Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  106. “Phantasm” was chosen over “phantom,” because the latter term implied a visual component, whereas the cases could involve any of the senses, or even what was called a “diffused sensibility” (HP 1:xix).

  107. Gauld, Founders, 290.

  108. For a full, and balanced, early intellectual history of the term, see Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy: 1870–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  109. Gauld, Founders, 18.

  110. Bertrand Méheust, Somnambulisme et médiumnité (1784–1930) (Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo Pour Le Progrés de la Connaissance, 1999), 2:320.

  111. Ibid., 2:426.

  112. Upton Sinclair, Mental Radio, preface by Albert Einstein (Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 2001).

  113. Telepathy as a reduction to the irreducible nature of human consciousness is a lovely example of the kind of mystical humanism or gnostic methodology I proposed in The Serpent’s Gift.

  114. I cannot help pondering the potential connections between Myers’s metaphor of the imaginal as an adult insect and the imaginal realm of later UFO encounters, which often involve psychical, evolutionary, and insectoid themes, from the beelike “buzzing” of the craft, through the evolutionary intentions of the interventions, to the insectlike appearance of the telepathic aliens. I don’t know what to make of this, but there it is.

  115. Myers, Science and a Future Life, 37–38.

  116. Ibid., 39–40. Myers invokes the same larval/imaginal language at HP 1:97.

  117. For an excellent discussion of the evolutionary mysticisms of both Carpenter and Bucke and their correspondence, see Paul Marshall, Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences and Explanations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  118. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1935), 275.

  119. See, for example, Myers, Science and a Future Life, 40.

  120. Myers, however, recognized that telaesthesia merges into telepathy, since it is always possible that a perception at a distance is being picked up from another mind there (HP 1:xv).

  121. HP 1:112. This is another place where Myers and Freud are very close. Freud, after all, turned to the exact same Greek classic in order to gloss his own understanding of sexuality as an omnipresent force capable of genital, cultural, literary, and philosophical expression, that is, Plato’s Symposium and its fundamentally mystical notion of eros. “In its origin, function, and relation to sexual love,” Freud wrote, “the ‘Eros’ of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido of psycho-analysis” (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey [London: Hogarth Press, 1975], 18:91).

  122. Blum, Ghost Hunters, 264.

  123. Myers, Fragments, 35.

  124. Blum, Ghost Hunters, 258–59.

  125. Eveleen Myers, preface to Myers, Fragments, v–vi.

  126. From Fragments, quoted in Gauld, Founders, 119.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. The standard source for Fort’s writings is the Omnibus volume, first published as The Books of Charles Fort, with an introduction by Tiffany Thayer (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1941), and later reissued as The Complete Books of Charles Fort, with a new introduction by Damon Knight (New York: Dover, 1974). Most recently, the Omnibus volume has been reissued again as The Books of the Damned, with a new introduction by Jim Steinmeyer (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2008). My page references (which are in fact consistent throughout the three editions) are to the second volume and are preceded in the text by BD (The Book of the Damned), NL (New Lands), LO (Lo!), and WT (Wild Talents).

  2. Fort made all of this quite clear in a May 1926 letter to the science-fiction writer Edmund Hamilton, as quoted in Damon Knight, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 171–72.

  3. Colin Bennett, The Politics of the Imagination: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort (Manchester: Headpress, 2002), 120.

  4. Quoted in Jim Steinmeyer, Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), xv.

  5. I am indebted for this quote and line of thought to Steinmeyer, ibid.

  6. Knight, Charles Fort, 65.

  7. The phrase “intellectually promiscuous” is mine, but it is entirely faithful to Fort’s sexual-intellectual sense of his comparative sins. “I am a pioneer and no purist,” he wrote, “and some of these stud-stunts of introducing vagabond ideas to each other may have about the eugenic value of some of the romances in houses of ill fame. I cannot expect to be both promiscuous and respectable. Later, most likely, some of these unions will be properly licensed” (LO 572).

  8. Tiffany Thayer, quoted in Knight, Charles Fort, 180.

  9. Quoted in Steinmeyer, Charles Fort, 237.

  10. Quoted in Knight, Charles Fort, 70,

  11. Quoted in Louis Kaplan, The Damned Universe of Charles Fort (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1993), 125, without reference.

  12. Cited and contextualized in Steinmeyer, Charles Fort, 75.

  13. Quoted in ibid, 143. Dreiser wrote a play inspired by X entitled The Dream.

  14. Steinmeyer, Charles Fort, 155, 192.

  15. As early as 1879, the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli had claimed something similar, and the great French astronomer Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), who had his own spiritualist and occult interests, enthusiastically endorsed a version of the same idea. For more on this, see R. A. S. Hennessey, Worlds Without End: The Historic Search for Extraterrestrial Life (Charleston: Tempus Publishing, 1999), chapter 9, “To the Canals of Mars—and after, 1880–1920.”

  16. Quoted without reference in Damon Knight’s introduction to The Complete Books of Charles Fort, xiii.

  17. Cited without reference in Kaplan, Damned Universe, 124.

  18. Steinmeyer, Charles Fort, 158.

  19. Knight, Charles Fort, 5.

  20. Quoted in Knight, Charles Fort, 12–13. Knight is quoting from Fort’s unpublished and partial biography, Many Parts.

  21. My discussion of X relies almost entirely on Steinmeyer, Charles Fort, 137–44.

  22. Quoted in Kaplan, Damned Universe, 121.

  23. The source is anonymous. Quoted in David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 27.

  24. Steinmeyer, Charles Fort, 156–57.

  25. Quoted in Kaplan, Damned Universe, 126, without reference.

  26. An important exception here is Colin Bennett’s Politics of the Imagination. More on Bennett’s postmodern reading of Fort below.

  27. This is actually Roger Caillois, approvingly cited by Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 26.

  28. Ibid., 25.

  29. Quoted in Todorov, Fantastic, 25–26.

  30. David Ray Griffin, Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). The parapsychological use of the metaphor of the white crow originates with William James, who used it to point out that only one genuine psychical case, only one white crow, is sufficient to conclude that the easy assumptions of scientific materialism are false, that not all crows are black. Fort apparently read his James, as he makes a transparent reference to this same Jamesian logic early in The Book of the Damned (BD 43).

  31. Fort’s constant use of “hypnotics” and “somnambulists” to describe those duped by religion or science is a case in point. He employs these terms not to affirm the data of psychical research, but to explain the psychology of plausibility within these two Dominants (NL 424).

  32. See the letters quoted in Steinmeyer, Charles Fort, 210.

  33. Letter to Maynard Shipley, quoted in Knight, Charles Fort, 182.

  34. I explored the later history of this American metaphysical trajectory in my Esalen as “the science of mysticism” literature, which
came to the fore in the mid-1970s through books like Lawrence LeShan’s The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist (1974), Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975), and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979). Here I am changing my terms to reflect both a change of mind and a subsequent realization that this literature has its deepest roots in the psychical-research, science-fiction, and Fortean narratives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The quantum mystical movement, I see now, did not begin in 1975, with the appearance of Capra’s The Tao of Physics. It began in 1932, with the appearance of Fort’s Wild Talents, a book that in turn draws inspiration from the earlier psychical researchers’ desire to create a true “science of religion.”

  35. Quoted in Steinmeyer, Charles Fort, 47.

  36. Brian Stableford, introduction to H. G. Wells: Seven Novels (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006), ix.

  37. No doubt, to the horror of Wells, who hated The Book of the Damned and its author, calling the latter in a review “one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out-of-the-way newspapers” (cited in Steinmeyer, Charles Fort, 11). So much for easy lineages.

  38. Fort explains that New Lands is divided into two parts: (1) the neoastronomic, in which he asserts that astronomy and its mathematics are about 50 percent correct (this section is almost all total nonsense); and (2) the extrageographic, which develops the Super-Story of intergalactic or multidimensional colonialism. These break down into chapters 1–12 and chapters 13–38, respectively. Given that the first part covers pages 313–89, we can calculate Fort’s “gross and stupid errors” to be around 77 pages. But the theory appears throughout the corpus, hence my playful estimation of 130 pages.

  39. This idea would take on a dark history in the late 1980s and ’90s, with the rise of assorted right-wing forms of political paranoia in the U.S. that linked UFOs and various supposed government conspiracies, often of an outrageous nature. For more on this, see below, chapter 3, note 49.

  40. This series of events and Fort’s handling of them bear an uncanny resemblance to the 1967–68 winter events of Point Pleasantville, West Virginia, as novelized by John A. Keel in The Mothman Prophecies. Keel was a fan of Fort’s and certainly would have known of the 1904–5 events. Both stories even feature what Fort calls an “occult police force” (Keel’s “men in black”) whose job it is to “kill off mysteries with bogus explanations,” “to divert suspicion from themselves, because they, too, may be exploiting life upon this earth” (LO 661).

  41. William James, “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished,” in William James on Psychical Research, ed. Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou (New York: Viking Press, 1960), 25–26.

  42. The title finally chosen is a jab at the astronomers, who were good at calculating where a new planet should be and, effectively, declaring “Lo!” that is, “Look there!” only to find nothing at all in the sky. Fort was not very fond of astronomy—one of his real mistakes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. Jacques F. Vallee, The Magonia Collection (A Reference and Research Library), Annotated Catalogue, vol. 1, Paranormal Research (private publication, July 2002), 3.

  2. Jacques Vallee, Forbidden Science: Journals 1957–1969 (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1996), 44. Forbidden Science, vol. 2, Journals 1970–1979: The Belmont Years, is privately published, copyright 2007 by Documatica Research, LLC. Both are henceforth cited as FS, followed by the volume and page number.

  3. The phrase “Beyond Reason” occurs twice as a section title in Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969), 110, henceforth PM; and Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact (London: Souvenir Press, 1988), 136.

  4. FS 1:147–48. Other significant statements on the category occur at FS 2:42, 61.

  5. Jacques Vallee, in collaboration with Tracy Tormé, Fastwalker (A Novel) (Berkeley: Frog, Ltd., 1996), 22.

  6. For an excellent history of this moment, at least up to the mid-1970s, see David Michael Jacobs, The UFO Controversy in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975). Jacobs, a professional historian, would later become a major figure in the abduction controversies of the 1980s and ’90s through his conclusion that these events are aimed at a sinister alien-human hybrid breeding program. Hence his second book on the subject, Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions (New York: Fireside, 1992).

  7. For Kansas, see FS 2:243–44. For Batman, see PM 71–81. Batman first appeared on the cover of Detective Comics #39 in 1939. The earlier paranormal version, of which the comic-book artists and writers appear to have been unaware, was known as Springheel Jack.

  8. Ford was deeply disturbed by the way Project Blue Book, and particularly Allen Hynek, had handled the famous Ann Arbor case of March 23, 1966, when sixty witnesses saw four objects float over a farm northwest of Ann Arbor and another land in a swamp in Dexter. The witnesses included four policemen and an entire dormitory at Hillsdale College. The case was considered serious enough that the Pentagon got involved. Hynek famously suggested at a press conference a few days later that it may have been “swamp gas,” a response that was ridiculed by the press and infuriated Ford, who, as Vallee describes him, was outraged “at the suggestion that his constituents couldn’t tell marsh gas from spaceships” (FS 1:182). Ford wrote a letter to the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives and demanded immediate hearings.

  9. Michael D. Swords, “Donald E. Keyhoe and the Pentagon,” in UFOs, 1947–1997: From Arnold to the Abductees: Fifty Years of Flying Saucers, ed. Hilary Evans and Dennis Stacy (London: John Brown Publishing, 1997), 89.

  10. For stories of psychical researchers or psychics who died in suspicious circumstances, see FS 2:150, 330, 373, 396, 428–30, 443.

  11. FS 1:21–22. I once heard Vallee describe this event at a private symposium: “I’m sorry, but it was a UFO,” he said to us. The transparency, honesty, and frustration of the aside were palpable. I hope this book as a whole communicates the same intellectual and emotional message: “I’m sorry, but these things are real. Deal with it.”

  12. Kenneth Arnold, “I Did See the Flying Discs,” Fate 1, no. 1 (Spring 1948): 6, 7, 8.

  13. Timothy Good, Need to Know: UFOs, the Military and Intelligence (New York: Pegasus Books, 2007), 103.

  14. Donald E. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers from Outer Space (New York: Henry Holt, 1953), 209.

  15. See above, note 8.

  16. Jacques Vallee, Anatomy of a Phenomenon: Unidentified Objects in Space—A Scientific Appraisal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), 1.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Ezekiel himself never refers to the vision as a chariot. For this, and many other reasons, the Ezekiel vision functions as a key proof-text in ufology. Probably the best treatment of it is Michael Lieb’s gorgeous and haunting study of the modern technologization of the sacred, an approach that resonates deeply with my own hermeneutical understanding of the paranormal. Lieb traces this back to the vision of Ezekiel and its fiery, spinning wheels. Here he mines the apparent psychopathology of Ezekiel, rabbinic fears around studying this particular text, the subsequent chariot (merkabah) mysticisms of Kabbalah and their “riders of the chariot,” and the rare Hebrew word (hashmal) of the prophetic book that points to the original vision’s “amber,” “glowing metal” or electrum-like qualities (the “mysterium of hashmal,” as Lieb puts it). For Lieb, the “children of Ezekiel,” that is, the new UFO visionary of the New Age, is the “new merkabah mystic,” the new rider of the chariot. The visionary sign, moreover, has now become the machinelike thing. See Michael Lieb, Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).

  19. Vallee, Anatomy, 27.

  20. Like so many other assumed impossibilities, such alien-human contact remains a very real possibility for those in the know. Consider Michael A. G. Michaud’s recent Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials (New York: Cope
rnicus Books, 2007). Michaud is no naive enthusiast. He served as director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Advanced Technology and as counselor for Science, Technology, and Environment at the American embassies in Paris and Tokyo, and he played an active role in U.S.-Soviet talks on outer-space arms control. And unlike so many other writers, he understands well that many of the deepest challenges here are philosophical, symbolic, and religious, that is, the problems of translation, communication, and worldview that such contact would inevitably involve. He understands, in my own terms now, that any contact team would have to include more anthropologists than rocket scientists.

  21. Vallee, Anatomy, 39–42.

  22. Quoted in ibid., 40

  23. “Cloud-shaped” UFOs again blur the line between fraud and reality. Are these just clouds? Or some kind of stealth technology or mimicry technique, as one constantly sees in the natural world, particularly with insects? Much of the literature clearly suggests the latter, although of course there are many sightings that seem to be nothing more than misidentified cloud formations.

  24. Vallee, Anatomy, 112.

  25. By 1992, there were twenty major categories in Vallee’s mature classification system. See Jacques Vallee, in collaboration with Martine Castello, UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), appendix 2: Case Index.

  26. Jacques and Janine Vallee, Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), vi.

  27. I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1966), 448–62. This is Sagan’s expansion on Shklovskii’s original Russian book, a remarkable cold war accomplishment in a geopolitical context in which, as Shklovskii wryly observed with some dash of hope, “the probability of our meeting is unlikely to be smaller than the probability of a visit to the Earth by an extraterrestrial cosmonaut” (vii).