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By Root 389 0

War II, when Allied fighter pilots—people whose clear-headedness and abilities no one could question—brought home strange reports of flying objects they called “foo fighters.” Foo fighters were silvery or fiery spheres that appeared from out of nowhere and flew alongside the pilots’ planes. The balls or disks had no obvious means of propulsion but seemed under some kind of intelligent command. “If it was not a hoax or an optical illusion,” Time magazine wrote on January 15, 1945, “it was certainly the most puzzling secret weapon that Allied fighters have yet encountered.” But Allied scientists could detect no last-ditch “superweapon” or anything that explained the weird flying objects.

As returning Crusaders had brought home tales of myth and wonder, so American warriors returned with a new riddle. One can only guess how an idea or observation becomes viral, but starting in 1947, American civilians—most notably a Washington state pilot named Kenneth Arnold—began to report a spate of “flying saucer” sightings. The flying objects appeared over Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and, most famously, at the Air Force base near Roswell, New Mexico. The U.S. military and the militaries of other nations took the matter seriously enough to launch official investigations, and a new term entered the American lexicon: Unidentified Flying Object. But the military investigations, rather than reaching conclusive explanations or framing meaningful questions, became a round-robin of contradictory statements and fodder for theories of a government cover-up.

For pulp fans, a similarly infectious but more sinister narrative was unfolding. In the 1940s, a bounding subculture of readers grew enthralled with reports of “inner earth” and its alien inhabitants. Hollow-earth theories had a long and tangled history, and the legend resurfaced in a series of “true” stories that began running in January 1944 in the pulp monthly Amazing Stories. Richard Sharpe Shaver, a Pennsylvanian writer–artist, philosopher, factory worker, and sometime mental patient, promulgated the mythology of an underground race that most definitely did not wish humanity well. His tales were defended and embellished by the magazine’s energetic editor, Ray Palmer. Many thrilled to the stories and—as with William Dudley Pelley’s “Seven Minutes in Eternity”—wrote in to report their own encounters with evil figures “in the caves.”

The larger body of science-fiction fans revolted. Pulp readers wanted tales of rocket ships, laser guns, and Buck Rogers–type heroes, not “strange-but-true” paranormal dramas. In New York, the Queens Science Fiction League (a group you apparently didn’t want to get on the wrong side of) passed a resolution condemning Shaver’s “inner-earth” tales as a danger to readers’ mental health. In 1948, Ziff–Davis, the corporate owner of Amazing Stories, got tired of the complaints and cut off the mike: The Shaver mystery was thereafter banned from its pages.

The disappointed editor, Palmer, resigned in protest. Part true-believer and part opportunist, Palmer took a maverick stand to continue on with the Shaver narrative and a range of other occult tales in a series of poorly edited, digest-size monthlies, including Mystic and Search. The Palmer magazines committed the most oft-repeated sin among occult journals: Their sloppily written pieces actually made the bizarre and unknown seem boring. The only endearing factor was Palmer’s brand of unfathomable logic: “When you read this story,” he told readers of Mystic in 1953, “you will tell yourself that it is fiction; the editors assure you that it is. But what if it isn’t?” And only Palmer, in the history of American letters, could seriously run this Notice to Contributors: “It is not the policy of MYSTIC Magazine to pay for the material it publishes. Its purpose is to present the truth, and the truth cannot be bought.” But apparently it could be sold, as the magazine’s liveliest content came from its bazaar of advertisements from occult schools proffering Rosicrucian, Mayan, and Yogic mysteries or de Laurence–style pitches