UFOs in 1929? – The Art of Frank R. Paul

Look at this picture and tell me: what does it show?

A red and yellow UFO, you think–hovering or drifting through outer space with a skyscraper caught in its elongated tentacles?  A more distant UFO behind it, this one brandishing the Eiffel Tower?  Absolutely right!  (Extra points if you recognized the skyscraper as New York’s Woolworth Building.)  Your terminology, however, is anachronistic.  The painting, by the great science-fiction artist Frank R. Paul (1884-1963), appeared on the cover of the November 1929 issue of the long-defunct pulp Science Wonder Stories.  That’s almost twenty years before the culture recognized any such things as “UFOs,” or even “flying saucers.”

So what’s a UFO doing there?

As the announcement on the cover indicates, Paul’s illustration was unrelated to anything in the current issue.  It was supposed to function as a kind of Rorschach for readers’ imaginations, the subject of a contest for the best story written around it.  The winning entries were published in the March and April 1930 issues, and are summarized in Everett F. Bleiler’s massive reference work, Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years.

Though I’m indebted to Bleiler for providing these summaries, I wish he’d reproduced the words the authors actually used to speak of the space-disk, and not imposed on it the anachronistic term “flying saucer.”  (Which originated in 1947, in the wake of Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting over the Cascade Mountains of objects “like saucers skipping over water.”)

The first-prize entry (Bleiler’s no. 1481) was by Charles R. Tanner, and was called “The Color of Space.”  “The great scientist Dr. Henshaw, captured by the Russian scientist Godonoff, is currently in a flying saucer rendered possible by the Russian discovery of antigravity.  As can be seen through the window of the spaceship, the Russians, to demonstrate their power, are off into space on their way to Venus with the Eiffel Tower and the Woolworth Building in tow.”

Except they aren’t.  They and their prisoner are still in New York.  The whole outer-space scenario is a fake on the Russians’ part, as Henshaw realizes when he notices that “the Russians colored space blue instead of black.”

Second prize went to John Pierce for “The Relics from the Earth,” “set in the undated future [and] narrated by the leader of an expedition from Triton to recover symbolic souvenirs of mankind’s past, the Eiffel Tower and the Woolworth Building.  Because of overwhelming insects, humanity had been forced to abandon Earth and move to Triton.  There is an accident along the way back, as a meteor hits the narrator’s flying saucer, but he survives and returns to Triton” (Bleiler, no. 1133).

In the third-prize winner, by Frank Brueckel (“The Manuscript Found in the Desert”), the narrator stumbles into a desert cave with “a television equivalent that shows flying saucers carrying away the Eiffel Tower and the Woolworth Building.”  Not clear, at least from Bleiler’s summary, why the aliens piloting the disks–notice this is the first story that involves aliens–should want these items.  But “an Earthman, apparently in the Woolworth Building at the time of its removal, gun[s] down the alien crew of one of the saucers.  The saucer, out of control, accidentally rays one of the other saucers, then crashes into the third, thus destroying all” (no. 143).

Television, at the time a novelty, figures also in the fourth-place entry, Harold A. Lower’s “Raiders From Space” (no. 913).  An American family watches on the TV screen a horrific scene of alien invasion–“flying saucers carrying off the Eiffel Tower and the Woolworth Building, while other images show and a commentator describes the destruction being visited on New York City”–which turns out to be a teaser for a German science-fiction movie.  “A prevision of Orson Welles,” Bleiler remarks; and I wonder if any discussion of the “War of the Worlds” Martian panic of October 1938 takes this little nugget of information into account.

There were also two honorable mentions.  One, Victor Endersby’s “The Day of Judgment” (no. 362), had the Woolworth Building carried off with all its occupants, as a specimen of Earth society, for the judgment of the aliens inhabiting the planet “Suven.”  The only person in the building who might suggest to the Suvenians (?) that they should refrain from destroying our entire planet, is “a lame, self-sacrificing black janitor, who is scorned by the white crooks who have offices in the building.”  Bob Olsen’s “Cosmic Trash” (no. 1092), meanwhile, portrayed the flying disks as futuristic garbage trucks, carrying unwanted buildings into space where they’ll be abandoned to fall into the sun.

So the top six stories are evenly divided, between those imagining the disks to be human-piloted and those that see them as alien-piloted.  What did the artist himself have in mind?  Of course there’s no way to know for sure, but Paul’s cover illustration for the April 1930 issue of Air Wonder Stories may provide a clue.

You can see the illustration by clicking here.  (I prefer not to include it with this post, since I’m not clear on its copyright status.)  It accompanies a story by Harold McKay, “The Flying Buzz Saw” (Bleiler, no. 923), this being a secret weapon used in a future war–in the year 2024, which no longer seems as remote and science-fiction-y as it once did–between North and South America.  Compare the two images of the craft.  I think you’ll agree they’re nearly identical, apart from a slight shift in perspective and the loss of the serrated teeth from the “flying saucer.”

The “flying saucer” picture was published a few months earlier than the “flying buzz saw.”  But it’s easily possible that Paul painted them both at about the same time, and I would suppose that the “buzz saw” is the more original conception.  The discoid shape of the flying machine has a real function in the “buzz saw” story, which is lost when it’s turned into a “flying saucer.”  Why should spacecraft, whether of human or alien manufacture, be disk-shaped?  The only answer that makes sense to me is that the shape is carried over from another context, losing its meaning in the process.

Which raises the question: why are the post-1947 flying saucers disk-shaped?

To be explored, though alas not answered, in my next post.

by David Halperin
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