A “Paracast” Remembrance – Teen UFOlogists and the Klass Curse

“We were all teenagers once,” says my old friend Jerry Clark at the beginning of last month’s Fifteenth Anniversary interview on the Paracast podcast.  It’s plain from the timbre of Jerry’s voice that, like the rest of us UFOlogists from days of yore, he’s left those teen years far behind him.  “I have been young and am now old,” each of us might say with the Psalmist (37:25), though unlike the Psalmist we probably have “seen the righteous man forsaken” on one or two occasions.  The real question for us septuagenarians–as we all are–is: has the Klass Curse been fulfilled upon us?

What, you may well ask, is the Klass Curse?

Ah, all in good time.  Be patient with an old man’s meandering.

The guests on The Paracast were Jerry, who in his 74 years has cast a giant shadow across American UFOlogy–he’s almost single-handedly the author of the 2-volume masterpiece The UFO Encyclopedia—and Tim Beckley, maybe two years younger and just as prolific in a more flamboyant vein, who has come in some circles to be known as “Mr. UFO.”  I’ve reminisced about Jerry in an earlier blog post, and I won’t repeat myself here.  I’ll only say that in a lifetime mostly spent among the salaried intellectuals of academe, I’ve never known a truer intellectual, a person more profoundly devoted to the search for truth, than Jerry Clark.

(Not that we’ve ever met face to face.  Apart from one telephone conversation more than 30 years ago, we’ve known each other entirely through our UFO correspondence when we were both teenagers, and now through emails.)

And Tim?  I’ll let another old acquaintance, from the generation of UFOlogists before mine, describe him.  This is the late Jim Moseley, writing in his often delightful, intermittently insightful 2002 memoir (co-authored with Karl Pflock) Shockingly Close to the Truth:

“Tim was and is quite a character. … Over the years Tim has peddled, in his various books and magazines, every outrageous point of view imaginable about UFOs and kindred subjects, even though he believes very little of it himself. … Tim makes no pretensions, and doesn’t have a vicious bone in his body.  I consider him to be an honest businessman and a good friend.”

I knew Tim from New Brunswick, New Jersey, when we were both teenagers and I lived just across the Delaware in Levittown, Pennsylvania.  Tim then published a mimeographed UFO zine called Interplanetary News Service, while I ran off my own N.J.A.A.P. Bulletin on a mimeo machine in the Trenton office where my aunt worked.  (NJAAP was the “New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena,” of which I was Director; Jerry, in Minnesota, was Assistant Director.)  Gene Steinberg, one of The Paracast‘s co-hosts, was also a friend, whom I visited occasionally in what was then for me the fabled, exotic city of New York.

The only participant in the podcast whom I didn’t know from the old days, but whom I’ve had the great pleasure of getting to know through The Paracast–we’ve had wonderful exchanges on several Paracast episodes, including the current one in which I’m the interviewee–was J. Randall Murphy.  Randall is a remarkable man, about ten years younger than the rest of us.  He’s been involved with UFOlogy since his childhood, but Google his name and you’ll mostly find references to his other life as a recording artist, at which he’s very talented.

Beneath the surface of last month’s anniversary celebration, you couldn’t help but feel the solemn and melancholy undertone of remembrance and finitude.  It marked 15 years from the time Gene launched The Paracast with its first guests, UFOlogists Moseley and Brad Steiger, both of them now deceased.  We are their heirs–and, as Gene reminded us in asking whether the UFO issue will ever be resolved in our lifetimes, there’s not much time left for us.

About halfway through the program, Randall remarked that the old days of UFOlogy were better ones, a “golden age.”  To this, Jerry took exception.

“I pride myself on having no nostalgic genes,” he said–and I’m reminded that “nostalgia” is a combination of the Greek words nostos, “homecoming,” and algos, “pain,” a painful yearning for an impossible return to a home that’s now gone and perhaps never existed outside the imagination.  “It was what it was.  It was fun sometimes, and I associate it with growing up, going through your teens, your adolescence, and trying to find your way in the adult world.  There’s a lot of pain associated with that … part of the whole package of growing up and trying to figure out how to live in the world. 

“To me, it was just strange,” Jerry went on, “because I read Ruppelt [Edward J. Ruppelt, author of The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects] and [the books of Charles] Fort at an early, impressionable age, and the next thing I know, I’m way older and I’m still with UFOs.  And I made a whole career out of it, as did Tim.”

As did I.  For what was the merkavah (“chariot”) vision of Ezekiel chapter 1, the research into which launched my academic career, but an ancient manifestation of the unidentified Other that still haunts our psyches and that we project into the skies?  Remembering, and hearing my old friends remember, I marveled as I often do at how we’re all in some sense still together, drawn together by the UFO’s wonder and mystery.  Any grownup of 60 years ago, predicting that pretty soon we’d outgrow this childish flying-saucer nonsense, would be, as our British cousins say, gobsmacked.

Does that mean, then, that we’re all doomed to be victims of the Klass Curse?

The Curse bears the name of its author, UFO debunker Phil Klass, who died in 2005.  Here it is, as quoted by Moseley in the last chapter of Shockingly Close to the Truth:

“To ufologists who publicly criticize me, … or who even think unkind thoughts about me in private, I do hereby leave and bequeath:

“THE UFO CURSE:

“No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today.  You will never know any more about what UFOs really are, or where they come from. You will never know any more about what the U.S. Government really knows about UFOs than you know today.  As you lie on your own death-bed, you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today.  And you will remember this curse.”

So are we UFOlogists and our works all, as Paul says (sort of) in Galatians 3:10, under the Curse?  Each of us must answer that question for himself or (rarely) herself.  For myself–no, I don’t think I am.  When I was a teen UFOlogist exchanging 10- and 20-page letters with Jerry Clark, I couldn’t possibly have written Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.  I think, yes, the years in between have taught me what UFOs really are and where they come from.  Also that the US government, like all other governments, has no clue to any of it.

Or perhaps I knew it even back then, but didn’t know I knew it.

Last May, I received an extraordinary email from my high school English teacher, about ten years older than myself, now living in Florida.  He reminded me of an incident I’d entirely forgotten, when our eleventh-grade class was discussing the famous poem of Emily Dickinson:

“Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.”

On which “a student”–plainly myself–commented: “The chariot is just a UFO, and it is always with us.”  

So I knew.  Later I forgot, but even then I knew.

by David Halperin
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