Today, we have a guest-post from friend and fellow-researcher/author Kenn Thomas, who updates us on his investigations into one of the weirdest stories to come out of the very earliest years of Ufology: Maury Island. And, with that said, here’s Kenn:

Persistent Bothering Anomalies: Gerald Heard heard
By Kenn Thomas

For the sake of research on the new edition of Maury Island UFO, which Feral House now plans to have out next spring, archivists provided me with a one-of-a-kind lecture performance by the great philosopher Gerald Heard—from 1952.

Nick mentions Heard in his Science Fiction Secrets as proffering the insectoid intelligence theory of UFOs. Heard does this in his 1950 groundbreaking book, The Riddle of the Flying Saucers, later re-titled Is Another World Watching? for its American edition. Apropos to my research came the fact that the UK edition had a chapter on Maury Island that the US edition did not. Poking around about that, I discovered that serendipitously Heard gave a talk in my very neighborhood at around the time of his UFO book, and a local university recorded the event.

Getting to listen to that recording did not come easy, however. The university would not allow it because age had made the reel tape quite fragile. Archivists there even refused my plea to allow me to have it digitized; the university does not loan items from the archives. My argument about the absurdity of having an archived tape that researchers could not use persuaded no one. Because of my interest, however, when a digitizing vender approached this archive for a digitizing project, the archivist selected the Heard tape for the vender to use as a free sample of its work for further consideration.

So on the slim hope that Heard might say something about the removal of his Maury Island chapter I sat through ninety minutes of lecture on “Flying Saucers and Human Intelligence”. In terms of my immediate objective, I did not hit pay dirt. I did, however, listen to a fascinating speaker who offered great insight into the topic. In the process I liberated a lecture that had been permanently filed away and forgotten on the old analog reel tape method of information storage. Liberated, that is, for anyone who would make an appointment at this archives. The lecture does not appear online and the university has no plans to make it more widely available.

Heard saved the data recital for the last part of the lecture. He discussed Kenneth Arnold in terms of his relationship to Arnold’s friend Emil Smith, a doubter who later had his own sighting; discussed the Mantell case with particular rage for attempts to explain it away as the planet Venus; talked of his acquaintance to Walter Riedel, the rocket engineer (“of the V2, the V3, we don’t know how high those V numbers went”); gave Jack Bicknell’s 1951 sighting over Kilimanjaro as an example of the tube shaped craft (one of three common descriptions according to Heard, the others including the disc and dual rings); and provided the example of the UFOs witnessed in Las Cruces, NM by Clyde Tombaugh , discoverer of Pluto, in response to the idea that sightings never come from reputable scientists.

I hope I’m not the only one delighted by such things, but I had a great time listening to this respected intellectual breaking it down about UFOs for what must have been a stodgy 1950s audience. It reflected a much more nuanced understanding of the UFO conundrum than often gets attached to the fad phenom of that decade. A brilliant—and credentialed—academic took it seriously. Under this light, events in the life of Heard’s contemporary, Wilhelm Reich, took on an added dimension. Like Reich, Heard placed great importance on the double discharge Geiger counter readings around UFOs ostensibly hovering at 35,000 feet and the implications about their control over radioactivity. Also like Reich and many others, he noted that the flying saucers maintained interest in “the main interest of ours”, as shown in the sighting clusters around areas of atomic testing.

The challenge of the time, Heard argued, was the almost impossible necessity of taking in data without giving it an explanation. “UFOs do not have a gimmick,” he argued. People see them, report them and unless they are hoaxes or otherwise explained, humanity shrugs its collective shoulders and waits for the next wave. He even offered an alternative acronym for the UFO: the PBA—persistent bothering anomaly. Heard remarked that Einstein no doubt considered the saucers as “leading to a larger system or enlarged into a greater circle”, but in general, he said, “no mind is wholly open; only one side or another; one side needs to be shut.” He gave meteors as one example of where scientists initially dismissed their existence and reports of them as coming from wide eyed naifs; and another as the scientific resistance to the depths at which whales swam, since as mammals they would get the bends. “ ”Nothing but’ is never true”,” argued Heard.

Early in the talk he had given Galileo as his best example of a mind with a shut side. Famously, Galileo had clerics look into his telescope at the readily visible moons of Jupiter. The clerics couldn’t see them because of their earth-centric mental paradigm. Yet Galileo himself, when seeing the disappearing teacup shaped things that passed as Saturn’s rings in telescopes of the time, never found Saturn as a cause for further study. Instead, he noted that “Saturn devours its children”, a reference to the ancient mythology. Heard surmised that Galileo feared that the ancients may have known something about the celestial bodies that he didn’t and backed off from anything that might have proved that assumption (backing off as well from making another great discovery). The clerics couldn’t see the moons of Jupiter; Galileo wouldn’t go looking for the truth about Saturn. Talk about persistent bothering anomalies of human attitudes.

Heard ended with a call for people to continue to report their sighting experiences, either to the Air Force or to him (he gave his post office box in LA) without fear of ridicule or disdain. “All we want,” he said, “is knowledge.”

So I advanced the Maury Island update project not one bit (there’s another place to look, though), but I took advantage of a rarified circumstance and had a great time listening to this great thinker. In the pantheon of UFO lectures today, where have such people gone?

NOTE FROM NICK: For more information on Kenn, his work, his books and much more, see: Steamshovel Press.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 11:55 am and is filed under Alien Encounters, Anomalous Phenomena, Breaking News, Close Encounters, Conspiracies, Crash Sites, Evidence, Eyewitness Accounts, Fortean, Government Projects, Guest Column, History, Men In Black, The Redfern Files, UFO Sightings, UFOlogists, UFOlogy. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.
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2 Comments to “Kenn T; UFOs; Maury Island…”

1. drew hempel Says:
   February 3rd, 2010 at 2:53 pm

   Heard’s comments on Galileo are chilling, especially in relation to what Kenn writes about Reich, and when, then, dialectically reversed. Galileo was inspired by Kepler but Galileo and Kepler had different interpretations of Pythagorean cosmology. Kepler’s equation was inspired by Pythagorean harmonics with a ratio between Saturn and Jupiter orbits of 5:4. Archytas extended the Pythagorean Tetrad to 5:4 as the cube root of two and this 5:4 cube root of two ratio was three dimensional spacetime perception in the West — Galileo’s equation. Kepler was against the closed algebraic irrational form of ratios because it violated the “male” and “female” Pythagorean alchemical resonance as complementary opposites.

   So, in one sense, the Church clerics, still using the Pythagorean tetrad of “flat” space, could not perceive the spacetime anomalies of outer space discovered by Galileo.

   In the other sense spacetime anomalies rely on the original clerical Pythagorean tetrad as the complementary opposite resonance that Reich also discovered. The Keplerian ratio of the Saturn Jupiter orbit resonance violates the phonetic-based logic of Western science.

   Or, as with modern cosmology, Jupiter protects Earth from catastrophic comets, but due to chaos, there is an unpredictable harmonic resonance between Saturn and Jupiter’s orbits, changing the trajectories of comets and asteroids. All life on Earth with three dimensional bifocal spacetime perception will be destroyed.

   Maybe the UFOs, like Saturn and Jupiter, can be better Heard than seen. Jenny Randles calls it the Oz Effect.

2. chris obrien Says:
   February 3rd, 2010 at 5:28 pm

   Great find Kenn!
   Thanks to Nick and Kenn for the fascinating overview of the Heard lecture steamshoveled out of obscurity by Mr. Thomas. It is the research from folks like Kenn Nick & Greg that keeps my interest in the more subtle aspects of modern ufology and “parapolitics.”

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