Incident at Exeter (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966). Saturday Review writer John G. Fuller wrote a column for that magazine and an article for Look magazine about a wave of UFO sightings in New Hampshire. He expanded those articles into this book, which is the first to draw a connection between UFOs and powerlines, over which the bright balls of red lights were seen hovering, and which may have caused a blackout affecting the Northeastern United States.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
insectoids “Big Bugs” thought to be of alien origin. Generally the form resembles a praying mantis that is larger than a man, but variants include grasshopper, fly, ant, and caterpillar. Their history is quite unusual and bears special interest to those with an interest in the cultural dimension of alien imagery.
Throughout most of history, believers in other worlds have buttressed their position with theology. The feeling was other worlds must be populated. God would not waste worlds by having them barren of life and people. God designed the world for men. Other worlds meant other men. The first important challenge to this reasoning appeared in 1742 when David Hume, famous for his criticism of the Argument from Design which supported belief in the existence of God, warned that life on other worlds would not be copies of ourselves. In a fictional dialogue, a character of his named Philo points out that nature is diverse for such expectations.
Pierre Louis Moreau in his Essaie de Cosmologie (1750) soon after affirmed, “If such great varieties are observed already among those who populated the different climes of the earth, how can one conceive of those who live on planets so distant from our own? Their varieties probably exceed the scope of our imagination.” The atheistic Baron d’Holbach in La systeme de la nature (1770) similarly argued that the different temperatures of other worlds meant their inhabitants may not be like us.
This sensibility did not immediately overturn more stolidly anthropomorphic views. Pride of place on the eve of the Darwinian revolution goes to Thomas Cullin Simon’s Scientific Certainties of Planetary Life (1855) which asserted all planets would share the same vegetable, animal, and intellectual life. Charles Darwin’s demolition of the Design argument with his theory of evolution by natural selection gave the speculation of nonhuman life elsewhere added force. In 1870, Richard A. Proctor indicated stellar nebulae might be inhabited by “their own peculiar forms of life.” In his 1873 work, The Borderland of Science, he affirms that if life exists on Mars, “it must differ so remarkably from what is known on earth because of its atmosphere.” R. S. Ball in Story of the Heavens (1885) indicated life elsewhere should be specially adapted to their particular environments: “Life in forms strange and weird…stranger than ever Dante described or Doré drew.”
Camille Flammarion was especially influential with the 1885 edition of The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds (1885) when he routed prior thinkers on the question for their anthropomorphism. The “planetarians” imagined by Huygens, Wolff, Swedenborg, Kant, Locke, and Fourier were only remodeled men. Soon after, the idea of silicon-based lifeforms turns up in Astronomie with a Dr. Julius Scheiner urging that extraterrestrials may not resemble us. Imagination was clearly being set free by the new worldview of the Darwinians.
It was a cousin of Darwin, Francis Galton, who first introduced the idea of alien insects into scientific discourse. While on a dreamy vacation in 1896, he was pondering the question of Earth-Mars communication using dot-dash-line signals. A fantasy came to him of a mad millionaire on Mars signaling us. A clever girl deduces a base-8 code because “the Mars folk are nothing more than highly-developed ants, who counted up to 8 by their 6 limbs and two antennae as our forefathers counted up to 10 on their fingers.” A couple years later, Edward Mason offers a paper proposing life on the planets of other systems might be similar to ants and dragonflies. (Crowe, 1999)
Perhaps the first work of fiction to put Big Bugs on distant planets was John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894). It involves a trip to Jupiter that is still in the carboniferous stage of evolution. Among the creatures they find are dinosaurs, mastodons, giant serpents and flesh-eating ants the size of locomotives. Paleontological finds of giant dragonflies and other fossil discoveries indicative of giant life earlier in Earth’s history combined with the growing popularity of evolutionary thought
Fred T. Jane’s To Venus in Five Seconds (1897) takes up Francis Galton’s communicative ants and populates Venus with big, brainy bugs. Soon after, the Darwinian, H.G. Wells famously imagined a society of insectile Selenites in First Men in the Moon (1901). Diverse writers in the pulp era, including leaders like E.E. “Doc” Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft, kept the idea going during the pulp era among the flood of the Big bug stories up to the start of sci-fi’s Golden Age around 1940. John W. Campbell exiled them from science fiction because of their scientific implausibility.
They soon returned in the fifties, as filmmakers grew comfortable with sci-fi themes and trick photography. Killers from Space (1954) had aliens hoping to destroy humanity with Big Bugs and other giant vermin. The success of the giant-ant film Them! (1954) quickly turned Big Bugs into an easy horror cliché. There has been a relatively constant stream of insectoid-related films, TV shows, comic books, and cultural media ever since. Much of it is considered campy by culture vultures and even specialists in horror and science fiction rarely discuss it.
Fictional insectoids in 1937
While the current philosophy that Nature does indeed waste worlds—an idea now amply reinforced by space probes proving the existence of dead worlds—is partly responsible for alien insects being a feature of modern Western imagination, non-rational aspects also must partly underlie their use. The creatures are a way of exploiting people’s fears about bugs, evoking the emotions of horror. Obvious enough, it seems, yet this leads us into a deep paradox.
Fear of insects is one of the more common phobias in human psychology, though the argument continues about whether this fear is learned or innate. The nervous system seems to have a bias in developing fears about spiders; arachnophobia is easier to acquire and harder to extinguish than other animal phobias. It may be in part be learned in youth when one sees the fear in the mother or others; but traits like blackness, similarity to pubic hair, or sheer strangeness may act on a more innate level to imprint fear. Whatever the ultimate explanation, the fear exists viscerally in many humans and we may reasonably expect storytellers to have exploited it for its cringing value throughout history. Exaggerating the size of bugs should be a common gimmick much as giants and large beasts are a common feature of world mythology.
It should, but in fact the image appears only in modern Western civilization. One can spend days looking through texts on mythology and world artwork and find only a tiny few ambiguous and isolated specimens analogous to current Big Bug fantasies. One hopeful precursor would be the giant spider drawing among the Nazca lines etched into the landscape of Peru. Though the image is big, what is not known is if the culture actually envisioned the spider as large in its myths. Spiders appear on Nazca ceramics, and one seems to represent a demon transformed into a large insect that captures a bird. Tarantulas however actually have shown the ability to kill birds. The Nazca lines also have giant drawings of a spider monkey and bird with no indication of them being thought mythically gigantic.
A compilation of superstitions about animals can be found in Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics where it is blatantly obvious that insect lore is a small genre compared to that of bears, goats, dogs, cats, and even cuckoo birds. We are told the Bushmen worshipped a mantis named Cagn or Ikaggen. Caucasians termed the mantis the “Hottentot god.” The Hottentots also feared the scarab beetle, and the author notes the existence of a cult of the scarab among Egyptians. But if there is any relevance to modern big bug fantasies, it has to be faint. May Berenbaum’s discussion of insect art and myth is especially recommended as illustrative of the fact that bugs had various symbolic properties through the ages, but gigantism never featured in their portrayal
until recent times.
Should the scorpion men of the Epic of Gilgamesh be called Big Bugs or monstrous men? An 1149 painting of Satan, the Vision of Tundal, makes him look almost like a giant centipede, yet the intent was to portray him as a man with a thousand hands and fingernails like knights’ lances. A giant Earth spider drawn by Hokusai in Japan around 1814 comes as close as anything to being a true Big Bug yet I found nothing about the myth it illustrates. An 1846 story by Edgar Allan Poe seems possibly relevant, yet it involves an illusion that makes a small bug seem large, not a fantasy about a truly monster-sized bug. Even if one was in a generous mood to consider these things as somehow relevant, the frequency of this imagery before 1890 is orders of magnitude below the rate since then.
Cross-cultural studies do not exist to confirm or deny if arachnophobia is a specifically modern phenomenon, but animal phobias demonstrably are panhuman and this is probably grounds enough to suspect bug fears predate the modern era. In the 19th century, substantial strides were made in sanitation that might have enhanced anxieties over the germ-carrying activities of bugs, yet pre-moderns surely associated bugs with sickness and death. It would be nice if one could blame Big Bugs imagery on the invention of the microscope, but that happened three centuries too soon.
Some Big Bug stories predate their use as alien insects. They involve tropical origins and origins in biological experiments, areas made familiar by the Darwinian revolution. Even after they start populating fictional other worlds, these themes of bugs grown large in mad experiments and primitive tropical regions —lost jungles, evolutionarily isolated caverns, the inner Earth—recur repeatedly.
The main deduction following these observations is that Big Bug imagery did not arise out of pure archetypal psychological processes, but arose as a tradition contingent upon historical events. When storytellers create new examples they cannot be re inventing the idea wholly by accessing an unconscious realm of universal fears. They are building upon prior work.
The idea of UFOs being populated by bugs is one of the earliest speculations of the UFO literature, but evidence for it was indirect and arguably nonexistent. For the first couple of decades of the flying saucer era, no accounts exist of anyone seeing bugs inside an alien craft. There are a couple of ambiguous creatures—a humanoid with compound eyes like a bug and a dream reported to Carl Jung—but the first fully realized space bug appears in the mid-1960s.
The first claimant was Ted Owens and his story of the alien grasshoppers Twitter and Tweeter emerged under circumstances that would today be called channeling. That would be enough to render it dubious to serious UFOlogists and we should add they did not embrace it. The saucer press gave him some public exposure and he managed to get an autobiographical account of his contact published by Gray Barker’s Saucerian Press. (Owens, 1969) The doubtful character of the Owens contact is enhanced by the presence of elements that look inspired by the movie First Men in the Moon (1964), a gorgeous extravaganza made possible by Ray Harryhausen’s effects artistry. Aliens with grasshopper traits appear in abductions with better pedigrees sporadically thereafter. (Kottmeyer, 1996)
The first insectoid said explicitly to resemble a large praying mantis appears in a hypnotic regression dated March 14, 1986, in which horror writer Whitley Strieber explores a 1967 incident at this grandmother’s house. A praying mantis appears in the middle of the living room, scaring the beejeesus out of his son. “How can it be so big?” he asks. A few months after Communion was published, John Lear issued a statement revealing the “horrible truth” that a saucer crash many years ago proved that UFOnauts were ugly little creatures, shaped like praying mantises and who were more advanced than us by perhaps a billion years. Like a Lovecraft creation, those who learned this firsthand have tended to commit suicide, one of those being Defense Secretary James V. Forrestal whose records are still sealed. Lear’s statement was one of the more widely disseminated pieces of EBE-lore and probably was a major influence in people coming forward with their insectoid encounters in the past decade. Cases now number in the dozens, a small yet impressive fraction of abduction entities reported. The nature of these entities is a matter of interesting debate with some thinking them almost godlike in their oversight of humanity. Others think they are servants to more imperial minded reptoids. (Kottmeyer, 1999)
That UFOlogists have dared to allow such campy material to be presented as evidence for the reality of aliens is a strange testament to open-mindedness. Insectoid accounts will be rejected outright by people with an exposure to science-writing. Bugs are small in real life for certain reasons. As they become larger, hair-like limbs cannot support the weight of the body. The physical material has to be thicker and stronger and placed more directly under the torso. Bugs oxygenate their tissues via diffusion of air through small holes in the exoskeleton. Beyond a couple of inches, oxygenation of the deeper tissues becomes impossible. Bigger bugs need lungs. A more extensive musculature is needed with increasing mass, and with it an interior skeleton. The proboscis of some bugs is an adaptation to deal with the surface tension of water and would be useless for man-sized bugs, yet it has been reported in at least one encounter case.
Some will doubtless argue that insectoids must be real and that earlier cultural material reflects evidence of veiled encounters now known only because UFOlogists use hypnosis to unlock the secret of their presence on Earth. The obvious problem is the arrival time. Most UFOlogists assume either the aliens arrived in 1947 to check on atomic activity or have been with us throughout history. If one picks 1947, why is there is so much Big Bug imagery in science fiction before then? If one chooses to believe they have always been with us, why is there virtually no Big Bug imagery before 1890? Did insectoids have a special fear about the development of Darwinian philosophy that they chose then to furtively invade us?
By failing to reject such reports, UFOlogists grant themselves the same dramatic license as creators of horror films and tacitly flaunt abductions as a tool to evoke fear, revulsion, and confusion. The claim that abduction experiences are immune to psychological insight is only acceptable in the same way one might casually lament why so many people go to horror films or how anybody could produce such monstrosities.
The presence of insectoids proves with high probability the fictional character of a significant subset of abduction reports. The imagery of the UFO phenomenon is distinctly reflective of modern Western culture in this matter. To accept their material reality is to play blind to a substantial cultural genealogy and their birth on Earth in modern times.
—MARTIN S. KOTTMEYER
References:
Berenbaum, May R. Bugs in the System: Insects and Their Impact on Human Affairs (Helix, 1995).
Bleiler, Everett. Science Fiction—The Early Years (Kent State, 1990).
Crowe, Michael. The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 (Dover, 1999).
Kottmeyer, Martin. “Space Bug a Boo Boo,” Talking Pictures #15 (Summer, 1996).
Kottmeyer, Martin. “Graying Mantis,” The REALL News (May, 1999).
Owens, Ted. How to Contact Space People (Saucerian, 1969).
Sullivan, Jack, ed. Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (Viking, 1986).
Intelligent Life in the Universe (Holden-Day, 1966) by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. A Russian and an American astronomer team up in this book to voice their suspicion that an advanced civilization may have visited or briefly colonized our solar system in ancient times. Shklovskii theorizes that Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars, might be artificial satellites, which are “mute testaments to an ancient Martian civilization.” Sagan calculates, based on Frank Drake’s estimate of technical civilizations existing in our galaxy, that each “should be visited by another such civilization about once every thousand years.”
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Interrupted Journey, The (The Dial Press, 1966). Saturday Review magazine columnist John G. Fuller relates the story of a New Hampshire couple who underwent regressive hy
pnosis to uncover memories of their apparent abduction by aliens. This case involving Betty and Barney Hill became the first alien abduction story to receive widespread publicity, resulting in a 1975 made-for-television movie called The UFO Incident, starring James Earl Jones. Their experience became the standard by which all later abduction accounts would be compared.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
interstellar travel A major argument against any UFOs being intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft is that travel between star systems is impossible. Other stars are too far away from us; it would take too long to get here; it would take too much energy; it always takes less energy to communicate than to travel, etc. These arguments are almost never made by aeronautical or astronautical engineers, but rather by astronomers and often by SETI specialists trying to justify the use of radiotelescopes to listen for radio signals from alien civilizations.
Some assume that visitors would have to come from another galaxy. Our own Milky Way galaxy is about 80,000 light years across, perhaps 15,000 light years thick, and contains upwards of 100 billion stars. Why worry about another galaxy? There are none closer than about 1 million light years, yet within 55 light years of our solar system there are about 1000 stars of which 46 are very similar to the sun and might well have planets and life. That is to say they are not too hot or too cold; too new or too old; don’t have a companion star which would make planetary orbits too variable; don’t vary in their energy output very much over time, so life would have a chance to develop in fairly stable conditions. There are even some planets orbiting nearby sun like stars—more than a billion years older than our sun—within possibly habitable zones. Civilizations on planets around such stars might have begun their technological development a billion years before ours.
Most arguments against interstellar travel neglect the simple fact that technological progress almost always comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way. Lasers aren’t just better light bulbs. Micro-integrated circuits are not just better transistors; nuclear fission rockets—many of which were successfully operated in the 1960s, at power levels as high as 4.4 billion watts—are not just better chemical rockets. In each case different physics are involved in the more advanced system.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 50
