Date With Fate

Aside from the Pan-American Highway wending its way through the desert sands, there was nothing but the Presencias Tutelares to cause Pampa Acha to stand out from the surrounding desert landscape.

That is, until the gargoyles came....Dark Twilight: Gargoyles Unbound, Scott Corales, Fate, October 2004

Old magazines serve useful functions...

Waiting rooms make good homes for outdated periodicals.  As we kill time before our appointments, we thumb through them between glances at our watches and the clocks on the wall.  Old magazines take up space in our houses.  Stacks of them, precariously perched and strategically placed, convince children grown and gone that Mom and Pop are hoarders.  But our kids are too young to understand that old magazines must be saved for rainy days when there is nothing worth watching on TV...

... there was nothing but the Presencias Tutelares to cause
Pampa Acha to stand out from the surrounding desert...

A bookshelf in my office holds a poorly balanced column of back issues of Fate.  Drizzly desert afternoons come rarely but, when they do, I have a treasure trove waiting and ready to inform me about ghosts at the Alamo, comets that set fire to Chicago, gargoyle attacks, sea serpents of Nova Scotia, and how I can lose weight by understanding my past lives...

The first issue of Fate probably wouldn't fetch as much at auction as an intact copy of the initial appearance of Playboy.  Hugh Hefner launched his magazine in December 1953, frustrated by a painfully stagnant career at Esquire.  It would go on to sell millions of copies monthly.  The publishers of Fate, on the other hand, danced for joy after the number of its subscribers crossed the 100,000 mark...

Curtis Fuller and Raymond Palmer, both successful editors, launched Fate in March 1948.  Volume One, Number One of the magazine recapped Kenneth Arnold's sighting of flying saucers over Washington State in June of the previous year. The reading public responded well because people really did want to know what Arnold saw.  Unidentified objects continued to appear over American skies.  The mood of ordinary citizens and military officials had shifted from curiosity to something just shy of alarm...

Fate, Volume One, Number One

Forty-five years later, when Fuller sold his interest in the magazine, he wrote Fate's purpose had always been "...to explore and to report honestly the strangest facts of this strange world and the ones that don't fit into the general beliefs of the way things are"...

Whether or not the magazine succeeded in accurately recounting Fortean phenomena is a matter of individual judgment.  But no one can deny Fate ever failed to tantalize its readers...

Or it may be that I'm easily amused.  As I write this, I have about a dozen issues of the magazine on the desk beside me.  Topping the stack is March 1988.  Its stories include Dowsing for Oil, Sea Serpents of Nova Scotia, Virgin Mary's Latest Visits, and Stagecoach Stop on the Spirit Trail. 

Warning to boaters and swimmers, Nova Scotia

This last feature is about the St James Hotel of Cimarron, New Mexico, whose guest register records visits by Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James (who stayed under his Mr Howard pseudonym), Annie Oakley, and General Phil Sheridan of American Civil War notoriety.  The man who wrote Ben Hur and served as territorial governor, Lew Wallace, bunked at the St James when he journeyed to northeastern New Mexico.   

Current owners of the hotel report minor problems:  frisky phantom ladies of the evening and a gunslinger's ghost who seems to like fresh orange juice.  Taking the advice of Oz, an Albuquerque psychic and Wiccan priestess, the property's managers burned juniper branches in a partially successful attempt to cleanse the hotel of undesirable spirits...

Turning to the classified ads in this issue, I am informed that I can MASTER MENTAL TELEPATHY! for $2.95 (check or money order) sent to a P O Box in Long Island.  A chap residing on Highway 34 near Plattsmouth, Nebraska, had (thankfully) solved the mystery of vampires and would share this useful information for some green paper with Abe Lincoln's portrait.  A gentleman near Jasper, Arkansas, was selling real estate-- a cave that combined an absolutely spectacular view of the Ozarks with protection from nuclear holocausts...

Carnival game featuring Mrs O'Leary's much maligned bovine

November 1990's issue told me the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was (more likely than not) sparked by a comet that decided to become invisible and split in half as it passed over the Windy City.  Historians can now acquit Mrs O'Leary's infamous lamp-kicking bovine of those arson charges...

By way of trivia, from another article in the same issue, I also learned Rosemary's Baby, the classic horror film set in New York City, was inspired by an incident at Chicago's Hull House where a woman gave birth to a boy with horns and a forked tail...

Raymond Palmer's name may seem vaguely familiar to readers with an interest in old science fiction.  Best known for publishing Richard Shaver's "I Remember Lemuria" in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories, Palmer was also the editor who bought and printed Isaac Asimov's first short story...

Richard Shaver and Raymond Palmer

["The Shaver Mystery" actually began in 1943 when Palmer received a fan letter whose author claimed to have discovered mankind's original language.  Interested, the editor wrote back and received a rambling 10,000 word reply to his reply.  Shaver claimed to have been held captive by malevolent robot-like midgets living inside the Earth (which is hollow, not solid as claimed by scientists whose minds are clouded by "thought control" rays of these sinister subterraneans).  Managing to escape, Shaver saw it as his holy duty to warn the rest of the world. 

Palmer revised the letter, publishing it as a novella titled "I Remember Lemuria."  The magazine sold out on the newsstands and the happy editor asked Shaver to produce more tales about the evil deros.  Accounts of their misdeeds appeared in Amazing Stories for several more years, sparking intense debate between readers who believed Shaver had stumbled onto the truth and those who saw a bit of paranoid schizophrenia in his writings.  Shaver spent the last years of his life, in case one might wonder about his sanity, examining cave rocks to find the true history of Atlantis (as opposed to Plato's account) which had been imprinted upon them through some laser-like device by survivors of the doomed continent.]   

Palmer with Robert Bloch (left) and Louis Sampliner.  Bloch
penned Psycho, turned into a classic of horror and suspense by
director Alfred Hitchcock

Some people are probably destined to do what they do and Raymond Palmer may have been one of those people.  A childhood accident and botched surgery literally left him a hunchbacked dwarf.  Taunted and lonely, he turned to stories of fantastic worlds and became the editor of a fanzine called The Comet in 1930.  His semi-professional efforts came to the attention of Ralph Milne Farley, a then popular space-opera novelist, who, in 1938, suggested Ziff-Davis publications hire Palmer to replace a recently fired editor of Amazing Stories...

When Ziff-Davis moved its offices from Chicago to New York, Palmer resigned from the company and partnered with Curtis Fuller, another Wisconsin born Ziff-Davis employee who had no desire to leave the Midwest, to launch Fate...

Fuller bought Palmer's interest in the magazine seven years later when Palmer decided to concentrate on publishing materials with religious themes.  Among said spiritual works was the Book of Oahpse, delivered to our spiritually somnolent world in 1882, by John Ballou Newbrough.  He was a New York dentist prone to trances that produced 900 pages of revelations from "Embassadors of the angel hosts of heaven prepared and revealed unto man in the name of Jehovih".  Newbrough died of influenza nine years after he enlightened humanity when he (and a group of orphans recruited to live in a commune) tried to turn New Mexico desert into a farmer's paradise along the Rio Grande...   

Did this fellow's relatives move from France to Chile?

With his wife Mary as a co-editor, Curtis Fuller produced Fate for over 45 years until his retirement in 1991.  He sold the magazine to Llewellyn Publications, a giant in the New Age Market which now publishes it strictly online...

There is a certain sadness to this change to an electronic format.  Kindles and laptops may deliver reading content but there's no substitute for a rainy day, hot cup of coffee, and stories about a Mystery Pyramid of the Ozarks and the UFO Attack on Los Angeles at 2:25 AM on Wednesday, February 25, 1942...

But the story of the flying saucers can wait for another day.  Join me as we ride with Carlos Abett, his wife Theresa, and their children, through the Chilean desert on a July night in 2004.  Near Pampa Acha, daughter Carmen Albert notices four "dog-faced kangaroos" with wings.  These gargoyles (for such seems to be the best way to describe creatures of this ilk) easily match the car speed of 120 kilometers per hour.  Suddenly, two of the four airborne monstrosities veer to the side.  They swoop down toward the road...  

For those interested in more conventional unidentified flying objects:

http://www.fatemag.com/subjects/ufos/senator-goldwater-ufo-files/

Amazing Stories, June 1947

Note: All images located through Google Images without source information except as follows: none