Getting Probed
In July of 1952 a California maintenance mechanic named Truman Bethurum claimed to have been abducted by an alien craft while working on a road project in the desert. Awakened in his tent in the middle of the night by “eight or ten small sized men,” he was taken to their mothership and introduced to Aura Rhanes. Rhanes was the beautiful female captain of the alien’s ship (“she was tops in shapeliness and beauty,” he claimed). Apparently Bethuram spent too much time talking about his meeting with what he called the “Queen of women.” Bethuram’s soon to be ex-wife mentioned the mythical alien captain in her 1955 divorce petition.39
Bethuram was one of a number of flying saucer watchers who claimed to have been contacted, indeed kidnapped, by aliens in the postwar period. Numerous male contactees claimed their abduction included meeting at least one female alien whose beauty overwhelmed them. Increasingly, such fantasies took a pornographic turn. During the mid-1960s UFO researcher (and believer) John Keel eagerly collected stories from college coeds who, in the midst of the sexual revolution, claimed that alien visitors had raped them. A number of his male interviewees claimed that curious female aliens, both through invasive scientific procedures and in interspecies lovemaking, had extracted their sperm.40
Changes in America’s sex life fueled many of these tales, changes that pointed to deeper structural shifts in American society. Popular television sitcoms may have pictured husband and wife sleeping like siblings in separate beds, but more was happening under the covers than television would or could present. Two postwar books by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), flew off the shelves. These books, though written in a dry academic style, assaulted traditional assumptions about women’s sexual experience and the alleged dangers of extramarital intercourse. Clearly, Harriet wanted more from Ozzie (and sometimes was getting it).41
Adolescent experience changed as well with “the teenager” becoming a recognizable demographic pursued by advertisers, magazine publishers, record producers, and even automobile manufacturers. America’s new service-oriented economy gave teenagers jobs and pocket money, granting them more independence than this demographic had ever had. This new world of “the teenage years” opened up a frontier of sexual possibilities as courting culture changed dramatically. In her book From Front Porch to Back Seat, cultural historian Beth L. Bailey shows that, while American teenagers probably had no more premarital intercourse in the 1950s and early 1960s than at earlier periods, other changes in American society left open the possibility that “the date” could become a sexual encounter. The privacy provided by the automobile and the new autonomy of time away from watchful parents inspired many a trip to inspiration point.42
Postwar conceptions of family life structured by a male as provider and a female as servicer carried over into postwar notions of sex and romance. The date became an economic exchange in which the purchase of a Coke and fries came fraught with sexual meaning. A male letter writer put this explicitly in a letter to Seventeen in which he argued that “when a boy takes a girl out and spends $1.20 on her (like I did last night) he expects a little ‘heavy petting’ (which I didn’t get).”43
Women attempting to navigate the new world of postwar dating often found that the predatory instinct of American misogyny remained firmly in place. Discussions of dating in magazines and guidebooks almost always suggested that women had to protect their sexual purity from men who would likely be unable to control their impulses. These attitudes had real-world consequences in institutional attitudes toward rape and sexual violence. In 1947 a female student at the University of Michigan found herself suspended along with her rapist.44
Some cultural arbiters expected and encouraged sexual aggression in young American males. Albert Ellis, a respected physician who held teaching positions at Rutgers and New York University, encouraged all manner of physical and sexual coercion in Sex and the Single Man (1963). Driven by the same “swinging bachelor” fantasies as Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy,” Ellis urged his readers to turn petting sessions into wrestling matches for sexual dominance. “Get as much of her body bare as quickly as you can,” he urged, “she frequently will accept the inevitable.”45
Changes in sexual attitudes and cultural images of male sexual aggression found expression in American monster lore of all kinds. As descriptions of alien encounters became increasingly sexualized, pop culture images reflected this folklore. The 1957 poster for Invasion of the Saucer Men featured bug-eyed, cabbage-headed aliens grasping a young woman in their claws, her clothing ripped and disheveled. In the same year, Michael Landon had his first film role as the lead in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Landon played a troubled teen (obviously channeling James Dean from Rebel Without a Cause) who receives psychiatric treatment for aggression. Hypnosis meant to rein in these impulses literally unleashes the beast. Landon transforms into a wolf in the school gymnasium and kills a young woman. The film barely hid the metaphor of teenage male hormones run wild. Promotional posters and still shots made it explicit with Landon in wolf form threatening scantily clad women who showed a mixture of terror and delight.
By the late 1960s the sexual revolution supposedly reached from college dorm rooms to suburban bedrooms. Most social historians today argue that this profound change in mores and attitudes is a complex phenomenon that did not emerge primarily because of “the pill” but rather from a variety of changes that occurred in postwar America. Indeed, some of the changes in sexual attitudes had roots that went back to the 1920s. Stories of sex with aliens were part of the societal process of coming to terms with these changes. Like other fantasies of sex with monsters, the otherworldly nature of intimate encounters with aliens offered an opportunity to talk, out loud and in public, about otherwise unmentionable topics. Change was actively taking place in America’s social structures, and stories of sex with aliens became part of the process, part of the way Americans discussed the changes taking place in the real world. This conversation allowed for discussion of very real fears about gendered violence. Stories of rape by aliens registered larger fears about how social change would restructure power dynamics between men and women.46
The growing influence of religion in postwar America factored into the country’s monster obsessions as well as its attitudes toward sex. Religion in twentieth-century America structured how many believers viewed visitors from other worlds. Conventional religion worried that America had enough monsters to deal with in the form of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the boom in spirituality of the 1950s and 1960s sometimes transformed monsters into gods.
God Versus the Flying Saucers
Watching the skies in 1950s America often meant hoping and expecting divine intervention rather than fearfully waiting for things from another world. Scholars of American religion point to a dramatic increase in attendance, and membership, of churches and synagogues in postwar America. The year 1959 became the first one of the decade in which a religious book did not top the bestseller list. God was in.47
Perhaps even more important than evidence of increased personal devotion, the public culture of the United States became more officially religious than ever before. This reflected a new religious interest on the part of the American people, though it received some impetus from the propaganda demands of the cold war. In 1954 the move by Congress to officially add “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance was motivated by an effort to contrast American religiousness with “godless communism.” Senator Homer Ferguson, a Michigan Republican, urged the addition since, he claimed, “It highlights the fundamental difference between the free world and the Communist world.” The decision to add “In God We Trust” to American coinage followed a similar logic.48
Communism became a special kind of monster in this context. Millions of American Christians believed that the Soviet Union not only represented a rival ideological system, but a diabolical monstrosity engineered by the devil. Billy Graham, incre
asingly listened to by Americans of diverse faith backgrounds, made the most frequent assertions of this supernatural threat. “My own theory of Communism,” he declared in 1957, “is that it is master-minded by Satan … I think there is no other explanation for the tremendous gains of Communism.” Speaking in the same year that the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite, Graham insisted that such technological progress showed that “they [the Soviet Union] have supernatural power and wisdom and intelligence given to them.”49
Graham became the foremost spokesman for the notion of communism as a “satanic religion,” but other voices fully endorsed this view. It is important to recognize that, for Graham and other anticommunist leaders, this was not a metaphorical language about the nature of evil. Graham’s rhetorical construction of communism should be seen in the context of his fundamentalist Christian background in which Satan and demonic forces are literal threats. Graham’s assertion of communism as satanic meant that he believed that a powerful, sinister creature had moved against the United States in the form of a monstrous political system.
If a brooding hell beast stood behind communism, God must be the ultimate monster killer. In fact, the 1952 film Red Planet Mars suggests that only by turning to God could human beings be saved from extraterrestrial threat. Red Planet exudes the 1950s mix of American nationalism and religious faith. An astronomer receives threatening messages from Mars that promise destruction for the human race. Only a worldwide religious revival that leads to the overthrow of communism in the Soviet Union saves earthlings from extraterrestrial destruction.
Religion also informed a more positive reading of extraterrestrial threats. Alien visitors for some became emissaries of the divine rather than monsters. This had been an element of UFO sightings from the beginning, especially among those who claimed direct contact with these otherworldly forces. What some Americans described as a highly sexualized experience became for others a religious vision with great significance for the world of the atomic age.
UFO religious visionaries during the cold war era had some background in religious experience outside the American mainstream. One such guru of the space age, George Adamski, had formed a Buddhist religious sect he called the Royal Order of Tibet in the 1930s. By the time of the Second World War, Adamski ran a hamburger stand in Laguna Beach, California, and continued to give lectures in Eastern religious philosophy. In 1952 he became the first UFO contactee to claim the experience as a religious revelation.
Adamski had been sighting flying saucers since 1951 but claimed to have been first contacted by a visitor from another world in late 1952. Adamski quickly placed his experience into print as Flying Saucers Have Landed, a book that quickly went through three printings. In it, he claimed that aliens had warned him of an imminent nuclear holocaust and appointed him to share a message of love as the last hope of the human race.50
Imitators soon followed. Daniel Fry took a ride in a flying saucer with a creature known as A-lan, who brought a message of peace for warlike earthlings. In 1955 Orfeo Angelluci published The Secret of the Saucers, a mystical text of flying saucer religion. Angellucci’s account told of “space brothers” who warned of a nuclear apocalypse coming in 1986 if humanity failed to practice the tenets of universal love.51
By the mid-1950s networks of contactees had developed through conventions and meetings in major cities. University of California Berkeley sociologist H. Taylor Burkner studied one such “flying saucer club” for several years. Made up primarily of the elderly, the membership included veterans of various alternative religious groups. Adherents to various UFO sects borrowed liberally from Christianity and Buddhism and generally viewed visitors from other worlds in messianic terms.52
Flying saucer religion remained popular through the 1970s with the best-selling Chariots of the Gods? In it, Swiss writer Erich von Daniken claimed that alien visitors came to earth in the early stages of human development and were welcomed as gods. These “ancient astronauts” built the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. Daniken suggested that all major religions emerged from these encounters and that human–alien sex had been responsible for an increase in human intelligence over time. Although never producing an organized religious movement, Daniken’s theories gained wide circulation and provided the basis for a History Channel documentary as late as 2009.53
Mocked by a variety of critics whose ideological position ranged from secular humanism to “young earth” creationism, the durability of Daniken’s thesis is surprising. Religious studies scholar Douglas E. Cowan describes this as “the von Daniken paradox.” Lambasted from every side, Daniken’s notions have informed popular science fiction narrative from the Stargate SG-1 series to Battlestar Galactica.54
Ironically, the source for Daniken’s claims of friendly visitors bearing gifts to humanity may lie in the darkest corners of America’s monster tradition. Jason Colavito, a writer whose work focuses on debunking alternative archaeology, argues convincingly that a religious reading of flying saucers borrows directly from the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s tales also featured “Old Ones” that once ruled the earth and left behind artifacts of their existence. A crucial difference, which Colavito notes, is that the alien beings in Lovecraft’s work are indifferent to the human race, indeed terrifying in their indifference. It is unimaginable to think of any of Lovecraft’s creatures bringing a message of love and hope or giving humanity an evolutionary leg up. Lovecraft’s influence is certainly present in the small religious movements spawned by the age of the alien. However, these groups owe much more to the cultural need to come to grips with the terrifying realities of the nuclear age meeting the often optimistic tenor of postwar American religious life. Benevolent aliens became a deus ex machina for Americans anxious about the holocaust their own nation’s science and technology could unleash. Like many mainstream religious movements of the cold war, a belief in alien visitors bearing gifts offered an escape from the myriad dangers and anxieties of postwar America.55
Alien visitation as messianic hope underscores once again the multivalence of monsters in America. The otherness of the monster can embody the sum of all fears but also an escape from fear. In the age of the cold war, the shadow of the bomb represented the most terrible monster imaginable, while rapid social change had accelerated the speed of history. Friendly monsters in flying ships offered an escape from history.
Flying saucer cults did more than offer a comforting message, however. They may have offered some adherents a way to experience the frightening power of the sacred at a time when religious faith had become domesticated by America’s Christian mainstream. American civic religiousness failed to satisfy the human yearning for transcendence. While most Americans who felt this may have been attracted to the more recognizable horrors of Christian fundamentalism and its tales of monstrous demonic beings (and a somewhat monstrous God), others turned to monsters from outer space, searching for the frisson of divine terror unavailable from the warm and fuzzy world of mainstream American religion.
The postwar religious revival failed to contain American terror of the atomic age. Although America’s postwar years look from the outside like an age of consensus, they actually represented a moment of cultural splintering. By the late 1960s loss of faith in American government ignited countercultural protest. A loss of faith in American religious institutions resulted in both the gathering strength of Christian fundamentalism and a growing secular critique of religion’s claims. White Americans, in the South and later in the urban North, resisted the African American freedom struggle’s claims, often with violence. America seemed, once again, a society cleaved apart by inherent tensions.
In 1958 on edge of this cultural precipice, a young logger walked out of the woods and into the offices of the Humboldt Times of Eureka, California, carrying a plaster cast of a giant footprint.
Attack of the Cryptids
Jerry Crew was working on the logging trails necessary for the building of Trinity Dam in the hot summer of 1958
when he and his fellow loggers started seeing the unexplained tracks. Minor vandalism of machinery and outsized prints worried some that large bears were in the vicinity, angry that their habitat had been disturbed. Crew pointed out to his fellow loggers that the lack of claw prints meant that the creature stalking the camp could not have been a bear. Moreover, several of his coworkers claimed that they had seen a hairy creature with long arms run across the road in front of their trucks.
Sightings of mysterious woodland creatures were certainly not a new American phenomenon. In the early twentieth century, hunters on the Santa Barbara Channel Islands off the coast of Washington State had sighted, and supposedly captured, a “wild girl” who lived on the island in a cave full of animal bones. During the same period, Canadian Albert Osterman claimed to have been held captive by a family of “ape-like” people near Vancouver Island.56
None of these incidents garnered the attention of the 1958 sightings, perhaps because Crew claimed to have empirical evidence in the form of a plaster cast of the creature’s footprint. Crew’s cast of “Bigfoot’s” big foot became the trigger for an explosion of media interest. Not even the fascination with the sea serpent compared to the media storm that made Bigfoot into one of America’s most well-known monsters. The sightings in the Pacific Northwest intersected with the worlds of 1950s advertising, entrepreneurism, and the desire for alternative spiritualities. Bigfoot as a popular culture phenomenon was born. The Humboldt Times happily put a photograph of Crew holding the cast on the front page of their October 5th edition, the strange image and the story of the “mystery in the mountains” providing a distraction for readers from other stories of the day, including the NAACP’s struggle to implement Brown v. Board of Education and Eisenhower blasting critics of America’s foreign policy.57
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