Frank R. Paul – “The Man Who Created Flying Saucers”?

It’s an accolade more commonly given to Ray Palmer, the Amazing Stories magazine editor who’s best known for his promotion of the “Shaver Mystery” of the late 1940s.  The idea, floated in 1983 by UFOlogist John Keel in a self-assured article entitled “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers,” was that Palmer had introduced “disc-shaped flying machines” on the covers of Amazing Stories in the years just before June 1947, when Kenneth Arnold reported his landmark flying saucer sighting over the Cascades.

“Anyone who glanced at the magazines on a newsstand and caught a glimpse of the saucers-adorned Amazing Stories cover had the image implanted in his subconscious,” Keel declared.  These numbered in the “millions”; and “studying the empty skies in the hopes that they … might glimpse something wondrous,” they went on to see flying saucers.  All thanks to the inspiration provided by Ray Palmer.

You can test out Keel’s theory.  Go to the website http://pulps.retro-scans.com/Pulps-A/Amazing-Stories-1940-1953/Amazing-Stories.php, which has a gallery of Amazing Stories covers, and see how many you can find from 1945 to 1947 that are “saucers-adorned.”  The answer, you will discover, is: zero.  Several covers (February and September 1946, July and September 1947) depict spaceships, but these are the conventional rocket-ship variety, sometimes with wings attached.  Not a flying saucer will you see.

It’s true that Palmer foresaw the beginning of the UFO era with almost uncanny prescience, an issue that I explore in my forthcoming book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.  But that he created it, or even significantly influenced it?  Unlikely.

Weak as Keel’s case was, his man-who-invented-flying-saucers designation for Palmer caught on.  It sounded so very knowing, so very sophisticated (given that we all know flying saucers don’t exist and had to be invented by somebody or other).  It was parroted by later writers, such as Curtis Peebles in his debunking history of UFOlogy, who sounds unsure what he means by it.

And now a new candidate has been proposed for the flying saucers’ inventor: science-fiction artist Frank R. Paul, whose 1929 magazine cover showing a flying disk towing the Woolworth Building into outer space was the subject of my last post.

Paul’s candidacy is advanced by one Armando Simon, in an article published in 2011 in Skeptic magazine (Altadena, California).  The title: “Pulp Fiction UFOs: How the Origin of the Idea of UFOs Developed from the Extraterrestrial Spacecraft Depicted in Pulp Magazines.”  It’s available on the Web at www.questia.com, where I read it.

Like Keel, Simon is nothing if not self-confident.  “After a decade of searching for clues,” he writes, “I finally discovered that the man who created flying saucers/UFOs prior to 1947 was not Kenneth Arnold but a man named Frank R. Paul.”  For those who believe UFOs really do exist and are extraterrestrial spacecraft, he has no respect whatever.  “They simply want to believe, and they do not want to be convinced otherwise. … Trying to convince a true believer is a waste of time, speak from experience.”

Why, Simon asks, do people interpret ambiguous anomalies in the sky as flying disks?  Surely, because science-fiction tells them that’s what they ought to be seeing.  The problem is that, before 1947, science-fiction doesn’t seem to have predisposed them in this direction.  “From the 1930s through 1969, tubular rockets were the extraterrestrial vehicles of preference, patterned after rockets such as the V-2 and Saturn V.”  Only after 1947 does the flying disk take its place alongside the rocket ship.  The natural conclusion is that the direction of influence is the opposite of what Simon posits.  It was the UFO phenomenon that impacted science-fiction, not the other way around.

Frank R. Paul gave Simon a way out of the impasse.

“Paul’s designs for spacecraft were truly novel and eye-catching,” Simon writes; and nobody who looks at Paul’s 1929 cover for Science Wonder Stories can deny that.  And in the next paragraph: “Paul’s illustrations for the pulps, I believe, created a mental set of UFOs and flying saucers-as-extraterrestrial spacecraft.”  In between these two statements, in the Internet version of Simon’s article, the statement [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] occurs twice.  Surely the omitted illustrations were the 1929 “flying saucer” and one other; I don’t know which.

You already see one problem with Simon’s argument.  At least Palmer and his “Shaver Mystery” were close in time to the beginning of the UFO era; to connect Palmer’s imaginings with the flying saucer wave of 1947 was no great jump.  But between the Science Wonder Stories cover and Kenneth Arnold came a stretch of more than 17 years, during which fantasy illustrations of flying disks were–by my impression, and by Simon’s own account–sporadic at most.  Grant that the 1929 cover was impressive, even unforgettable.  Could it really, almost single-handed, have given shape to an entire nation’s imaginings 17 years afterward?

There’s another problem also.

Toward the end of his article, Simon invokes the 1896-97 wave of “airship” sightings, apparently thinking that this supports his position.  In fact it undermines it.  The imagined “airships,” Simon points out, were modeled after the actual dirigibles which had been “in the forefront of the race to develop flight technology since the 1850s.”  They were based, in other words, on things that existed in the real world.  But what would have been the real-world model for flying disks?  No such things existed, at least of human manufacture.  To say, well, the flying-saucer sighters got their image from science fiction and its artists, just pushes the question back a step.  Where did they get it from?

In my last post, actually, I gave an explanation for where Paul got the idea for his disk-shaped spaceship.  It was carried over from a painting he’d done about the same time of a “flying buzz saw,” which had to be disk-shaped because that’s the way buzz saws are.  It was a brilliant flash of artistic imagination but one without any enduring effect, at least any that we can trace in the science-fiction art of the next two decades.  To say that it’s what prepped people in 1947 to see saucers in the skies, is long stretch indeed.

So why did they construe what they saw as flying disks?

The obvious answer: they saw them as disks because that’s what they were.  We really were–are–being visited from other worlds, and for technological reasons beyond our grasp this is the shape our visitors’ spacecraft need to have.

But if you’ve been following this blog, you already know I can’t accept that answer.  For me, no less than for Simon, UFOs are a human phenomenon.  Their shape, like everything else about them, must be a human creation.  Its motivation and meaning have to be, somehow or other, human.

Identifying and fleshing out that human meaning is, for me, the real mystery of the UFO.  And the path toward the true answer was, for me, marked out sixty years ago by Carl Jung in his classic Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.

“If we apply [the principles of dream interpretation] to the round object–whether it be a disk or a sphere–we at once get an analogy with the symbol of totality well-known to all students of depth psychology, namely the mandala (Sanskrit for circle).  This … can be found in all epochs and in all places, always with the same meaning, and reappears … in modern individuals as … a modern symbol of order, which organizes and encloses the psychic totality. …

“If the round shining objects that appear in the sky be regarded as visions, we can hardly avoid interpreting them as archetypal images.  They would then be involuntary, automatic projections based on instinct, and as little as any other psychic manifestations or symptoms can they be dismissed as meaningless and merely fortuitous. … They are impressive manifestations of totality whose simple, round form portrays the archetype of the self, which as we know from experience plays the chief role in uniting apparently irreconcilable opposites and is therefore best suited to compensate the split-mindedness of our age.”   (From the paperback edition by Signet Books, pp. 30-32.)

How badly we needed the UFOs in 1959, at the height of the Cold War!  How badly we need them today!

by David Halperin
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