Feb. 20 - Entities and Sacred Texts in 1959‏

Dear Friends,

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Be Well.

David

Entities and Sacred Texts in 1959

I was reading Sacred Texts the other day [letter exchanges between Dick Hall and Isabel Davis in 1959]. Much of interest continually fell off the pages. Several of these bits of "news" involved Dick, Isabel, Ted Bloecher, and Lex Mebane's grappling with the problems of the great menagerie of creatures which might or might not be involved with unidentified flying objects. Isabel and Ted had gotten well inside the Kelly-Hopkinsville stories; Dick and NICAP had not. Lex had examined much of the French 1954 wave [for his translation and publication of Michel's book], NICAP was still pretty uncomfortable. To give NICAP a break on this, their current goal was to impress congressmen with the validity of the UFO phenomenon [to get open hearings] and adding in a healthy dose of mischievous hairy dwarves was probably not "politic". Nevertheless, here is Dick, well out of the earshot of Keyhoe, wondering where all this weirdness is heading. By the way, Dick was just "transferring" his life from Tulane University to DC [he'd gotten there in the summer of 1958] and was probably a bit unsettled on "borders" being set by NICAP [but being a quick study, I'll bet that he had it figured out what to say to friends and what to say to the press]. Well, lets see what they did say. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What they said was quite a lot of course; so much that I could never get it all across to you on this blog. I've picked three things which were going on regarding entity cases; each of which you may find interesting. The first regards "Hairy Dwarves", probably no one's favorite UFOnaut. Dick had a friend and investigations buddy named Don Neill. Neill and Hall were apparently already wondering about the true nature of certain "UFO" encounters. Neill was reading Bernard Heuvelmans' On The Track Of Unknown Animals [what might be regarded as Cryptozoology's foundational text], and focussed on the chapter entitled, "The Little Hairy Men". Dick says to Isabel: "One incident describes an attack from behind on human beings reminiscent of the Venezuela affair." Dick, surprisingly, seems here to be willing to entertain the hypothesis that some UFO cases may be more in the line of productions by long-term "folkloric" entities known by other names for ages. We don't have Isabel's return letter on this [believe me, I'm sorrier about that than you are]. But right at that moment, she was shaking her head about a set of cases which were coming to CSI that seemed to multiply the variety of entities beyond all sense. [And her big work on the Kelly "hobgoblins" was certainly in this mode]. We'll look into a couple of these other cases later in this post.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dick's flirtation with the idea that the Hairy Dwarves may have owed something to folklore entities would have been easy to circumstantially defend. We have today turned the folkloric entity "Brownie" into a cute little fairy handful-sized and basically friendly. That concept owes to writers like Palmer Cox, who constantly wrote charming fiction about such lovable creatures. The folklore about these critters is somewhat different. They are described as smaller-than-humans but not much [perhaps four foot high] and of definite brown skin, and covered with thick hair--hairy dwarves, in fact. Their behavior might be tolerable, but it depends on which one you encounter and what mood it's in. Brownies might ignore you or even do you some service; but it's just as likely that you're in for mischief. Because they are not of the "handsome" variety of folklore entities, they fall under the general class of the "Bogles", sometimes said to be led by Puck, with all that entails about behavior. They might be nasty [like bogeymen or bugaboos] or just neutral but dangerous [like The Fenoderee]. It is at least a mind-stretcher to contemplate the [to me] extremely odd Venezuelan part of the 1954 wave in such terms. One wonders how much Dick and Isabel kept things like this in mind.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Other cases were stretching them in other directions. One was the Old Saybrook, CT case. This encounter occurred on December 16,1957 .the witness, a Yale graduate with two degrees, Mrs. Mary Starr, did not report the sighting immediately [she was living in a cottage on the Connecticut side of Long Island sound, the other cottages were unoccupied at that time of year, and she was concerned that there would be no other witnesses to back up her story]. Nevertheless, in September of 1958, she decided to report to NICAP. Dick Hall fielded the letter and talked to CSI about the event. Dick and Isabel arranged to meet Mrs. Starr at the cottage and take her story. This is what she said: "I was alone that night so I went to bed early, about ten o'clock. Sometime between two and three in the morning, I was awakened by a bright light in my room. I looked out the window and there was what I first thought was a crippled airplane in my back garden. But when I got my eyes really open, I saw it was a cigar-shaped object, brightly lit and with square portholes, hovering above my clothesline. I could see three men inside. An antenna poked up from what seemed to be the tail of this object. There was no sound. After about five minutes, it turned at a right angle and I could see that it was so shallow that the men could not have been more than three and a half or four feet tall. It glided out of my garden, rose almost vertically, and then disappeared." [These were the quotes in the news story that the Air Force included in the Blue Book file, though it did not bother to investigate]. The rest of the story was published by Isabel in the CSI Newsletter of July 15, 1959. In it Mrs. Starr describes the occupants as having squarish head-gear [possibly robotic] colored orange-red and having an attached bright red bulb. There were no "hands". When Mrs. Starr leaned forward to get as good a glimpse of the things as she could, the portholes "coincidentally" faded out, and the object began a sparkling brilliance. This led to the retraction of an antenna, and its sharp turn and departure. Dick and Isabel were VERY impressed with the quality of the witness, and CSI published the case with no apologies. NICAP didn't. Dick wanted to mention it in his famous UFO Evidence, but as it was headed to Congress, only the craft was mentioned without the occupants. Later, NICAP got over some of its hang-ups and published the details in Lore/Keyhoe's UFOs: A New Look. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A second case disappeared even more profoundly. This was the March 7, 1959 case of Silver Springs, MD. Once again, NICAP got the case report, and Hall fielded it. He and Don Neill and a third person went to the scene. The case had seven witnesses and two had seen pieces of the encounter close up. The first primary witness saw a person with a "white helmet" on, standing on the opposite side of some bushes on their property. Moving around a hedge to see who this was, she was startled to encounter a small person in an all-white body-suit, covering even his feet. The only variation to this was trunks of bright blue coloring. The "helmet" was attached to the bodysuit as well. [by the way, folks, I have never seen any of the original field report on this; hopefully it has not been lost. But the descriptions of the letters allowed me to make a general guesstimate as to what they were talking about. Unfortunately, I didn't read one key phrase clearly when I made the drawing that you see above--the "helmet" should cover everythingeverything else up. So just imagine the "eyes-only" blackly staring out at you]. The first witness screamed, and the entity "ran off", seeming to "skim" rather than meet the ground. As it passed, the second main witness got a good look at its face, noting the "empty" eyeholes. Whereas the Old Saybrook case boggled NICAP, the Silver Springs case boggled everybody. It was never published anywhere, maybe because Dick became really busy and dropped the ball. We would know nothing of it had not Ted Bloecher published a note about it in HUMCAT twenty years later.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
but the eyes, which were described as dead black "holes" as if nothing but empty {outer} space were there. Sorry for the screw-up, but the blog technology doesn't allow me to correct this with a new drawing without messing So this is what they were facing in those early days: Hobgoblins from Kelly-Hobgoblinsville [my nowadays nickname for the case], Bogles from Venezuela, Robots from Connecticut, and what Dick called the "blue-tailed flyer" from Maryland. NICAP was schizophrenically trying to cope while still "selling" UFOs to Congress, and CSI was thinking "how weird is this going to get?" Isabel was wondering whether the Air Force might occasionally put something really goofy out there to make things maximumly confusing and incredible. I think that maybe she was on to something, but with the wrong perpetrators. I think that it just might have been, occasionally, the folkloric characters that were deliberately messing with us and having their time-honored fun. Who knows, maybe Ted would have agreed with me, even if Lex and Isabel thought I was nuts? It would have been great fun to have been back there with them to find out.

Posted by The Professor