Colin Bennett interviewed by Sean Casteel for UFO Magazine
1.Can we start with some biographical background on you? When and why did you become interested in UFOs and the paranormal? Did you have any personal encounters that got you started?
In the course of an adventurous and largely misspent youth, I was both a musician and a mercenary soldier amongst other things. After I had mercifully calmed down a little, I won an Oxford University Scholarship and I read English Language and Literature. On leaving Oxford, again always on the hunt for new experiences, I formed two businesses of my own in printing and electronics. During the 70s and 80s I wrote some half-dozen plays for the London stage in which were well received. However Theatre to my mind was beginning lose the Age; it could not cope with burgeoning cyber or techno culture. As such, it remains stuck with ancient left-wing Brechtian concepts plus some other influences that it is not politically correct to mention.
In the 90s I sold my businesses, and took up full-time writing. I wrote a couple of novels which were published, and then started writing the books on UFOs which you mention here.
The UFO inspiration was provided by a direct experience I had in central London round about 1980. Both my girl-friend and myself witnessed maneuvering lights and the black shape of an old World War 2 Lancaster bomber hung suspended over Powis Square, just off Portobello Road. The bomber morphed into a triangular craft which flew off north. There were a few more lights and the show was over. It was only when I got back to my own flat that I realized that I had lost some time. Let no-one underestimate the intensity of a UFO experience. The relationship between myself and my girl-friend (a dour physics graduate) was never the same after that night. The full detailed story is available on the web magazine “Phenomena” under the title “A New Ufology.”
2. Please discuss briefly your earlier books, “Looking For Orthon” and “Politics of the Imagination.” Why did you choose to write about George Adamski and Charles Fort? Why are they still so hugely relevant today?
Charles Fort (1874-1932), like Marshall McLuhan, is a very important political philosopher for our techno-cyber Age, and not a mere eccentric collector of amusing curiosities as some would have him. He was the world’s first Ufologist, and the first writer to conceive of cultures as staged explanation-structures. Within such structures, those absolute fact-versus-absolute fiction arguments which give us all so much trouble are replaced by organized and developed allowance schedules within consciousness. Using such constantly evolving mechanisms, we raise the curtains of perception and experience according to how much we think we can handle. Such a Fortean idea allows us to see both belief and skepticism as useful controls rather than simple oppositions.
In this Fortean sense we are at the moment for example, slowly and carefully allowing the alien to enter our experience in bits and pieces rather than raw dosage. I expressed this idea in my recent essay “The Alien is Under Construction,” published in both Phenomena and Paranoia magazines. Fort had what might be called such postmodern views long before Borges and Barthes.
I found such a view quite fascinating, and I wrote a biography of Fort, “Politics of the Imagination” for which John Keel, author of “The Mothman Prophecies” very kindly wrote an Introduction.
To my mind, Fort’s view replaced conventional “objective” history, and made both past and present live things full of mysteries and paradoxes, and utterly fantastic events instead of consisting of the piling up of disconnected weeks and years rather like dusty case-histories in a filing cabinet. Historical causation in this sense becomes something more than merely political and economic terms: both past and present become involved with vast networks of images, mythologies, and symbols. History seen as such allows us to see say Nazism as an occult philosophy rather than being merely about the racist and fascist militarism or the re-occupation of the Rhineland.
Under the influence of Charles Fort, I began to look again at the some of history’s almost forgotten figures such as George Adamski, the UFO prophet of the early 1950s. In this view, Adamski began to emerge not as a simpleton who claimed he met a man from Venus but as a person whose life was a grey-scale between the purely theoretical limits of absolute fact and absolute fiction. To my mind, finite psychologies could in no way describe Contactees such as Adamski and what they were involved with. Lee Harvey Oswald, though he had nothing to do with UFOs, was nevertheless another holistic personality in the Fort-Adamski sense. I wrote about Oswald in this sense in the last chapter of “Politics of the Imagination.”
3. Can you give us a basic overview/retelling of Capt. Edward Ruppelt’s story? Beginning when he first overheard rumors from Project Grudge? What’s the basic narrative of Ruppelt’s few years of adventure as a military UFO hunter? What was his working routine like on a day-to-day basis? (I realize I can get this kind of thing from the book, but I’m hoping to get it more in your own “conversational style,” if possible. Which is true for all of the questions, by the way.)
In the latter half of World War 2 Ruppelt served mainly as a navigator in B-29 bomber wings. After some service in India, he flew from Tinain in the Pacific on missions against the Japanese mainland. Tinain was the base from which the B-29s Enola Gay and Boxcar flew to deliver the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Ruppelt, as a lead navigator for the air group, was still in the thick of conventional bombing action the week after the nuclear attack, just before Japan’s surrender. It can be said therefore that Ruppelt was a most experienced USAAF officer.
After the war he joined Northrop and obtained a Degree in Aeronautical Engineering. In those days Northrop was at the cutting edge of air technology, and Ruppelt was in the thick of it all. The Northrop Flying Wing was the most advanced bombing aircraft of the time. Developed from a German Horton brothers design, it was the prototype for the modern B-2 Spirit “stealth” bomber, though almost half a century was to run before aircraft designers got the message! Some 25 pre-production prototypes were ready for operational squadron acceptance trials when the entire Flying Wing project was scrapped. For some reason which has never been explained, the USAF preferred the lumbering B-36, a totally inferior aircraft in every respect.
On the outbreak of the Korean War (1950-1953) Ruppelt as a re-enlisted captain, worked on the Russian MIG-15 design at Air Technical Intelligence based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. There was a UFO analysis desk in existence at the time, but all Ruppelt heard from this quarter was laughter and sophomoric jokes. He developed a more serious interest and was eventually put in charge of the more properly constituted Project Blue Book. Although he had extremely limited resources, he nevertheless succeeded in putting UFO studies on a reasonably scientific basis, and used state-of the-art information processing as it existed at the time. The story of his investigations is told in his own book, “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects” which he wrote after he left the Air Force.
4. In the new book, you unreservedly treat Capt. Ruppelt as a hero of mythic proportions, as you did previously with Adamski and Fort. Why is Ruppelt worthy of that kind of esteem? What lifts his story out of the ordinary?
Because he is the horse’s mouth as regards the relation of the military-industrial-complex and the UFO at this time in history. He is that rarity of rarities – the military insider who can write well. His book “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects” is a military classic to be put on the shelf alongside Che Guevara’s “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War” and T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”
Ruppelt’s book is also the story of a man who had a terrible struggle not only with the UFO, and the multiple intrigues of the military-scientific establishment, but also a struggle with himself. World War 2 had taken his first youth, and the Korean War had taken his chance of a second youth. All he had ever known was warfare and weaponised air-technology. His formal education was not high, he had practically no purely civilian life experience, no wide background of deep reading, and no intellectual mentors. Yet through Ruppelt’s book there is the pathos of a good intelligence struggling to come to terms with both itself and the almost unimaginable task – detection of alien life-forms no less – quite a formidable task for an enlisted Captain and two or three part-time staff!
You ask about heroes. Well to my mind, Fort, Adamski, and Ruppelt are part of the Pantheon of the secret heroes of Americana. Their books are contrasting mythological texts which represent a part of the mystical codex of the American Imagination, no less. Weaving between their somewhat isolated lives are the half-submerged wrecks of men and machines, the ghost vessels of dreams and ambitions, and the soaring almost-impossibilities of their prototypal imaginations.
They are also heroes in another sense. If Charles Fort was an American exile from the pages of Dostoyevsky, then Adamski is strung between Harry Potter and Toad of Toad Hall, and as such is straight out Melville’s novel, “The Confidence Man.” Like Lee Harvey Oswald indeed, these men were holistic characters, more than the sum of their finite selves
Ruppelt, though lacking Fort’s brains and Adamski’s style and nerve, took on mighty opponents whose robotic fists would have crushed a lesser man immediately. As such, Captain Edward Ruppelt USAF is one of the finest examples of clear-minded Jeffersonian courage in American history.
I like to think that “Deconstructing the B-29” section at the very end of “An American Demonology” unifies imagistically some of the character and achievements of these men, all three of whom showed us that our beloved parish pump is made of more magical things than one would ever believe.
5. You offer an excellent metaphor for how the government came to the idea that the UFOs posed no threat to National Security—the man who walks through the wall as the family eats dinner. Can you restate that here and expand on it a little more?
This is my image for my idea of “management of explanation structures.” We should really replace those Victorian Station Master terms of “fact versus fiction” with the idea of scales of allowances. That way the universal light are switched on. We de-scale utterly fantastic experiences in order to be able to live with them. For example, if we do not like someone or something the first thing we call them or it is “little.” In this sense skepticism is not about facts versus fiction but a functional element in wonder-control. Too much belief and the prowling belief-systems will pick your bones clean. Too little, and we look for the nearest high building to cast ourselves from if only because we have scoured ourselves clean of all transcendental possibilities.
6. Ruppelt is a little hard to pin down in terms of his believer/unbeliever status. What do you think is the underlying truth of how he felt about it all?
The underlying truth in my opinion is that he believed that UFOs were alien space ships. But he was so besieged by powerful forces of skepticism and denial in social, political, military, and scientific terms, that understandably, he was almost overwhelmed and destroyed. He tried to make not very convincing reservations, he edged, he avoided issues, but he had such a big fish on the hook in the Hemingway sense that the poor man was almost annihilated by just about every psycho-social force that could be assembled against him. He was left almost entirely alone in his view and practically isolated by the Air Force. This probably affected his health which deteriorated after his military service.
7. You say Ruppelt’s tenure at Blue Book fell within the timeframe of a more innocent age in Ufology. Would you expound on that a little here? What makes you say we live in a less innocent age today? Please talk about the relative corruption of our present day a little.
The idea of the passing of different kinds of innocence expresses just about everything concerning all kinds of social change. The West lost its innocence after 1914; it tried to regain it after 1945, in the brief chromium-bumper period of early consumerism. This sense of euphoria backed up by a belief in science and technology lasted until Vietnam utterly destroyed it again. T
Before Vietnam, there was a time when shiny prototypes of all kinds were exhibited with national pride. You could take your young children to an unfenced AFB, and be photographed by the side of the latest fighter. In this what might be called the Chuck Yeager “heroic” period, the processes of production and design were hard-wired, visible; they could almost be reached out and touched, the connections between social and technical processes were almost fully understood. Now we do not know who we are, what we are making, or where we are going. The product has become not a thing of joy, but a devious thing woven by conspiracies and whose origins go right under the hill. Doris Day has fallen to Hannibal Lector!
8. Can you recount the events of the sightings over Washington in the summer of 1952 that the book climaxes with? What exactly happened, and what role did Ruppelt play at the time? Did it have anything to do with why Ruppelt left the Air Force later that year?
Let me answer the last question first. Ruppelt was an enlisted officer, and his time of serving was at an end later that year. It was a good time for him to leave since he may have had an inkling of the heart condition that was to cause his early death.
The story of the Washington UFO sightings deserves a book by itself. In “An American Demonology” I have done my best within a short space to describe the tragic-comic fiasco the bafflement and incomprehension of the mighty USAF “defence” system which has to-and-fro echoes of both 9/11 and Pearl Harbour indeed.
It took some considerable time to get fighters over Washington on the nights in question. When they did eventually arrive, these sub-sonic F-94s, low on fuel, were no match for the UFOs. Unbelievably they had no Sector Control at all. The pilots were flying by direct observation by the seat of pants in deep night, with a little help from the radar operator in the rear cockpit. Lacking all military control, they were reduced to asking civilian ground-control supervisors what they should do! It should be realized that these fighters were fully armed. If a jittery civilian controller had advised that they open fire on the glowing objects all around them (after all the objects were over the Capitol Building!), and they had done so, there is no telling what would have happened. If they had been Russian weapons, then a nervous controller at the City airport could have caused a third world war.
What was Ruppelt doing between these two weekends of UFO visitations over the capital city of the United States? As a single-man team, he was running between Wright Patterson and Washington like the proverbial blue-assed fly with little more than a pencil and a notebook for comfort and company. He was almost completely ignored by the Pentagon, and refused any kind of effective co-operation or help. He could not get an AF car, had no help with expenses, and the lowest point was reached when he says he could have been arrested for not reporting back for duty in time!
Finally the fixed Pentagon Press conference almost washed Ruppelt out of history. Unbelievably, the conclusion was that the Washington UFOs were nothing more than a weather manifestation!
Given such mighty forces of denial, were If were it not for my own book and the Hall and Connors book “Summer of the Saucers,” we might have lost Edward Ruppelt forever.
9. This may be off the track a bit, but I’ve always wanted to ask you for a basic working definition of your term “The Entertainment State.” It sounds like a fascinating concept, but I’m not sure I understand it completely.
Our Entertainment State can be defined by adding one more element to the Eisenhower equation, which becomes a military-industrial-mythological complex. This mythological element is none other than the media and entertainment sector which in our time has grown so big and influential that industrial and military components are symbiotically integral and somewhat subordinate to this sector.
Modern citizens now live and think entirely within the communications and information webs of this mythological complex. Despite ourselves, our minds now contain mythological figures woven by powerful image systems mounted by various technologies whose accelerating growth and vertical development appear to be unstoppable. The ancient Egyptians would have understood this process far better than we do.
We are all part of the vastly extended lives of both the living and the dead, from Chaplin to Clint Eastwood, and on to Robert De Niro and Michael Jackson.
In this brave new world we have to get used to the idea that, like Marilyn Monroe and Adolf Hitler, these people can no longer be considered as finite individuals who died a finite death. Such glamorous voodoo dolls, though many are long dead in the strictly corporeal sense, have become infinite in mental extent. In our time they form intelligences, whose vast nets are such that we can conceive of such image-concentrate as a new form of information-life.
Cartesian time has thus become Consumer time, and these highly developed products, from Errol Flynn to Madonna now weave their living way into every single living mind, whether we like it or not, there being no OFF switch. In the not too distant future, there is every possibility that human beings will become little more than hatcheries for commercial breaks for such tribes of doll-folk. This gives us a new and daunting concept of the meaning of the word “industrial.”
Fact and objectivity have no chance at all against such super-beings as I describe. Scientists and all other purveyors of discursive data take very much a second place to Stars. Old industrial “facts” have about as much chance against media as the horse and carriage did against the steam railway.
Whether we like it or not we now mentally navigate and reason by whatever performances and images and acts have managed to reach prime time. In cultural consciousness, media has become a new state of matter, neither molecular or atomic but built of image-theatres.
We mentally navigate by such things, we produce and reproduce such shows and acts in dreams and ambitions such that our very identities are made up such things, rather like a Statue of Liberty made of items of scavenged trash and garbage.
The situation now is such that we can begin to conceive of a world in where an intense image life will replace all “objective” data processing in the mind. In this brave new world, some of the best prime-time acts will be the star anomalies, ranging from the hollow earth to the reptoid alien. Bits and pieces of such will appear in the manner of Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”
In the final development of Entertainment State, there will be no alternative to being batched, switched, cooked, processed, and sold. We are near a cultural stage where such is the level of media indoctrination that possession of a TV set is hardly necessary, TV now being both a state of Mind and Being. It is a daunting thought that with or without a TV set, we will now be producing infinite private episodes of “Roseanne” until we die.
I developed these ideas in my novel, “The Entertainment Bomb.”
10.Is there anything you wish to add? Some kind of question I haven’t asked or some kind of final comment you’d care to make? (And please feel free at any point to write your thoughts and feelings extemporaneously about anything you want to.
Yes well I would like to say that from Ruppelt’s book Report on Unidentified Flying Objects to Skinwalker via Passport to Magonia is a long journey in cultural time, but I think that such books represent the completion of a Great Cycle as concerns our views and experience of many different kinds of transcendental experience.
We are now ready to lift the curtain more than a little on Charles Fort’s “damned” events. Contact with such means an unprecedented new adventure for human kind.
This is an exciting time for out New Ufology!
Colin Bennett 15th January 2006