The UFO, the UNO and the Local Librarian

 
(  Originally written and posted on MySpace on March 23, 2008 )
 
We are accustomed to having an expanse of time before us,  but, facing the imminent coming of my 65th birthday, I have experienced a sudden reversal of the expanse of time.  Now, it has become the past, not the future.  The word "bouleversement" comes to mind, a word first encountered when I read Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon back in 1953 in an English translation held by the local public library.  That word seems to me to suggest the sensation of being overthrown, head over heels, backward, with only a vista of the past.  In Verne’s book, the bouleversement changes the vista of the travellers from the earth to the moon.  The great reversal occurs when they cross the point where the gravitational fields of the earth and the moon are of equal strength.  

Thinking of the past, thoughts arise of the many books that I have given away, thrown away, or even sold (for a pittance) to some used book dealer.   Among these was M. K. Jessup’s The Expanding Case of the UFO (1957), a book which I once owned but gave up when I went through my collection in preparation for a geographical move from point R to point S or wherever.  I do wish that I still owned that curious book.  (While deploring wrong decisions made in the past,  mention will be made of my discard of the box of comic books which I owned back in the period from 1950 to 1953!)
 
Jessup’s The Expanding Case for the UFO came to mind when I discovered that someone has put on the Internet the text of Jessup’s The Case for the UFO (1956), a book by Jessup which I have never read until now and never owned.   Had I read The Case for the UFO, I would have better understood its sequel The Expanding Case for the UFO.   The latter seemed to me to be a strange agglomeration of accounts of activity on the moon, strange lights, etc., references to UFO in the Bible, followed with a discussion of the similarities of meteor craters in Mexico to lunar craters, the massive ruins of the Mayans, mysterious falls of ice and other objects from the sky, and an account of the pygmies of equatorial Africa and Malaysia.  It all seemed so heterogeneous,  unwieldy, unorganized, but it had an underlying theme, which becomes apparent upon reading The Case for the UFO.
 
Although my local public library had a copy of Desmond Leslie and George Adamski’s better-known Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), it never acquired a copy of Jessup’s The Case for the UFO.   I asked the librarian if a copy could be ordered.  Her reply was:  "You must mean The Case for the UNO."   During the later 1940s and the early 1950s, the United Nations was often referred to as the United Nations Organization or UNO.   The librarian made it evident that she would welcome a request for a book on the UNO more than for a book on the UFO, which I explained meant Unidentified Flying Objects.  (Leslie and Adamski’s work was a best seller, which probably accounts for its presence in the library.)
 
That was my first intimation, though not one that surprised me, that public librarians were enthusiasts for the United Nations even as the public schoolteachers were.  Not long before this, around 1954 or 1955, our teacher had praised the UN and wanted us all to know how foul the USA was because it had "stolen" the Panama Canal Zone.  In an earlier entry, I have noted how teachers and librarians alike, mostly dependent on public tax monies, are, by that very circumstance,  nudged over to the left.   The early effort of the teachers to innoculate us against the virus of patriotism was obviously, in retrospect, due to their fear that, otherwise, we might be susceptible to the patriotic pretensions of the anti-tax party, the hated Republicans.
 
Getting back to  Jessup’s The Case for the UFO, part of which I have now read for the first time,  it seems that the disparate investigations of The Expanding Case for the UFO are all linked by the hypothesis that Jessup presents in The Case.   Jessup’s hypothesis is that intelligent beings, possibly extraterrestrial in origin, though not necessarily so, had discovered the means to lift heavy masses, thus accounting for the massive megalithic ruins, and that they were little people, thus accounting for a  genetic trace which they may have left on earth’s surface, the pygmies.  All of this occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Now these beings had at least one site for their habitation:  the sun-earth-moon gravitational neutral area.  This is about 160,000 to 170,000 miles from earth, thus closer to the moon.  The signs of activity on the moon were traces of these beings.   Their mother ships, from one mile to ten miles in length, were more or less parked in the gravitational neutral zone (or Lagrangian point).  From these mother ships, they sent forth the scout ships, the "flying saucers" seen by earthlings.
 
Jessup’s hypothesis seems to owe something to Charles Fort, particularly his speculations in his works The Book of the Damned and New Lands.  It is one of the more ingenious speculations about UFO.  While not as entertaining as accounts of George Adamski’s meeting with a Venusian or Billy Meier’s encounters with alien beings from the Pleiades, it is much more down (or at least closer) to earth.