UFO Kooks And Cranks
Many years ago, my friend Donna Kossy published an excellent zine entitled Kooks. Donna printed an article I wrote on contactee religions in issue #6, which was my first published work.
Donna defined the difference between a “kook” and a “crank” as mainly one of attitude. While Cranks tend to be bitter and argumentive about their marginalized ideas, the Kook believes that anyone who reads or listens to his theories will find them so self-evident, it’s a wonder that everyone didn’t realize the “truth” before now. The Crank knows that you are going to disagree with him, while the harmless Kook is generally surprised at your laughter, and probably feels sorry for you.
Many letters came to the P.O. box when I published The Excluded Middle, and my favorites were always the almost indecipherable kook messages. One guy sent in his plans for a giant, rivet-studded tank to be used by firefighters. He enclosed a drawing that looked like it had been done by a crazed elementary schoolboy, carefully labeling all the marvelous features which ensured that “no fireman will have to needlessly risk his life ever again.” What this had to do with UFOs or the paranormal, I was never able to figure out. Perhaps he felt some sort of kinship because of the “conspiracy” topics we often covered.
The UFO Kook is probably best represented by some of the old-line Contactees. Most of them sincerely believed even the stuff that was probably made up. Maybe they didn’t even realize that their experiences with golden-haired space brothers or shapely women from Lanulos were imagined. A couple of years before his death, contactee Orfeo Angelucci said that he thought he had dreamed his UFO encounters which he said “came back through my subconscious as visions.” Contactees didn’t usually get into arguments with anyone who disagreed with them (unless prompted, as in a few instances on the Long John Nebel show.) Perhaps the more mercenary personalities didn’t figure that it was worth wasting time with people who weren’t going to listen without filters.
There are plenty of UFO Cranks out there, but my favorite has to be Bob Girard of Arcturus Books, although he isn’t the “classic” Crank as described above. Girard has been selling rare and wonderful books and magazines for decades, providing a great service to serious students of UFOs and anomalies. In the early 1990s, he began to run ads in UFO Magazine without any graphics or pictures, just large, block letters that warned “NON BUYERS ARE NON-PERSONS TO US.” His catalogues, sent out a few times a year to people who had actually bought merchandise, were full of Girard’s cantankerous reviews. If Bob didn’t like what he was reading, he told you so, in no uncertain terms, and this was for books he was trying to sell!
His assessment of Ceto’s New Friends (Leah Haley’s book for child abductees) ended with, (if I remember correctly) “Lock this one in the closet with the guns so the kiddies don’t blow their heads off.” I tried to ask Girard’s permission to republish the review in my zine, but he retracted it after talking to Haley. Girard landed in the hospital without any medical coverage early last year, which prompted an appeal to the UFO community for help. He’s still selling great (and kooky and cranky) titles.
Many of those who are interested in UFOs are considered kooks and cranks anyway by many people, but who are your favorites?
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Jun 11 2008 
June 12th, 2008 at 10:54 am
And the “unicorn deer”?
June 12th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Well, one of my favorite cranks is Miguel Serrano, he is a chilean and was a senator; the fascinating thing about him is that he’s a nazi! A bonafide, old-school nazi that claims Hitler was an illuminated Bodhisattva or something like that; and surely he mixes his nonsense with a bit of UFOs here and there.
I hope no one gets the wrong idea here! It’s not that I’m a white supremacist or anything like that, but what boggles my mind is that such ideas were able to survive—and thrive—in a modern country nowadays. Serrano’s aryan mysticism is emblematic of the kind of ideologies that permeate Ufology in Chile—Friendship Island, the Colony Dignidad, Douglas Tompkins and his mysterious enviromental plans in the south cone— whereas if Serrano lived in Europe he would surely have ended up in prison.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Kind of like the Pope?
June 12th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Ok Drew, that will cost you AT LEAST 20 ‘Our Fathers’ and 10 ‘Hail Maries’, or do you want me to bring out the wooden ruler??
June 13th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Hmm, favorite kooks and cranks…besides
you and Nick, you mean?
Sorry, couldn’t resist…anyway, favorite kook is probably Richard Shaver.
June 15th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
It seems kind of pointless to call people names or categorize them into neat little packages that you can then dispose of in the trash, doesn’t it? What name comes to mind about the average person who believes in UFOs? Gullible? Intellectually suicidal? Does that help resolve the mystery any better?
Humans desperately need fairytales in order to live life to its fullest — they cannot survive without them. That is why even though the UFO mystery had been solved a long time ago by psychologists like Carl Jung, no one cares what actual reality is like concerning them. To misquote Joseph Campbell, “Like dreams, UFOs are productions of the human imagination. Their images, consequently, though derived from the material world and its supposed history, are, like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts, of the human will…Every UFO tale, that is to say, whether or not by intention, is PSYCHOLOGICALLY symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors…the UFO narratives…are hermetic fields within which those apparitions known as…demons, angels, demigods, ETs and visitors and the like, typify in the guise of charismatic personalities the locally recognized vortices of consciousness out of which all the local theater of life derive their being. The figurations of UFOs are expressive, therefore, as those of dreams normally are not, of a range of universal, as distinguished from specifically individual, concerns…The distinguishing first function of properly read UFOlogy is to release the mind from its naive fixation upon such false ideas, which are of material things as things-in-themselves” (THE INNER REACHES OF OUTER SPACE, Joseph Campbell, pgs 55-57)
June 16th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Sage — I didn’t realize Campbell wrote on UFOs but I’m not surprised — also not surprised how one dimensional it is. I’ve never been impressed by Campbell.
For example, Sage, when Jung demonstrated psychokinesis to Freud — the whole hot solar plexus, book shelf cracking noise thing — this is an example of how psychological projections create PHYSICAL changes.
Pretty basic idea there Sage — I recommend reading Nandor Fodor’s MIND OVER SPACE (or close to that title). Then there’s D. Scott Rogo’s follow-up masterpiece: MIRACLES.
Anyway thanks for sharing.
June 17th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
“I’ve never been impressed by Campbell”
This isn’t about Campbell, the person, but about the accuracy of Campbells words — and they seem to be very accurate.
“For example, Sage, when Jung demonstrated psychokinesis to Freud — the whole hot solar plexus, book shelf cracking noise thing — this is an example of how psychological projections create PHYSICAL changes”
1) That was an example of a false memory
2) That has nothing to do with Campbell
“Pretty basic idea there Sage — I recommend reading Nandor Fodor’s MIND OVER SPACE (or close to that title). Then there’s D. Scott Rogo’s follow-up masterpiece: MIRACLES”
I am only interested in peer reviewed scientific literature, not pseudoscience.
June 17th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Craig,
I’ve always liked Shaver too. Have you seen my posts on him? Just type his name into the search box at the top of the page.
June 17th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Sage,
No complaints about my other posts on contactees, outsider artists, and other non-standard UFO personalities? It’s all part of the puzzle.
Not all of my posts attempt to “solve” the UFO enigma.
I like Campbell’s lectures on James Joyce.
June 17th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Greg,
Sorry if it sounded like I was complaining, I’m just saying that there is a difference between, for example, an outsider artist and contactee or kook and crank. The difference is one is endearing while the other is judgmental. Nothing nice ever comes to mind when we hear kook or crank. You never know, maybe someday a kook or crank will solve the UFO mystery to everyone’s satisfaction, and then how will that make the rest of us look?
June 18th, 2008 at 1:55 am
Sage,
Fair enough. But I LIKE “kooks” and “cranks.” I have been labeled as such on occasion. It don’t bother me none. My first business card (when I was in my early ’20s) bore the phrase “The kooks are our future.”
As you point out, one person’s kook or crank is another’s genius, and the definition changes once they become popular (without necessarily being “right.”)