Fort thought that humanity was controlled by beings beyond the Earth's atmosphere.
This was in the mid-1910s, when he was working on the manuscript that would become The Book of the Damned but was then called "X." X was the name of the force, projected from Mars, or some other distant place, that compelled us to play out our dramas. The stars are projectors, we their movies.
Tiffany Thayer twisted this notion around, finding the directors closer to home.** It wasn't Martians controlling us, it was the OSS. They were bureaucrats were the scriptwriters, we merely actors.
The paranoia is not surprising. Michael D. Gordin, in his book on Immanuel Velikovsky, argues that the Cold War injected debates over science and pseudoscience with a healthy dose of paranoia. Thayer was reflecting his times.
But the paranoia should not be dismissed, either. I reviewed Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men two years ago, and he used paranoia as a tool to productively explore the UFO sub-culture. Sure, he said, the government is interested in flying saucers--but often only to spread disinformation. They can make interest in the saucers work for them, hiding important tests or throwing off critics. It is an interesting, if not fully proved, argument.
Thayer isn't quite as straight-forward in his argument. He clearly wants to make villains of the government (as well as an establishment that is in cahoots with it). He starts off and closes his rant with the claim that the Fortean Society has no official stand on what the flying saucers are--hoaxes, hallucinations, visitors. But then clearly advances his notion that we are all the OSS's puppets.
This was in the mid-1910s, when he was working on the manuscript that would become The Book of the Damned but was then called "X." X was the name of the force, projected from Mars, or some other distant place, that compelled us to play out our dramas. The stars are projectors, we their movies.
Tiffany Thayer twisted this notion around, finding the directors closer to home.** It wasn't Martians controlling us, it was the OSS. They were bureaucrats were the scriptwriters, we merely actors.
The paranoia is not surprising. Michael D. Gordin, in his book on Immanuel Velikovsky, argues that the Cold War injected debates over science and pseudoscience with a healthy dose of paranoia. Thayer was reflecting his times.
But the paranoia should not be dismissed, either. I reviewed Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men two years ago, and he used paranoia as a tool to productively explore the UFO sub-culture. Sure, he said, the government is interested in flying saucers--but often only to spread disinformation. They can make interest in the saucers work for them, hiding important tests or throwing off critics. It is an interesting, if not fully proved, argument.
Thayer isn't quite as straight-forward in his argument. He clearly wants to make villains of the government (as well as an establishment that is in cahoots with it). He starts off and closes his rant with the claim that the Fortean Society has no official stand on what the flying saucers are--hoaxes, hallucinations, visitors. But then clearly advances his notion that we are all the OSS's puppets.
From Doubt 31 (1951): 50-51.
"The Fortean Society has no official “Stand” upon, or explanation of, any body of data, whether it be Flying Saucers, Floating Stenches, Falling Fishes, or anything else. Fort never explained anything, but only hazarded theories in ridicule of the ‘official’ ones advanced by Authority. Hence, the only stand the Society could take on Flying Saucers would be to find the holes in the Authoritative Scientific explanation of the phenomena if such an explanation had been advanced. None has been. The people most likely to profit by the publicity on the this subject have been at pains from the beginning to contradict each other and to deny on Tuesday everything they said on Monday. This practice has been ‘Fortean’ in its results, inasmuch as the ‘question’ is thus kept in suspense, and no final judgment handed down, but one doubts that the object or purpose of Authority has been philosophical or even scientific. One suspects that the purpose is to keep the public in a state of confusion, but always looking up--high up into the sky where “Peace on Earth” is no longer to be seen because PEACE IS A RED PLOT.
“Fort’s method in assailing preposterous explanations was to advance acceptances equally fantastic, and then to ‘prove’ them as conclusively as his adversaries ever ‘proved’ anything. In the case of the so-called Flying Saucers, the Society’s work on those lines is being done for it by the opposition. We should be quintessential idiots to enter the nutty-notion-fest which has been flourishing since July 3, 1947, old style. We could not be nuttier than they. Not even Fort himself could match the follies we have accumulated from even the most staid and respectable sections of the press through this campaign. We have no choice but to let them rave, only calling attention--as we have in DOUBT--to the enormous amount of free space and time being donated to a subject which could not get two inches in the press if the release came from the Fortean Society; and calling attention to the quality of the witnesses--newspaper publishers, holders of public office, military commanders, insurance executives, air-line operators, etc., etc., etc.
“The only agency known which could command the space and time, the brains,paper and ink, devoted to this topic since it began is the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D. C. This is the bureau which the public has heard the least about in the past twenty years. It is what the Brain Trust used to be--with differences. It is the place where is determined what is good for people to think, and where the means of making them think it is implemented and set in motion It is staffed on the one hand by Dollar A Year Men, who have everything to gain by manipulating the public mind, and on the other hand by the best-paid expert semanticists, word-slingers, and public-relations counselors in the world.
“There the world’s future is planned for at least three generations to come. There is decided what the newspapers are to print when. There is decided every question of peace or war or life or death for millions of people--strategically.
“If the OSS invents an atom-bomb, and later a hydrogen-bomb, the laboratories hasten to make something that will pass as such.
“If the OSS decides that Hitler shall commit suicide and Mussolini be hacked to death beyond recognition--bodies are found--and the press services announces [sic] that these things have occurred.
“If the OSS wishes to justify the waste of billions of dollars in the armed services for bouncing beams off the moon, for a radar network over the continent to protect it from sea-gulls and ‘angels,’ for guided missiles that can’t hit a barn door, for rockets that go up but never (?) come down, and decides that what the way to do it is by making the tax-payers think either that the Reds have better guided missiles or that Mars is about to invade the Earth, then masses of newspaper publishers, holders of public office, law enforcement officials, military commanders, insurance executives, air-line operators, etc., etc., etc., are glad to oblige by seeing Flying Saucers.
“The vast body of date grouped under this head and by the press is so various that it defies intelligent study. Anything and everything seen in the sky is now a ‘saucer,’ so that attempting to classify the material would be like trying to separate grains of sand from the Sahara, the Mojave, the Atlantic and the River Jordan after they had been whirled together an hour or two in a cyclotron.
“For the same reasons, every Fortean is at liberty to take his own ‘stand’ on Flying Saucers. Your Secretary has no opinion to advance.”
"The Fortean Society has no official “Stand” upon, or explanation of, any body of data, whether it be Flying Saucers, Floating Stenches, Falling Fishes, or anything else. Fort never explained anything, but only hazarded theories in ridicule of the ‘official’ ones advanced by Authority. Hence, the only stand the Society could take on Flying Saucers would be to find the holes in the Authoritative Scientific explanation of the phenomena if such an explanation had been advanced. None has been. The people most likely to profit by the publicity on the this subject have been at pains from the beginning to contradict each other and to deny on Tuesday everything they said on Monday. This practice has been ‘Fortean’ in its results, inasmuch as the ‘question’ is thus kept in suspense, and no final judgment handed down, but one doubts that the object or purpose of Authority has been philosophical or even scientific. One suspects that the purpose is to keep the public in a state of confusion, but always looking up--high up into the sky where “Peace on Earth” is no longer to be seen because PEACE IS A RED PLOT.
“Fort’s method in assailing preposterous explanations was to advance acceptances equally fantastic, and then to ‘prove’ them as conclusively as his adversaries ever ‘proved’ anything. In the case of the so-called Flying Saucers, the Society’s work on those lines is being done for it by the opposition. We should be quintessential idiots to enter the nutty-notion-fest which has been flourishing since July 3, 1947, old style. We could not be nuttier than they. Not even Fort himself could match the follies we have accumulated from even the most staid and respectable sections of the press through this campaign. We have no choice but to let them rave, only calling attention--as we have in DOUBT--to the enormous amount of free space and time being donated to a subject which could not get two inches in the press if the release came from the Fortean Society; and calling attention to the quality of the witnesses--newspaper publishers, holders of public office, military commanders, insurance executives, air-line operators, etc., etc., etc.
“The only agency known which could command the space and time, the brains,paper and ink, devoted to this topic since it began is the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D. C. This is the bureau which the public has heard the least about in the past twenty years. It is what the Brain Trust used to be--with differences. It is the place where is determined what is good for people to think, and where the means of making them think it is implemented and set in motion It is staffed on the one hand by Dollar A Year Men, who have everything to gain by manipulating the public mind, and on the other hand by the best-paid expert semanticists, word-slingers, and public-relations counselors in the world.
“There the world’s future is planned for at least three generations to come. There is decided what the newspapers are to print when. There is decided every question of peace or war or life or death for millions of people--strategically.
“If the OSS invents an atom-bomb, and later a hydrogen-bomb, the laboratories hasten to make something that will pass as such.
“If the OSS decides that Hitler shall commit suicide and Mussolini be hacked to death beyond recognition--bodies are found--and the press services announces [sic] that these things have occurred.
“If the OSS wishes to justify the waste of billions of dollars in the armed services for bouncing beams off the moon, for a radar network over the continent to protect it from sea-gulls and ‘angels,’ for guided missiles that can’t hit a barn door, for rockets that go up but never (?) come down, and decides that what the way to do it is by making the tax-payers think either that the Reds have better guided missiles or that Mars is about to invade the Earth, then masses of newspaper publishers, holders of public office, law enforcement officials, military commanders, insurance executives, air-line operators, etc., etc., etc., are glad to oblige by seeing Flying Saucers.
“The vast body of date grouped under this head and by the press is so various that it defies intelligent study. Anything and everything seen in the sky is now a ‘saucer,’ so that attempting to classify the material would be like trying to separate grains of sand from the Sahara, the Mojave, the Atlantic and the River Jordan after they had been whirled together an hour or two in a cyclotron.
“For the same reasons, every Fortean is at liberty to take his own ‘stand’ on Flying Saucers. Your Secretary has no opinion to advance.”
There's a hidden theme here worth bringing out. In his Foundation series, Isaac Asimov had his characters trying to identify the home of the group chosen to shepherd humanity through its dark ages. At one point, it is thought that the base is in the capital, although it is supposed to be distant, because a circle has no beginning or end: the most distant place might be the first one. There are strong Fortean echoes here, with Fort's famous quip that one measures a circle beginning anywhere. Tiffany Thayer seems to be playing the same game, finding the controllers in the capital.
