By the Light of the Moon: Lives of the Lunarians
Shrouded in Mystery: Venusians in All Their Variety
The Not-So-Dying Race: Martians Envisioned and Encountered
Extremophile Living: Life and Love on the Outer Planets
PART THREE Between This World and the Otherworld
The Road to Fair Elfland: Fairies Experienced
Ghost Riders in the Sky: Spectral Armies on the March
Sky Serpents: The Horror of the Heights
Mystery Airships: Aeronauts from the Twilight Zone
Acknowledgments
To Chris Aubeck, Henry H. Bauer, W. Ritchie Benedict, Lucius Farish, Kevin Hile, Theo Paijmans, Mark Rodeghier, Nick Sucik, David Sutton, Michael D. Swords, and Robert Wood, who all, in one way or another, knowingly or unknowingly, made this book possible. And especially to my publisher, Roger Jänecke, for his saintly patience and splendid ideas, and to my wife, Helene Henderson, for putting up with years’ worth of an author’s complaints and frustrations. And finally, to two great men, the long-gone Charles Fort and the longer-gone Rev. Robert Kirk, for setting the thoughts in motion.
Introduction
At most given moments, human beings live in two worlds. One is pedestrian reality, the other the one we experience in dreams and speculations. Each world has its wonders and its horrors, and each can elevate or bring us down. Both are tricky to negotiate. To the unwary, both offer false certainties that, just as we are most sure of them, can fall out from under our feet.
Tricks of certainty respect no educational level or social class. Anyone can become obsessed with a belief that seems sensible, even empirically grounded, and some go to their graves unabused of a notion even when most other observers think it has been conclusively discredited—for example, Percival Lowell and his Martian canals. So unyielding was his advocacy, even in the face of what others saw as growing disconfirmation, that it lived on decades past his death and was at last abandoned in the face of evidence that even the most resolute could no longer deny. On the other extreme, many followers of flying-saucer contactee George Adamski, who claimed associations with Venusians, Martians, and Saturnians, refused to be persuaded by clear and specific indications that his stories were conscious fabrications.
If some things are purely imaginary—and no less interesting and revelatory for that—other things are something else, something not quite wholly real and something not quite wholly dreamed up. Something, in other words, that can be experienced vividly in ways that resist both prosaic explanation and lazy categorization. Call them encounters of the liminal kind, visions on the threshold of possibility, or—as I prefer—experience anomalies, as opposed to anomalous events. The latter can be demonstrated, or at least potentially demonstrated, to have occurred in consensus-level reality. They exist in the world, and you can prove as much, even if not always easily.
Experience anomalies, on the other hand, are visions of the otherworldly, and nothing brings them into or keeps them inside this world in any but an experiential sense. They are preserved in memory and testimony and nowhere else. That, however, makes them no less mysterious. Indeed, they are highly mysterious, so much so that they transcend language itself. To the extent that vocabulary tries to encapsulate them, it conjures up the noun and adjective “visionary,” which translates as “powerful hallucination,” except that hallucinations by definition are subjective and personal. The contents of experience anomalies are subjective—in the sense that (as this book will demonstrate) they tend to be culture-specific—in other words, in forms that are at once supernatural and recognizable—but they are also collectively observed. More than one person can have the experience of “seeing” a strange being, creature, object, or landscape. Ordinarily, collective perception settles the issue of whether or not the perceived something is “real,” but not in this third world. Here, we learn that an experience of the otherworldly can be, indeed, experienced. We also learn that an experience is not automatically an event, and it is all the more mind-bogglingly puzzling for that.
Among the consistent themes of the human presence in all times and places is the longing for fantastic places with populations of fantastic beings to match. Such realms may well exist on extrasolar planets astronomers are now discovering almost daily and in parallel universes about which physicists continue to theorize. But if they exist as so-far-unproved possibilities, we human beings are not content to await validation from authority. In the meantime, we do as we have always done: explore those hidden realms of the imagination. Even more evocatively, those realms enigmatically continue to open themselves to our experiences of them, and for a brief time, before they fade back into mist and memory, we live them.
—Jerome Clark
Minnesota
August 31, 2009
Situated near the southern end of the Cascade range, in Siskiyou County, Mt. Shasta rises 14,161 feet (4,316 meters) above the landscape of northern California, 40 miles (64 kilometers) south of Oregon and midway between the Pacific Ocean and the Nevada border. It is a volcano which, according to geological evidence, erupts every 600 to 800 years. It has been alleged that the most recent eruption—or so some have inferred from the testimony of an observer looking to land from a ship at sea—occurred in 1786. The witnessed eruption, however, may not have been of Shasta; the issue is in dispute. (White people did not start settling in the area until 1827.) The lakes, rivers, and forests surrounding the mountain make Shasta a major tourist destination.
Whatever its distinctive beauty and natural features, Mt. Shasta is best known around the world for the curious lore associated with it. Its most celebrated legends, which owe more to conscious fabrication than to traditional folklore, are barely more than a century old. Older supernatural myths and tales, which come from the American Indian tribes who live or lived in the area, are just as interesting and in some ways more intriguing. For example, besides the ubiquitous belief in a race of supernatural, often invisible little people—a worldwide fairy tradition with cultural variations — natives spoke of their fear of cave-dwelling hairy giants, the Shupchers, who dispatched their victims by embracing and crushing them. As Bigfoot and Sasquatch such creatures, albeit minus murderous impulses, would survive, at least in supposition and testimony, into modern times.
Shasta as international occult landmark is in good part, however, the consequence of the imagination of Frederick Spencer Oliver, born in 1866. Two years later his parents and he migrated from Washington,