines his leg broken; a shot is fired. The scene fades out and next up is a coroner, who finds that the man died for no apparent reason. Then comes the Lovecraftian epilogue: the murdered hunter was no man, but a visitor from Jupiter, able to regenerate itself even after being shot. The Jovian was visiting earth on a hunting expedition, and rated killing the murderer one of his best triumphs.
By that second issue, Anubis’s connections to Forteanism were being made clear: there was a slip one could pull out and send in to subscribe to INFO Journal. Anubis also republished Robert Barbour Johnson’s history of the Fortean Society and broadside attack on Thayer. The third issue made the connections even clearer, the back cover a full page advertisement for INFO. Markham’s contribution was pure Weird Tales, though—about a finicky man who appears at a diner and drives everyone around him to senseless fighting and murder. It turns out he is in the service of some god, and these dead will become its revenants.
The fourth issue proved to be the last for Anubis—though there were plans for more. It would be the last for Markham’s original material, too. The magazine had slipped into an erratic publishing schedule, so that the fourth issue appeared in the autumn of 1968—by which time Markham was dead. His posthumously published story was “The Murals.” It told of paintings so horrible that looking at them caused the death of one man; when the coroners came, they saw that the murals were demonic—able to incorporate into themselves flesh from the world. They left, unable to deal with the strangeness.
It’s not a perfect epitaph—there are no Venusians—but it was the one that Markham received.
That mixing, though, is somewhat helpful in making clear that we are dealing with one person, not two different Markhams. The quality of the material sent to Thayer and published in “Doubt,” and also to Bloch (and, as we’ll see, elsewhere) also clarifies this point. Markham—whether he be David or Norman—was inordinately fascinated by unexplained vanishings of ships and planes, the orbit of Venus and Mars, flying saucers, Fort, and, especially, the correlations between all these subjects. Unlikely, then, that there would be two different Markhams with such obscure interests. Later correspondence—to Eric Frank Russell, and quoted in studies of the flying saucer—specify the middle name as Garrett.
There’s a rough chronology to Markham’s use of the different Christian names, with him seeming to prefer David in public contexts until the early 1940s, then switching to Norman, but the rule is not hard and fast. Still, it gives us a starting point for tracking him through time. There were three letters written to science fiction-related magazines in the late 1930s and 1940 signed by a David G. Markham. (Three that I know of, at least.) One to “Weird Tales,” in 1937, praised H.P. Lovecraft. Even though it was later reprinted, I have not seen the letter. Two more were published in “Unknown,” sister magazine to “Astounding Science Fiction.” Both dealt with Fortean topics, and the first concerned flying saucers, Venus, and mysterious disappearances of water and air craft. The same guy who would appear in “Doubt” later then. “Unknown” magazine, nicely, provided the address of their correspondents. A letter published in February had him in Greenville, California—a town that no longer exists, but then was located in Alameda county. A letter in June has him in Sacramento, California.
We take a leap, now, and look at the 1940 census. There we find a David Markham living in Placer, California, doing relief work for the federal government. Five years before, he’d been in Anchorage, Alaska. This Markham was born in New York around 1906—he was 34 at the time the census was taken, which in this case was 17 April 1940, or between the publishing of his two letters. The frequent moving suggested by his letters fits with his being in yet a third northern California location, as well as possibly being in Anchorage before that. But all this is speculative: seems right, might not be.
Step back, then. Was there a David G. Markham born in New York around 1906. Well . . . no. But, there was a _Norman_ G. Markham born in Buffalo around 1905. Let’s follow that out a bit. This Norman appears in the 1910 federal census, the 1915 New York census, the 1920 federal census, and then he drops out of the official records, at least as far as I can tell. He’s not in the New York state census for 1925, and not in the federal census for 1930. There are other Norman G. and David G. Markhams in those years, but ones who are clearly different: they show up in earlier and later records as a different person entirely. Almost as if the Norman/David G. Markham in question went off to parts unknown and questioned his own identity. Parts, like, say, Alaska, which would not become a state until 1959, and, questioned his identity by, say, changing his name. Still, speculative.
One record, though, brings these various strands together. In 1945, the father of Norman-G.-Markham-born-in-Buffalo-around-1905, applied for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. As part of the application he of course had to trace his own ancestry back to someone who served in the Revolutionary War; in addition, he provided information on his own family. Among his descendants he listed one . . . David Garrett Markham. He further wrote that he had no idea where this David was living. Clearly, this is our Fortean. It seems inconceivable to interpret that data any other way: in 1910, George Arthur Markham was listed, in the U.S. census, as the father of Norman G. Markham. He continued to be so listed in 1915 and 1920. In 1945, he writes that this son is (also) named David Garrett Markham and has fled to who-knows-where. Just prior to this writing, we know from the census there is a David Markham living in northern California who was born in New York around 1905, just like George Arthur’s son. As it so happens, at the same moment, a David G. Markham starts writing letters that originate from the same general area where the census’s David Markham lives. And, this David G. would later use the name Norman G. It simply has to be the same man.
[Edited 24 January 2016] I just received confirmation of this train of thought from the Social Security Administration. On 24 June 1940, Norman Garrett Markham—born 26 May 1905 in New York to George Arthur Markham and Emma Edith Simmons—filed the paperwork to change his name to David Garrett Markham. He was living in Oakland, California, at the time. [End edit.]Thus, having cleared out the confusion, let’s step to the side—rather than back anymore—and tell his story as best we can, his story as a man and a Fortean. Fair warning, first: the rest of this will be very long.
Norman Garrett Markham was born to George and Emma Markham in Buffalo around 1905 (likely 26 May 1905). George, as we now know, could trace his heritage back to the Revolutionary War. Emma was born Barbara Emma Brooks, in New York or Michigan. In 1910, George worked as a probation officer. Emma had given birth to Norman, and two daughters, Virginia and Olive. Both about 35 years old, Norman’s parents had been married 20 December 1905 in Michigan (which makes Norman’s birthday a little too close to the wedding date for propriety’s sake).
Five years later, the New York state census captured the family. There had been both great tragedy, and joy. Two new daughters enlarged the family, Jean born in 1911, and Sara in 1915. But in between, Virginia, the eldest girl, had died—in 1914, when she was about 8. George was still working for the government, now with the health department. Three years later, on 12 September 1918, George registered for World War I. Now he was working as a special investigator for the Larkin Company, which made soap. Emma was listed as his nearest kin.
The next seven years would apparently be difficult for the family, though. Before 1920, Emma died—she couldn’t have been more than forty five. The girls were apparently sent to live with other family members, because in 1920 the census only had George and Norman living together. George was now doing social services for the Larkin Company—it seems to have been a pioneer in welfare capitalism, providing employees with social clubs, dentistry, gyms, and a restaurant. Norman was in school. Olive Hope Markham married Glenn Knack, then died in childbirth, on 15 June 1925, while bringing into the world Glenn Knack Jr. As of 1945, he was the only grandchild of the family; Virginia and Olve were dead, as was there mother. The two other sisters—the youngest, Jean and Sara—lived in Bristol Connecticut.
All of this might have been enough to drive Norman from his family, especially if there was any conflict with his father. At any rate, the last mention I find of him in Buffalo is a 1923 City Directory, when he would have been about 18. He was going by the name David now, working as a clerk with the Erie Railroad, but still living with his father, now a real estate supervisor with Larkin. (It may be worth noting that there were a lot of Markhams living in Buffalo at the time.)
If the 1940 census can be believed, David spent some time in Anchorage, Alaska, at least in 1935, before making his way to northern California, working his way across the state, according to the return addresses of the letters he sent to “Unknown.” He’d had some experience with railroads and was an otherwise-undescribed laborer according to the census. His two epistles give no further information on what he had been up to. The census did say that he had completed a year of college—a later letter to Doubt said he studied zoology at a junior college in Brownsville, Texas—but by that time was scraping by, doing relief work for $500 per year—about $8,500 in today’s economy.
I lose track of Markham’s biographical thread for a time after 1940. He started corresponding with Thayer and Doubt, in 1942, but I do not know where he was living at the time, or what he was doing. In early 1949, Don Bloch apparently wrote to Tiffany Thayer about Markham—at the time Bloch was in Colorado and I suppose Markham had approached him, maybe because he was also in Colorado. He seems to have been, any way, as there is a listing in the 1948 Pueblo, Colorado, city directory for a Norman G. Markham; his father had died in 1946, which may account for his switching back to Norman. Markham was listed as a telegraph operator—which makes sense, as in 1952 he noted in a later to Life magazine (but published in Doubt) that he worked as a morse telegraph operator for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, which had a connection in Pueblo. The directory lists him as living with a Doris Markham, who may have been his wife—or may have been a relative. There was also a Doris Markham living in Buffalo in 1923, for example, and she doesn’t appear in any of his correspondence or other records. In 1949, he wrote to Eric Frank Russell from that city. Three years later, in 1952 when he wrote the letter to Life, he was in Clovis, New Mexico, which also was attached the railroad line.
After 1952, Markham’s fortunes—never seemingly grand—apparently declined quite precipitously. Likely this was the result of telegraphs falling out of use, replaced by telephones. In 1953, he moved to Denver, and in 1954 reached out to Don Bloch again, complaining of having to work long hours for low pay. He washed dished at the Pig Parlor, a hamburger joint on Alameda and Federal, from 6 pm to 4 am every night but Friday. The rest of the time he was at his room in a hotel, sleeping. Markham said he didn’t like “the ways of employers in Denver” to explain his crummy job—but didn’t explain what those ways were.
Thirteen years later, in 1968, Markham was still in Denver, we know from correspondence. He seems to have come out on the other side of his hard financial times, but it is not clear how stable everything was for him. Approaching 65, he would have soon been eligible for social security—he’d applied for a social security number in Alaska, and received 574-01-5661—but he must have been working at something. I just do not know what. The question is relevant because, unlike many other Forteans of his era, he did not give up his avocation as he aged. Rather, like Sid Birchby and Harold Chibbett, his interest in the topic was reinvigorated in the late 1960s. He corresponded with Forteans again, became active with various groups.
According to the Social Security Administration, Norman Markham, resident of Denver, Colorado, died in August 1968. He was 63 years old.
Markham clearly new of Fort prior to coming to the Fortean Society, and prior to the publication of the omnibus edition of Fort’s work. His letters to “Unknown,” both published in 1940—although one was likely written in 1939—show a familiarity with Fort’s works that went back at least a few years. It seems likely that he may have first come to them through Astounding’s serialization of Lo! in 1934, though if he was reading science fiction and weird fiction widely enough at the time, he may very well have been pointed in Fort’s direction by something else—there were enough references, certainly. But those early letters, and the articles that spurred them, give some sense of Markham’s Forteanism at the time.
It’s a good baseline, because following Markham will take us pretty deep into the UFO weeds.
Markham’s public Forteanism began with an article published by Eric Frank Russell, in the September 1939 issue of “Unknown.” Russell himself had come across Fort earlier in his career, without much enthusiasm, only to rediscover him and be moved greatly. His novel “Sinister Barrier”—also 1939, also in “Unknown”—evolved from Fort’s remark, “I think we’re property.” The article in question, “Over the Border,” set aside that hypothesis; it was not fiction, but an essay—indeed, it reads like a continuation of Fort, a sequel or a pastiche. (“It is our quaint notion of logic that a thing which is not an air machine is something else.”) Over the course of 8-or-so double-columned pages, Russell developed the argument that mysterious “planes” dropping into the sea were not planes, but space craft, probably from Venus—itself an aqueous planet, it was believed at the time—in order to harvest some substance, which accounted for mysterious earthquakes and seismographic mis-readings. He went off on a tangent, a bit, to show that scientists, generally, could be quite wrong—were often guessing, as he said, and his guesses were just as good, probably better. The article ended in a way similar to his novel: the visiting Venusians, he suggested, sometimes collected humans and brought them back—over the border, as it were, or through the sinister barrier—accounting for mysteriously abandoned ships. “It is a quaint thought,” he concluded, “that the sons of the Sun may also be the stuffed monkeys of the Stars.”
Markham, in his response, commended Russell for his “basic Forteanism” but thought the article was too empirical—a hasty collection of a vast amount of material. He would have kept quiet, he said, if he hadn’t something to add—a bit of humility that seems common to Markham’s writings. As it so happened, he said, he’d been working over Fort’s data for the last three years—“I anatomized Fort’s encyclopedic lore with an eye toward attempting to riddle the secret of their origin—and after much trial and tribulation had arrived at a solution. Comparing those Fortean anomalies which might be interpreted as spacecraft and the synodic periods of Venus and Mars, he uncovered a correlation—that is to say, by comparing the dates of the Fortean anomalies with the period it took Venus and Mars to return to the same position, relative to the position of the earth and the sun, he found relationships. The correlation held not just for unusual phenomena in the sky, but mysterious ship disappearances, too—the main anomalies that interested Russell. Truly a Fortean coincidence of its own!
Markham was sympathetic towards Russell enthusiasm and “cock-sure” attitude: he himself could fall into wild flights of fancy, he admitted, until he sat down with the numbers again and disciplined himself. And that discipline led him in a different direction from Russell—though he implied their theories were similar, without giving further detail on his own ideas—in that he was disinclined to criticize scientists. Certainly, they could be wrong, or blinded by their own theories, but they were working hard at their craft—and, indeed, Markham thought that his own Fortean investigations were not a way of disproving science, but of expanding it: of finding new laws. He was more akin, then, to a Maynard Shipley, or even John W. Campbell, editor of “Unknown,” who saw in Fort data for new scientific discoveries than Thayer or Russell, or saw in Fort data to puncture their superciliousness. He concluded, “Well—until Russell’s a better scientist than he is a writer, he’d better save his guessing. I too can guess, but I don’t want to do too much of it; might guess altogether wrong some time—too loudly—and be ridiculed for my pains. Ridicule stings worst, when you realize you have it coming!”
There was no response from Russell, but later that year “Unknown” piqued Markham’s Fortean interests again, this times with a short blurb by Willy Ley. A German emigre involved with science fiction, rocketry, and Fortean themes—he wrote early examples of cryptozoology, Ley took aim at the inadequacies of newspaper reporting, and some of his shots ended up hitting Fort, too. This was in the March issue—a space-filler titled “A Few Notes on the Reliability of Newspaper Clippings without Additional Remarks about Charles Fort and Others.” Ley gave examples of newspaper articles that were based on very old events, or obscure ones—sometimes even outright hoaxes passed off as the truth. He had examples from his own life—doing rocket experiments—in which the journalist completely garbled what he had said.
In the habit of writing now, Markham posted a letter that appeared in “Unknown”’s September issue. “hardly fair to the Fortean movement,” he opened—suggesting that he had perhaps become aware of the Fortean Society, if he hadn’t been before: perhaps that letter about Russell had gotten others int he Society to notice him—maybe even Russell. At any rate, he persisted in explaining just how much time he had spent analyzing Fort’s works: he’d carefully read them all, and copied many notes. A “goodly proportion” of Fort’s citations were from books and periodicals, not only newspapers. Forteanism, he insisted, should be seen as a helpmate of science, opening up new vistas for exploration. Having gotten that off his chest, Markham then pulled back, refusing to criticize the rest of the magazine because he knew he could not do better—which suggests that he may have been contemplating writing science fiction or fantasy himself, had maybe even tried it but not been pleased with the results. The only response was a defensive one from editor John W. Campbell, who interpreted Ley to say that one needed to carefully evaluate news reports, not dispense with them.
Some time in late 1941, Markham definitively found his way to the Fortean Society, writing a long epistle to Thayer that was published in “The Fortean”—as the magazine was called then—in January 1942. This was the sixth issue, leading with Thayer’s notorious editorial “Circus Day is Over.” Between the furor caused by his so-called seditious writing and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it would have been easy enough to overlook Markham’s letter. Still, it took up the better part of two pages—5 of 6 columns—most of it in capital letters. Thayer headed it with a noted about Markham, and a request: Markham had been studying “maritime vanishments” for several years and had come to some conclusions, but was asking the Society to keep them quiet because they were “too dangerous to make public.” He was also seeking additional information on the supposed sinking of the Japanese submarine I-63 on 6 February 1939. (For what it’s worth, the submarine crashed with another Japanese submarine; most of the crew was killed, but there were a few survivors; the wreckage was salvaged in 1940.) Thereafter followed Markham’s own writings.
The letter began with several verbatim reports taken from newspapers about mysterious “ghost” planes seen near Sweden and Finland that could not be identified. Markham one ton to editorialize that the newspapers—facing a wall of silence from authorities—interviewed aviation experts, who claimed that the mysterious crafts maneuvered far better than any European pilot could hope to achieve, and that there was a suggestion these were futuristic planes being tested for a coming war. There is then a parenthetical—the reports of he ghost planes stop at about the time of the inferior conjunction of Venus, in February 1934. But during the period in question, in addition to the Scandinavian reports, there were reports of odd aircrafts in London, flying blind above a snowbound New York, of a blimp that disappeared in West Virginia, and a plane that disappeared in New Jersey.
Alone, this material doesn’t make much sense. But in conjunction with his letter and comments on Russell’s article, it became clear that Markham was collecting data that earth was being visited by inhabitants of Venus. Such a conclusion was not unknown—pun unintentional, but apposite—in the Fortean Society (which says a lot about the Fortean Society), but Markham’s ideas are still notable. A lot of the early talk about flying saucers, in general and in the Fortean Society, linked them to Theosophical ideas about ascended races and space brothers. That was even true of Frederick Hehr, the Fortean engineer who claimed dot be in contact with Venusians—who seemed to communicate mostly in Theosophical modes, such as telepathy. But Markham, like Hehr, thought that the Venusian crafts were physical objects, belonging to this dimension—unlike N. Meade Layne, who thought flying saucers phenomena of the ether, altering their density to emerge into our dimension or leave it. That Markham worried over public reaction—and was, indeed, reticent about his conclusions when he wrote “Unknown”—suggests he may have seen the Venusians not as mere looters, the way Russell had portrayed them, only marginally interested in human beings, or as saviors, the way that Hehr did, but as a distinct threat.
Of course, the United States at that time was dealing with a more obvious battle blamed on earthbound invaders.
After that initial salvo, Markham became a frequent contributor to Thayer’s publication over the next decade—so frequent, in fact, that I have not tried to record every instance of him being mentioned. There are already better ways to understand his Forteanism, and such indexing would be a real slog. It’s worth noting, though, that Markham was among those Forteans who stayed with he Society across the decadal dividing line, starting in the 1940s and continuing into the 1950s.
For all that he was deeply involved with Forteanism, there was a period of quiescence after his initial foray into the community. He sent those two letters to “Unknown,” and the long one to Thayer—and then there was nothing from him until late 1947, almost a full six years. Assuming he was in California when he sent the note to Thayer—and that’s a big assumption—this era of his life would cover his move from California to Colorado (with, perhaps, stops in other places) and likely a change from his relief work (back) to railroad employment. That the Pueblo city directory has him living with a woman named Doris might also indicate that he was ill during this period, or otherwise needed some help. The period also covers the time when he went from using David back to using Norman and his father’s death.
Markham seems to have been lured back into public activity and Forteanism with the flying saucer flap of 1947. Fittingly, the first inklings of his return are coincidental, on a couple of levels. In June 1947, (Fortean) Vincent Gaddis had an article published in (Fortean) Ray Palmer’s “Amazing Stories.” At the time, “Amazing Stories” was chock-a-block with the Shaver Mystery. Gaddis pointed in the other direction: not below the earth, but into the skies. Mostly the article was what Forteans would latter call a “seed catalog”—a list of anomalous reports, strung together, but making no larger point. What’s worth noting, though, is that the first three examples came from Markham’s article in Doubt, and explicitly cited him, the Fortean Society, and Markham’s fear that his information was too dangerous for the public.
As it happened, that very month—though Amazing was probably on newsstands before June—24 June 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw what were described in the press as flying saucers near Mt. Ranier, Washington. Thus was born the flying saucer craze. As anyone will say, the history of flying saucer’s is complex, and still being written, as new documents come to light. For this part of Markham’s story, I have relied on secondary sources, which seem legitimate, rather than digging through masses of material myself.
In the middle of September 1947, Markham—now going by Norman—wrote a letter to the Pueblo Times, which has been uncovered by UFO historian Loren E. Gross. Markham was living in Pueblo then and apparently decided that with the media on the story now was the time to unveil his theory. As quoted extensively by Gross, Markham wrote,
"Since the time of the Bolshevist revolution at the end of World War I the countries not involved in the revolution have had a tendency to look upon the Russia with suspicion. Let any strange occurrence be reported which defies ex- planation and immediately Russia is blamed--especially if this occurrence seems menacing.
"In 1921 (see New York Times index March-July 1921 under 'Accidents, Shipping') a number of ships of all nationalities vanished off the north Atlantic. One of these ships, the Albyan, was a Russian vessel. These disappearances, which took place during one short space of a few weeks, never have been explained. At the time the unproven assertion was made that Soviet ships were stealing them.
"In the winter 1933-34 (New York Times December-February 1933-34) strange aircraft were seen in northern Scandinavia. These craft flew at night and were equipped with lights. Observers were unable to identify them. They vanished or reports on them stopped near the inferior conjunction ofVenus.
"At the time of inferior conjunction, Venus is at its closest to earth for a period of 584 days.
“Russia was blamed for the ‘ghost airplanes’ of Scandinavia. She denied having dispatched them.
"It would have done Russia no good to deny the 'ghost rockets' of 1946. From some time in July 1946, until August and after, there were reports from Sweden and Norway and Denmark on spool-shaped and spindle-shaped things, vomiting fire, which streaked through the sky. In spite of the fact it was sheer foolishness for a country to be carrying on experiments in rocketry under conditions where, because of military censorship in the target countries, the result could not be known. Russia was blamed for the rockets. See papers for July and August, 1946. These rockets were heard of no more after November 17, that year.
'There are some, reading this, who will say that if this is the case then Russia was probably availing herself of the date of the inferior conjunction ofVenus in order that the appearances would be attributed to Venus. But this would not be intelligent; there are very few people on the entire earth who would look for such a periodicity and association.
"Recently we have had a host of reports on 'flying saucers.' What these things are, is unknown. Many have seen them--or at least claim to have done so.
It seems foolish to disregard the observation of Captain Smith and his pilot (United Airlines) and o f the flier Arnold o f Boise who first brought them to public notice. There are more reports than these which seem acceptable. While hysteria unquestionably added many false reports t the record nonetheless many oft he reports on the discs are doubtless upon something actually observed. Whatever these things were, they flew faster than any aircraft so far invented. They seem to have been driven by some unknown, possibly unguessable [Gross’s sic] means o f propulsion. Most reports on them indicate that they made. no sound in flight. After re- ports had been out on them for a while, there were witnesses who came forward to tell of earlier appearances of them.
“The army was investigating reports that at Manitou, Colorado, last May, some employes [sic[ of the Pikes Peak and Manitou railroad had seen at noon some object above Pikes Peak. By description it was like the 'flying saucers.' A Japanese businessman, Tomoyo Okado ofTokyo, said that during B-29 raids on Tokyo on May 23 and 25, 1945, he and others had seen something like 'flying pancakes' which had cruised at 'taxicab speed' in the sky which the bombers had vacated.
"In Denver a Belgium warbride, Mrs. Emmett Cagley, who had recently come to the United States, said that in February 1947, the discs had made their appearance in Beligium. She said the same furore had greeted them there as attended upon them in the United States-and the same doubts and attributions to hysteria and practical joking.
"(See for the Japanese account Associated Press dispatch datelined Tokyo July 12, for Mrs. Cagley's account: Rocky Mountain News July 7, 1947)
"As though following a system of some sort, we find that the Tokyo appearance of the discs fell near to the inferior conjunction ofVenus ofApril I51 1945: that in the Belgian case the appearance of the discs followed inferior conjunction ofVenus of Nov. 17, 1946.
"It is not known what the surface ofVenus may be like. The planet is covered with clouds. That Venus is some 24,000,000 miles from earth at its closest means nothing for the purposes of space travel. According to Hohmann, Richardson, Ley and others who have concerned themselves about future space the cheapest and longest trip from here to Venus would consume 146 days, with the possibility that if hyperbolic orbits were used by the craft the distance could be negotiated in as little as 12 days.
"We have only in the past forty years dreamed mathematically of reaction-driven spacecraft to the other planets. There have been accounts printed from time to time as if some other entities, living somewhere else, had beaten us to space flight.
"In the '60s of the last century there were black rains at Stains, Scotland, some of which were accompanied by enormous appearances of furnace slag washed in on the Scottish seacoast. These slag floes were so copious that in the language o f James Rust, who wrote of them: 'All the blast furnaces in the world could not have [Gross’s note: part of clipping missing] ...is these black rains accorded with the periods of close approaches ofVenus. This may predicate metallurgical work on the sea bottom.
"For the purpose of opening a speculation it might be thought that an older culture somewhere else has long depleted its own planetary natural resources and is obliged to go elsewhere to find mineral raw material, metals and the like. It would be thought the reason why we have never caught them at work on the sea bottom When one thinks of it, space craft, which would have to be hermetically sealed in order to voyage through space, could just as easily function as submersibles if rigged to do so-the use of ballast tanks would make such a usage possible to them
"In our haste to blame these things on Russia we are only overlooking a series of phenomena which may be of the most interesting character and of the highest conceivable importance to us in times to come.
"Suppose that we succeed in some day making space craft. That is, if our stupid haste to kill each other with atomic bombs and disease germs does not forever forestall such a possibility. And suppose the phenomena of ‘ghost airplanes,' 'ghost rockets,' and 'flying saucers' are the writing on the wall which tells a tale of extremely well-advanced, highly intelligent outsiders.’
“If such appearances accord so well with close approaches of Venus, it is
possible that planet has a great civilization upon it.”
Markham followed this letter with one to the Fortean Society. By his calculations, there should have been some vanishings starting around July of 1947, and he thought he’d found one. Thayer did not reprint the letter, but summarized it thusly in in Doubt 19, October of 1947:
“MFS Markham (our own Maritime Vanishment expert) was expecting to hear of an epidemic of vanishing vessels between July 5 and the next inferior conjunction of Venus. He links the discs with the expected phenomena and points with excusable self satisfaction at the burning ship off Sonoma County, Calif.,--no trace or record to be found by investigators.”
(The sinking occurred on 4 July 1947; a forest ranger on look-out duty reported what he thought was a burning tanker, but searches of the area subsequently uncovered no evidence of something that large burning or sinking in the area. The mystery was widely reported by the Associated Press.)
Over the next couple of years, Markham continued to write extensively on the subject. (Thayer told Don Bloch in January 1949, “I’ve known Markham for years. He’s harmless--but you should see his bulging folders in the archives!!!”) Aerial anomalies, and their relationship to mysterious disappearances continued to vex him. In February 1948, there was a large explosion over Norcatur, Kansas—big enough to break windows and shake buildings. The report, of course, caught the attention of many Forteans, who sent in clippings. Thayer, by this time, was already fed up with flying saucers and dealt with the subject only grudgingly. Markham was in his wheelhouse.
He wrote to the army, apparently an extensive collection of letters, though I have only seen them reported, not their contents. His first letter was dated 20 February 1920 and suggested that the event might be related to the position of the moon: perhaps there was a civilization on earth’s satellite. (This position had been abandoned by many other Forteans at this late date.) The army passed the correspondence on to the Air Force, which passed the letters to the group inside it charged with investigating flying saucers; that group worked under the name Project Sign. According to some histories, early on Sign was divided into different factions, one of which leaned turned the hypothesis that earth was being visited by beings from another planet; that may account for Markham’s letters not being thrown away.
At any rate, they found their way to meteor specialist Lincoln LaPaz. The scientist thought Markham’s theories too “fantastic,” but did concede that Markham was right in having compiled a number of unexplained incidents. (There’s also some speculation among UFO historians that Markham’s method of calculating reports against the position of nearby planets may have influenced the procedures of Project Sign.) In the end, LaPaz thought the thing exploding over Kansas was a bolide, but he couldn’t say definitively. Markham was clearly not happy with what he heard back from the military, remarking to Thayer—quoted in Doubt 21, June 1948—“Too bad when we have to depend upon the press for descriptions, the army for information, the public for reaction and science for explanation . . . It’s like a dream sequence where the urge is important but the wrong things all come up.” Markham, it seems, was becoming dyspeptic about science—a change from his views eight years before.
The month after that Doubt appeared, on 15 July 1948, Markham wrote to Eric Frank Russell. Although Markham had commented upon Russell’s article in 1940—and chastised him for anti-science views he was now developing—this seems to be the first letter between the two, a fan letter that laid out Markham’s thinking about galactic events:
“Been following with much interest your current run in ASTOUNDING (“Dreadful Sanctuary”)—and am again gaining grim satisfaction from the stuff you put into your stories. The one about Lucifer (Displaced Person) in Weird Tales was not missed either, with its ironical jibe at the stranglehold of religion over commonsense.
“I seem to get the picture of a community of interests shared by us: —I hold entirely to the acceptance that he people on this earth are planetary dejecta—but your idea of the Chinese, etc., being aboriginal stock on this earth is an angle I need thought about.
“In fact, the stories you have written—that is, that I could find—have always struck a note in me no other science-fictionist has so far been able to hit.
“Putting you on the back is not, however, the entire purpose of this letter (nor am I looking for a quarter since I already have one). What I am trying to get to is, that I believe you and I are both pretty much acceptors of this idea: this earth is visited with great regularly from without by aliens so cautious of contact that we shall never meet them face to face—and live, or return to tell about it.
“For a long time in my own blundering way I’ve been performing experiments with the timing of phenomena which to my mind have to do with outsiders, and at times I hit some results which give much to think about.
“I’ve been lining up the data with the synodic periods of Venus and Mars as yardsticks—and several hundred different reports on fundamentally relatable occurrences, though bound to develop all kinds of accidental juxtapositions, still provide a few instances which look like cut-and-dried cases of real relationship.
I am earnestly desirous of getting somewhere with this stuff of mine, and it is almost impossible for me to get into New York City for perusal of the Fortean files
“I would like to propose that we exchange correspondence, and would be glad to show you what kind of headway I’ve been making in return for any data you can give men which might be along the line of my ‘investigations.’
“Believe that if you and I could get together postally, over a long period of time we could achieve some results not possible to either one of us while we stand alone. In other words I believe I’ve got what you want, and vice versa.
“The kind of stuff you put into OVER THE BORDER, s the kind of stuff I’m talking about. I’ve changed my mind about astronomers—I’ve been privileged (if gaining that kind of education is a privilege) to meet some. I’ve never seen such a concentrated, conservative bunch in my life—And with space-travel in the offing, their blindness may be dangerous in the extreme.
“I believe I can provide you, in time, with some speculations base don the actual order of occurrence of data, which, if handled in a sober manner, a soundly convincing sort of manner, would not only startle hello out of a number of smugly complacent bastards who in order to keep their dogh [sic] coming in would turn their backs on the most vital ideas.
“Correspondence would develop the trend of the matter, however—but if I could have a personal visit with you sometime, I could show you in the space of a few hours, things it would take a month of writing to lay bare.
“At any rate, I’d really love to swap letters with you on the subject of outsiders, their maggotings—that is, if you’ve the time, the inclination, and are interested.
“Nope—this stuff ain’t ‘crystal ball’ like that Shaver ordure—I get my results from long thought and from the end products of a lot of drudgery with comparisons. There are no ‘voices’ mixed up in it.
“Nor—astrology. (which might be all right, and sometimes I think it is. But it’s not my metier.).
“Sincerely, and with a lot of respect,
“Norman Garett Markham
MFS”
Apparently, Russell put Markham off—at least, Russell’s collection of papers at the University of Liverpool gives no evidence of a correspondence developing between them. But the letter is still revelatory and important. It reveals that Markham had a science-fiction inflected (or purplish) imagination: no one sees the aliens and lives to tell about it! He’d also been influenced by Thayer, in thinking that astronomers had sacrificed a labile imagination to keep the flow of filthy lucre unimpeded. The letter is important because it marks the mid-point of his transformation as a Fortean. He started out in the mold of Roy Lavender or Maynard Shipley, thinking Fort a source of scientific data (and only a few usable theories). He ended up so closely embracing alternative modes of knowledge—not astrology, but psychic compulsions and, in his way, voices—that even though they were meant to ultimately give information for the scientific gristmill—he remained a rationalist, just using different tools—that he was quite far from what counted as a “sober manner, a soundly convincing sort of manner.” Here, in the summer of 1948, he was somewhere in between: scientists were too “smugly complacent,” but astrology and Shaver’s updated version of Theosophical voice-hearing and intuition were off-limits.
That summer, Markham also seemed to find another outlet for his views. The (Fortean) editor and writer August Derleth produced a periodical called “The Arkham Sampler,” which was rooted in Derleth’s first love—H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos. Markham, of course, was also a Lovecraft fan. The third issue of the sampler included an article by Markham called “Strangers from Hesperus.” I have not seen it, but according to the October 1948 “Fantasy Review,” in it Markham—the name, it suddenly appears to me, so much like Arkham—“plumps for Venus as the origin of the Flying Saucers.” Hesperus derives from the Greek word for the evening star: Venus.
Markham continued to deepen his theory into 1949, continuing to use Fort as a source of ideas. In Doubt 25, from May 1949, Thayer published an essay by Markham. Likely, Markham wrote his piece in response to Thayer’s recent call for the founding of a Fortean University—subtly acronymized F.U.—and his announcement that there might be degrees associated with certain courses of study, based on Fortean analyses of particular problems. By 1949, though, Thayer’s enthusiasm for a Fortean University was running a bit dry, which may account for his not tagging Markham’s essay as a contribution to the F.U. Or, perhaps, Markham had decided to write up what he was learning for some other purposes.
The essay was titled “‘The Riddle of the Monstrator’ A Fortean Speculation’” and ran for two pages. Monstrator was what Fort named—in “The Book of the Damned”—an planet-like body thought to exist between the sun and Mercury. As Fort reconstructed the history, it was first seen in the 1760s; later, Urbain Le Verrier calculated—based on eccentricities in Mercury’s orbit—that such a planet must exist and called it Vulcan. (This proposed planet would become an object of interest to Theosophists in the 20th century.) Based on the various reports cited by Fort—as well as the lack of reports from other observers—Markham deduces that Monstrator was not between Mercury and the sun, but much closer to the earth, and very large. He goes on to compare its controversial history with that of Neith, a proposed moon of Venus that had been seen a few times but could not be confirmed.
The problem, Markham said, was the observers assumed that they were looking at planets—objects without volition, following a pre-ordained course. But what if they were looking at something more temporary—that could explain why some people saw Monstrator (and Neith), and no one could now find them in the heavens. That might make sense of another anomaly: Monstrator was said to be a bit obscure, as though it had an atmosphere, even as it was much too small to maintain one. Could this have bene a tail, like a comet’s—maybe, though that would have been hard to see. More likely, then, it was the exhaust of . . . well, of a spacecraft. Neith, he suspected, was the mother-ship, Monstrator its offspring, and both may have been launched by a highly intelligent—but peaceful!—civilization that inhabited our solar system. We thought we humans were created in God’s image, but there may be others out there, too—not just in science fiction, but in fact. “If by some unbelievable miracle--something even more incredible than ‘Neith’ and ‘Monstrator,’ and all the other titanic innominata of space--we avoid the war that is coming and which carries in it the seeds of our cultural annihilation, we may grow up enough, some time, to invade space with space-ships.” And then we would meet these outsiders.
There was no doubt that, for Markham—unlike many other Theosophically-inclined Forteans and UFO enthusiasts—these extra-terrestrial beings were material. Again, he seems to have had no truck with the ehterian ideas of N. Meade Layne and his coterie. The point was made in July 1950 (Doubt 29), when Thayer was reporting on a mysterious blob that had washed up on the shores of Oregon. An expert quoted in a newspaper story said that it was whale blubber, because only whales grew to such a size. (“That’s simple enough, isn’t it?”, Thayer quipped.) Markham, Thayer noted, had his own speculation: mightn’t it be the pilot of a Venusian space craft? By his reckoning, the crafts were diving into the sea—maybe one of them had crashed. Certainly a Venusian would be unrecognizable to a wildlife expert.
Also clear from Markham’s writing is that he was quite pessimistic about the survival of the human race after World War II—the cynicism seems of a piece with his growing distrust of science as an institution. Already he had criticized humans for wasting their talents on war, rather than the exploration of space—and the meeting of our peaceful, or larcenous neighbors. By 1952, this defeatism was shining through. Doubt 35 (January 1952) published a poem by him—incidentally proving he had not given up on literary endeavors. “Too Late for Dreams,” it was called:
It’s later than we thought!
Across the shrunken world a shadow creeps
And prayers are powerless against
The frightful fear that curdles in its path.
Oh, later than we dreamed!
Mad prophets bawl puerilities abroad!--
Their jangling can all sum down to this:
The lot is cast.
Great thieves have split the swag before the crime.
Each who thought he had a precious neck
Has thought his neck more precious than all others’.
Those who survived by finding boots to lick
Can find no further service in such fawning.
The war’s been planned:
The clever lies all told.
Oh, that we had more time!
Would that we could re-write the play and change
The stupid statesmen for conclaves of men!
Would that we could
Put clamps upon all scientific zeal--
Ostracize the cunning and the vain--
Lay low all greedy schemers--
Strip off uniforms--
Kill as mad dogs the fiends who led us here!
Would that we could have ended out and slain
All those who battened on the grain of treason!
Too late—too late!
Where mankind might have walked in dignity
A pack of mean-eyed mandrills will be found;
Where liars made their fortunes telling lies,
Where immorality gave keys to power,
Where brutal selfishness grabbed up the reins
A lousy mob of frightened ape-like beasts
Will scream and lay about them right and left
Without regard to what or whom they hit.
The end! The end of all familiar things!
We rationalized this life like schizophrenes--
The sumptuous lushness of our foolish dreams
Will turn to a hard and jagged bed of stones.
Our paradises will turn into hells--
And those who cherished softness as a drug
Will fall and be trampled by the grinding boots
Of simpletons driven to panic by the fear
Of death lose on us by our vapid Great!
A few months later, in Doubt 37 (June 1952), Markham tied his pessimism to his Forteanism: Forteans were clear-eyed enough to see the world’s possible destruction, while those in charge dismissed such apocalyptic yammering even as though steered the world toward oblivion. Thayer quoted him—probably from a longer missive: “For my own good, and for everyone’s, I nominate Mount Pelee as the official symbol of the Fortean Society. It is a terrible symbol of the unpredictable. It is a concrete emblem of those things we know in our hearts to be true, though others may reason them away. It should serve to remind us that dogmatic assumption is just as deadly for those who prate it, as for those who servilely accept. The people of St. Pierre were terrified of the noises and the shocks, but the scientists KNEW Pelee would never explode! Mount Pelee is a monument to Charles Fort!”
It is doubtful that Thayer was particularly fond of Markham’s poem. It is not very good. It was clearer than his more recent essays, though, and expressed, in simple form, ideas that were consonant with Thayer’s—the stupidity of people, and particularly their leaders. But he said later that he did it mostly to spur Forteanism in new directions. After he lost interest in the Fortean University, he had a brief flirtation with promoting the Fortean arts. Science fiction was one form of it, he acknowledged, but there could be others, too, and he hoped that Markham’s poems—as well as some other pieces he published in that issue—would show the way. Nothing really came of this endeavor, either, besides giving Markham a chance to vent his anger—an anger that had led him to out and out ridicule of science. In Doubt 43 (February 1954), he sent in a clipping about a can of tomato juice that was heard ticking, and authorities who buried, dug, shot, and hatcheted it, only to find . . . regular tomato juice. Markham simply wrote, “Scientific Method!”
Not that Markham had yet given up on convincing the world of his theories—though he was perhaps losing a sense of what counted as a good argument. In Doubt 41 (July 1953), he linked a rain of mud over Long Island to the inferior conjunction of Venus. And the same June 1952 issue of Doubt carried the letter that Markham sent to “Life” magazine about a remarkable photograph he took in Clovis, New Mexico, where he was living. A full version of the letter follows, but the short version is this: Markham was psychically compelled to take some photographs during an electrical storm, during which time he saw something that was not lightning, and that blinked the Morse Code for “Hi” to him—an event he could not explain away as a coincidence, and which his reputation and graphological analysis of his handwriting would prove was not a hoax. It was the psychic data, the reliance on handwriting analysis, and the raising of a minor coincidence—lights blinking during an electrical storm!—to the level of world-historical importance that suggest most strongly Markham had drifted far, far from his 1940-concern that Forteans too easily dismissed scientists.
“Dear Sir:--
“The enclosed photograph is not a fake as can be easily determined by anyone who knows my reputation as an amateur photographer.
“At about 4:30 a.m., April 21, I had the hunch to go up on the ridgepole of the house to photograph a minor electrical storm then in progress.
During the time I was up there I had the impulse to make a time exposure photograph toward the Clovis Hotel which is approximately SW x S of the house.
“At about the time of the enclosed time-exposure, something shot out of a cloud to the southward, traveling east. The cloud from which it emerged was highly charged. There were occasional bright, diffuse flashes of lightning inside it. The thing that emerged went horizontally at tremendous velocity--perhaps something like 15 degrees in one tenth of a second.
“When this photograph was developed, a streak turned up in it, visible toward the top of the picture. Just above this streak there is a sequence of dots, 4-2. This sequence is almost exactly in the center of the picture. This was not a scratch on the film: inspection of the negative reveals a dark streak.
“Now here is a series of coincidences which may be significant.
“I am a member of the Fortean Society, NYC. For about fifteen years I have concerned myself with investigation of the possibility that things comes here from outside space. I am also a morse telegrapher. That is my trade. No one pays money for the kind of investigations that are my hobby so, by working for a railroad--the ATSF--I make my living.
“Does it not strike you as odd, that at the time I had my camera open--the exposure is about 1 minute--I had to pick that precise time when something, conceivably NOT an airplane, should shoot past the instrument, and ‘blink’ me an ‘HI,’ which in Morse argot is either a sign for amusement, or a greeting.
“I have had articles published on the subject of possible outsiders. Very few to be sure. Most appeared in DOUBT, published by the Fortean Society.
“The thing that shot out from under the cloud, as before mentioned, may have been one of several objects in the sky at the time.
“My impression is that something from somewhere else, knowing I am who I am, either wigwagged me a friendly or derisive greeting and passed on.
“Data:”
description of camera
430 am april 21
his apartment at 501 pile st., clovis NM
too fast for a plane
too cloudy for meteor
“I have what is termed a psychic nature. The enclosed example of my writing, when submitted to a competent graphologist, will assure you of that. I had the impulse, obeyed it, and this is the result.
“Take it or leave it.
“Yours, Norman G. Markham
“In a postscript to YS, the writer adds:
“Neglected to mention that, whatever this thing was that left the streak, it was invisible to my eyes--or at least I did not see it. It made no sound that I can remember. There was a pretty complete silence at time [sic], broken only by occasional mutters of thunder.”
Markham continued working with Fortean data, correlating it to an increasing number of astronomical markers. In August 1953, he wrote to Thayer from Denver about a new set of connections he had discovered. (Published in Doubt 44, April 1954.) The letter is a bit hard to parse, but it seems that Markham had become interested in the motion of Jupiter, and was creating tables of its synodic period as well as of other orbital relationships between it and the earth. Some of these he could correlate with material that had been in Fort’s notes—reprinted in Doubt—about odd things appearing in the craters of the moon. Others he correlated with a different datum from Doubt, about black, three-legged worms founding living in the Russian snows back in October 1827. That date was right about the time Jupiter made one type of approach to earth, and Markham speculated “Joveans, pestered, belike, by bugs native to their planet, and which pullulated threateningly during the 311 days it took their ultravelocity craft to get here, decided, soft-hearted people, to kick them off into Russia (it was winter and they’d live a while longer in any case) and swept them out of a hatch.”
Thayer, who seems to have been receiving a steady stream of letters from Markham, recognized the change. When Markham moved to Colorado, around 1953, Thayer warned fellow Colorado Fortean Don Bloch that he might be approached—though Thayer was also interested to hear back about a man whom he only knew through the mail: “Perhaps screwy David G Markham, who has appeared in DOUBT, is now in Denver. Sooner or later he will look you up. Aside from letters, he is an unknown quantity. Let me know what you think of him.”
Apparently, Bloch liked Markham; at least, that was the impression that Markham got. In September 1954, he approached Bloch about co-authoring a book with him. He had a lot of data, but not the time to pull it altogether—he’d lost his railroad job and was washing dishes now. “I’m writing you,” he told Bloch, “because, like Thayer, you’ve got somewhat of an insight into my ‘soul’ and know me better than do any of these people who surround me. To them I’m an enigmatic if not nutty sort, but I think you know better.” Bloch seems to have put him off, but nicely. More than a year later, in December 1955, Markham wrote again. (They’d met in person at times, too.) He said that, at Bloch’s suggestion, he was going full-bore writing a book, in the course of which he had indexed the three thousand reports he’d collected over the years. Some of his time, too, was being sent trying to support J. G. Graham, who’d been accused of blowing up an airplane. Markham thought him innocent—he doesn’t say why in the letter, but one expects that it has something to do with his theories of space visitors, perhaps attributing the explosion to Venusians or Jovians rather than a human. Graham’s trial was held in Colorado, so Markham could have followed it easily.
Markham mentioned to Bloch that some of his time, too, was being spent keeping Thayer up-to-date on his work—and apparently he was doing so at a frenzied pace by the middle of the 1950s. In Doubt 50, November 1955, Thayer admitted to being overwhelmed. Under the title “Markham erupts,” he wrote, “Out of Denver comes a flow of Forteana, 17 epistles wide, 73 pages long, and depth beyond sounding, all from MFS Markham whose contributions you have admired here before. All this is original stuff and does not count the body of press clips which came along in between.
“You will have the opportunity to read a good part of Markham’s cogitations in future issues, but in this cramped space we can only touch the high spots of his gleanings from the news.”
There followed a long list of articles, laced with Thayer’s commentary: Markham sent a clip about mentally retarded children being ignored by society; Thayer responded that those in charge of the country weren’t ignoring them—they were causing the retardation. Markham sent a clip about the military making room for the “sub-normal”; Thayer responded, they better, that’s all who will be left. Markham sent in a clip about a Pueblo man, found dead in Los Angeles; the coroner there ruled the cause a heart attack, but once the body was sent to Colorado, the Pueblo coroner found a wound in the gut and bullet. Markham sent in a clip about a Denver principal asking parents to prevent their kids from bringing guns and knives to school; Thayer quipped it must be to “keep the students’ pockets from bulging. (I don’t get it either.) Markham sent in two clippings that Thayer chose to pair: one in which a North Carolina Representative said the USA would only defeat communism if it had a strong ideology based on absolute morality; another in which the army was organizing college courses to make killing as efficient as possible. Another clipping noted that Russia did not have the equivalent of civil defense; Thayer said that now would seem the time to invade. There was also a clipping about someone putting needles in asparagus sold near a U.S. air base in Morocco, and a fantastic increase in childhood ulcers right after Colorado Springs got television.
Thayer came back to Markham’s (continuing) flood of material two issues later, Doubt 52 (May 1956). He only sampled one piece, though—about an engineer who said planes may someday have to be designed to last only for a few hours. (All the better to sell more, Thayer must have thought.) Thayer said he was trying to find space for the rest of Markham’s out-put, but that doesn’t seem fully convincing. The issue had some filler—a long piece on the Cook-Peary controversy over who reached the North Pole first, for example. He would never get around to publishing long excerpts from Markham—even as he continued to hold him up as an exemplar of Forteanism for specializing in one particular area. (Toward the end of Thayer’s run, he was getting so much material that he was looking for people to specialize in some particular area so that they could handle all the clippings on the subject and wrote up a summary. Jay Scandrett had done just that for government fraud, waste, and abuse.)
Markham was still contributing, though, as late as 1958, a year before the Fortean Society, and perhaps to its bitter end. Indeed, Markham continued in his Fortean vein beyond the Fortean Society and into new periodicals for weird tales and Forteanism.
American Forteanism had no institutional home after Thayer’s death. There was some talk that his wife might keep the Fortean Society afloat, but that went nowhere. Then, in the mid-1960s, there were a couple of different attempts to establish large Fortean organizations. One was by Ivan Sanderson; another was by a pair of brothers, Ronald and Paul Willis. Originally, they thought of calling their magazine Question, but opted, in the end, to go with International Fortean Organization Journal, or INFO Journal. The first issue came out in the summer of 1966; shortly thereafter, they purchased printing equipment and established their own press—The Golden Goblin Press. In the autumn of that year, they also started printing a weird fiction ‘zine called Anubis—Weird Tales itself, like the Fortean Society, defunct. There was some overlap in the two—and one of the points of overlap was Markham.
I’m not sure how the Willis brothers came in contact with Markham, but he was present in both the early issues of INFO and Anubis. I do not have access to the first issues of INFO right now—I looked at them many years ago—but online sources indicate that Markham kept the brothers up-to-date with a rash of material. They also put him in touch with Damon Knight, who was putting together a biography of Charles Fort and had been intrigued by Markham’s letter in Doubt 44, as well as his general approach of looking for correlations and periodicity in Fortean data. In a letter to Knight, Markham mad it clear that he was starting his Forteanism from scratch—he’d lost his issues of Doubt and the many (many) letters he’d sent to Thayer were also lost: at least, no one knew where they were after Thayer’s death, despite plenty of speculation. Markham had received very few letters back from Thayer, and these, too, had apparently been lost.
The first issue of Anubis contained two poems by Markham, as well as a short story—he’d not given up on literary Forteanism. The poems were in a similar style to the one he had published in Doubt. The first was called “Realism”:
I see gnawed horrors passing by
In one unending stream--
I see with blinding clarity,
And know it is no dream:
From Hell they come
Through Hell they move
To final Hell supreme.
The second, “Last Words,’ was much longer—73 lines. It developed out Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and told the story of a man who’d wandered into some kind of cursed area, where he was haunted but he voices of the Old Ones, on their way to steal his soul. The short story—“The Effigy”—also riffed on the Mythos, though combining it with Markham’s own obsession: a Russian astronaut visited Venus, then returned to the earth with some of that culture’s books and an effigy that was a monstrous Venusian. The books were such that those who read them were driven insane.
The next issue, copyrighted in 1967, contained only one piece by Markham. (There was also a Fortean article by Vincent Gaddis.) “Tit for Tat” was the longest story yet published by Markham. It started as a combination of Fortean anomalies and Biercian structure: a man uses the hunting season as a cover for his murderous sprees. Only this time, the rifle he used mysteriously—anomalously—appears in his home, twice. The man imagines his leg broken; a shot is fired. The scene fades out and next up is a coroner, who finds that the man died for no apparent reason. Then comes the Lovecraftian epilogue: the murdered hunter was no man, but a visitor from Jupiter, able to regenerate itself even after being shot. The Jovian was visiting earth on a hunting expedition, and rated killing the murderer one of his best triumphs.
By that second issue, Anubis’s connections to Forteanism were being made clear: there was a slip one could pull out and send in to subscribe to INFO Journal. Anubis also republished Robert Barbour Johnson’s history of the Fortean Society and broadside attack on Thayer. The third issue made the connections even clearer, the back cover a full page advertisement for INFO. Markham’s contribution was pure Weird Tales, though—about a finicky man who appears at a diner and drives everyone around him to senseless fighting and murder. It turns out he is in the service of some god, and these dead will become its revenants.
The fourth issue proved to be the last for Anubis—though there were plans for more. It would be the last for Markham’s original material, too. The magazine had slipped into an erratic publishing schedule, so that the fourth issue appeared in the autumn of 1968—by which time Markham was dead. His posthumously published story was “The Murals.” It told of paintings so horrible that looking at them caused the death of one man; when the coroners came, they saw that the murals were demonic—able to incorporate into themselves flesh from the world. They left, unable to deal with the strangeness.
It’s not a perfect epitaph—there are no Venusians—but it was the one that Markham received.
