A riveting chapter on the Crusades began
Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.
The edition I first read was adorned by a quote from the financier and adviser of Presidents, Bernard M. Baruch, attesting that reading Mackay had saved him millions.
There had been a long history of spurious claims that magnetism could cure disease. Paracelsus, for example, used a magnet to suck diseases out of the human body and dispose of them into the Earth. But the key figure was Franz Mesmer. I had vaguely understood the word ‘mesmerize’ to mean something like hypnotize. But my first real knowledge of Mesmer came from Mackay. The Viennese physician had thought that the positions of the planets influenced human health, and was caught up in the wonders of electricity and magnetism. He catered to the declining French nobility on the eve of the Revolution. They crowded into a darkened room. Dressed in a gold-flowered silk robe and waving an ivory wand, Mesmer seated his marks around a vat of dilute sulphuric acid. The Magnetizer and his young male assistants peered deeply into the eyes of their patients, and rubbed their bodies. They grasped iron bars protruding into the solution or held each other’s hands. In contagious frenzy, aristocrats -especially young women – were cured left and right.
Mesmer became a sensation. He called it ‘animal magnetism’. For the more conventional medical practitioner, though, this was bad for business, so French physicians pressured King Louis XVI to crack down. Mesmer, they said, was a menace to public health. A commission was appointed by the French Academy of Sciences that included the pioneering chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and the American diplomat and expert on electricity, Benjamin Franklin. They performed the obvious control experiment: when the. magnetizing effects were performed without the patient’s knowledge, no cures were effected. The cures, if any, the commission concluded, were all in the mind of the beholder. Mesmer and his followers were undeterred. One of them later urged the following attitude of mind for best results:
Forget for a while all of your knowledge of physics . . . Remove from your mind all objections that may occur . . . Never reason for six weeks … Be very credulous; be very persevering; reject all past experience, and do not listen to reason.
Oh, yes, a final piece of advice: ‘Never magnetize before inquisitive persons.’ Another eye-opener was Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Here was Wilhelm Reich uncovering the key to the structure of galaxies in the energy of the human orgasm; Andrew Crosse creating microscopic insects electrically from salts; Hans Horbiger under Nazi aegis announcing that the Milky Way was made not of stars, but of snowballs; Charles Piazzi Smyth discovering in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh a world chronology from the Creation to the Second Coming; L. Ron Hubbard writing a manuscript able to drive its readers insane (was it ever proofed? I wondered); the Bridey Murphy case, which led millions into concluding that at last there was serious evidence of reincarnation; Joseph Rhine’s ‘demonstrations’ of ESP; appendicitis cured by cold water enemas, bacterial diseases by brass cylinders, and gonorrhoea by green light – and amid all these accounts of self-deception and charlatanry, to my surprise a chapter on UFOs.
Of course, merely by writing books cataloguing spurious beliefs, Mackay and Gardner came across, at least a little, as grumpy and superior. Was there nothing they accepted? Still, it was stunning how many passionately argued and defended claims to knowledge had amounted to nothing. It slowly dawned on me that, human fallibility being what it is, there might be other explanations for flying saucers.
I had been interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life from childhood, from long before I ever heard of flying saucers. I’ve remained fascinated long after my early enthusiasm for UFOs waned – as I understood more about that remorseless taskmaster called the scientific method: everything hinges on the matter of evidence. On so important a question, the evidence must be airtight. The more we want it to be true, the more careful we have to be. No witness’s say-so is good enough. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes. People stretch the truth for money or attention or fame. People occasionally misunderstand what they’re seeing. People sometimes even see things that aren’t there.
Essentially all the UFO cases were anecdotes, something asserted. UFOs were described variously as rapidly moving or hovering; disc-shaped, cigar-shaped, or ball-shaped; moving silently or noisily; with a fiery exhaust, or with no exhaust at all; accompanied by flashing lights, or uniformly glowing with a silvery cast, or self-luminous. The diversity of the observations hinted that they had no common origin, and that the use of such terms as UFOs or ‘flying saucers’ served only to confuse the issue by grouping generically a set of unrelated phenomena.
There was something odd about the very invention of the phrase ‘flying saucer’. As I write this chapter, I have before me a transcript of a 7 April 1950 interview between Edward R. Murrow, the celebrated CBS newsman, and Kenneth Arnold, a civilian pilot who saw something peculiar near Mount Rainier in the state of Washington on 24 June 1947 and who in a way coined the phrase. Arnold claims that the newspapers
did not quote me properly . . . When I told the press they misquoted me, and in the excitement of it all, one newspaper and another one got it so ensnarled up that nobody knew just exactly what they were talking about . . . These objects more or less fluttered like they were, oh, I’d say, boats on very rough water . . . And when I described how they flew, I said that they flew like they take a saucer and throw it across the water. Most of the newspapers misunderstood and misquoted that, too. They said that I said that they were saucer-like; I said that they flew in a saucer-like fashion.
Arnold thought he saw a train of nine objects, one of which produced a ‘terrific blue flash’. He concluded they were a new kind of winged aircraft. Murrow summed up: ‘That was an historic misquote. While Mr Arnold’s original explanation has been forgotten, the term “flying saucer” has become a household word.’ Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers looked and behaved quite differently from what in only a few years would be rigidly particularized in the public understanding of the term: something like a very large and highly manoeuverable frisbee.
Most people honestly reported what they saw, but what they saw were natural, if unfamiliar, phenomena. Some UFO sightings turned out to be unconventional aircraft, conventional aircraft with unusual lighting patterns, high-altitude balloons, luminescent insects, planets seen under unusual atmospheric conditions, optical mirages and looming, lenticular clouds, ball lightning, sun-dogs, meteors including green fireballs, and satellites, nosecones, and rocket boosters spectacularly re-entering the atmosphere.* Just conceivably, a few might be small comets dissipating in the upper air. At least some radar reports were due to ‘anomalous propagation’ – radio waves travelling curved paths due to atmospheric temperature inversions. Traditionally, they were also called radar ‘angels’ – something that seems to be there but isn’t. You could have simultaneous visual and radar sightings without there being any ‘there’ there.
[* There are so many artificial satellites up there that they’re always making garish displays somewhere in the world. Two or three decay every day in the Earth’s atmosphere, the flaming debris often visible to the naked eye.]
When we notice something strange in the sky, some of us become excitable and uncritical, bad witnesses. There was the suspicion that the field attracted rogues and charlatans. Many UFO photos turned out to be fakes – small models hanging by thin threads, often photographed in a double exposure. A UFO seen by thousands of people at a football game turned out to be a college fraternity prank – a piece of cardboard, some candles and a thin plastic bag that dry cleaning comes in, all cobbled together to make a rudimentary hot air balloon.
The original crashed saucer account (with the little alien men and their perfect teeth) turned out to be a straight hoax. Frank Scully, columnist for Variety, passed on a story told by an oilman friend; it played a central dramatic role in Scully’s best-selling 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers. Sixteen dead aliens from Venus, each three feet high, had been found in one of three crashed saucers. Booklets with alien pictograms had been recovered. The military was covering up. The implications were profound.
The hoaxers were Silas Newton, who said he used radio waves to prospect for gold and oil, and a mysterious ‘Dr Gee’ who turned out to be a Mr GeBauer. Newton produced a gear from the UFO machinery and flashed close-up saucer photos. But he did not allow close inspection. When a prepared sceptic, through sleight of hand, switched gears and sent the alien artefact away for analysis, it turned out to be made of kitchen-pot aluminium.