Page 11 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - Vol 24 No 2 - February 24 2015

Crashed Saucers and Contactees
Crashed Saucers and
Contactees: UFOs and the
Secret Origin of the Green
Lantern
By Gregory L. Reece
It was 1958 and comicbook superheroes were a
thing of the past. Batman and Superman and
Wonder Woman were still around, but just
barely. Their stories were, for the most part,
tired and unimaginative. Costumed heroes were
just no longer needed after the hard work of the
war was over, after the men and women in
uniform became the men and women in
business suits and cocktail dresses.
But that was changing and changing
fast.
In 1956, DC Comics editor Julius
Schwartz led writer Gardner Fox and artist
Carmine Infantino in the revitalization of the
old second-string superhero, the Flash. Today
we would call what they did a reboot. The
1940’s Jay Garrick/Flash in the Mercury-style
helmet was replaced by Barry Allen/Flash in a
sleek red track suit and mask. Battles with two-
bit mobsters were out and science fiction
adventure was in.
It was a hit. The Silver Age of
comicbooks had dawned.
In 1958, Schwartz, along with writer
John Broome and artist Gil Kane, turned their
attention to another old-fashioned hero from the
past, the Green Lantern. The original character,
Alan Scott, had a ridiculous costume–all red
and yellow and green and purple. He was, when
he premiered in 1940, an updated version of
Aladdin, his magic railroad lantern replacing
Aladdin’s mystical oil lamp.
Schwartz wanted something different
for the new character. He wanted a hero, not
steeped in the classic tales of old but built out of unsuccessful, to add more science fiction and
something new and modern. Like the Flash, the
Green Lantern would have a new origin
constructed from the DNA of science fiction.
His powers would not come from ancient magic
but from outer space, the new horizon, the final
frontier.
In turning Green Lantern from a
mystical hero of the past into a galactic hero for
the future, Schwartz was clearly returning the
character to the roots of the superhero. After all,
the first and most popular superhero, Superman,
was the last survivor of a dying world, a strange
visitor from another planet. But Schwartz
wasn’t just thinking about making Green
Lantern more like Superman; he was thinking
about making Green Lantern more relevant for
the present at a time when the space race was
underway and people everywhere were looking
to the stars.
It’s clear that science fiction was
something that Schwartz knew very well. Way
back in the 30’s he co-founded one of the very
first science fiction fanzines. He went on to be
the literary agent for a wealth of accomplished
science fiction writers. He knew the genre,
loved the genre, helped to build the genre; he
believed that the future of publishing was in
publishing the future.
Much has been made about the fact that
Green Lantern and the Green Lantern Corps
bear a striking resemblance to the pulp science
fiction stories of E.E. “Doc” Smith. His
Lensman series featured a Galactic Patrol of
heroes who worked wonders with powerful
lenses activated by the psychic- and will-powers
of their wearers. Originally published serially
beginning in the 30’s, the stories were
republished in book form in the 50’s. Clearly,
much of Lensman DNA found its way into the
new Green Lantern. (And, for that matter, into
both Star Trek and Star Wars.)
It has always seemed to me that
Schwartz, Broome and Kane were drawing
upon other sources for their new hero, however,
namely sources more closely associated with
the UFO movement than with the literary genre
of science fiction. Schwartz must have been as
intimately familiar with the UFO scene as he
was with science fiction. After all, he was both
the business associate and friend of Ray Palmer,
the man who introduced the world to the Shaver
Mystery, itself a precursor to the flying saucer
phenomenon, and who went on to publish Fate
Magazine, an early popularizer of flying saucer
sightings. As a matter of fact, when Schwartz
turned his attention to rebooting another Golden
Age hero, he named the new character after his
old friend. Ray Palmer was the secret identity of
the new Atom.
(Green Lantern was not the first attempt
to attempt to capitalize on flying saucers in an
effort to revivify superheroes. That distinction
probably belongs to Atlas Comics who included
a traditional flying disc on the cover of the first was identified, not as a scientist, but as a
issue of Marvel Boy back in 1950. Marvel Boy
was clearly an attempt, though mostly
flying saucers to the Superman formula.)
The origin story of the Silver Age Green
Lantern looks remarkably like the kind of
accounts that UFO believers were reporting.
Indeed, the origin of the Green Lantern includes
two of the most popular tropes of UFO folklore:
the story of the flying saucer crash and the story
of contact with a representative of an
interplanetary civilization.
When we think of UFO crash stories
today, we, of course, think first of Roswell. The
Roswell story was just a flash in the pan,
however, in 1947. The story broke about the
discovery of some unknown materials on a farm
in New Mexico, a plausible and mundane
explanation was offered, and people moved on.
The Roswell story didn’t come to life until the
80’s and 90’s when the bare bones of the
original tale were padded with stories of real
wreckage and alien bodies and government
conspiracies.
The story that would have been most
familiar to Schwartz in 1958 was not the story
of a crashed saucer in Roswell, New Mexico but
the story of a crash near the New Mexico town
of Aztec. The Aztec story was first told in 1950
by writer Frank Scully, whose name would later
serve as the inspiration for one of the main
characters on TV’s The X-Files. Scully’s book,
Behind the Flying Saucers, contained all the
elements that would later be associated with the
Roswell story.
Scully’s account of the Aztec crash is
based on a story told to him by a man identified
under the pseudonym of “Dr. Gee.” Dr. Gee
described a disabled craft, a broken porthole,
strange technology, government scientists who
break everything apart and box it up for
shipment to some unknown location, and the
bodies of 16 dead extraterrestrials. Scully
described everything in breathless prose. The
actions of the scientists who were investigating
the crash read more like the antics of amateurs
than of highly trained specialists. It is all very
odd.
The whole story was shown to be a hoax
in the September 1952 issues of True. Dr. Gee
hardware store owner who was later convicted
of selling bogus oil-finding equipment that he
claimed was based on technology acquired from
the crashed spaceship. Phony story or not,
however, the elements of the tale would live on
in flying saucer lore, being repeated time and
again in a variety of forms until finally coming
to be associated with that other New Mexico
town.
(Continued on Page 13)
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