"Camp - Little Green Men From Afar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Camp L. Sprague de)

VERSION 1.0 dtd 033100



LITTLE GREEN MEN
FROM AFAR*

L. Sprague de Camp

Four of the authors represented in this volume are here because their stories were judged the best in their class for the year in which they were published. Sprague de Camp's award is something else. It isn't for a story. It is for a life. The Grand Master Nebula goes only to those who are judged to have made such significant contributions to the field of science fiction that no temporally limited award will sufice. Only four have ever been given-Robert A. Heinlein, Jack Williamson and Clifford D. Simak are the previous winners. To commemorate it for this volume, we asked Sprague de Camp to let us publish the text of an address: "Little Green Men from Afar."

In 1950, when the flying-saucer craze was enjoying its first boom, Francis F. Brahman, an instructor in general science at the University of Denver, staged an experiment to test his students' judgment of evidence. He presented to his class a self-styled flying-saucer expert. Broman told his students to judge this man's tale by five criteria: that the report be first-hand; that the teller show no obvious bias or prejudice; that he be a trained observer; that the data be available for checking; and that the teller be clearly identified.
The class met on March 8. Students invited friends, so the classroom was crowded with strange and eager faces. The speaker was one Silas Newton.

'Winner, Grand Master Nebula of 1978.

He had, Newton said, learned from government officials that three unidentified flying objects, containing a total of thirty-four extraterrestrials, had crashed, killing all their occupants. These were little blond, beardless men, around three and a half feet tall. They became green only in later versions of the story.
A fourth saucer landed unharmed, and the little men got out. But they fled when officials approached them, and their vehicle vanished.
Broman's class unanimously flunked Newton's story on all five criteria. He had, for instance, shown a bias against the U.S. Air Force. The tale, however, appeared in the Denver newspapers. Reporters flocked to interview Newton, who, it appeared, was promoting an alleged magnetic method of prospecting for oil. Newton repeated his story with embellishments. The vehicles, he said, were powered by magnetic lines of force, and those that crashed had run into something he called a "magnetic fault." This is pseudoscientific gobbledygook, signifying nothing. Also, he said, the government was trying to suppress all news of this visitation.
Even if Broman's students did not believe the story, many others did. Newton sold several articles about his saucerians. His friend Frank Scully, a theatrical journalist living in Hollywood, California, published a book, Behind the Flying Saucers. This puffed up Newton's claims and denounced the government for suppressing the truth about the saucerians.
Such circular logic is commonly used by pseudoscientists. You start by assuming what you wish to prove. If you assume that saucers have landed, why haven't they been exposed to view? Obviously, because the government has censored the news, and the fact that the government has squelched this information proves that the saucers exist. QED. .
The tale of the shy saucerians has grown with retelling, so that the pygmy visitors are now firmly established in American folklore. Newton's tale has generated the usual imitations and elaborations. Recently, a pair of enterprising Texans, Marshall Apple white and Bonnie Lu Nettles, were traveling about calling themselves Bo and Peep, or simply the "Two." They have collected a gaggle of followers by promising to carry them all off in UFOs to a happier life on some other world. All the Two wanted was for their disciples to abandon all family ties and give the Two all their money.
In the history of cultism, one is always experiencing a feeling of deject vu. Cultist beliefs have been confuted countless times but bob up again as lively as ever. The idea that the earth was once devastated by a comet began in the seventeenth century with a Cambridge professor, William Whiston. It was revived in the eighteenth by Count Gian Rinaldo Carli. It. was revived again in the nineteenth by Ignatius Donnelly, who also made popular cults out of earlier scholarly speculations about the lost Atlantis and the idea that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. In our own times, the cometary-collision hypothesis has been revived with stunning success by Immanuel Velikovsky.
The story of the Two seems like a replay, with modern embellishments, of the Millerite agitation of 1843. William Miller, an upstate New York farmer, became convinced by his biblical studies that the world was about to end. When a shower of meteors and a passing comet aroused excitement, Miller gathered a following, who sold or gave away all their property in anticipation of the End. Their logic is hard to follow, since after the End nobody would have any use for property anyway.
On the appointed night, Millerites in white robes gathered on hilltops, the more easily to be caught up to Heaven with the rest of the righteous. Needless to say, nothing happened, and the dupes were obliged to go back to scratching a living as best they could.
The Newton episode and its sequels form but one thread in the long and tangled web of pseudoscientific belief. Beginning a decade ago, a Swiss bank employee named Erich von Daniken widely popularized the notion that no mere human .beings could have built the pyramids of Egypt, the statues on Easter Island, and similar feats of pre-industrial engineering. These must, therefore, have been constructed by extraterrestrial visitors. The fact that don Daniken's books are solid masses of misstatements, errors, and wild guesses presented as fact, unsupported by anything resembling scientific data, has not stopped them from earning their author a much better living than he ever made back in Switzerland.

The idea of enlighteners from afar was not new when von Daniken took it up. It formed part of the teachings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, and her successors. Madame Blavatsky was a big, fat Russian adventuress who, when she launched her cult in the 1870s, had already led a colorful career. She had lived in Europe, Egypt, and the United States. She had been a circus bareback rider, a professional pianist, a businesswoman, and a spiritualist medium. She had also been the mistress of, among others, a Slovenian singer, a Russian baron, and an English businessman.
In 1878 she moved to India, where her organization took final form. In 1885, she left India for good, after exposure of some of her magical tricks by a pair of disgruntled accomplices. Three years later, she published her chef-d'oeuvre, The Secret Doctrine, in which her credo took permanent if wildly confused shape. This work, in six volumes, is a mass of plagiarism and fakery, based upon contemporary scientific, pseudoscientific, mythological, and occult works, cribbed without credit and used in a blundering way that shows only skin-deep acquaintance with the topics discussed.
In addition to the gaudy Theosophical cosmos of multiple planes of existence and chains of planets, following each other in cycles from plane to plane, we are told that life on earth has evolved through seven cycles or Rounds. Man develops through seven Root Races, each comprising seven sub-races.
The First Root Race, we learn, was a kind of invisible astral jellyfish, dwelling in the polar Imperishable Sacred Land. The Second Root Race, a little more substantial, lived in the arctic continent of Hyperborea (derived, like Atlantis, from Greek myths and speculations). The Third Root Race were the gigantic, green, apelike, hermaphroditic, egg-laying Lemurians, with four arms, and eyes in the backs of their heads. Edgar Rice Burroughs probably used Madame Blavatsky's Lemurians as models for his Martian green men.
The downfall of the Lemurians came with their discovery of sex. Madame Blavatsky took a dim view of sex, at least after she got too old to be interested in it herself. Lemuria, like Hyperborea before it, broke up by the subsidence of its parts, while Atlantis took shape. The Fourth Root Race we
the wholly human Atlantians; we are the Fifth; the Sixth ant' Seventh are yet to come.
After Madame Blavatsky died in 1891, her successors, clothed her skeletal account of lost continents and pxehistorХ: is races with a substantial body of detail. Her associate A. P.. Sinnott, in The Growth of the Soul (1896) wrote:
From Venus, as all students of esoteric teaching will be aware, the guardians of our infant humanity in. the later third and early fourth race of this world period descended to stimulate in our family the growth of the manistic principle [P. 277]

Madame's successor as head of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant, said in The Pedigree of Man (1908):

The third class of Manasaputras consists of Beings who come to our earth from another planetary chain. They . . . come from outside, from the Chain wherein the planet Venus, [or] 3hQkra, is Globe D. [P. ss]

Not even Madame Blavatsky originated the idea of the enlighten era from afar. The concept belongs to a class of myths and legends of culture heroes, who taught mankind what it needed to know in order to thrive. In Greece, the culture hero was Prometheus, who stole fire from Heaven and gave it to mankind against the orders of Zeus. In Egypt, he was Osiris. Among the North American Indians, he was often called the Coyote.
In the naive old days when the earth was flat, the culture hero used to come down from Heaven. Astronomy, by showing that Heaven was mostly empty space, scotched this idea. Then the discovery that the planets were worlds provided a substitute. The idea that such worlds might be inhabited was broached in the second century by the Syrian satirist Loukianos, or Lucian of Samosata. In his True History, Lucian told how a boatload of adventurers, snatched up into the heavens by a whirlwind, got involved in a war between the king of the sun and the king of the moon over the colonization of Venus.
Voltaire, in his Micromegas (1752), brought to earth an eight-mile-high visitor from Sirius and a slightly smaller native of Saturn. Because of their size, these beings have a hard time deciding whether there is intelligent life on earth. Some of us have trouble deciding that, too.
The reason for this persistent desire to credit the early
advances of mankind to superior beings -angels, demigods,
or extraterreatrials-is simple. The vast majority never have
a new idea that is at once origins], practicable, and a significant contribution to human progress. For this majority, to
admit that some human beings do have such ideas is to
admit that such people are more intelligent than they. No
body likes to confess that he is stupider than someone else.