Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (26 page)

Flying saucer religion remained popular through the 1970s with the best-selling
Chariots of the Gods?
In it, Swiss writer Erich von Daniken claimed that alien visitors came to earth in the early stages of human development and were welcomed as gods. These “ancient astronauts” built the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. Daniken suggested that all major religions emerged from these encounters and that human–alien sex had been responsible for an increase in human intelligence over time. Although never producing an organized religious movement, Daniken’s theories gained wide circulation and provided the basis for a History Channel documentary as late as 2009.
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Mocked by a variety of critics whose ideological position ranged from secular humanism to “young earth” creationism, the durability of Daniken’s thesis is surprising. Religious studies scholar Douglas E. Cowan describes this as “the von Daniken paradox.” Lambasted from every side, Daniken’s notions have informed popular science fiction narrative from the
Stargate SG-1
series to
Battlestar Galactica
.
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Ironically, the source for Daniken’s claims of friendly visitors bearing gifts to humanity may lie in the darkest corners of America’s monster tradition. Jason Colavito, a writer whose work focuses on debunking alternative archaeology, argues convincingly that a religious reading of flying saucers borrows directly from the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s tales also featured “Old Ones” that once ruled the earth and left behind artifacts of their existence. A crucial difference, which Colavito notes, is that the alien beings in Lovecraft’s work are indifferent to the human race, indeed terrifying in their indifference. It is unimaginable to think of any of Lovecraft’s creatures bringing a message of love and hope or giving humanity an evolutionary leg up. Lovecraft’s influence is certainly present in the small religious movements spawned by the age of the alien. However, these groups owe much more to the cultural need to come to grips with the terrifying realities of the nuclear age meeting the often optimistic tenor of postwar American religious life. Benevolent aliens became a deus ex machina for Americans anxious about the holocaust their own nation’s science and technology could unleash. Like many mainstream religious movements of the cold war, a belief in alien visitors bearing gifts offered an escape from the myriad dangers and anxieties of postwar America.
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Alien visitation as messianic hope underscores once again the multivalence of monsters in America. The otherness of the monster can embody the sum of all fears but also an escape from fear. In the age of the cold war, the shadow of the bomb represented the most terrible monster imaginable, while rapid social change had accelerated the speed of history. Friendly monsters in flying ships offered an escape from history.

Flying saucer cults did more than offer a comforting message, however. They may have offered some adherents a way to experience the frightening power of the sacred at a time when religious faith had become domesticated by America’s Christian mainstream. American civic religiousness failed to satisfy the human yearning for transcendence. While most Americans who felt this may have been attracted to the more recognizable horrors of Christian fundamentalism and its tales of monstrous demonic beings (and a somewhat monstrous God), others turned to monsters from outer space, searching for the frisson of divine terror unavailable from the warm and fuzzy world of mainstream American religion.

The postwar religious revival failed to contain American terror of the atomic age. Although America’s postwar years look from the outside like an age of consensus, they actually represented a moment of cultural splintering. By the late 1960s loss of faith in American government
ignited countercultural protest. A loss of faith in American religious institutions resulted in both the gathering strength of Christian fundamentalism and a growing secular critique of religion’s claims. White Americans, in the South and later in the urban North, resisted the African American freedom struggle’s claims, often with violence. America seemed, once again, a society cleaved apart by inherent tensions.

In 1958 on edge of this cultural precipice, a young logger walked out of the woods and into the offices of the
Humboldt Times
of Eureka, California, carrying a plaster cast of a giant footprint.

Attack of the Cryptids

Jerry Crew was working on the logging trails necessary for the building of Trinity Dam in the hot summer of 1958 when he and his fellow loggers started seeing the unexplained tracks. Minor vandalism of machinery and outsized prints worried some that large bears were in the vicinity, angry that their habitat had been disturbed. Crew pointed out to his fellow loggers that the lack of claw prints meant that the creature stalking the camp could not have been a bear. Moreover, several of his coworkers claimed that they had seen a hairy creature with long arms run across the road in front of their trucks.

Sightings of mysterious woodland creatures were certainly not a new American phenomenon. In the early twentieth century, hunters on the Santa Barbara Channel Islands off the coast of Washington State had sighted, and supposedly captured, a “wild girl” who lived on the island in a cave full of animal bones. During the same period, Canadian Albert Osterman claimed to have been held captive by a family of “ape-like” people near Vancouver Island.
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None of these incidents garnered the attention of the 1958 sightings, perhaps because Crew claimed to have empirical evidence in the form of a plaster cast of the creature’s footprint. Crew’s cast of “Bigfoot’s” big foot became the trigger for an explosion of media interest. Not even the fascination with the sea serpent compared to the media storm that made Bigfoot into one of America’s most well-known monsters. The sightings in the Pacific Northwest intersected with the worlds of 1950s advertising, entrepreneurism, and the desire for alternative spiritualities. Bigfoot as a popular culture phenomenon was born. The
Humboldt Times
happily put a photograph of Crew holding the cast on the front page of their October 5th edition, the strange image and the story of the “mystery in the mountains” providing a distraction for readers from other stories of the day, including the NAACP’s struggle to implement
Brown v. Board of Education
and Eisenhower blasting critics of America’s foreign policy.
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The story proved to have legs as well as giant feet and soon attracted the attention of a little-known subculture of monster hunters. The story hit Ivan Sanderson, a trained zoologist, like a lightning bolt. Sanderson’s career had always displayed a taste for the strange and exotic combined with a penchant for showmanship. Successful nature books in the late 1930s had made him well known, and his interest in “unexplained phenomena” led to his being a frequent guest on both radio and later television.

Sanderson’s interest in “unexplained animals” went back to his student days. Walking the line between popularizing science and Barnumesque showmanship, Sanderson made it his goal to create a new field of study that would involve “the collection and examination of evidence for the existence of any creatures as yet unknown to and unidentified by zoologists.”
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Sanderson pursued a strange path first cut by the amateur naturalist and failed novelist Charles Fort. In the 1920s Fort mounted a full-throated assault on scientific positivism. His
Book of the Damned
(by damned he meant “facts” excluded a priori by science) examined the question of sea serpents, strange climatic conditions, and unexplained wonders in the sky. Fort mastered a writing style that seemed skeptical and hard-nosed about strange phenomena while also poking at the scientific establishment for its allegedly hidebound notions of truth. His writings are so influential among those interested in unexplained phenomena that “Forteanism” has found expression in quasi-academic associations and popular magazines.
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Sanderson saw in Fort’s writings a mirror of his own interests and worldview. By the early ’50s, Sanderson had used the Fortean approach to stake out a claim as a paranormal expert. He had also become a close friend and frequent correspondent with Bernard Heuvelmans, a French zoologist whose 1955
On the Track of Unknown Animals
became a kind of bible for cryptozoological investigators. Both men served as advisors to Tom Slick, a multimillionaire who made his fortune in the Texas oil boom. Slick had used his fortune in the late 1950s to fund expeditions to the Himalayas in search of “the Yeti,” better known as “The Abominable Snowman” (a creature that both Heuvelmanns and Sanderson wrote about at length). Slick provided the funds for the first “Bigfoot expedition” in Humboldt County in the fall of 1959.

Slick’s expedition caught the imagination of the public. In December, Sanderson published an article in
True
, a popular men’s magazine that featured pseudo-journalism and adventure stories, entitled “The Strange Story of America’s Abominable Snowman.” Bigfoot mania
exploded. By 1960 several more expeditions, a Hollywood production company, and even some alternative religious groups had made the pilgrimage to Humboldt County. Teams of monster hunters and their yapping dogs filled the Bluff Creek area. The uproar in northern California lasted for close to two years, with funding for Bigfoot research drying up after Slick’s death in 1962.
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Bigfoot quickly became America’s most famous “hidden animal.” Interest in his existence tended to blend into fascination with UFOs, sea or lake monsters, and various other cryptids. Sanderson formed “The Society for the Unexplained” in 1965, an organization that focused on unexplained creatures and phenomena of all kinds. In 1967 he wrote a book called
Uninvited Visitors
, which examined UFO sightings. Meanwhile his colleague, Bernard Heuvelmans, published
In the Wake of Sea Serpents
, which called on the scientific community to embark on a new hunt for the creature he insisted had “finished its wandering among the monsters of mythology and returned to the fold of zoology.”
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These monster hunters represent a profound shift in American cultural attitudes toward science. The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a growing cynicism about the scientific worldview and introduced new discourses about the unreliability of science as the final arbiter of significant questions. Belief in cryptids, and in the individuals who publicized them, offered the public an alternative vision of scientific knowledge. At its heart, the cryptid obsession provided a counternarrative to the idea that scientific experts connected to major universities and funded by the government had rationalized the world.

The birth of modern creationism in the post-World War II era represents another strand of this phenomenon. Proponents of so-called scientific creationism rely heavily on the claim that mainstream science exerts excessive control over the basis for knowledge of the world. Creationists make, in essence, the same argument as Charles Fort, that science represents a system of control based on circular assumptions that exclude certain facts a priori. Recent efforts by proponents of Creationism (and of its new incarnation as the “Intelligent Design” movement) assert similar claims when they argue that creationism should be taught alongside evolutionary biology so that by “teaching the controversy” the classroom can become a democracy of ideas.
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Mainstream science has responded to the claims of monster hunters and creationists much as it did to sea serpent mania. Data never collected and irreproducible can never be analyzed. Until empirical evidence for Bigfoot or an omnipotent creator deity turns up, such questions are not scientific questions at all. For many Americans then and
now, these assertions proved unsatisfying and were perhaps even evidence of the inherent limitations of science.

The cryptid hunters themselves became living counter-symbols to the increasingly untrustworthy men in white lab coats. Many of them seemed to embody the explorer and amateur zoologist of an earlier era, setting off on expeditions/safaris that were the stuff of men’s adventure magazines. Ivan Sanderson’s first claim to fame had been a book about his adventures in Africa. Tom Slick had a photograph of himself taken after his Himalayan Yeti expedition that made him look every inch the gentleman adventurer. Peter Byrne, a cryptid hunter funded by Slick in the late ’50s was described as looking as if he had “stepped out of a comic strip … in safari clothes, replete with ascot and bush hat.” A character straight out of central casting, Byrne had been a big-game hunter before he began hunting monsters.
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The cryptid hunters seemed more Indiana Jones than Dr. Strangelove. Cryptid hunters on the search for the unexplained became a way for many Americans to express faith in science as an investigative system while also doubting the scientific establishment and its authority. Rather than cooking up monstrous creations in test tubes, these were men of science who explored the hidden parts of the earth and brought back tales of wonder. This image suited Americans who had begun to have doubts about the world science had brought them.
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The cryptid mania of the ’50s and ’60s reflected changes in the images of science in American pop culture. A number of scholars looking at horror films from this same era have noted that the role of the “expert” begins to change in significant ways during this period. If the 1930s had been the apogee of the mad scientist and the 1950s the age of the heroic professional who makes use of science to defeat scientific threats, the 1960s fully embraced the idea of science out of control. Rather than a rebirth of “the mad scientist,” this seems to be the birth of “mad science,” chaotic forces outside the control of human agency.
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