The following is an article I thought was interesting considering who the pulp science fiction magazine publisher / editor is: the same guy who liked Hubbard's science fiction story called "Dianetics" so much that he told Hubbard to expand the topic and write a book. I suspect that Hubbard had read several stories about aliens on Mars who are part of a "federation," as in the story 'Consulate' published in _Thrilling_Wonder_Stories in 1948. Whereas "William Tenn" wrote his fiction as entertainment, Hubbard wrote it as "religion:" one makes ten thousand times as much money that way.

A Klassic Abduction Found
by Martin S. Kottmeyer

The REALL News Vol9Num5 May 2001CE

According to a collection of his writings, The Square Root of Man (Ballantine 1968/1981), William Tenn published a story titled "Consulate" in an issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1948. Tenn began writing science fiction in 1946 and this was one of his earliest published efforts. He matured as a writer and produced some well-regarded tales in the Fifties distinguished by an incisive sharp humor. "Consulate" has excited no attention among students of SF that I can find and I’m not really surprised by this to the extent that it is seems a conventional sort of tale as SF stories go. It does nothing to really stand out over the rest as a literary creation. But as a tale of alien abduction, it has some charms.

The story starts with a Nobel Prize-winning physics professor named Fronac puzzling over difficulties man is having over getting beyond the Moon to reach Mars and Venus. The story shifts to a pair of guys setting out to do a little bit of night fishing. They argue about the nature of extraterrestrial life since Fronac has made it the talk of the day. One mentions a Sunday Supplement where the Nobel professor argues that there probably are no aliens with advanced technology. "If they’re smarter than we are and have more stuff we’ll be licked, that’s all. We just won’t be around any more, like the dinosaur." Any alien even slightly smarter than us would have space travel. "They’d be visiting us instead of us them." Therefore the fact that we are alive means there probably aren’t any smarter animals out there ready to treat us like chili con carne.

If we stop, we already have an interesting bit of history here. This argument should sound familiar. It is, in essence, identical in form to the notorious Fermi’s Paradox: If aliens are as ubiquitous as plurality of life adherents gush about, Where Are They? According to SETI historians, however, Fermi offered his argument in the summer of 1950 stimulated by someone talking about a flying saucer cartoon in the May 20, 1950, issue of the New Yorker. William Tenn is arguing it already in 1948 and attributing to a Nobelist, like Fermi was. Does Tenn get priority, or is history wrong somehow?

The boaters’ debate is interrupted by a green bulbous thing moving in the water. One guy suggests it is a lump of seaweed. The other suggests it is Portuguese man-of-war, a big jellyfish. It approaches the boat. The guys then feel its eyes and decide it is something else. The boat leaps up 15 feet and they discover after some exploration that they are inside a force bubble. The lump of green fixes boxes on the bubble and in a while they see Earth receding into the distance. The boxes take care of air and food and music and the bubble also took in some seawater around the sailboat allowing them to swim. They wonder what is going to happen to them. Thoughts of dissection or torture to acquire information about Earth come up. That night the pair have a "mutual nightmare in which [they] were being dissected by a couple of oyster stews." This appears to be only a night-mare for nothing more is said of it. They eat some food that was provided for them by a box.

They land on Mars and a green speck appears in the distance that grows into a bulbous jelly like the one that created the force bubble. "It didn’t have any wings or jets or any other way of pushing itself along... It just happens to be flying." It had odd eyes "... they felt just the same as the other... – as if they could undress our minds." A second being arrives that is half the size of a human, very thin, blue, shaped like a flexible cylinder and bearing about a dozen tentacles in the middle. He arrives in a vehicle bearing some equipment. The equipment makes an airlock in the bubble. Outside, the two men are asked about whether they are the intelligent life from Earth. The blue cylinder continues the conversation with them and reveals the green jelly is an ambassador from the galactic nation of Shoin. The blue cylinder is native Martian. The green Shoinite had originally been studying the evolution of intelligent life in the core of Earth, but when it was learned surface dwellers were acquiring space travel it was felt that some representative for us would be needed on Mars.

Our pair of abductees worry they weren’t proper choices and warn the Martian that they are only a small-town grocer and gas station owner. There are far better and brighter folk who would love to have such a position. From the aliens’ perspective, the differences would matter little. Earth is too backwards. The gulf between the aliens and all of us is far vaster than that between individual earthlings.

One is selected to go the alien city and interview for the position while the other waits by the bubble. The tour is made in a one-wheeled car. Upon the return, the chosen guy is sighing in half-breaths, "I’ve just been through a -- well, a big experience." The alien city was what New York must look like to the members of a beehive or anthill. The Martians are thousands of years beyond us, but look up to the Shoins as a still more advanced world who watches and helps younger races. They are in turn part of a federation that is watched over by a still older race. "The universe is old... and we’re newcomers, such terribly new newcomers! Think of what it will do to our pride when we find it out." He also learned that the reason Man was having trouble getting to Mars and Venus was because there was a barrier out in space like the force bubble to keep our planet isolated. This is a nice parallel to ufologist Harold Wilkins’ speculations in the Fifties that a ‘death ceiling’ was imposed by aliens to prevent man conquering the stars. If man does not figure out how to pass through the barrier, they’ll figure we don’t have enough intellect to warrant their interest. He’s not sure what happens to his job if we fail. "Nobody up here cares much." The guy chosen to be ambassador stays on Mars. The other returns home.

After a boring trip back, the bubble lands and dissolves. This robs the guy of proof of the abduction. When he tells his wife that he was on Mars during the two months he was gone, she leaves him. The local paper interviews him, distorts some facts, and the story finds it way into "one of the Boston papers as a little back-page squib with a humorous illustration... I’ve been going crazy since trying to get someone to believe me." The End.

This is not a perfect Bullard-style abduction but it comes mighty close. The standard sequence is 1) capture, 2) examination, 3) conference, 4) tour, 5) otherworldly journey, 6) theophany, 7) return, 8) aftermath. This one runs 1-5-2-3-4-6-7- 8. As I pointed out in "Entirely Unpredisposed" (which readers can find at http://www.debunker.com/texts/unpredis.html), most deviantly ordered abductions in Bullard’s study involved the otherworldly journey not staying in the place he deemed correct, so this could be called the standard imperfection. The more impressive point is that very few abductions reach the ideal of containing all 8 standard elements.

A number of aspects of the story parallel motifs often seen in UFO reality arguments. The initial sighting where the strangeness level progresses from seaweed to jellyfish to alien displays "escalation of hypothesis," which Hynek affirmed was common in good cases. The transparent force bubble parallels the transportation bubbles seen in Andreasson’s experiences.

The ability of the alien to fly with no visible means of propulsion appears in many important cases and is a trait supposedly sufficiently unusual that Fowler used to argue the Andreasson case must be real. This trait long predates science fiction. As has been recently observed, the founder of the Mormon religion Joseph Smith, in a visitation experience on September 21, 1823, saw a personage appear at his bedside, "standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor."

The ability of eyes to undress the mind is strikingly reminiscent of what David Jacobs calls mindscan. The initially rare, but now recurrent, presence of two forms of alien of unequal rank has been spoken of as an unusual feature of modern abductions, but here it is in a 1948 tale. The abductees were chosen basically at random instead of for ability, morality, or faith as has been remarked of modern abductions. The essentially indifferent attitude of the aliens parallels the lack of emotions of the Gray, a trait that impressed both Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs.

The obvious differences – no bald BigHeads, no saucer, no breeding experiments – may come down to Tenn wishing to avoid clichés. Big-brained bald villains and metal spaceships had been done to death over the prior years and he was probably opting for something a bit more exotic. The fear that aliens might dissect the pair had already been done in some well-known stories like "Up Above." Alien beings capturing humans to use as breeding stock was such an infamous pulp attitude that it spawned a backlash by Joseph Campbell when he became an editor. The theophany and intellectual horror of our newness is tame against modern horrors in the abduction genre. This is in the spirit of Copernican and Deep Time rhetoric and in the service of providing a sense of wonder which is the raison d’être of science fiction. The disappointment here Tenn does not exploit it as lyrically or as deeply as other authors.

There are two additional coincidences that are more confusing. Did you notice that quoted line near the end of the abductee’s story appearing in a Boston paper? Ufolgists will recall that John Fuller got to write The Interrupted Journey because the Hills were distressed that their story of alien abduction had been distorted by a newspaper reporter and splashed across "a series of articles in a Boston newspaper." The first great American abduction and this fictional abduction published over a decade earlier have their abductees victimized by a Boston newspa per. It seems quite improbable, but what plausible chain of causation could create it?

The second odd detail: William Tenn is a pseudonym for a man named Philip Klass. This is not the famed UFO debunker Philip Klass, but a man with the same name. A near perfect abduction tale is created over a decade ahead of its time by a man with a name whose nominal counterpart made it his business to take apart abduction tales. As before, this just boggles. If this is not a random matter, what could it possibly mean?

Needless to say, Tenn’s tale could not have been influenced by any real life UFO tales. Not a single UFO book had yet appeared and barely anybody beyond Ray Palmer was thinking about saucers being from outer space. Inversely, though it might not be impossible it influenced later saucer culture, the tale was plenty obscure. Most of the similarities we see demonstrate the ease with which the imagination can call up such material either because the material is so common in the cultural environment or the mind is biased in some way to gen erate them when it needs to construct an alien abduction experience. If someone wants to argue the Boston coincidence argues Tenn was a veiled abductee and aliens engineered these coincidences because they saw the future or planned them, be my guest. Just don’t complain when I say aliens are so weird.

1 Poundstone, William, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, Owl, 1999, pp. 22, 393.

2 Hynek, J. Allen, The UFO Experience Ballantine, 1972, p. 15.

3 Fowler, Raymond, The Andreasson Affair - Phase 2, Prentice-Hall, 1982, pp. 126-7

4 Fowler, Raymond, The Andreasson Affair, Prentice-Hall, 1979, pp. 174-5.

5 UFO Updates: From: Chris Aubeck: Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 09:15:52 -0800 (PST) Fwd Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 02:47:57 -0500 Subject: Joseph Smith [was: More Pre1947 Cases]

6 Jacobs, David, Secret Life, Fireside, 1992, pp. 96-108.

7 Jacobs, David, The Threat, Simon & Schus-ter, 1998, p. 93. & Bullard, T.E., Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery, FFUFOR, pp. 239-42, 253-6

8 Evans, Hilary, Gods, Spirits, Cosmic Guardians, Aquarian, 1987, p. 161.

9 Hopkins, Budd, Intruders, Random, 1987, p. 192 & Jacobs, David, Secret Life, Fireside, 1992, pp. 230-6.

10 Raphael, John N. "Up Above" Pearson’s Magazine December 1912, pp. 709-60.

11 Bleiler, Everett, Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years, Kent State, 1998, p. 628 & Aldiss, Brian, Trillion Year Spree, Avon, 1988, p. 217

12 Fuller, John, The Interrupted Journey, Dell, 1966, p. 7

---- Women without bras have my support.

Go Back