Editing UFO conspiracy theories (section)

===1940s origin in Raymond Palmer's pulp magazine===
[[File:Raypalmer1930.jpg|thumb|upright=.5|right|Raymond Palmer, called "the man who invented flying saucers"]]

UFO conspiracy theories began in 1940s pulp magazine edited by [[Raymond A. Palmer|Raymond Palmer]], known as "the man who invented [[flying saucers]]".<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|3}}<ref name="Nadis"/>  For years prior to the [[1947 flying disc craze]],  Palmer had published reports of strange craft in his pulp sci-fi magazine ''Amazing Stories''.<ref name="Barkun2006"/>{{rp|32}}<ref name="Nadis"/>  During the 1947 flying disc craze,  Palmer hired original saucer witness [[Kenneth Arnold]] to investigate a flying disc report near Maury Island, Washington.<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|13}}<ref name="Nadis"/> By October 1947, Palmer's magazine featured claims that the truth behind the discs was being covered up.<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|12}}<ref name="Nadis"/>  Palmer would continue to promote UFO conspiracy theories for the rest of his life,  eventually linking them to the JFK assassination and Watergate.<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|323}}<ref name="Nadis"/>

====Spaceships of "The Shaver Mystery"====
[[File:Amazing stories 194503.jpg|thumb|right|Shaver's first published work, the novella "I Remember Lemuria", was the cover story in the [https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v19n01_1945-03_Ziff-Daviscape1736 March 1945 ''Amazing Stories'']]]
Beginning in 1945, Palmer began to print ostensibly-true stories based on the writings of Richard Shaver, a Pennsylvania welder who claimed to be  in telepathic communication with a secret underground race.<ref name="Barkun2006"/>{{rp|32|quote=The most influential examples of this genre are a set of science-fiction stories published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories between 1945 and 1948. The stories and their surrounding circumstances came to be known as “the Shaver Mystery,” after their principal author, Richard Shaver, a welder from Pennsylvania. Shaver claimed to have been in psychic communication with a subterranean race and to have once physically visited their underground civilization.}} In 1934, Shaver had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems;  Barkun argues: "By most accounts Shaver himself believed with absolute conviction in the truthfulness of his stories. This, combined with their appearance in a pulp-fiction venue, served further to blur the already uncertain boundary between fact and fiction."<ref name="Barkun2006"/>{{rp|115}}
Shaver claimed that ancient civilizations had mastered space travel, spread civilization to other planets, and could travel to Earth.<ref name="Barkun2006"/>{{rp|116|quote="It is worth bearing in mind that the Shaver Mystery was well under way before the first publicized UFO sighting in 1947. Nonetheless, there were ample opportunities for linkage. In the first place, although Shaver focused on Lemurian survivors, he believed that thousands of years ago, some beings from earth had mastered space travel and colonized other worlds, from which they were in a position to return.}}

In a July 1946 editorial, Palmer argued that "responsible parties in world governments" were aware "of the fact of spaceships visiting Earth".<ref name="DClarke">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=K_R0CQAAQBAJ | title=How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth | isbn=978-1-78131-472-2 | last1=Clarke | first1=David | date=14 May 2015 | publisher=Quarto Publishing Group USA }}</ref>{{rp|x|quote=" In the years that followed he published letters sent to Amazing Stories by a man called Richard Shaver who claimed that a race of demonic creatures lived secretly in caves beneath the Earth and persecuted humans with mysterious rays. Then, in a prescient editorial written in July 1946, a year before Kenneth Arnold's sighting, Palmer told readers: 'If you don't think spaceships visit the Earth regularly then the files of Charles Fort and your editor's own files are something you should see. And if you think responsible parties in world governments are ignorant of the fact of spaceships visiting the Earth, you just don't think the way we do.'"}}<ref name="Laycock"/> Peebles opines:  "One would be hard pressed to find a more concise summary of the flying saucer myth. Yet this was a year before the first widely publicized sighting."<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|6}}<ref group="note">[https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v20n04_1946-07_cape1736 ''Amazing Stories'' July 1946]. The same issue carried a letter from Fred Crisman in which he claimed to have battled underground monsters in Burma (Peebles p.13, Gulyas 2015 p.30)</ref>

====Kenneth Arnold ignites flying disc craze====
{{main|1947 flying disc craze}}
[[File:Ramey-dubose-debris.jpg|thumb|right|Army officials pose with balloon debris from Roswell.]]

The flying disc craze began on June 24, when media nationwide reported civilian pilot [[Kenneth Arnold|Kenneth Arnold's]] [[Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting|story of witnessing disc-shaped objects]] which headline writers dubbed "[[Flying Saucers]]".<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|ch.2}}<ref name="G_Arnold">{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8GBVEAAAQBAJ|title=Flying Saucers Over America: The UFO Craze of 1947|first=Gordon|last=Arnold|date=December 17, 2021|publisher=McFarland|isbn=9781476646527 |via=Google Books}}</ref> Such reports quickly spread throughout the United States; historians would later chronicle at least 800 "copycat" reports in subsequent weeks, while other sources estimate the reports may have numbered in the thousands.<ref name="jkHK1"/><ref name="Bullard"/>{{rp|53}}

On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that they had recovered a "flying disc". The Army quickly retracted the statement and clarified that the crashed object was a conventional [[weather balloon]].<ref name="olmsted184">{{cite book|first=Kathryn S.|last=Olmsted|title=Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=u7Sd5vyOOtEC&pg=PA173|chapter=Chapter 6: Trust No One: Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories from the 1970s to the 1990s|year=2009|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-975395-6|pages=173–204|access-date=2016-03-16}}{{rp|184}}
</ref> The Roswell incident did not surface again until 1978, when  [[Ufology|ufologist]] [[Stanton Friedman]] interviewed [[Jesse Marcel]].<ref>{{cite magazine |date=June 23, 1997 |title=The Roswell Files |url=https://time.com/vault/issue/1997-06-23/spread/120/ |magazine=Time |volume=149 |ref={{harvid|"The Roswell Files"|1997}} |number=25}}</ref>{{rp|69}}

In late July, Palmer contacted Kenneth Arnold and asked him to investigate a "flying disc" report from Fred Crisman near Maury Island, Washington.<ref name="Gulyas2015"/>{{rp|30-31|quote="Even before the Maury Island Incident (as it became known), Crisman’s life intersected the paranormal and parapolitical worlds throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Before spotting the flying saucer in Washington, he wrote to Amazing Stories magazine, claiming that he had fought his way out of a cave in Burma during World War II, battling mysterious and evil underground creatures. In the 1960s, Jim Garrison would subpoena him in his case
against Clay Shaw as part of the John F. Kennedy assassination."}}   In June 1946 and again in May 1947, Palmer had published fantastical letters from Crisman, who claimed to have battled inhuman underground monsters in Burma.<ref name="Gulyas2015"/>{{rp|30–31}} Arnold agreed and Palmer wired him $200 to fund the investigation."<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|13|quote=Palmer received a letter from two Tacoma harbor patrolmen—Fred Lee Crisman and Harold A. Dahl. The letter said they had seen a group of flying saucers and had fragments from one of them. Crisman was known to Palmer. A year before, Crisman had written a letter claiming he had had an underground battle with the Deros. Palmer asked Kenneth Arnold, to whom he had written earlier, to investigate the story. Arnold agreed."}}  Arriving in Tacoma, Arnold interviewed Crisman, who told a tale of a flying disc that emitted rock-like debris and a visitation from mysterious black-clad stranger who gave ominous instructions not to speak of the disc.<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|13–15}}

Arnold summoned two Air Force investigators who took possession of the supposed debris, described as lava rocks, from Crisman.<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|13–15}} As the investigators returned to base, their B-25 caught fire and crashed. A local paper ran a story suggesting the plane had been sabotaged or shot down to prevent the shipping of the flying disc fragments. Though Crisman later confessed to a hoax, Peebles argues the story was the "first to give a sinister air" or "conspiratorial atmosphere" to the flying saucer myth.<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|13-15|quote="In retrospect, the newspaper publicity about the B-25 crash was the first to give a sinister air to the flying saucer myth. The talk of "sabotage," "mysterious stranger," and "classified material" gave it a "conspiratorial" atmosphere. The Army Air Force knew it was a hoax and why the plane crashed, but the public had only the contradictory newspaper accounts.}}

==== Aftermath====
In the October 1947 issue of Amazing Stories, editor [[Raymond A. Palmer|Raymond Palmer]] argued the flying disc flap was proof of Richard Sharpe Shaver's claims.<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|12}} That same issue carried a letter from Shaver in which he argued the truth behind the discs would remain a secret.<ref name="MirageMen"/><ref name="auto5" group="note">[http://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v21n10_1947-10_cape1736 ''Amazing Stories'' October 1947]</ref>

Wrote Shaver:<blockquote> "The discs can be a space invasion, a secret new army plane — or a scouting trip by an enemy country...OR, they can be Shaver's space ships, taking off and landing regularly on earth for centuries past, and seen today as they have always been — as a mystery. They could be leaving earth with cargos of wonder-mech that to us would mean emancipation from a great many of our worst troubles— and we'll never see those cargos...I predict that nothing more will be seen, and the truth of what the strange disc ships really are will never be disclosed to the common people. We just don't count to the people who do know about such things. It isn't necessary to tell us anything."<ref name="MirageMen">{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TQ3BBAAAQBAJ|title=Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs.|first=Mark|last=Pilkington|date=July 29, 2010|publisher=Little, Brown Book Group|isbn=9781849012409 |via=Google Books}}</ref><ref name="RToronto"/>{{rp|159}}<ref name="auto5" group="note"/>    </blockquote>During the last decades of his life, Shaver devoted himself to "rock books"—stones that he believed had been created by the advanced ancient races and embedded with legible pictures and texts.<ref name="RToronto"/>{{rp|206}} After Shaver's death in 1975, his editor Raymond Palmer admitted that "Shaver had spent eight years not in the Cavern World, but in a mental institution" being treated for [[paranoid schizophrenia]].<ref name="MirageMen"/>{{rp|ch. 3}}
{{Quote box
|quote="There is a definite link between flying saucers, The Shaver Mystery, The Kennedy’s assassinations, Watergate and Fred Crisman."
|source=Ray Palmer, 1976 letter to Gray Barker<ref>Gray Barker’s Newsletter #5, March 1976, Letters to Editor, pg 15,cited in LeFevre (2014) pp 52-56</ref><ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|323|quote=Crisman was the perfect suspect to create a “link” between UFOs, the occult, and the various assassination theories. His testimony was never released and he is now dead. Garrison’s investigation was worthless, relying on hearsay, nonexistent “links,” and spurious “unanswered questions.” Most of the “suspects” were dead by the time Garrison sought indictments. }}
|width=30%
}}

In 1952, Arnold and  Palmer would author ''Coming of the Saucers''.<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|13,92}} It detailed his 1947 investigation of Fred Crisman's claims, alleged he had been eavesdropped on during his investigation, and other strange behavior.<ref name="Gulyas2015"/>{{rp|30}}
In 1968, Crisman would be subpoenaed by a New Orleans grand jury in the prosecution of a local man for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—a prosecution that would later be dramatized in the 1991 Oliver Stone film JFK.<ref name="Gulyas2015"/>{{rp|pp=30–31}}<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|323|quote=Crisman was the perfect suspect to create a “link” between UFOs, the occult, and the various assassination theories. His testimony was never released and he is now dead. Garrison’s investigation was worthless, relying on hearsay, nonexistent “links,” and spurious “unanswered questions.” Most of the “suspects” were dead by the time Garrison sought indictments. }}  
{{Ufo}}