The Woman Behind The Most Influential Book No One Actually Reads

"Never utter these words:  'I do not know this-- therefore it is false.'  One must study to know, know to understand, understand to judge."-- H P Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1877

 Trivia lovers constantly seek to impress others with obscure facts for reasons probably best (and better) known only to themselves.  This truth can be verified by anyone who has suddenly been asked by the resident know-it-all to state, for the record, the average distance between Jupiter and Pluto, the atomic weight of Molybdenum or the occupation of Theda Bara's father...  

We arm you with our own fact of minimal value or interest:  July 1878 was the month and year when the first Russian born woman was granted citizenship by the United States government.  The lady in question didn’t really wish to while out all her days in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  She, in fact, desired to travel to India and stay there for an indefinite period of time, possibly even take up residence.  But the British were a suspicious lot and she thought a new nationality on an already well-worn passport would allay the notion that this visitor to the crown jewel of their Empire was, in fact, a Russian spy...

Madame Blavatsky and the Logo of her Theosophical Society

 

Exactly who and what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was (or was not) remains a matter of debate.  Toward the end of her life, the British Society for Psychical Research issued its opinion of her activities in India:  "For our part, we regard her not as the mouthpiece for hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters of history"...

More charitably, we will say Madame Blavatsky (HPB, to her followers) co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875.  Partners in this venture included lawyers Henry Steel Olcott and William Q Judge.  Known as "Colonel" for services rendered in the American Civil War, Olcott was blessed with an inquisitive mind that pondered subjects as varied as methods to improve agricultural yields and claims made by the spiritualist movement.  Attorney Judge specialized in commercial paper cases when not pursuing esoterica...

The goals of the Theosophical Society (which continues as an active and significant force in the occult movement to this date) cannot be quickly summarized without doing the movement grave injustice… 

HPB and Colonel Olcott

Blavatsky believed all faiths and sets of religious belief contain core spiritual truths that could be recovered through a combination of direct revelation from the Divine and meditative and/or occult practices designed to isolate these truths from the dogma surrounding them.  A God Who is the Source of all, an immortal soul, and a possibility of total spiritual enlightenment are among these core truths...

In July 1878, preparing to travel overseas with a reinvented identity, H P Blavatsky refused to take credit as sole author of the weighty Isis Unveiled, published the year previous.  She had written much of the book herself, she confessed to her supporters, but she’d also simply assembled pages which appeared mysteriously in her study, as many as 50 per night.  The truth of the matter: a Great Lodge of highly evolved spirits, an invisible brotherhood, had chosen her to be their instrument to guide mankind to higher states of consciousness...

Born in 1831 near the village of Yekaterinoslav, Helena Petrovna's father served the Tsar as an artillery officer.  He descended from aristocratic German stock.  This was well and good but her mother had the better blood lines-- her noble family traced itself to Prince Mikhail of Chernigov.  In turn, Mikhail claimed Rurik, the legendary Norseman credited with founding the Russian state, as his ancestor...

Theosophical Society Headquarters, Adyar, India, 1890

 

Several things about HPB's childhood hint at the woman she becomes...

Her mother and grandmother, also named Helena, provided strong role models.  Mother wrote novels whose heroines strove to break free of the emotionally constricting lives society expected of them.  The Russian literati compared her to George Sand (aka Amandine Dupin, Baroness Dudevant), the scandalous French novelist who advocated free love and had an affair with composer Frederic Chopin.  Grandmother,  aka the Princess Dolgorkurov, studied the natural world and earned academic respect for her botanical studies...

Blavatsky (her married name) demonstrated disturbing hints of genuine telepathic and precognitive abilities while growing up at the family estate near Odessa.   More upsetting to her relatives was HPB's distinct democratic streak.  The girl simply did not care if the new friend she brought home to dinner was an unkempt peasant child or the equally odious offspring of a peddler...

These factors-- strong female role models, psychic phenomena, and indifference to her social standing-- appear to have come together in her mid-teen years to create HPB.  At sixteen, she discovered her late grandfather's library and began poring over his books about medieval occultists, hoping to make sense of her own paranormal experiences.  A year later, she ran away from home to spite her governess and promptly married a General decades older than herself.  Three months after exchanging vows with the old soldier, Helena walked away from the marriage...

Thomas Edison would eventually be among the many persons
who made the acquaintance of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.  An
agnostic on the question of the survival of the human
personality after death, Edison toyed with the idea of creating
a machine that would capture spirit vibrations if they existed.

 

Four decades and three years later, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky would die far from New York, India, or Holy Mother Russia.  She would move to the next plane of existence in London...

Those 43 years spanned a time of incredible technological progress and the atheistic intellectual challenges posed by Charles Darwin and Karl Marx.  They simultaneously twined with serious attempts by educated men and women to find a scientific basis to believe in a teleological universe-- or at least locate reasonable hints lives had some meaning and we could hope to continue beyond the grave...

The British were in the forefront of this search.  Since the appearance of the London Dialectical Society in the late 1860s, many intellectuals in the land of Angles and Scots had investigated claims of contact with spirits, thought transference, glimpses into the future, and similar phenomena.  At the suggestion of physicist William Barrett, a Society for Psychical Research was formed in 1882... 

The city of Wurzburg where HPB worked on The Secret Doctrine

The society attracted the attention of natural scientists like William Crookes (discoverer of the element Thallium) and Oliver Lodge (noted for studies in electromagnetism), as well as students of the mind Sigmund Freud and psychologist William James.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Scottish physician best remembered for creating Sherlock Homes, belonged to the group.  Like Doyle, Lodge had a very personal interest in knowing if the soul continued its existence after death-- both had lost family members to the horror of the First World War…

Another thread of research co-existed with organizations interested in finding any hard science that might explain paranormal events.  This thread consisted of esoteric societies whose goal was to isolate, refine, and reunite the divine spark in mankind with the Ultimate Source.  It is probably fair to say these magical orders were more in search of mythic truth rather than scientific fact... 

Members of these esoteric orders were well educated, well-to-do, often with some sort of connection to Masonic lodges.  Perhaps the best known of these societies is the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn whose members included William Butler Yeats, Bram Stoker and Arthur Edward Waite...

Adherents of societies such as The Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn were inclined to
odd costumes.  Here, a member seeks to
embody Isis

 

For Helena Petrovna (whose Theosophical Society was closer in intent to the purpose of the Golden Dawn than the goals of the Society for Psychical Research) the 43 years during which she attached Blavatsky to her name were simply a magnificent adventure, a rollercoaster whirlwind of activity.  There were shipwrecks off the Egyptian coast, treks to remote monasteries in Tibet, voyages to New Orleans to learn secrets of voodoo…

But, above all, there was the grand stay in India where the invisible (and probably non-existent) Ascended Master and Secret Brother Koot Hoomi assisted HPB in creating a lucrative business as a spiritual adviser… 

Then came the British Society of Psychical Research to examine her claims.  Oddly enough, their experts determined Master Koot apparently used HPB's own hand and ink to write his messages from The Great Beyond...

Denying wrongdoing, the disheartened HPB left India.  She penned another book in Europe, The Secret Doctrine, spending time in Italy and Germany as she did so.  Then it was on to Belgium.  Then London.  One hopes she found her way to a joyful reunion with Koot Hoomi in the world beyond this and that the Ascended Master enjoyed traveling as much as she did ...

HPB's magnum opus, Isis Unveiled, remains in print today, thanks to the Theosophical Society that she, Olcott, and Judge organized well over a century ago.  It is a massive work consisting of two volumes (Science, 657 pages, and Theology, 848 pages).  One suspects that very few of HPB's critics or devotees have actually read this collection of writings despite its impact on New Age thought.  This is a shame, considering Volume 1, page 327 (Science) offers the definitive discussion on the subject of the astral body of apes...     

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and member
of the Society for Psychical Research, found himself at odds with
colleagues who considered this 1917 "Fairy Photographs" to be
a blatant hoax

 

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CREDITS

Note: All photographs and research for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia or other readily available public materials, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: HPB/Theosophical Society logo from http://www.richardcassaro.com/

More Public Art In A Desert Town

On the first day of November 2012, we took a brief walking tour of San Angelo’s public art…

Then as now, San Angelo sits at the northeastern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert.  A little more than 100,000 people call the city and surrounding county home.  They are approximately two-thirds of the population of the Concho Valley whose hard and dry terrain covers an area greater than the square miles of the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined…

Hemphill-Wells Building: Remo Scardigli

It is an area heavily invested in the “old” American West’s economy of ranching, hard scrabble farming, oil and gas.  Hemphill-Wells-- a San Angelo department store whose building was later transformed into the county library-- hired celebrated sculptor Remo Scardigli to honor this heritage and placed the completed project on its western wall in 1972.  Scardigli had lived along the central California coastline in his younger days and had been part of the “bohemian” crowd surrounding novelist John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts.  It was a circle that included scandalous storyteller Henry Miller and cerebral mythologist Joseph Campbell.  Readers who have visited the town of Carmel may have seen another of Scardigli’s works, a redwood carving of Father Junipero Serra, a Franciscan friar who established missions in California’s days under Spanish rule…

Salmon Competition: Texas Flora by Joe Barrington

Salmon Competition: Windswept by Ben Woitena

The ranching heritage of San Angelo and other aspects of area life form the basis for a series of murals sponsored by a non-profit organization called Historic Murals of San Angelo.  At this writing, the group’s latest project (Native American life) is in the process of being completed by muralist Stylle Read whose other work includes historically accurate depictions of ranch life, the military presence in the area, and the work of western writer Elmer Kelton.  Another muralist, Crystal Goodman, has painted wall scenes showing the impact of the railroad and downtown San Angelo as it appeared in the very early Twentieth Century…

Crystal Goodman: Chadbourne Street circa 1908

Melodie McDonald, Designer: Mosaic Car

Goodman is one of the artists associated with The Old Chicken Farm Art Center founded in 1971 by Roger Allen.  With twenty artist studios and a Bed and Breakfast for visitors to southwest Texas on its three acre site, the Chicken Farm is a major force in the regional art scene.  On the first Saturday of each month, the compound hosts an open-to-the-public exhibition of artists at work and blacksmithing as local musicians provide background entertainment…

Roger Allen: Decorative Plates, Old Chicken Farm Art Center

The most easily noticed local celebration of the arts may be the juried Richard and Pam Salmon Sculpture Competition with its nearly yearlong exhibit at the Sunken Garden Park in the center of the city.  Seeking to win the prize this year is Uruguay-born and USA educated Ana Lazovsky, who lives now in Israel.  Previous competitors include San Angelo sculptor Anthony Fuentez...

Salmon Competition: Copacabana Wave by
Ana Lazovsky

Salmon Competition: Cuddling Fish aka Hot Lips
by Bobby Peiser

Fuentez, incidentally, created one of San Angelo’s most easily missed works of public art-- a whimsical sculpture of a cat burglar quartet scaling the sides of an insurance company’s offices.  The wire figures are almost invisible to a pedestrian walking past a shaded patio between the walls of a bank and those of the insurance company.  Many thousands of people have strolled by, unaware of the “crime” in progress…

Richard Fuentez: Cat Burglar Quartet

The almost-invisible public art theme is repeated elsewhere in the city.  Unless one knows where to look, it’s all too easy to walk past the entrance to downtown Paintbrush Alley where mostly anonymous artists gave new life to the back side of old buildings.  Most of the work was completed in 2005 but a visitor suspects the creativity behind the paintings is merely dormant, perhaps taking a long nap...

Paintbrush Alley: June 1937 (Artist Unknown)

Paintbrush Alley: Movie Memories (Artist Unknown)



Paintbrush Alley: Saint Joseph (Artist Unknown)

Elsewhere on the streets of the city at the edge of the desert sit mermaids and stand fiberglass sheep.  There are several statues of Pearl to be found downtown.  Local folklore has it that the lovely half-human half-fish makes her home somewhere along the banks of the Concho River where she supervises the mussels who produce rare purple freshwater pearls endemic to the region…

Pearl (Artist Unknown)

A plethora of fiberglass sheep dot the San Angelo cityscape, the visitor notices... 

The answer of why there are so many of them is simple.  Historically, the city holds a prominent place in the business of shearing sheep.  A local businesswoman, musing on San Angelo’s historic claim to being the Wool Capital of the World and the Miss Wool pageant that honored this status, put her senses of humor and whimsy to good creative use and saw a downtown filled with painted fiberglass sheep grazing the sidewalks…

Standing on a corner in the old part of the city, I think Brenda Gunter had a good idea.  I see a mural honoring the spirit of the warrior, a store celebrating the hippie ideal with a bright pink peace sign, a fiberglass sheep paying homage to the hard work needed to survive life at the edge of the desert.  And I agree with her comments that San Angelo is the true capital of West Texas.  Where else, I ask myself, could these three things come together...

 

Fiberglass sheep, Military Heritage Mural by Stylle Read,
and Store

 

For more Public Art in San Angelo:            

http://lrnarts-lrnarts.blogspot.com/2012/11/public-art-in-desert-town-clear-skies.html

 

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CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: All photographs by Louis R Nugent.  Research for topics covered in this essay consists primarily of information from readily available sources such as Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica except as noted: Remo Scardigli as sculptor of Hemphill-Wells artwork, information on the Salmon Competition, and Richard Fuentez’ sculptures from San Angelo Standard Times columns by Rick Smith; information on Remo Scardigli as friend of John Steinbeck from With Steinbeck In The Sea of Cortez by Sparky Ennea and Audry Lynch (Sand River Press, 1991).

Big Boy and Mr Big

“If you will allow the conceit, I see myself sometimes as one of those great Egyptian fresco painters who devoted their lives to producing masterpieces in the tombs of kings, knowing that no living eye would ever see them.” Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die, 1954

Mr Big sat in front of the English secret agent James Bond.  He was a monstrous man who had devoted his life to creating the greatest criminal enterprise that would remain forever unknown to ordinary people who worked in factories and offices.  Mr Big’s head, twice the size of a normal man’s, reminded Bond of a football.  His taut grey-black skin could have been worn by a corpse that had spent a week in the East River of New York.  The thing Bond found most frightening was the absolute power and genius intelligence radiating from eyes that danced with evil…

Buanopart Ignace Gallia, aka Mr Big, was far from being the first freakish fiend to grace pop culture.  Most Americans who devoured the James Bond adventures in the late 1950s and early 1960s had at least a passing familiarity with the detective Dick Tracy who had a penchant for encountering bad men and women who belonged in a carnival sideshow…



Mr Big (Yaphet Koto) prepares to execute James Bond (Roger Moore) and
Solitaire (Jane Seymour), the seer who has betrayed him for the love of the
secret agent, as one of Big's henchmen looks on.

Chester Gould, whose Dick Tracy strip debuted in 1931 with a villain named Big Boy, understood we humans allow ourselves to be publicly fascinated by grotesqueries in a way that overshadows our power to embrace beauty except in the most private places of our hearts.  Big Boy was one the few hoodlums Gould permitted to escape swift justice, surviving encounter after encounter with Tracy for over forty years until one of his henchmen makes the fatal mistake of murdering the detective’s daughter-in-law…

[The character of Tracy’s daughter-in-law, incidentally, first entered the comic strip as a result of its creator’s fascination with futuristic technology.  Gould had already incorporated the notion of a wristwatch allowing for two-way televised communication between Tracy and police headquarters when he decided to have to have one of his minor characters invent a “magnetic space coupe” that journeys to the Moon.  There, the daughter of the Moon’s Supreme Governor stows away and travels back to Earth where she and Tracy’s adopted son fall in love and soon become the proud parents of little Honeymoon Tracy, much to the chagrin of the Supreme Governor who would have preferred his daughter marry a lad who sported giraffe horns on his head, a trait that made it relatively simple to distinguish lunar folk from ordinary humans.



The Moon Governor and his Daughter, Moon Maid,
celebrate her nuptials to Dick Tracy's son

Gould’s Moon Maid is not to be confused with Nah-ee-lah, the heroine of Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Moon Maid trilogy, a thinly veiled attack on Russia’s Communists and their totalitarian mindset set in outer space.  Like Honeymoon Tracy’s mother, Nah-ee-lah is also the daughter of a lunar ruler.  She captures the heart of Julian, another earthling who has traveled into space and who describes her as being “as perfectly formed a human female as I had even seen” with raven-black hair and creamy-white skin.  As with many of ERB’s heroines, this Moon Maid turns out to be a strong, tough-willed, highly intelligent and quick-witted princess who also, fortunately for the young men who devoured Burroughs stories, passionately believes beautiful women should never be overly encumbered by garments.]

Cover art for the 1926 A C McClurg edition of Edgar Rice
Burroughs' novel is credited to J Allen St John, whose long
career as an illustrator included time as an instructor at the
Chicago Institute of  Art and the American Academy of Art 

Big Boy dies of a heart attack in the midst of a fit of rage as Dick Tracy closes in on him.  His fate was far more merciful than the one Ian Fleming bestowed on the nemesis of James Bond-- to be slowly ripped apart by ravenous barracuda.  It is a horrible fate.  Even the secret agent he failed to kill briefly hopes Mr Big’s disease-ridden heart will fail him and deliver him the savagery of the fishes’ teeth.  But it does not…

Occasionally, other villains defeated by Tracy met ends far more gruesome than Big Boy’s.  Flattop Jones, loosely patterned on the real-life Depression era bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd, drowns after being trapped underwater at a harbor under a replica of the Columbus ship, Santa Maria.  The ocean surface and life are but inches away from the killer’s eyes as he struggles to free himself.  A Nazi spy, The Brow, escapes prison only to die impaled on a flagpole reserved for the Stars and Stripes of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  But for the most part, Dick Tracy’s foes spend their last days in prison as they await a date with Old Sparky in the execution chamber.  Tracy was an old-fashioned cop who tried to bring the bad guys in alive-- it was a jury’s job to decide the just rewards of a criminal, not a task for adrenaline-fueled men with badges and guns…



Al Capone as Big Boy schemes with Madonna as Breathless Mahoney on the
best ways to do in a pesky detective in Warren Beatty's film adaptation of
Chester Gould's Dick Tracy comic strip 

Big Boy and Mr Big belong to the world of human oddities, a landscape greatly favored by both Robert Ripley of Believe It or Not fame and entrepreneurs whose carnivals and “freak shows” lined their pockets with entrance fees paid by gawking rubes eager to see human deformities…

Ripley’s interest in unusual people remains far more palatable to modern sensibilities than the distasteful public displays of physically abnormal persons which enthralled viewers in Europe and the United States from the 16^th to early 20^th centuries.  Born in 1890, Ripley was a cartoonist with youthful dreams of becoming a baseball player.  He was fascinated by the incredible diversity of the world around him, the strangeness of exotic cultures…

It was an interest that embraced the macabre without pandering too greatly to ghoulish tastes.  Ripley was as intrigued by tallest woman in the world as he was by the voltage generated by electric eels.  Culinary delights of Lapps and men who covered the backs of postage stamps with Biblical quotations both had a home in his syndicated Believe It Or Not comic strip, an outgrowth of a sports-oriented cartoon feature which Ripley first began drawing in 1918…



D C Comics reprinted the Flattop saga in 1975.  The cover
art celebrated a number of the strip's favorite villains.

After Champs and Chumps became Believe It or Not in the autumn of 1919, Ripley’s fame soared.  The strip had over eighty million readers during the darkest days of the Great Depression and World War Two.  Not one to be content with recognition only by newspaper readers, Robert Ripley recognized the growing importance of radio, movies, television, and public exhibitions in building and sustaining an audience in what was even then a rapidly changing world…

Whether it was prescience as to the role technology would play in creating audiences in the future or merely the drive of a showman to put on the biggest and bestest spectacle possible, there is no doubt Ripley’s strategy worked. He did have a bit of P T Barnum in his blood-- over two million visitors to “Ripley’s Odditorium” at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair were occasionally distracted by people hired to “faint” at shocking sights their eyes encountered…

Unlike Barnum and his mermaids of dubious authenticity, Ripley had a passion for truth and knew he could lose an audience overnight that had taken him years to build if fraud or factual inaccuracy were proven.  He hired researchers to check and double check his data-- one of them, Norbert Pearlroth, spent ten hours a day, six days a week, in New York City’s public library, attempting to disprove items destined to appear in Ripley’s comic strip…



Robert Ripley joins five lovely companions for a lake excursion

[One November 1929 Ripley panel would eventually spur Congressional action when the cartoonist revealed, despite popular belief, “The Star Spangled Banner” had never been officially designated as the National Anthem of the United States of America.  In 1931, this legislative oversight would be corrected with President Hoover’s approval.] 

It is to be expected that a chap like Robert Ripley would carefully cultivate eccentricities to make himself even more distinctive to the general public.  He had the money to do so-- in addition to the $100,000 salary paid him by William Randolph Hearst for the rights to his strip, the cartoonist’s other ventures took in another $400,000 or so yearly during a time when people hit hard by the Great Depression needed cheap thrills to get them through the day…

He lived a life designed to appeal to the fantasies of his readers-- traveling the world on Mr Hearst’s dime, surrounding himself with beautiful girlfriends, attending parties with the likes of the Marx Brothers and Harry Houdini as guests, broadcasting radio shows from snake pits and ships in the middle of the ocean, posing for photographs in his trademark pith helmet and holding the shrunken head of an unfortunate enemy of South American tribesmen…



Robert Ripley in a series of publicity photographs

Quests for the odd and unusual did not place Mr Ripley on a search for deeper and darker truths about the nature of the universe…

Such roads were the ones traveled by Charles Hoy Fort who combined Robert Ripley’s enthusiasm for the bizarre with Norbert Pearlroth’s passion for sitting in the New York Public Library and doggedly searching out facts that “Dogmatic Science” preferred to ignore.  These were the truths the academic establishment had relegated to the real of the damned…

Fort had no real explanation for the events he found chronicled in old newspapers and forgotten books but he had a passion for forcing scientists to confront phenomena such as red rains, fish falling from the sky, mariners’ reports of wheels of light just below the ocean’s waves, anomalous shapes traversing the heavens, flashes of illumination from the moon’s surface…



Artist's conception of tests of  a Nazi flying saucer--
perhaps the very craft used to ferry Hitler to a sectet
base in Antarctica if one conspiracy theory is to be
believed

Despite this, he did offer suggestions as to what might be going on behind the scenes of our placid world.  Perhaps there are worlds and dimensions parallel to our own, perhaps alien beings abduct us for their scientific curiosity or amusement, perhaps objects might be teleported instantaneously from one location to another…

[Generally unsuccessful as a fiction writer, Fort explored some of his notions in novels.  One suggested a Martian civilization controlled events on Earth.  Another hinted at an equally sinister human civilization based at the South Pole.  This latter notion is favored by a number of modern conspiracy theorists, some of whom assert the Nazis created a secret base in Antarctica, with Hitler escaping to a safe-- if not frozen-- haven in one of the flying saucers the Third Reich secretly built during the closing days of the second world war.]



Charles Fort published his first collection of data, The Book of the Damned, in 1919, the year that Robert Ripley changed the name of his fact-based cartoon to Believe It or Not.  Unlike the erstwhile baseball player, Fort failed to capture an extremely large following among the general public but he did attract a number of the more minds of his day…

Prominent intellectuals who immediately rallied to Fort’s call to not ignore the “damned”, those anomalous events that couldn’t be pigeon-holed into the notion of a mechanistic and orderly universe, included Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woollcott, H L Mencken, Booth Tarkington, Tiffany Thayer, John Cowper Powys.  Fort himself refused to accept leadership of a Fortean Society created in his honor, neither willing to be bothered by the time such duties entailed nor desiring to be cast in the role of authority figure for anyone other than himself…



Charles Fort and wife Anna

Today, Charles Fort is generally regarded as a harmless crank, occasionally mentioned by the scientists he mocked as a mere collector of data that could surely be explained if Fort had bothered to dig a little deeper into the circumstances surrounding red snows on the Antarctic ice or people whose charred remains hint at spontaneous human combustion.  He is seen by The Establishment as a bit akin to Robert Ripley-- a chap who loved interesting facts but had no real desire to explain anything, a little boy who brings a nine-legged spider to class to shock the teacher…

Perhaps he was less of a crank and more of a man who wished to create masterpieces of data that would remain uncatalogued by today’s ordinary minds, awaiting intellects of the future that would see patterns that he himself never saw.  In this, he would be akin to those great Egyptian fresco painters admired by Mr Big, toiling away to honor kings whose living eyes would never see them…             

             

 

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CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Jane Seymour and Yaphet Koto still from Live and Let Die (Director: Guy Hamilton, 1973)  photograph of Charles and Anna Fort from http://www.forteantimes.com/features/commentary/ 395/who_was_charles_fort.html; Robert Ripley photographs from “The Unbelievable Mr Ripley” by Neal Thompson (linked below); Dick Tracy by Chester Gould cartoons from Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate and D C Comics; Al Pacino and Madonna still from Dick Tracy (Director: Warren Beatty, 1990); Nazi flying saucer from http://www.henrymakow.com/nikola_tesla2.html  Research for topics covered in this essay consists primarily of information from readily available sources such as Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica except as noted: Mr Big quotation taken from Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming, 1954; additional Robert Ripley biographical data from “The Unbelievable Mr Ripley” by Neal Thompson, extract published in Vanity Fair (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/05/robert-ripley-believe-it-or-not)

High Strangeness At Hopkinsville

J Allen Hynek, PhD, professor of astronomy and a specialist in stellar evolution at Ohio State University, probably wasn’t thinking about a small town called Hopkinsville in the neighboring state of Kentucky as he sat down to dinner in the early evening of August 21, 1955...

Dr Hynek had no idea that a visitor from Pennsylvania, one Billy Ray Taylor, would be stepping outside at 7 PM to get a drink from a hand pump because the Suttons, his hosts, did not have running water inside their modest home in Kentucky’s backwoods not too many miles from Hopkinsville...

For his part, Billy Ray Taylor probably didn't know J Allen Hynek was a consultant to the United States Air Force investigation into Unidentified Flying Objects.  And he almost certainly had no premonition that Hynek would be credited with coining a term-- "high strangeness"-- many years later when he no longer worked with military men who were trying to figure out what people saw in the sky when they saw things that ought not be seen in the sky...

J Allen Hynek makes a cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg's
Close Encounters of the Third Kind

 

High Strangeness is a good way to describe what happened to Billy Ray Taylor and his hosts about an hour after the Pennsylvanian got his drink of water.  He told the others that he'd just seen a flying saucer in the western sky.  Its lights had all the colors of the rainbow.  The Suttons chuckled, amused by Billy Ray's vivid imagination, and told him he should recognize a shooting star when he saw one...

What happened next is well-known to any serious student of the UFO phenomena.  At roughly 8 PM, the Sutton hound began barking and howling and soon crawled under the house where he hid until the next morning.  Being good rural sorts, Billy Ray and Elmer "Lucky" Sutton decided to get a shotgun and a deer rifle to investigate the ruckus.  They stepped outside and promptly opened fire.  Moments later, the men rushed back inside, claiming they’d seen something floating in the air near the tree line...

The "something" was humanoid, roughly three feet tall.  It had huge ears that pointed up and spindly limbs that reminded the Suttons of a hospital patient with atrophied legs and arms.  Claw-like talons seemed to be the best way to describe the creature's hands.  It had a silvery glow.  Most disturbing to Billy Ray and Lucky was the fact it seemed to be impervious to bullets.  A shotgun blast would hit the critter and it would gracefully tumble backwards through the air in slow motion and then resume floating toward the house...



Biologist Ivan T Sanderson, who had a strong interest in
unusual phenomena, poses with a model of the Hopkinsville
Gremlin in an undated Polaroid photograph.

Eventually, the gremlin-- as the Suttons called it-- and several more like it reached the Sutton house, where (still floating in the air) they peered in through the windows and clambered on the roof, scaring the tarnation out of kids and adults alike.  Billy Ray and the Suttons fired at the creatures through the glass and walls for several hours.  Every bullet had the same effect: the gremlins floated away unharmed and then returned to be shot again so they could float away unharmed and then return...

Neighbors down the road heard gunshots from the Sutton place and wondered what in the world could be going on.  None called the sheriff, figuring it was the Sutton’s affair if they were shooting at someone…

After a couple hours, the goblins (a term often used by modern researchers) appeared to tire of the game and disappeared.  Billy Ray and Lucky and the rest of the household piled into the family car and burned asphalt to nearby Hopkinsville where they reported what had happened to Police Chief Russell Greenwell...

Greenwell and twenty other lawmen including Kentucky State Troopers investigated the Sutton home that night.  The chief and his officers didn't know what to make of the crazy tale they heard when the Suttons invaded his station.  But they knew a look of genuine terror when they saw it and they saw it in the eyes of every man, woman, and child who stood before them.  What made this troubling was that a State Trooper had radioed in a report of a strange object in the skies near Hopkinsville.  What made this more troubling was that the Sutton family enjoyed a good reputation in Christian County-- hardworking, devout and regular churchgoers, honest, and not inclined to sample moonshine...

What do we do with a case like the Hopkinsville Goblin Incident…

United States Air Force investigators opined the Suttons mistook a
Great Horned Owl for silver-clad "gremlins" floating in the air.

 

Do we ignore it?  Do we attempt a ludicrous explanation such as one offered by Major John Albert of the Air Force two years after the incident-- the gremlin was an escaped circus monkey painted in silver?  Do we nod sagely and agree with those who opine Billy Ray and the Suttons misidentified Great Horned Owls defending their nests?  This latter is perhaps more ridiculous than Albert's escaped monkey explanation.  Country folk know owls and educated fools when they see them...

Seven years before the Sutton incident, J Allen Hynek was, by his account, a skeptic when it came to UFOs.  He was a man with solid academic credentials and he'd been teaching at a major state university since 1936 with the exception of the World War II years when he worked as a civilian scientist for the Navy as one of the developers of a radio proximity fuze.  In 1948, newly hired as a part-time consultant to the Air Force's Project Sign, Hynek was confident he would learn people who saw flying saucers had misidentified known objects or were unreliable witnesses.  He considered the whole subject "utterly ridiculous"...

J Allen Hynek would become infamous in the early spring of
1966 for suggesting Michiganders were seeing "swamp gas"
and not flying saucers.

Dr Hynek attempted to debunk UFO sightings for many of his 21 years as a Project Sign and Project Bluebook consultant, writing he not only enjoyed finding rational explanations for extraordinary phenomena but also felt an unspoken pressure from the military to find the unusual was simply misunderstood and mundane.  In the mid-1960s, he would become infamous for explaining a series of sightings in Michigan as "swamp gas"...


The official attitude that everything about unidentified aerial phenomena could be easily explained away as misidentification of conventional objects began to trouble Hynek who basically initially believed the same thing... 

As a scientist, he had difficulties with his own willingness to jump to conclusions without a thorough analysis of the data.  His review of information available to him suggested that the subject of UFOs was more complex than he initially thought.  Another thing that bothered Hynek was that many reports coming across his desk were made by trained observers such as military pilots.  These were not men who were prone to jeopardizing careers by signing their names to a prank incident log...

Hynek would eventually found his own Center for UFO Studies in 1973.  His studies of the subject never led him to any definite conclusions but he increasingly placed a high value on the strangeness of some reports.  It is one thing to see an unknown light zip across the night sky in a straight line at a speed ten times greater than the fastest plane made by men.  But it is another thing if this object comes to an abrupt halt, changes shape, disappears, then reappears to resume a zigzag journey across the heavens...



Hopkinsville, site of the infamous

Gremlin attack, was also home to the

Sleeping Prophet, Edgar Cayce, said

by many to be a worker of miracles.

[Jacques Vallee, another scientist who has investigated the high strangeness of some UFO reports, originally supported the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin for some of these unusual aerial events.  His study of the phenomenon caused a shift in thinking for the co-developer of NASA's first computerized mapping of Mars.  He now suspects the UFO phenomenon is associated with a non-human consciousness that can manipulate time and space.  In Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Vallee served as the model from the French researcher Lacombe who was played by noted film director Francois Truffaut.  J Allen Hynek also appears briefly in Spielberg's movie in a non-speaking role as the bearded pipe-smoking man who witnesses the alien disembarkation towards the end of the story.]

As for the Suttons, Chief Greenwell and the other lawmen accompanied them back to theirhome around midnight.  The police officers and troopers saw walls filled peppered with gunshot and broken windows.  Each witness was interviewed separately and told basically the same story.  Neighbors were tracked down and they told the cops they'd heard lots of gunshots from the Sutton place.  Late in the night, the police left, unsure of exactly how to report the incident, but convinced something strange had happened...

After the law had gone, a lone floating gremlin returned at around 4:30 AM to the small house between Kelly and Hopkinsville.  Billy Ray Taylor grabbed the shotgun, fired, and shattered one of the home's few unbroken windows as the little troublemaker playfully vanished...

 

The Sutton family's experience was not the only unsettling "contact"
between humans and small humanoids during the 1950s.  A little more
than two years after the Hopkinsville incident, a Brazilian farmer claimed
to have been forced into a sexual encounter with an alien female.

 

THE MARKETPLACE

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CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: still of J Allen Hynek cameo appearance from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977, directed by Steven Spielbergl undated Polaroid of Ivan T Sanderson with model of Hopkinsville Goblin from johnkeel.com; Great Horned Owl from ksbirds.org; Antonio Vilas-Boas article from webelieveinaliens.com. Research for topics covered in this essay consists primarily of information from readily available sources such as Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica except as noted: none