“You have people on Mars! Think how great you are. Ask the white man if he has any out there. We have life on other planets, but he don’t.”
I don’t know when Elijah Muhammad, until his death in 1975 the leader and most visible face of the black-nationalist “Nation of Islam” (a.k.a. “Black Muslims”), first spoke or wrote these words. They appear in a posthumously published book, The True History of Master Fard Muhammad; their context speaks of “the devil”–that is, the white man–having “come so near to looking at the surface of Mars to look for creatures on it.” This would seem to date the passage to after the flyby of Mars by Mariner 4 in July 1965.
Of course Mariner 4 detected no trace of the black-skinned beings, humanlike but also godlike, who according to Elijah Muhammad are the inhabitants of Mars. For this, he has an explanation. “They are very wise, very skillful. … If they don’t want to be seen by you, they don’t have to let you see them.”
I understand Elijah Muhammad’s words as part of an unfriendly dialogue between the UFOlogy of white America–what we normally have in mind when we think of UFOlogy–and its ill-explored, ill-understood African American counterpart. Religion scholar Stephen C. Finley has devoted a series of pioneering articles to this African American UFOlogy; I’ve touched on it, and on Finley’s work, in my blog posts. (Click here and here and here.) I wrote a chapter on it for my forthcoming book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO. The chapter began:
“The paradox of UFO abductions: introduced into the culture by a black man (Barney Hill) who gave every sign of having been horribly traumatized by what he’d undergone, they quickly turned into a trauma for whites only. African-Americans are almost entirely absent from the standard narrative of the abduction phenomenon—a commentary on the phenomenon? Or on the narrative?
“In a society split by race, is there a distinctively black American UFO experience? I think the answer is yes, and I think the abduction paradox is one facet of this mostly unrecognized and unexplored issue. That’s what this chapter is about.”
The chapter, alas, had to be cut from Intimate Alien because of space limitations. What follows is taken, with appropriate revisions, from the deleted material. It hasn’t been published anywhere else.
Start out with the autumn of 1953, where my post of two weeks ago ended.
Albert Bender, recently “silenced” by the Three Men in Black after his discovery of the supposed dreadful truth about UFOs, is visited in his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut, by two of his fellow researchers. Desperate for any clue as to what the awful secret might be, they ask him to suggest a subject for a science-fiction story.
He replies:
“Here is something no one has used before. Suppose there was another world out in space, and there the people were black. What do you think would happen if they came to this planet? Do you think they would help the colored or the white people? You know the prejudices that exist here, and if they came to Earth, what do you think would happen?”
Of course your mind goes to the movie The Brother from Another Planet. But that film dates only from 1984. Bender came up with his idea of black-skinned ETs a full generation earlier, when indeed it was “something no one has used before.” He may not have discovered any secrets about the UFOs, dreadful or otherwise. But it’s a measure of how remarkable a man he was, that he was alive to something few of his contemporaries can have sensed–the UFOs’ power to mirror the racial torment of the society in which they’re embedded.
Now, 1952-53 was the dawn of the “contactee” movement in UFOlogy. “Contactees,” Jerome Clark writes in his UFO Encyclopedia, “are individuals who believe, or claim to believe, they are in regular communication with benevolent extraterrestrial intelligences, often referred to as Space Brothers. Space Brothers are essentially angels in spacesuits: strikingly handsome or beautiful … usually with longish blond hair and a wise, patient manner.” They’re benevolent; they’re preachy. They’ve come in the flying saucers to redeem us earthlings from our warlike ways.
And they’re white. Perhaps a touch on the exotic side: the man from Venus whom contactee George Adamski met in the California desert in November 1952 was “round faced with an extremely high forehead; large, but calm, grey-green eyes, slightly aslant at the outer corners; with slightly higher cheek bones than an Occidental, but not so high as an Indian or an Oriental.” His skin color was “an even, medium-colored suntan.” The same Venusian again encounters Adamski in February 1953, in the company of of two other Space Brothers, one from Mars and the other from Saturn. The latter has brown eyes, a ruddy complexion, and black hair “cut according to our style”; while the Martian “had a round boyish face, a fair complexion and eyes of grayish blue. His hair, also wavy and worn in our style, was sandy in color.”
“A HUMAN BEING FROM ANOTHER WORLD!” Adamski proclaims of the Venusian, in capital letters; and these extraterrestrial humans, in Adamski’s tales and those of the other contactees who arose in his wake, are Caucasian one and all. “Ask the white man if he has any out there,” Elijah Muhammad would taunt fifteen or twenty years later, and Adamski had already prepared the “white man’s” answer. We, not you, populate the planets. Black and white traditions confront each other in a shared framework, mirroring each other precisely. Each is bent on filling the solar system with its own race.
With one lovely exception, which by itself almost redeems this depressing story of warring fantasies.
In 2001, two twin sisters, Shurlene Wallace and Earlene V. Carr, published a book which they titled From the MotherLand to the MotherShip, the “MotherLand” being Africa. As far as I’m aware, this is the only memoir of UFO abduction–as white UFOlogists would call it; the sisters deliberately avoid the term–written by African Americans.
Of the two authors, Wallace is the experiencer, and most of the book is devoted to her recollections of her “trips,” as she calls them (always with the word in quotation marks). Carr, who contributed one chapter and a portion of another, provides the theoretical framework for her sister’s experiences, drawing out their implications for what it means to be black in America and on the planet Earth.
Wallace’s first “trip” takes place on December 30, 1995. This is eight months after she’s moved from Kansas City to Dallas as part of a separation from her husband, whom she obviously loves but whom she’ll divorce before her story is finished. (It’s also, coincidentally or not, a little over two months after the Million Man March.) She goes to sleep and awakens inside a circular spaceship, its encircling window giving her a view out onto the galaxy.
The typical white abductee would find himself or herself on an examination table, there subjected to incomprehensible and sometimes gruesome probes and experiments. Wallace preserves this detail but lets it morph into something vastly more benign: “a bed about the size of a king-size bed,” on which her husband sleeps peacefully beside her. She wakes him up. Together they marvel at the cosmic sights they’re privileged to see.
Over the coming months, the “trips” continue and the pattern holds. They’re almost always positive experiences to which the ominous word “abduction” could hardly apply. Wallace doesn’t deny that other people undergo “abductions” that are frightening, even traumatic. These are genuine experiences; she wouldn’t think of trying to discount them. But they’re not hers. She joins an abduction support group in which she’s the only African American; she finds welcome and understanding among the white abductees. “Your magic binds together / That which custom has strictly divided,” Schiller had written in his “Ode to Joy,” which Beethoven set to magnificent music in his Ninth Symphony. Thanks to the magic of the UFO, there exists one space in a race-bedeviled society where a black woman can be fully and comfortably accepted for who she is.
The classic “grays,” first depicted on the cover of Whitley Strieber’s 1987 bestseller Communion, put in a cameo appearance near the end of the book. But by and large the people of the UFO world are humans like Wallace, mostly black but sometimes white. Visiting Mars, Wallace learns from “a human-looking Caucasian being” that the planet is home to a civilization that’s predominantly but not exclusively black. She’s astonished: “Could a place actually exist where race was not an issue?” Evidently so; for the black majority and the whites on Mars seem to mingle amicably. Yet “I could not integrate this knowledge with our history on earth.”
“You have people on Mars!” Elijah Muhammad had crowed. “We have life on other planets,” but the white man doesn’t. Now the two sisters, their race consciousness leavened with a kindly good nature that allows ample sorrow but only a touch of bitterness, adopt this boast while softening it. White people, in their cosmology, can be Martians too.
“I sincerely hope these personal experiences will be embraced with the love with which they were written,” Wallace appeals to the reader at the end of her book. “We do create our own reality and there is an awesome, unique power in knowing this. Let’s walk hand-in-hand through the ‘front door’ of this phenomenon.”
Surely an evocation, almost heartbreaking, of the classic line from “We Shall Overcome”: “We’ll walk hand in hand some day.”
When will all of us in this country, UFO believers or not, be ready to accept Shurlene Wallace’s invitation?
by David Halperin
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