The Philadelphia Experiment
by David Halperin All were extraordinary, in ways that did hardly a speck of good for any of them. All came to bad ends. The myth they created fared better. Continue Reading →
Tag: david halperin
Gray Barker, the Men in Black, and North Carolina Amendment One
By David Halperin
You are David Halperin.
It’s 1960, and you’re twelve going on thirteen, and although you’ve noticed for a while now that there are exciting differences between girls and boys, it’s only recently you’ve begun to grasp that this fact might have some relevance to you. Your mother is sick with heart disease—slowly dying, though no one in your little suburban home dares to talk about that.
You and a friend are doing a project about flying saucers for science class. You go to your local library and check out a book you’ve never heard of, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers by a man named Gray Barker. It looks like any book you might find in your school library. It’s got an index, and even a bibliography, the entries composed the way you’ve been taught bibliography entries ought to be. You take it home and begin reading.
Soon you’re riveted with fear.
You read about a seven-foot monster “worse than Frankenstein,” with glowing green face and red eyes, that landed on a West Virginia hilltop in 1952. You read about a Connecticut man named Albert Bender, who in 1953 solved the flying saucer mystery and was visited by three men in black, who terrified him so he never would reveal the awful secret he’d discovered. You pray God to protect you from all these horrors, seen and unseen; and it never crosses your mind to doubt what you’ve read, partly because it’s written in a LIBRARY BOOK and you trust library books, but also because you know first-hand that life has secrets and shadows so dreadful no one will speak of them. You see them every day, as your mother withers away. Continue Reading →
Outer Phenomenon and Inner Journey
A review of David Halperin’s Journal of a UFO Investigator (Viking, 2011)
By David Metcalfe
Riddles chased mysteries, were chased by enigmas, around and around my brain. –from Journal of a UFO Investigator
On June 24, 1947 the U.S. Air Force pilot Kenneth Arnold witnessed a series of angular, wedge shaped objects skipping like saucers across the sky near his plane. Although he described them as angular or wedge-shaped, from his statements about “a pie tin cut in half” the news reports gleaned the word “Flying Saucer.” The media’s misrepresentation of his description stuck, defining the iconic image of the UFO for decades to come.
Ambiguity from eye witness accounts, media misrepresentations, ‘expert’ analysis, and the phenomenon itself, pervades UFO culture at every level. On this unstable ground David Halperin builds his debut novel, Journal of a UFO Investigator, weaving the tale of young Danny Shapiro as he experiences alienation and personal growth inside the shifting realities of 1960’s UFO research and its heretical place in the cultural struggles of the mid- to late-20th century.
As a noted religious scholar specializing in traditions of heavenly ascent and the heretical messiah Sabbatai Zevi, Halperin may seem like an unlikely candidate for authoring a debut novel about UFOlogy. In truth, however, his expertise allows him to uncover some of the more perplexing and valuable aspects of the UFO narrative, and show how even at its most flimsy, the cultural phenomenon surrounding UFOs can provide real insights into the human condition. Continue Reading →
"The Myth is the Mystery":Reflections on Annie Jacobsen's Area 51
by David Halperin
1.
Why, folklorist Thomas Bullard has asked, are UFOs in this country “at once so popular and so despised?” It’s a good question; the hubbub over Annie Jacobsen’s best-selling Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is the latest demonstration of how good it is. “Oh, I’ve got to read that book,” a waitress said when she saw me with Area 51, and from our conversation it became clear that it was the Area 51 of UFO legend, not the real Area 51 of Cold-War dread (to which most of Jacobsen’s book is devoted) that had drawn her interest. UFOs, a.k.a. “flying saucers,” have zoomed around our cultural skies for more than sixty years. They’ve survived innumerable debunkings, their fascination undimmed. Evidently they’re saying something, communicating something, that needs to be heard. What?
This is the real “UFO mystery.” It’s a cultural, a psychological, even a religious mystery, the sort of thing a religious studies professor like myself might well take an interest in. I can’t claim personal immunity from the subject. Back in the 1960s I myself was a teenage “UFOlogist.” I believed fervently in UFOs, though not necessarily (at least at first) that they came from outer space. I thought solving their mystery to be the greatest and most important challenge facing the human race. Continue Reading →
“The Myth is the Mystery”:Reflections on Annie Jacobsen’s Area 51
by David Halperin
1.
Why, folklorist Thomas Bullard has asked, are UFOs in this country “at once so popular and so despised?” It’s a good question; the hubbub over Annie Jacobsen’s best-selling Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is the latest demonstration of how good it is. “Oh, I’ve got to read that book,” a waitress said when she saw me with Area 51, and from our conversation it became clear that it was the Area 51 of UFO legend, not the real Area 51 of Cold-War dread (to which most of Jacobsen’s book is devoted) that had drawn her interest. UFOs, a.k.a. “flying saucers,” have zoomed around our cultural skies for more than sixty years. They’ve survived innumerable debunkings, their fascination undimmed. Evidently they’re saying something, communicating something, that needs to be heard. What?
This is the real “UFO mystery.” It’s a cultural, a psychological, even a religious mystery, the sort of thing a religious studies professor like myself might well take an interest in. I can’t claim personal immunity from the subject. Back in the 1960s I myself was a teenage “UFOlogist.” I believed fervently in UFOs, though not necessarily (at least at first) that they came from outer space. I thought solving their mystery to be the greatest and most important challenge facing the human race. Continue Reading →