Alien Universe

by Don Lincoln

  Erich von Däniken is a Swiss author who has the distinction of being the person who blasted the idea of ancient astronauts into the public consciousness. His 1968 book Chariots of the Gods was a smash success, with some 20 million books sold to date, and he has published nearly twenty books in English. He has also been jailed three times for fraud and theft. A criminal record is not a reason to a priori dismiss a person’s ideas but, given the outlandish nature of von Däniken’s claims, a record that includes fraud is presumably a relevant bit of information.

  The central thesis of his books is that there is tremendous evidence for Alien visitation in the archaeological and historical record. He suggested that in the Christian Bible, the chariot of Ezekiel was a report of a UFO as seen by Bronze Age eyes. He interpreted the lid of a sarcophagus of a Mayan king as depicting an astronaut piloting his craft. The Great Pyramids of Giza, the Nazca Lines in Peru, Stonehenge, the huge heads on Easter Island— there aren’t many interesting large ancient monuments that have eluded his speculation.

  Few, if any, archaeologists give any credibility to von Däniken’s theories. Most of his claims have been debunked, and von Däniken himself has conceded in interviews and in documentaries that some of his claims were false, embellished, or since discredited. Here are some examples. A picture in Chariots of the Gods is claimed to be reminiscent of a runway and parking areas for spaceships. Closer inspection shows that the picture in the book was cropped in a quite misleading way and that the parking areas were just too small to park much of anything, with the “runway” being 8 to 10 feet across and the “parking lot” being not much bigger. In his book Gold of the Gods, he tells of an expedition in which he was guided through tunnels containing gold, statues, and a library in a cave in Ecuador.

  In an interview in the December 1974 issue of Playboy and again in the 1978 Nova episode “The Case of the Ancient Astronauts,” he admits to not actually having been in the cave and having embellished his story to make it more interesting. In the same documentary, he defends a museum in which carvings reported to be thousands of years old are stored. The documentary’s producer located a local sculptor who claimed to have made the carvings and who re-created some of them for the camera. It should be stressed that von Däniken did not participate in this fraud, which seems to have been the work of a local entrepreneur out to make a buck, but von Däniken clearly isn’t one for letting something as inconvenient as the truth get in the way of a good story.

  The Playboy interview should be required reading for von Däniken enthusiasts, as it clearly demonstrates a shockingly cavalier attitude toward disciplined investigation. Even though von Däniken has conceded that many of his claims in his books didn’t stand up to even casual scrutiny, later versions of his books remain uncorrected. It would seem that diligent scholarship isn’t an important consideration for these publications.

  Regardless of the veracity of his claims, there is no question that von Däniken’s books had a huge impact on the public. This impact was amplified by a subsequent German language film version of his book Chariots of the Gods. This film was subsequently edited, dubbed into English, and shown in 1973 on American television under the name In Search of Ancient Astronauts with Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling doing the narration.

  Von Däniken is not the only author to postulate ancient Aliens. In his 1976 book The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple tells of the Dogon tribe in Mali who are reported to have long believed that the star Sirius has a companion that orbits the main star with a period of 50 years. Western astronomy discovered a faint companion star in 1862 that is invisible to the naked eye. As it happens, this star has an orbital period of about 50 years. Temple took this interesting bit of information and added claims about the origins of the culture of ancient Egypt and Greece, to name but a few. Temple didn’t say he was certain that ancient astronauts gave the Dogon their knowledge, as an earlier, undiscovered, human culture with advanced technology could also explain the mystery. Temple did say that he thought that the Alien hypothesis was the more likely of the two.

  Naturally, some anthropologists criticize the ethnographical studies on which Temple based his book, stating that the Dogon did not have a multicentury fascination with Sirius. Others claim that the origins of the knowledge of Sirius B stems from cross-cultural pollination, specifically from Europe (and possibly from the original ethnographers). Temple’s book didn’t penetrate the public consciousness the way von Däniken’s book did, and so we leave it without deeper discussion.

  The idea of ancient astronauts has certainly entered the public awareness. This can be seen in the 1994 movie Stargate, in which the ancient Egyptian civilization was modeled on Alien visitors to Earth millennia ago. The movie spawned three television shows with more than 250 episodes, spanning 14 years. We will revisit this series in chapter 4.

  Aliens Today

  In this chapter, we have taken a whirlwind tour through what we might call “Alien-ology.” The incidents here are by no means the only tales of Alien contact there have been, nor are they the first. The stories here are not even selected as being ones that are plausible. They were selected as the stories that grabbed the public’s attention and shaped our collective vision.

  There are still people who believe in all of the tales told here and in many others. In the next two chapters, we’ll tell the story of Aliens in fiction and relate the fiction to these tales of supposedly true extraterrestrial contact. But perhaps it is worthwhile to list the most common forms of Aliens that one will encounter if one attends a UFO convention. (Note that we will repeat this exercise at the end of the next chapter to include Aliens that come mostly from science fiction.) The typical aliens are:

  Little green men. These are not terribly common anymore and originated more in the fiction of the early twentieth century. LGM were diminutive humanoids, sometimes with antennae. They were the precursors of the Grays.

  Grays. Grays are the aliens of Betty and Barney Hill. They are short humanoids, gray in color, with large heads, no noses, pointy chins, and large, almond-shaped, soul-less black eyes. (Betty’s dream of large-nosed aliens morphed over time into our now-familiar Grays.) They abduct humans and perform medical tests on them, frequently centered around the pelvic region.

  Nordics. Also called Space Brothers, these Aliens are bigger than humans, beautiful in countenance, and spiritual in nature. They contact humanity only to teach us of the harmonious ways of the peaceful space community. These are Adamski’s Aliens, although in Adamski’s original contact, the Space Brothers weren’t larger than humans.

  Reptilians. These are a lesser-known form of Aliens, so they don’t warrant a special segment. They tend to be much larger than humans (5 to 12 feet tall); they drink blood and can shape shift. According to British writer David Icke, they live on Earth in underground bases and have created reptilian/human hybrids. Most of the world’s leaders are hybrids, including ex-U.S. president George W. Bush and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth. The origins of this alien stem from a 1967 abduction report in which the Aliens had a slightly reptilian appearance and had a winged-serpent insignia on their uniforms.

  Wrap Up

  Throughout this chapter, I have described the incidents over the past 60 years or so that have shaped what we, as a culture, think about Aliens. I have not troubled myself to be skeptical, although I personally am unconvinced by any of them. For our purposes, the question of whether these encounters are real, intentional hoaxes, or well-meaning mistakes is quite unimportant. What is important is that these episodes are the ones that have defined society’s vision of Aliens.

  Skeptics will point to various things, for instance the episode of The Outer Limits, which portrayed Aliens looking much like Betty and Barney Hill reported and played just 12 days before the day they were hypnotized and described Aliens with big eyes and no nose to the therapist. These were features not present in Betty’s dreams. Skeptics will also point to the fact that Kenneth Arnold didn’t call the phenomenon he saw a “flying s
aucer.” That fact was misinterpreted by a headline writer, and yet subsequent sightings were saucers and not the shape that Arnold saw. And, of course, there is Adamski’s usurpation of the classic prophet story and von Däniken’s astoundingly cavalier attention to archaeology. There are many books and countless articles out there deconstructing the Alien tale and it is entirely fitting if you are skeptical.

  But it doesn’t matter. These are the people and tales who have told us all what Aliens look like.

  THREE

  FICTIONS

  Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man.

  John W. Campbell, Editor of Astounding

  Literature is one of the many fine creations of humanity. In writing fictional tales, an author can take us to places we’ve never been before or show us a situation that perhaps we’ve never considered. A good story can show familiar themes in unfamiliar surroundings and, done well, a story can be a lovely metaphor, a story in which the real message is unspoken, but stated clearly even so.

  Of all the types of literature that have been developed over the millennia, science fiction is unique. It allows for plot devices that are not available to other genres. Its only possible competition is fantasy, but even that type of tale has at least some strictures. In science fiction, almost anything is allowed, as it can incorporate all of the other forms of literature with a setting that is quite unreal, say a murder mystery involving an alien death ray on Betelgeuse or a pair of star-crossed lovers who were literally born under different stars.

  As we move forward, it bears remembering the theme of this book, which is the evolution of mankind’s vision of Aliens. Thus the subthemes of science fiction that describe the impact of robotics, future dystopias, and even space travel into an empty galaxy (for instance Isaac Asimov’s epic Foundation series) are not really topics suitable for our discussion. Further, it must be noted the stories that are considered the most important by the more serious science fiction fans (e.g., Foundation or Frank Herbert’s Dune or much of Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long stories) are not always the ones that have had the biggest impact on the public. The stories that influence public thinking are the ones that are disseminated most widely, which generally means radio, television, or movies. Delightful and innovative stories that live only in pulp magazines and science fiction anthologies are often read by a small group of people.

  Accordingly, in this chapter and the one that follows, we will focus on the high-impact, high-visibility stories and try to understand what made them popular. This is in no way a simple job. Science and science fiction interact with one another in a way that cannot be easily disentangled. In a similar way, a popular movie may beget other movies that are clearly derivative. This can feed back into the science fiction literature, until it is difficult to know how the tale actually started.

  We begin at the turn of the twentieth century. As we travel through the decades, trying to understand how our modern thinking of Aliens has developed, we will consider books, pulp periodicals, radio shows, movie short serials, and feature films and television series. We will see that the dispersal of ideas about Aliens is clearly interwoven with the existence and growth of mass media. Just as the moon hoax of 1835 needed the penny press to become a widespread phenomenon, so too have our modern visions depended heavily on the growth of visual media, especially television and movies.

  Though he was not the first to combine scientific knowledge—or theory—and storytelling, perhaps Jules Verne might still be called the real father of science fiction. His stories were published in the 1870s and include such famous titles as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and A Journey to the Center of the Earth. However his From the Earth to the Moon, with the sequel Around the Moon, are the only stories that deal with extraterrestrial travel. In the story, a crew is shot from a big cannon, they orbit the moon and return to Earth. But no Aliens were encountered in Verne’s stories, so we turn our attention elsewhere.

  Mars Attacks the First Time

  Arguably, the father of Alien fiction might be H. G. Wells. Wells was trained as a science teacher and was an editor of the science journal Nature during the Martian canal frenzy. His 1898 story The War of the Worlds reflects speculation of the sorts championed by Percival Lowell and tells of an invasion of Earth by Martians against which mankind has no defense. It is a testament of the quality and timeliness of the story that it has never gone out of print. The story begins with a dying Mars. Martians, being the older and more technologically advanced civilization, shoot cylinders toward Earth by means of a large cannon. The cylinders land in England and, after a brief excursion outside their spaceship, the Martians return to their craft, only to emerge later in large tripods, small craft perched in the air on three long legs “higher than many houses.” The craft also sported articulated tentacles that could grasp things and a heat ray that could disintegrate what it touched. After a long and harrowing tale of death and destruction, the Martians eventually died, laid low by a disease from Earth. As the Martians had no immunity to illness, mankind’s salvation was but luck.

  While most of the story spoke of the battle between the tripods of the technologically advanced Martians and the hapless humans, we were briefly introduced to the Martians themselves. The narrator expected to see a humanoid, “everyone expected to see a man emerge—possibly something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man.” However, the Martian was in fact rather unlike humans. The Martian was a big, grayish, rounded, bulk, the size of a bear and covered with tentacles (figure 3.1). It had two large and dark-colored eyes, with a mouth that panted and dropped saliva. The narrator relates:

  Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth— above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

  Wells’s story was published in a serial format in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897, followed by the appearance of the book in 1898. As was typical of the time, a serialized novel appeared over the course of several issues, with each installment ending in a cliffhanger of some sort so as to induce the audience to buy the next issue. The story resonated well with readers who were beginning to worry about the fin de siècle (French for “end of the century,” the equivalent of the late twentieth-century Y2K worries). The thinking was that the culture was in decline and awaiting an invigorating renaissance.

  FIGURE 3.1. These illustrations by Alvin Corréa from the 1906 edition of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds show early depictions of Aliens and their spacecraft. Martians were octopus-like in appearance, while their fighting machines maintained some of the fluid movements that would appear natural in an invertebrate. The Martians were handicapped by being under the much larger Earth gravity.

  The War of the Worlds is noteworthy not only for its impact in 1898 England but also for its other intrusions on popular culture. On Halloween 1938, 23-year-old George Orson Welles was a rising young director and producer. He was also to unleash what may be the most famous radio broadcast of all times. In an era before television, families crowded around the radio and listened to news, music, and entertainment. On the CBS radio show The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Welles broadcast the now-famous version of War of the Worlds to the radio audience. At the beginning of the show, the narrator said that the story was set in 1939 (i.e., a year in the future), but not everyone heard that. Being broadcast
at the same time was the rival (and more popular) Edgar Bergen / Charlie McCarthy program. However, radio channel surfing was just as popular in the 1930s as television channel surfing is today. Some people would cut away from the Bergen/McCarthy show to see what was going on a different channel. And they tuned into what seemed to be a news broadcast saying that Martians had landed in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, and were attacking. The secretary of the interior was quoted as saying:

  Citizens of the nation: I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the country, nor the concern of your government in protecting the lives and property of its people. However, I wish to impress upon you—private citizens and public officials, all of you—the urgent need of calm and resourceful action. Fortunately, this formidable enemy is still confined to a comparatively small area, and we may place our faith in the military forces to keep them there. In the meantime placing our faith in God we must continue the performance of our duties each and every one of us, so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation united, courageous, and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth. I thank you.

  Scary stuff.

  Welles did try to counter potential panic, for he ended the broadcast with:

  This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be: the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying “Boo!” Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight: that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian—it’s Halloween.