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My usual answer is, “I assume that by UFO you mean ‘unidentified flying objects.’ I certainly believe that many people have seen objects in the air or sky that they can’t identify, and those are UFOs.
But then, many people can’t identify the planet Venus, or a mirage. If you are asking me whether I believe that some mysterious object reported is a spaceship ma
Mysterious objects have been reported in Earth’s skies all through history. Usually they are interpreted according to the preoccupations of the day. In ancient and medieval times and in primitive societies, they would be interpreted as angels, demons, spirits, and so on. In technological societies, they would be interpreted as first balloons, then dirigibles, then airplanes, and then spaceships.
Of course, if they’re spaceships now, then they’ve been spaceships all the time, and some people have indeed interpreted Ezekiel’s vision in the Bible, for instance, as the sighting of spaceships ma
The modern surge of flying saucer sightings began on June 24, 1947, when Ke
Nothing much might have happened in consequence, for wild reports about all sorts of things reach the news media every day and then fade out. In this case, though, the report attracted the attention of Raymond A. Palmer, who was then the editor of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.
Palmer may not himself have been a piece of broken pottery, but he was certainly not averse to building circulation by means of items that appealed to crackpots. He had shown this in his earlier work on something completely wacky that he called “The Great Shaver Mystery.”
Now he took up flying saucers and single-handedly promoted them into an international mania. That is one co
Mind you, I have a soft spot in my heart for Ray Palmer. Way back in 1938, he bought the first science fiction story I ever sold, and sent me the very first check I ever earned as a professional writer.
Nevertheless, candor compels me to state that for years after this noble deed of his I never had occasion to believe a word he said.
At the other extreme of the flying saucer spectrum is professor J. Allen Hynek. He is a respectable and learned scientist who has spent decades examining the evidence and who remains firmly convinced that there is something there. He doesn’t accept the extraterrestrial spacecraft hypothesis, but he thinks that something mysterious underlies the phenomenon, which, if understood, may revolutionize science.
However, in all the years he’s been investigating the phenomenon, he’s come up with-nothing! Far from revolutionizing science, his work has not added one even marginal item to the world of physical science.
Then what am I doing helping edit this anthology?
That brings us to the second co
All of us have written flying saucer stories. I have myself, and one of them is included in this book.
Generally, we have to deal with a situation in which extraterrestrial spacecraft visit us, but keep out of sight for some reason, or decide not to do anything for some reason, or try to do something and fail for some reason, or fail to manage to convince Earthpeople they are real for some reason.
You see, science fiction writers, being sane and rational, have to find some reason for so many spaceships doing nothing. Usually the results turn out to be fu
Come, see for yourself that every cloud has a silver lining, and that even the silliest notions can undergo a sea change into something rich and strange in the hands of skilled science fiction writers.
Invasion
Invasion is undoubtedly as old as humanity. Hunting groups must occasionally have encountered each other, if only by accident. Each side must have felt the other was invading. The obviously weaker side would have had to decamp. If the matter were not obvious, there might have been threats or even a brief struggle to settle the matter.
Once agriculture became a way of life and farmers were pi
We begin to have records of early civilizations suddenly inundated and taken over by raiders. The Sumerians were taken over by Gutian invaders as early as 2200 B.C. The Egyptians fell under the grip of the Hyksos invaders soon after 1700 B.C. We can go through an endless list of such things.
Considering that those people who were invaded (until quite recent times) had little knowledge of the world outside the boundaries of their own cultures, the invasions must usually have come as unbelievable shocks, as a sudden influx of the unknown from the unknown. This would be especially so when the invaders spoke strange languages, wore strange clothes, had strange ways, and even, perhaps, have looked odd.
As the most recent example of our cultural ancestors being subjected to the horror of an unexpected invasion, we need only go back to 1240, when the Mongols (short, squat, slant-eyed) swept into Europe on their hardy desert mounts. Europe knew nothing about them, had no way of knowing they were on the way (they had been ravaging Asian kingdoms for twenty years). All they knew were that these terrible horsemen, moving with incredible speed and organization, wi
But the Mongols were “the last of the barbarians.” Partly because of the Mongolian empire that was set up, communications between China and Europe became smoother. Such things as printing, the magnetic compass, and (most of all) gunpowder, leaked westward from China, and these things-for some reason not exploited by the technologically more advanced Chinese-were put to amazing use by Europeans.
And begi
But how did the non-Europeans feel about it? How about the Africans who watched the Portuguese ships come from nowhere and carry them off as slaves; the Asians who watched Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships come in set up trading posts, skim off profits and treat them as inferiors; the Native Americans who watched the Spanish ships come in and take over and destroy their civilizations? There must have been the feeling of monsters arriving from some other world.
All invasions, however, at least of the kind I’m discussing, were by human beings. However strange they might have seemed-Mongols to Europeans, or Spaniards to Incas-they were clearly human beings. (There were also invasions of infestations of non-human types-rats, locusts, the plague bacterium of the Black Death, the AIDS virus-but these fall outside the subject matter of this introduction, and even they were forms of terrestrial life.)
What if, however, the invaders were intelligent beings who were not human and, in fact, not Earthly. The possibility did not seriously arise until the time when it was thoroughly recognized that the planets were other worlds and that the universe might be full of still other planets outside the domain of our own sun.
At first, other worlds were the subject of “travel tales.” Human beings went to the moon (as early as the second century A.D. in fiction and more frequently as time went on), but there are no tales I can think of in which the inhabitants of the moon came to Earth.
In 1752, the French satirist Voltaire wrote Micromegas, in which visitors from Saturn and Sirius observe the Earth, but this ca
But then in 1877, there was the discovery of thin, dark markings on Mars. This was interpreted by some as “canals” and the American astronomer Percival Lowell was convinced that they were artificial waterways built by intelligent beings trying to use the ice of the polar caps to maintain agriculture on their increasingly desiccated planet. He wrote books on the subject in the 1890s that created quite a stir.
The British science fiction writer Herbert George Wells proceeded to make use of the notion and, in 1898, published The War of the Worlds, the first significant tale of the invasion and attempted conquest of Earth by more advanced intelligences from another world (in this case, Mars). I have always thought that Wells, in addition to wanting to write an exciting story with an unprecedented plot, was also bitterly satirizing Europe. At the time he wrote, Europeans (the British, particularly) had just completed dividing up Africa without any regard for the people living there. Why not show the British how it would feel to have advanced intelligences treat them as callously as they were treating the Africans?
Wells’s novel created a new subgenre-tales of alien invasion. The ma