THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
March 20, 2016
www.theparacast.com
The Paracast Explores Plans for an Orbiting UFO Detector
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY A PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! We have another radio show, and for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to After The Paracast, plus a higher-quality version of The Paracast without the network ads, and chat rooms when you sign up for The Paracast+. NEW! We’ve added an RSS feed for fast updates of the latest episodes and we give free ebooks for long-term subscriptions. We’ve also launched The Paracast+ Video Channel. Check out our new “Lifetime” membership! For more information about our premium package, please visit: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio.
This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris explore a crowd-sourced plan to launch a UFO detection satellite into low Earth orbit with Dave Cote, a project manager and software engineer for CubeSat for Disclosure. Plans call for launching the tiny satellite in 2017. It’ll be run with open-source software, and will contain instrumentation to measure possible spaceborne UFO activity. The instruments include radiation detection, imaging equipment, including a scintillation counter and two high resolution cameras with parabolic lenses. If the project succeeds, Dave and his crew hope to launch more satellites. Other methods for detecting possible UFO activity will be discussed during this interview.
Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet
CubeSat for Disclosure: http://www.cubesat.tech/
After The Paracast -- Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on March 20: This is an episode that goes off the reservation to some extent. First, Gene and Chris discuss persuading millennials, younger people, to get involved in the UFO field. Chris briefly recalls an invention of his and some friends, including his late brother Brendon, involving low cost, all natural building blocks for residential homes. The discussion moves on to the efforts to develop UFO detection systems and the confluence of events, where more and more people are coming up with related concepts. Gene and Chris segue to the world of high-end audio, where they go back and forth about the supposed advantages of analog versus digital, double-blind comparisons, and their experiences working in that field.
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums.
It All Started with Science Fiction
By Gene Steinberg
In recent weeks, I read an article on a friend’s Facebook page about the unlikely origins of the UFO field. It’s commonly believed that it all started on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine ellipsoid objects flying in formation near Mt. Rainier in Washington State.
Their shape appeared to resemble a pie plate, although that description was simplistic. A more descriptive version had it that the objects were "half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear.”
Regardless, the description of their erratic motion soon became the stuff of legend. The phrase “like a fish flipping in the sun” didn’t inspire the media, for otherwise we’d be dealing with the flipping fish mystery. But their motion was also referred to as that of a saucer skipping across water, so the press picked up on it and dubbed them “flying saucers.”
Other sightings before and after the Arnold incident helped bring the flying saucers to the front pages of newspapers around the world. Remember those were the days before broadcast news had taken over, although there were news segments on radio and even on that new-fangled box known as a TV.
However, dedicated researchers soon realized that the Arnold episode, and the sightings that occurred that week, were not the start of it all. The “foo fighters” during World War II were cited as evidence that the phenomenon was around for a while. But possible sightings were soon located that went back decades, perhaps centuries.
So the Arnold sighting may have just been a case of something happening on the right day and the right time to get worldwide coverage. In other words, more traditional events could have dominated the media and supplanted Arnold’s sighting, but they didn’t. So it might have been little more than a matter of luck, or the lack of same if you ever wished the saucer mystery never happened.
If you spend any time at all poring through books or doing online searches, you’ll find extensive material about the case. Indeed, if you allow for a wider margin of error in Arnold’s estimates of the size of the objects, their distance and their speed, the unconventional could clearly become conventional. Though it started a legend — or a myth — this case does not represent ironclad proof that the saucers, or UFOs, are spaceships. That’s true even though it remains unexplained to this very day.
Around the same time, a controversial character in the science fiction world had helped paved the way for the arrival of the saucers in the public consciousness, and that’s Ray Palmer. A prolific editor and writer, with a sharp eye towards unusual opportunities to promote, he had been publishing stories by one Richard Shaver, who claimed to have actually met up with ancient beings in caverns beneath the Earth.
These caverns were occupied by a race of beings known as the teros, the good guys, and the deros, the bad guys. And, yes, you can find similar concepts in older sci-fi stories, but Shaver’s version stuck.
Although the stories were originally presented as fiction by Palmer in the magazine he edited, Amazing Stories, from Ziff-Davis, he soon claimed they were based on fact. The Shaver Mystery also achieved legendary status because circulation of the magazine doubled within just a few months after those stories first appeared.
This all happened during the late stages of World War II, when paper was still being rationed, so Palmer had to plead and prod his publisher to allow them to allocate enough pulp stock to print more magazines.
Curiously, when the Shaver Mystery disappeared from the pages of Amazing Stories, circulation reverted to its former level. So did Palmer strike a nerve and magically reach readers who’d never bought the magazine before courtesy of Shaver? And what was that audience anyway?
Some suggest it included people who were not quite sane, for Palmer revealed years later that Shaver was incarcerated in a mental institution in the years where he claimed to be inside the caves. Indeed, I was witness to this revelation, as I’ll explain shortly.
In 1947, with the saucer mystery in full bloom, Palmer prepared an all-saucer issue of Amazing Stories. He felt that the Shaver stories in many respects presaged the arrival of the flying discs. But his publisher decided to kill the issue.
But Palmer had another way to get the information to the public, when he and another magazine editor, Curtis Fuller, founded Fate magazine, which first appeared in 1948. The new digest-sized magazine was filled with reports of UFOs and other strange mysteries, such as possible hauntings, were given extensive coverage. In fact, the very first issue featured an article about the Arnold case.
It does appear that the saucers became Palmer’s first love. He and Arnold co-wrote “The Coming of the Saucers,” which was basically two short books in one. The first part was a fairly straightforward recounting of the early saucer sightings, whereas the second part told the frightening tale of Arnold’s strange experiences while investigating the Maury Island case.
It read as a spy story, with Arnold arriving in Tacoma, WA and finding no hotel rooms to rent. Well, except for one, where they already had a reservation for him, except he hadn’t made any. It also appeared as if the things that went on in that room were being recorded by outsiders.
The presence of government agents, the curious crash of a plane carrying the alleged fragments shed by flying saucers, all led some to regard this as a potential Men in Black case. But it also appears to have been little more than a hoax, made all the more tragic by the fact that people died in that plane crash.
Palmer went on to edit Flying Saucers magazine, which attracted followers around the world. Indeed, many young would-be saucer researchers now had a no-cost outlet to announce their own local events, clubs and newsletters in a special section of the magazine, entitled “Flying Saucer Club News.”
That’s where I first hung out and promoted my own fledgling efforts as a writer on the subject. I also met several lifelong friends there, some of whom you’ve heard on The Paracast, including Allen Greenfield and Rick Hilberg.
I got to know Palmer slightly when I was a member of a small group of researchers who traveled to his home in Amherst, WI in 1965. During an interview with me, he delivered the surprising news of where Shaver was actually staying when he claimed to be in the caves with the teros.
I later became friendly with Shaver, and once had hundreds of pages of material about the curious hobby that occupied him, that of attempting to decode the alleged crystalline records from the ancients in what he called “Rock Books.”
Yes, Palmer was a fascinating character, and you’ll find a couple of entertaining books about him if you do a search on Amazon. One of his long-time friends, fellow sci-fi author and editor Otto Binder, once upon a time gave me the scoop on Palmer. Ray, he said, was an expert at putting people on, arguing points in his magazines strictly to generate comment from readers.
So, according to Binder, you shouldn’t take Palmer seriously except as a clever rabble-rouser who raised all sorts of fascinating theories. But he never believed a word of it, maybe.
In case Binder seems familiar to you, not only was he a sci-fi author, but he also wrote the scripts for comic books in the 1940s and 1950s, including the original Captain Marvel, known today as Shazam. He also worked with Stan Lee on the early issues of Captain America.
In 1959, Binder helped create a comic book companion to Superman, his cousin Supergirl, a character now featured in a CBS drama. Oh, and by the way, in the very first episode of the show, the titular character, in her first mission, is seen flying over a bridge that is identified as the “Otto Binder Bridge.”
Closer to our corner of the universe, in 1967 Binder wrote a book on our favorite subject, “What we really know about flying saucers,” which featured an introduction by none other than John Keel. The following year, Binder came out with a sequel, “Flying Saucers Are Watching Us.”
His more “orthodox” credentials included editing Space World magazine, which covered the early space program. It was later sold to Ray Palmer, who continued to edit and publish the magazine for a number of years.
Indeed, between science fiction fandom in the years during and after World War II, and the early days of the modern UFO era, there seemed to be very few degrees of separation.
Copyright 1999-2016 The Paracast LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
March 20, 2016
www.theparacast.com
The Paracast Explores Plans for an Orbiting UFO Detector
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY A PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! We have another radio show, and for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to After The Paracast, plus a higher-quality version of The Paracast without the network ads, and chat rooms when you sign up for The Paracast+. NEW! We’ve added an RSS feed for fast updates of the latest episodes and we give free ebooks for long-term subscriptions. We’ve also launched The Paracast+ Video Channel. Check out our new “Lifetime” membership! For more information about our premium package, please visit: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio.
This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris explore a crowd-sourced plan to launch a UFO detection satellite into low Earth orbit with Dave Cote, a project manager and software engineer for CubeSat for Disclosure. Plans call for launching the tiny satellite in 2017. It’ll be run with open-source software, and will contain instrumentation to measure possible spaceborne UFO activity. The instruments include radiation detection, imaging equipment, including a scintillation counter and two high resolution cameras with parabolic lenses. If the project succeeds, Dave and his crew hope to launch more satellites. Other methods for detecting possible UFO activity will be discussed during this interview.
Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet
CubeSat for Disclosure: http://www.cubesat.tech/
After The Paracast -- Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on March 20: This is an episode that goes off the reservation to some extent. First, Gene and Chris discuss persuading millennials, younger people, to get involved in the UFO field. Chris briefly recalls an invention of his and some friends, including his late brother Brendon, involving low cost, all natural building blocks for residential homes. The discussion moves on to the efforts to develop UFO detection systems and the confluence of events, where more and more people are coming up with related concepts. Gene and Chris segue to the world of high-end audio, where they go back and forth about the supposed advantages of analog versus digital, double-blind comparisons, and their experiences working in that field.
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums.
It All Started with Science Fiction
By Gene Steinberg
In recent weeks, I read an article on a friend’s Facebook page about the unlikely origins of the UFO field. It’s commonly believed that it all started on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine ellipsoid objects flying in formation near Mt. Rainier in Washington State.
Their shape appeared to resemble a pie plate, although that description was simplistic. A more descriptive version had it that the objects were "half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear.”
Regardless, the description of their erratic motion soon became the stuff of legend. The phrase “like a fish flipping in the sun” didn’t inspire the media, for otherwise we’d be dealing with the flipping fish mystery. But their motion was also referred to as that of a saucer skipping across water, so the press picked up on it and dubbed them “flying saucers.”
Other sightings before and after the Arnold incident helped bring the flying saucers to the front pages of newspapers around the world. Remember those were the days before broadcast news had taken over, although there were news segments on radio and even on that new-fangled box known as a TV.
However, dedicated researchers soon realized that the Arnold episode, and the sightings that occurred that week, were not the start of it all. The “foo fighters” during World War II were cited as evidence that the phenomenon was around for a while. But possible sightings were soon located that went back decades, perhaps centuries.
So the Arnold sighting may have just been a case of something happening on the right day and the right time to get worldwide coverage. In other words, more traditional events could have dominated the media and supplanted Arnold’s sighting, but they didn’t. So it might have been little more than a matter of luck, or the lack of same if you ever wished the saucer mystery never happened.
If you spend any time at all poring through books or doing online searches, you’ll find extensive material about the case. Indeed, if you allow for a wider margin of error in Arnold’s estimates of the size of the objects, their distance and their speed, the unconventional could clearly become conventional. Though it started a legend — or a myth — this case does not represent ironclad proof that the saucers, or UFOs, are spaceships. That’s true even though it remains unexplained to this very day.
Around the same time, a controversial character in the science fiction world had helped paved the way for the arrival of the saucers in the public consciousness, and that’s Ray Palmer. A prolific editor and writer, with a sharp eye towards unusual opportunities to promote, he had been publishing stories by one Richard Shaver, who claimed to have actually met up with ancient beings in caverns beneath the Earth.
These caverns were occupied by a race of beings known as the teros, the good guys, and the deros, the bad guys. And, yes, you can find similar concepts in older sci-fi stories, but Shaver’s version stuck.
Although the stories were originally presented as fiction by Palmer in the magazine he edited, Amazing Stories, from Ziff-Davis, he soon claimed they were based on fact. The Shaver Mystery also achieved legendary status because circulation of the magazine doubled within just a few months after those stories first appeared.
This all happened during the late stages of World War II, when paper was still being rationed, so Palmer had to plead and prod his publisher to allow them to allocate enough pulp stock to print more magazines.
Curiously, when the Shaver Mystery disappeared from the pages of Amazing Stories, circulation reverted to its former level. So did Palmer strike a nerve and magically reach readers who’d never bought the magazine before courtesy of Shaver? And what was that audience anyway?
Some suggest it included people who were not quite sane, for Palmer revealed years later that Shaver was incarcerated in a mental institution in the years where he claimed to be inside the caves. Indeed, I was witness to this revelation, as I’ll explain shortly.
In 1947, with the saucer mystery in full bloom, Palmer prepared an all-saucer issue of Amazing Stories. He felt that the Shaver stories in many respects presaged the arrival of the flying discs. But his publisher decided to kill the issue.
But Palmer had another way to get the information to the public, when he and another magazine editor, Curtis Fuller, founded Fate magazine, which first appeared in 1948. The new digest-sized magazine was filled with reports of UFOs and other strange mysteries, such as possible hauntings, were given extensive coverage. In fact, the very first issue featured an article about the Arnold case.
It does appear that the saucers became Palmer’s first love. He and Arnold co-wrote “The Coming of the Saucers,” which was basically two short books in one. The first part was a fairly straightforward recounting of the early saucer sightings, whereas the second part told the frightening tale of Arnold’s strange experiences while investigating the Maury Island case.
It read as a spy story, with Arnold arriving in Tacoma, WA and finding no hotel rooms to rent. Well, except for one, where they already had a reservation for him, except he hadn’t made any. It also appeared as if the things that went on in that room were being recorded by outsiders.
The presence of government agents, the curious crash of a plane carrying the alleged fragments shed by flying saucers, all led some to regard this as a potential Men in Black case. But it also appears to have been little more than a hoax, made all the more tragic by the fact that people died in that plane crash.
Palmer went on to edit Flying Saucers magazine, which attracted followers around the world. Indeed, many young would-be saucer researchers now had a no-cost outlet to announce their own local events, clubs and newsletters in a special section of the magazine, entitled “Flying Saucer Club News.”
That’s where I first hung out and promoted my own fledgling efforts as a writer on the subject. I also met several lifelong friends there, some of whom you’ve heard on The Paracast, including Allen Greenfield and Rick Hilberg.
I got to know Palmer slightly when I was a member of a small group of researchers who traveled to his home in Amherst, WI in 1965. During an interview with me, he delivered the surprising news of where Shaver was actually staying when he claimed to be in the caves with the teros.
I later became friendly with Shaver, and once had hundreds of pages of material about the curious hobby that occupied him, that of attempting to decode the alleged crystalline records from the ancients in what he called “Rock Books.”
Yes, Palmer was a fascinating character, and you’ll find a couple of entertaining books about him if you do a search on Amazon. One of his long-time friends, fellow sci-fi author and editor Otto Binder, once upon a time gave me the scoop on Palmer. Ray, he said, was an expert at putting people on, arguing points in his magazines strictly to generate comment from readers.
So, according to Binder, you shouldn’t take Palmer seriously except as a clever rabble-rouser who raised all sorts of fascinating theories. But he never believed a word of it, maybe.
In case Binder seems familiar to you, not only was he a sci-fi author, but he also wrote the scripts for comic books in the 1940s and 1950s, including the original Captain Marvel, known today as Shazam. He also worked with Stan Lee on the early issues of Captain America.
In 1959, Binder helped create a comic book companion to Superman, his cousin Supergirl, a character now featured in a CBS drama. Oh, and by the way, in the very first episode of the show, the titular character, in her first mission, is seen flying over a bridge that is identified as the “Otto Binder Bridge.”
Closer to our corner of the universe, in 1967 Binder wrote a book on our favorite subject, “What we really know about flying saucers,” which featured an introduction by none other than John Keel. The following year, Binder came out with a sequel, “Flying Saucers Are Watching Us.”
His more “orthodox” credentials included editing Space World magazine, which covered the early space program. It was later sold to Ray Palmer, who continued to edit and publish the magazine for a number of years.
Indeed, between science fiction fandom in the years during and after World War II, and the early days of the modern UFO era, there seemed to be very few degrees of separation.
Copyright 1999-2016 The Paracast LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
