Dreaming of Alien Invasions

The other day, while I was out back throwing the ball to Holly the Pup, I began thinking about invaders from outer space. Was it in reaction to the chaotic and paranoiac times in which we live, where we seem to have as many enemies within as we have without? Was it an imaginative reaction to sitting under a vast and empty sky and wondering what might happen if it were suddenly filled with spaceships? Was it because I watched way too many trashy science fiction films during my misspent youth? Certainly any of these could lay claim for inspiring me, but it may also been because I was bored to tears and wishing that something interesting would happen, even an alien invasion. To Holly, every throw of the ball is different, every unexpected bounce a surprise to be anticipated and celebrated, but to me every throw is the same, time after time after time. She can go on for two hours or more without becoming one whit jaded, but, for me, my concentration begins to waver after two minutes, or less.

When you sit down and analyze the nature of any alien invasion, you realize there are limited possibilities for the nature of the invaders. I'm not thinking of their forms or motivations but rather their relation to us. I came to the conclusion there are four basic possibilities: 

• They are superior to us
• They are equal to us
• They are inferior to us
• They are unfathomable to us

The first aspect that pops to mind is technology, and the gut reaction of most people would be to assume an instant superiority to us. After all, they have space flight and we don't. They have to be superior to us, don't they? Not necessarily, and technology is only one aspect. The are other aspects of the invaders to take into consideration:

• Technology
• Society
• Biology
• Ethics

Take for example H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, not the first alien invasion novel, but the most famous and influential. The Martians were definitely more advanced than the English of the period in terms of technology. They had weapons like heat rays, black smoke and disintegrators, while the British army had only rifles and artillery. However, the Martians were inferior to us biologically, the reason our germs could lay them low. In film adaptations of the book, especially the unwatchable Tom Cruise version, the technological gap has almost closed. In fact, I'd say that in the films the Martians were about equal to us except for the gimmick of the force field--take that away and their machines blow up like any other machine. And yet they remain biologically inferior.

In John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, there is no technology with which to contend. There, the ambulatory plants have the advantage of biology and society. They are not heirs to the weaknesses of the flesh, nor are they burdened by conflicting social impulses. Their societal imperative, such as they could be said to have one, is clear--dominate and feed.

The aliens of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End appear to have technology so far ahead of ours as to seem like magic.They can make the spectators at a bullfight feel the pain of the bull and cause the sun appear not to shine in a specified area. They seem superior to us on all counts, even in the area of ethics and morality, which, of course, is the point of the book. However, we retain a biological superiority because the aliens are unable to make the evolutionary leap that is our destiny, though they can shepherd us toward it.

In The Midwich Cuckoos, again by Wyndham, we have aliens about which we can only guess. Are they technologically superior? We don't know because we never see evidence of actual technology. The same applies to society and biology, though we can at least assume there is superiority of some sort, if only because they can make a village go to sleep, protect it with some kind of dampening field and make every woman in the village wake up pregnant. Ethically? Who knows? We often perform experiments of "lesser creatures" and we consider ourselves moral and ethical beings. So why not them?

A few words about cinematic efforts at depicting alien invasions. Usually, we're treated to spectacular special efforts designed to make us think the invaders are technologically advanced--giant ships, exploding buildings, disintegrating people, etc. In reality, though, most of the invaders are about equal to us. That was the case with the aforementioned War of the Worlds films and is true also in such efforts as Independence Day and Battleship. Take away the force field gimmick and all their spaceships go boom. In Battle: Los Angeles, we just shoot the aliens. The examples of aliens truly technologically advanced is are as rare as technologically inferior aliens. While backwards aliens have appeared in print from time to time, I can only think of the Pakleds ("We go. We go fast.") from Star Trek as an example of "simple aliens" on the screen.

Will an alien invasion ever really happen? If we truly live in a universe of infinite possibilities, then the answer must be yes. No one knows what form it may take, but the odds of it being like anything you have read about or seen in the cinema or on television are low. Our imagination always falters when faced with the immensity of the unknown. Nor does anyone know if it will happen before or after the Zombie Apocalypse...yeah, at least we know that's coming.

"I was kidnapped by flying saucers!"

When I was growing up, flying saucers were very big, not just in pop culture (films, comics, television sci-fi magazines), but in the news as well. You may sneer and think, Yeah, but not everyone read the National Enquirer, but I mean such outlets as the New York Times, and even Look, which had a slick newsstand special issue:

I remember thinking, I'd really like to be the person to figure this out, but there's no hope of that -- after all, whether from outer space, Atlantis, Inner Earth or other dimensions, it won't be a mystery much longer, not with the CIA, the Air Force and investigators going after it hammer and tong. It's what we all thought. Not a single one of us even remotely considered that any mysteries would remain unrevealed well into the 21st Century. And yet here we are...

You may ask what flying saucers have to do with reading, or books. People like me, who were  pulled into the world of flying saucers (never did like the term UFO) were seduced not by newspaper reports of lights in the sky or of aliens -- I was in high school before I learned most people thought aliens came from Mexico -- but by books. The most influential book among us saucer heads was Flying Saucers: Serious Business by Frank Edwards. Its effect came not from it being so well written or meticulously researched but because it was available through the Scholastic Book Club; for students, the SBC represented a way to get books their parents would not buy otherwise -- if if was being offered through school, well, it just had to be okay.

This was hot stuff! One of the best aspects of this book was that it gave a great historical background to the flying saucer enigma, showing us that it did not all start with Kenneth Arnold's sighting of strange aircraft above Mount Rainier in June 1947 or, as some of us thought, with the Roswell crash the following year. Not only did it go farther back in time, it went much farther back in time; according to Edwards flying saucers had been reported in ancient times, and John Keel, another icon of the era, asserted the flying saucer mystery had been with us since the beginning, an idea he posited in Our Haunted Planet and The Eighth Tower.

These books were a great jumping off point for starting our own saucer clubs, conducting our investigations, solving the greatest mystery, and writing our own books, becoming world famous and making millions of dollars from our best-sellers. We did not write the books, but that did not stop us from mailing out our newsletters and blurry magazines. Computers were huge machines filled with vacuum tubes, calculators were dreams, and dry-process photocopying was coming. On the other hand, we had mimeograph machines, and we weren't afraid to use them. And use them we did, writing reams of reports, speculating wildly and publishing our own work as fast as we could turn a handle. And that wonderful, intoxicating smell...

This was a time when several new flying saucer books appeared at the newsstand every month, as did magazines of various types -- slick, pulp, specialized, tabloid and digest. It's not very surprising, given the media flood, that I was sucked into the flying saucer maelstrom; more surprising is how long I stayed, since most moved on to some other fad after a book or two. I was an investigator for the UFO Research Bureau (which was just really me, Steve and Gary), and I sent reports, observations and theories to all the journals and basement-mimeographed newsletters of the time. And, of course, I worked on my book which explained the Great Mystery once and for all, as well as tried to break into the big magazines like Saga, Look, Life, Fate, and Scientific American -- yeah, I was naive.

My first breakthrough in writing about flying saucers:
"New Light on the Flying Saucer Mystery: Beings From Other Dimensions!"

Hundreds of fantasy, science fiction and mystery stories, and my first piece of professional writing (hey, there was a check for $100!) is a research/opinion piece about flying saucers. I did not care! I was published! And there were other magazines over the years:

 

But also, over the years, it became a minor writing sideline for me, often written with as much amusement as wonder, as much nostalgia as inquisitiveness. Mostly my writing efforts took me into genre fiction, and I knew things had changed when I noticed the content of my library had changed. While stationed in Germany, where I wrote the article for Beyond Reality, I had to prepare my library for shipping and discovered my books on flying saucers, the Bermuda Triangle, Men in Black, the Philadelphia Experiment, aliens, ghosts, haunted houses and other things that went bump in the night outnumbered all other books by a factor of five to one; just twenty years later, another accounting of my library informed me that what had once formed the lion's portion was now a small fraction of the whole. But it wasn't news, not really, for I'd written and published just about everything except flying saucer stories for years. I had been kidnapped by flying saucers, but I eventually made my way back, just a bit later than others who'd taken passage to the second star on the right.

The flying saucer mystery is still a mystery, perhaps even more than before simply because it has gone on so long as to become a permanent part of our culture. While we in the first heyday of the unknown were passionate about finding the solution, investigators nowadays are content with the mystery being a mystery. If if were to go away, what in the world would they do with themselves, or that vacation planned for Area 51? I don't think they want to find out.

There is a big difference between then and now which has nothing to do with the mystery itself. Most of our information came from the printed word, mass market books and magazines from big publishers; or one-man publishing houses issuing 500 copies or less (collectors items now); or newsletters cranked out by geeky kids with coke-bottle glasses using their allowance money and meeting to discuss the latest MIB sightings. Nowadays, people get their UFO fix (the word "UFO" has triumphed despite my best efforts) from the television -- History Channel, Discovery, Military Channel, Spike, SyFy, Chill Network, USA, TNT, and more alphabetic cable outlets; and the nefarious Men in Black, just a comedy. Maybe the kidnappings continue, but those who journey beyond the sky now take a digital camera with them, not a typewriter. Too bad...they don't know what they're missing.

Run! The Martians are coming!

Today the Martians stopped by my house for a visit. I had not seen the leathery little devils in quite some time, not since their last attempt at world domination, so I was really quite pleased to see them, and we had a pleasant time, which will not end since the Martians decided to move in with me. As Nero Wolfe, a personage for whom I am at times mistaken, would have said, "Quite satisfactory!" My house may be crowded, but there is always room for more.

The Martians were transported over by my friend Charles, with whom I used to work at the Library. Charles and I have as much in common as we don't -- in a workplace of 800 people, we were the only veterans; we don't care for rhesus monkeys, rabid weasels or snakes-in-suits; we have no tolerance for fools; we both have a soft spot for the Insane Clown Posse; we both like weird films (his are far weirder than mine); and we both have a strong nostalgic bent. It was this last commonality that caused Charles to bring over the Martians.

Yes, a comic book, of course. After all, it's not as if anyone visiting me is going to see a real Martian -- you need special glasses for that. But I digress. The gift was a special 50th anniversary reprint of Classics Illustrated No. 124: The War of the Worlds By H.G. Wells. Originally published in 1955, the comic appeared at a time when American society was down on comics...had a Comic-Con been held at that period of history, it would surely have been raided by the FBI, the Vice Squad and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Classics Illustrated tried to legitimize comics and introduce kids to classic literature, and was the brainchild of publisher Albert Lewis Kanter, who is profiled on the reverse of the reprint.

For millions of kids, Classics Illustrated provided a doorway into a world of great literature. Most kids didn't even realize they had passed through that doorway; all they knew was that they were reading comic books that had great plots and interesting characters...the lack of tights, masks, capes and superpowers was nary a problem, certainly not when the stories kept you turning pages like crazy. Though I dearly loved The War of the Worlds, I must admit my two favorite Classics Illustrated issues were Jules Verne's Off on a Comet and Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea; and I also read and re-read another Wells tale: Food of the Gods.

I was quite touched that Charles gifted this book to me, as I have very fond memories of the comics published by Classics Illustrated, this issue in particular, which I read prior to seeing the George Pal film, but after reading the book. Although the book and the film had a particular impact on me, there's just something about reading a comic with a flashlight in the dead of night that makes the idea of Martians lurking in the shadows, or under the bed, quite believable...and probable.

The artists, editors and production people at Jack Lake Productions Inc., did a wonderful job in restoring the art and text of The War of the Worlds. Even though this edition is printed on much better paper than a comic book publisher would ever have dreamed of in 1955, with the resulting increase in color quality and clarity, the artwork still retains the flavor of the times, before artists convinced themselves they were the stars and that it was absolutely necessarily to depict not only every muscle in the human body but a hundred more muscles that don't really exist in an actual torso. The permanence of hard covers, enhanced artwork, and special articles about Classics Illustrated and its creators -- superior to the original.

Still, as good as the commemorative edition may be, the original still outshines it, even a fifty-year-old copy that looks as old as it is. The smell of the paper, the stark power of the artwork, the impact of seeing it for the first time...can't beat it. Oh, and there's one more thing: the reprint cost $14.99, and the original only 15 cents; on the other hand, the reprint was a gift (Thanks, Charles!) and 15 cents was a fortune.