THE EGO HAS LANDED: FREUD AND THE UFOLOGISTS

For ufologists of a certain age the name Clement Freud (rightt) means several things: grumpy doyen of radio and TV panel shows; grumpy Liberal MP for the Isle of Ely, grumpy celebrity chef and food critic, grumpy star of dog food adverts partnering an equally grumpy-looking dog, and grumpy newspaper journalist and columnist.

Surprising then, to receive from noted sceptic and experimental hoaxer David Simpson, a PDF file from an unidentified magazine recording the great grump’s visit to Warminster. It must have been written before 1968, as Arthur Shuttlewood refers to Freud’s visit in Warnings from Flying Friends, his second book, published that year. He recalls: “Clement Freud visited our hill one night and described these satellites as elderly dowagers at a sedate tea party or rolling lawns”, although in Freud’s piece he attributes the quotation to Shuttlewood. My own opinion is that it sounds more Freudian than Shuttlewoodian.

Freud gives entertaining pen-portraits on some ufological figures of the time. Here's Brinsley le Poer Trench:

Tall, bespectacled, 40 and abounds with boyish enthusiasm for the venture … we met for breakfast. He arrived 20 minutes early for the appointment, ordered coffe, eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade and was steadily worried about being late for the office; he is advertising manager for a gardening magazine

At the time neither Freud or Trench would have anticipated that between 1975 when Trench succeeded to the title Lord Clancarty, and 1989 when Freud was defeated in the General Election, they would both be Members of Parliament, though in different Houses. I wonder if they met in that period? Here's another familiar figure, Ken Rogers:

Secretary/Treasurer of [BUFORA], send one guinea and a stamped addressed envelope ... Rogers is 18, works as a copytaker on the Daily Express, which is a newspaper. He is a slight, fair-haired boy who spends an average of six hours a day on UFO work; his mum is unhappy about the size of the telephone bill ... BUFORA is the biggest association of its kind and in the words of the secretary "we have a scheme whereby nuts are excluded ... "

There is also Arthur Shuttlewood of Warminster in Wiltshire .... A home-spun rustic ('call me Arthur, Clement') with John Arlott-like fluency, a feeling for words and a penchant for taking your arm and pointing to the sky. Arthur and his group are unaffilated to any organisation of association and are probably unaffiliatable.

After Warminster Freud ventures to a location near Potters Bar, where he meets the Sky Scouts who are holding a skywatch to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Arnold‘s sighting, thus dating this event as 1967:

They were a motley group: 21 men, two women. A very small man in his early twenties wearing a corduroy suit was equipped with two cameras tied on a plank of wood. This device, he said, would take stereophonic pictures. So far each camera had a separate film but this was a teething problem upon which he was working. His wife, a sad long-haired lady, was carrying a thick batch of UFO magazines; her husband, she explained, was chairman, secretary, printer, everything really. They had an association. Membership had reached four. As it would have been sadistic to have asked if this number included the founder and his lady, I wished them good fortune.

Anyone recognise Mr Corduroy? Freud returns to Warminster where he joins the crowd on Cradle Hill. His description of the scene on the hill will be familiar to all Warminster veterans:

By now the mist was turning to fog and the journey was long and hazardous. Coming into Warminster of the Westbury road you turn sharp left … and Cradle Hill is the next hill up ... About 50 people, a dozen of them women; three telescopes mounted on tripods. A tape recorder flickering by candle light in the open boot of a car. A spirit-lamp hissing away at what would be instant coffee in about 20 minutes time; and over by the gate stood the great Arthur Shuttlewood.

It’s here that we get the disputed description of satellites as duchesses: “You can tell a satellite, says Arthur because it moves like an aging duchess with an umbrella at a tea party. It traverses the horizon in seven minutes while a UFO can do it in twenty seconds flat”

Arthur, we are told was 'surrounded by a small coterie of rustics', but even then, lurking in the background was 'a gaggle of sceptics who had seen nothing.'

Here's another anonymous figure needing identification: 'Arthur introduced me to a young woman, fair of hair and limp of handshake who was reputed to have made a number of sightings in London.' Soon Freud makes his first sighting, one of Arthur’s ‘matronly dowagers’, a satellite moving in the general direction of Devizes:

Elevation 36, bearing 259, said the No. 1 man on the telescope. Another relayed the information into the candle lit tape recorder. The elevation and bearing changed … the tape recorder was kept fully informed. ‘Are we doing a chop on it?’ said the elevation man. I missed the reply.

But the sceptics were still around:

’Does this count as a sighting?’ asked a sceptic who had give a lift to a hitch-hiking Ufologist and accompanied him in search of enlightenment. There was no-one qualified to answer; the Warminster lot, you understand, is unaffiliated.

Aha, just as I copied those last words from my PDF printout I noticed a logo of a small gothic typeface letter ’T’ at the end of the text, identifying it as being taken from the Sunday Telegraph colour magazine.

This picture, reproduced at several removes from the original, shows the London Sky Scouts at Alexandra Palace. Anybody identifiable there?
UPDATE: Dave Clarke has some more information on this; click on 'comments' below. And here's a link to the book he refers to. Essential reading:

stop abductions dot com

Does anyone know anything about this? Apparently the guy running it was annoyed because Nigel Watson didn't consult him when Nigel was writing his book on abductions. Is it kosher or a piss-take?

http://www.stopabductions.com/

TWO COUNTRIES DIVIDED BY A COMMON LANGUAGE

There's a (not very) interesting little spat going on over at UFO UpDates, which I'm ashamed to say I started. A posting by the very vocal Alfred Lehmberg referred to the alleged UFO crash at 'Shag Harbor', in Nova Scotia. I pointed out that in fact the town, being in Canada, is correctly referred to as 'Shag Harbour' (no tittering at the back, there), the Canadians, like all members of the Commonwealth, know how to spell correctly (apart from the Australian Labor Party, of course).

For some reason this mild interjection roused Mr Lehmberg's ire (in fact almost anything I ever write on UpDates arouses Mr Lehmberg's ire), calling it a 'derisive commentary' and saying the spelling was taken from the cover of the major book about the case, Don Ledger and Chris Styles' 'Dark Object'

At this point Don Ledger himself steps up and tells us that: "It's Harbor on the front of the book because Anne Strieber - the editor - changed it because she said having the 'U' in there would confuse Americans - seriously, that's what she said."

He makes the point: "Doesn't matter how the word is spelled in the US, Shag Habour is a place name. They changed the name of the place where the incident happened. It would be like us adding an 'R' to Chicago and spelling it Chicargo because it's confusing to spell it the way it 'doesn't' sound."

This does seem to suggest that Anne Strieber holds a rather low opinion of the intelligence of the average American, or at the very least the American readers of UFO books.

AMAZIN' AMAZON!

Checking my Amazon customer's page I noticed they'd put in the suggestions a book called 'Sacrifice', by S. J Bolton. The synopsis read:

"Set on the remote Shetland Islands, Sacrifice begins with the discovery of a woman’s mutilated body. A gaping hole appears where her heart has been cut out; runic symbols have been carved into her flesh and her uterus has barely recovered from childbirth."

It didn't sound like my usual bedtime reading and I wondered why they'd suggested it. I clicked on "Why is this recommended for you?". Their answer: "Because you purchased... Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking".

Blimey. This throws a whole new light on the nation's favourite Norwich City fan!

For those who'd like to work out the link:

SETH v. SAN - THE RE-MATCH

One of the great set-piece ufological battles of last year was when nuclear physicist Stan Friedman took a break from his busy round of nuclear physicisting and confronted SETI scientist Seth Shostak on the American "Coast To Coast" radio show hosted by George Noory. The debate was was reported in much of the UFO media almost in term of a boxing bout (e.g.: http://www.theufochronicles.com/2005/02/great-ufo-debate-friedman-v-shostak.html)

Friedman is pretty scathing about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or at least when it has capital letters and Seth Shostak is conducting the search:

"Although SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been getting a free ride from the popular press and the scientific community, a closer examination of its assumptions (there is no evidence to examine) clearly indicates it is basically a cult movement with the acronym really standing for Silly Effort To Investigate".

Shostak naturally doesn't agree, and a forthcoming book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter, published by the National Geographical Society, sets out his views on SETI and UFOs. Get ready for round two, because Stan's not going to like this bit in the promotional blurb:

"The UFO phenomenon has gone beyond being simply a popular myth; it is a cause célebre for many who feel that the government and the science establishment are conspiring to squelch the news of alien presence. Despite the drama and appeal of this argument, there's little evidence to support it ... It's quite possible that by the year 2025, conclusive evidence for a civilisation light-years distant will be found. Reports of UFOs, which have taught us nothing, will be supplanted with a torrent of data, beamed from deep space on a radio wave or a laser beam."

Where's that torrent of data coming from, and what's it going to tell us? You'll have to read Shostak's book to find out, but it looks like the SETI crowd can do vague speculation as well as anyone:

" ...what we might discover somewhere out there, existing among the stars. It is likely that the true intellects of the cosmos are non-biological, and some of them will be privy to wisdom accumulated over ten billion years. What, if anything, they would tell us, and what their existence would portend for both Homo sapiens and the future of the universe ...?"

Get a ringside seat here ...

DEATH OF A CONTACTEE

One of the colourful characters of the early contactee era has recently died. UFO writer and blogger Greg Bishop reports:

"Famed UFO contactee Howard Menger died at his home in Vero Beach Florida on February 25th, 8 days after his 87th birthday. He is survived by Connie Menger, his wife of over 50 years, four children, (two by a former marriage) and many grandchildren.

" …in 1956, [Menger] appeared on the Long John Nebel radio show, along with contactee George Van Tassel. He talked about contacts with space brothers (and more specifically -sisters) who appeared to him beginning when he was ten years old. Some of his later published descriptions sound distinctly sexual in nature, although he carefully couched them in language that could be construed as platonic.

"He also started taking pictures of the space people and their ships, although most who saw the photos say that they are quite indistinct. On August 4th of 1956, Menger said he was invited on board one of the flying saucers. The next month he said that the space people took him for a joyride where he saw alien civilizations on other planets and structures on the Moon.

"Later that year, an attractive young woman named Connie Weber appeared at one of Menger’s gatherings. He thought that she was the reincarnation of a blond spacewoman that he had known (in the biblical sense) in a previous life on Venus. He soon left his first wife an family to begin a new life of lectures and touring on the Contactee circuit. Many investigators visited the Menger home and interviewed witnesses whose stories varied with the telling or did not match
each other…

"In 1960, Menger appeared on a TV show with Nebel and basically recanted his entire story. He later said that he was involved in some sort of Army test of public reaction to possible alien contact. "

This pattern of proclamation then denial, often immediately folowed by an almost equally preposterous claim, seem to be a pattern with many contactees and UFO experiencers.

Nebel recalled his 1960 interview with Menger in his 1961 book, Way out World:

"Where he had once sworn that he had seen flying saucers, he now felt that he had some vague impression that he night have on some half-remembered occasion possibly viewed some airborne object -- maybe ... Howard Menger backed up and backed up until he fell into a pit of utter confusion"

Apparently in 1963 when he met James Moseley he was trying to raise money by marketing a radio controlled saucer model (see my namesake's own contribution to this field) and repeated the claim that he was involved in an elaborate, Pentagon-staged, hoax. He later told his publisher, Gray Barker that the book was "fact/fiction".

If you're interested a copy of his book From Outer Space to You can be picked up on Amazon HERE.