UFO Cover Art – Frank R. Paul, Donald Keyhoe

P.S. to my last two posts:

I’ve talked about the amazing cover painted by the great science-fiction artist Frank R. Paul for the pulp magazine Science Wonder Stories, showing a huge mechanical disk drifting through space with the Woolworth Building in tow.  I’ve noted what’s yet more amazing: that this cover appeared in November 1929, more than 17 years before Kenneth Arnold saw the first of the modern era’s “flying saucers” over the Cascade Mountains.

In an online discussion of when it was that flying saucers first appeared as spaceships, Paul’s painting is called “the first illustration of a flying saucer” ever published.  That seems about right.

Does this make Paul “the man who created flying saucers,” as UFO skeptic Armando Simon has dubbed him?  Did Paul’s artistic genius inject the idea of extraterrestrial flying disks into the public imagination, so that people went on to “see” such things in the skies?  Unlikely.  The time lag between the supposed cause and its effect is just too great, the evidence for flying disks in pre-1947 science-fiction art just too slender.

Yet there’s a real case, if a more modest one, to be made for Paul’s impact on UFOlogy.  Was he the inspiration for the cover of the first UFO book ever to appear in print, Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real?

The book was published in paperback in 1950, by Fawcett Publications.  As far as I know, there was never a hardcover edition.  There’s no indication in the book of who designed or painted the cover.  Its resemblance to the Paul cover of twenty years past is striking.

There are differences between the two covers, as well as similarities.  Both foreground a disk tilted at an angle; the angle isn’t quite the same in both, and the tilt is in opposite directions.  Both disks are red and yellow, but in different patterns.  Other spaceships appear in the background–two in the Keyhoe cover, one in Science Wonder Stories.  The planet Earth appears in the lower right corner of both, but in the Paul painting it’s at a greater distance, such that Keyhoe’s disk seems to be at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere, while Paul’s is somewhere in deep space.

Coincidence is possible, of course.  It’s always possible.  But on balance it seems more likely that Paul’s masterpiece was still remembered two decades later by an artist who recognized in it a talent dwarfing his own, which he did his humble best to imitate.

Jack Womack’s Flying Saucers Are Real!, a gorgeously illustrated but snide and shallow survey of the UFO literature, pays a backhanded compliment to the Keyhoe book from which Womack cribbed his title: it “bears the finest science fiction cover to ever appear on a non-science fiction book.”

How ironic, yet how fitting it would be if the reason was that the cover’s creator, his name forever lost, was a disciple of one of science-fiction art’s all-time masters.

P.S. to the P.S.:  “His name forever lost,” indeed!  I spoke way too soon, as my friend Martin Kottmeyer has pointed out to me.  The artist was one Frank Tinsley, and you can get a sense of his oeuvre at the pixels.com website.

Flying disks don’t seem from this sample to have loomed large among Tinsley’s artistic interests.  Still, he’d done this one at least once before.  “The craft on the cover of Keyhoe’s paperback,” Marty writes, “reprises a drawing by Frank Tinsley that first appeared the March 1950 issue of True magazine that accompanied Commander Robert B. McLaughlin, USN’s article ‘How Scientists Tracked a Flying Saucer.’ It is a sublimely imaginative re-visioning of the Chiles-Whitted incident [of July 24, 1948].

“Though [the Chiles-Whitted UFO was] described by the witnesses as cigar-shaped with windows and a red-orange flame exhaust, the article proposes it actually involved propulsion by a light ‘radiation pressure motor’ created by a fissionable gas, i.e.. the light of an atomic blast is harnessed to propel the craft forward and provide lift and steering. The windows, in this re-vision, are actually rows of ports venting light along the edge of a discus flying saucer.

“McLaughlin’s article in its entirety is available on the Web here
http://www.nicap.org/articles/TrueMar1950.pdf.  As True magazine was published by Fawcett Publications, the same organ that published Keyhoe’s paperback, it is not surprising that Frank Tinsley also did Keyhoe’s cover.”

Check out the True article.  I think you’ll agree that although Tinsley’s UFO is the same as on the Keyhoe cover, the setting he’s given it on the cover is something new.  Or, I think, old–taken straight from the artwork of Frank R. Paul.

And I hope you’ll agree that my judgment, that Tinsley found in Paul “a talent dwarfing his own,” was not amiss.

Thank you, Marty!  The breadth and depth of your knowledge, and your generosity in sharing it, never fail to astound.

by David Halperin
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