BEFORE GROUNDING believers in flying saucers perhaps it might be fruitful to hear what dissenters (by no means accepted by other dissenters) have to say on interplanetary travel.
Naturally if you follow any rival theorist too long, you'll either be sucked in by his prop wash or be blown over a cliff by his exhaust gases. It also naturally follows that men who are wedded to rockets as the only plausible means of getting from one planet to another (and that in 1950 included the Air Force) are not going to junk their rockets and embrace flying saucers merely because others may say saucers are already here, while the best military information puts rockets to the moon twenty-five years into the future, and a four-day trip even then.
Men stay with what they believe, or fight for buggy whips in an era of automobiles for the simple reason that their livelihoods are all tied up with buggy whips.
That rocketeers should pooh-pooh the reality of flying saucers while giving painstaking details of trips to the moon in their imaginary rockets reveals how theories as well as worlds can suffer collision.
Yet who can read Willy Ley and not be convinced that the man is writing about a trip to the moon that he actually took? And for those who may still doubt, they will be gathered in like daisies if they look at Chesley Bonestell's "documentary" paintings which support Ley's text. No camera could add anything to such an interplanetary understanding.
Viking, which gave The Conquest of Space (1949) the glamour treatment, published a more thorough if less glamorous book on rockets by Ley in 1944. Ley must have forgotten some of his own researches, because in the earlier book he lists a volume published in 1931 written by David Lasser. It bears the fetching title The Conquest of Space.
Both books commendably play down the lethal prospects of rockets and stress their possibilities for interplanetary travel. Ley is particularly persuasive, whether appealing to astronomers, engineers, or those who like a good story. He has been enamored of rockets for twenty-five years and has been publishing pamphlets on them since at least 1926. The Russians, however, were at them as early as 1893, and the French go back to 1814 when William Congreve published his first book on rockets. His theories spread to England, Ireland, and Germany and were the military vogue of the next fifteen years.
After the First World War there was another upsurge of interest-especially among those obsessed with the belief that one new weapon can win a war. The V2 of the Second World War convinced many enemies of the Nazis that perhaps the fanatics were right. Were it not for the fact that the Americans invented the atom bomb, war rockets would be completely in the saddle today. As it is, rockets hold a secondary position and their proponents, both among the military and civilian, must console themselves with such sublimations as trips to the moon instead of to Moscow.
Though Ley has a tendency to belittle what he calls second-rate novelists dealing with matter in the science-fiction field, he is really in the same field himself. He starts from a basic and believable premise, such as a rocket being shot off at the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico (north of El Paso, Texas), and overwhelms you with such a detail of engineering data, in connection with such a release, that you go with him into areas where, if you thought about it, you would realize he had moved from fact into a strictly fictional field with more laughable brass than any Jules Verne of flying saucers.
He calls the signal for firing "X minus 20," and he works you with a palpitant pace all the way down to X minus 1. After that there are only fifty seconds to go. . .forty. . .thirty. . .twenty . . .ten. A hand in a steel glove pushes an ignition button. A pinwheel burns, valves jump open, liquid oxygen and alcohol rush from tanks into the motor. Contact! Ignition!. . . A noise which can be heard one-half a :mile away like the roar of a waterfall, or of distant thunder. Peroxide and permanganate come together, the turbine wheel spins, the pumps move, the fuel is forced. There is a deafening roar. Zero! Rocket away!
How can anybody deny that such excitement is real?
There is a thrust of twenty-seven tons on a rocket weighing less than fifteen tons. Fifteen miles up the velocity climbs from forty feet per second to one mile per second. After sixty-eight seconds, there is a mechanism which shuts off the fuel flow. Ley insists on calling it Brennschluss because the Germans called it that. After that the rocket keeps moving on kinetic energy. It reaches a height of 110 miles, before gravity begins to reassert itself.
In five minutes it is back to the earth. And though it went straight up it has landed thirty miles away. Like all planets or other objects in space, it has followed Kepler's law of elliptical conformity. It might have been set to follow a different ellipse as war rockets do. In that case it might have landed 200 miles from where it was fired instead of thirty.
Of course if the rocket could have got outside our gravitational pull, it might have kept right on do the moon. But high performance depends on high velocity. With a high mass ratio, and a high exhaust velocity, a rocket slanted to land where the moon would be four days from now, would hit it right on the nose. There is an experimental rocket airplane called XS-1. Ley believes the winged, long-ranged rocket of the future will resemble this type of airplane. But he gives no thought to the idea that the rocket principle which he hugs so close to his breast may also be involved in the propulsion of flying saucers. If a rocket, simplified, is fireworks, a flying saucer, equally simplified, can be a pinwheel in the same pyrotechnical display.
The atmosphere of the earth extends 250 miles, but at forty miles the density is nearer a vacuum than anything else. Apparently Ley cannot conceive of any propulsion beyond our combustion engines, turbines, turbojets and, in his dreams, athodyds. Though believers in flying saucers have frequently been classified as beautiful dreamers, Ley talks about a rocket with flawless down-to-earth logic-until you find that his rockets do not have enough power to get to the moon. In that case they can become orbital rockets! That is to say, sort of artificial moons, there to revolve in our atmosphere and be used for navigation purposes or stations in space, for later rocket ships to refuel on their way to the moon.
What Willy Ley is cooking up, a group calling themselves the Borderland Scientists believe is here already. They call these space ships and the people moving around on such a plane between this planet to another, "Ethereans."
Once he has got an unmanned rocket to overcome all barriers and actually reach the moon (possibly with a load of gypsum so that its crash-landing will show up white against the moon's habitual greyness) Ley would be ready for a moonship manned by a crew conditioned to all sorts of atmospheric pressures and vacuums. Because man on this earth functions at 1 g. (gravity), the rocket could not exceed an acceleration of 4 g. without tearing him apart. Thus it would take 500 seconds of acceleration at 4 g. before the ship hit a velocity of 7 miles per second-a speed it would have to maintain to get out of the earth's gravitational pull. In its fall toward the moon, there would have to be enough fuel reserved to resist the pull of the moon's gravitational pull. And in fact enough fuel left over, to get out of it again. There would be no way to relay a message, as there is no air around the moon where the temperature varies from 250 degrees below zero to 200 above. Unless the crew hit a happy medium, their chances of coming back on Ley's slow boat would be academic.
Coming back to this earth, Ley hoped the engineers could work out a series of breaking ellipses, so that the rocket could eventually get home like a glider. He also suggested a two-step rocket, one inside the other, and the smaller one to take on the final job of getting to the moon.
Funny thing that Lucian of Samosata, who wrote the first story of a trip to the moon, in the third century, had a ship caught in an Atlantic storm and had the ship carried to the moon. It took eight days. That's not bad calculating, considering that the best figures today, according to those unfamiliar with magnetic energy (Ley apparently among them), would be four days.
Johannes Kepler who discovered the laws of planetary orbits also made an imaginary trip to the moon. But his wasn't as believable as Ley's. Ley's own imaginary trip takes place on a mountaintop near the equator. It will be out of sight within a minute. Its path will be vertical, and then tipped eastward so it can gain some of the earth's rotational momentum, and then pointed to a spot where the moon will be four days hence. It will leave the earth's atmosphere three minutes after taking off, and the rocket's motors will work for eight minutes.
Once the terrible acceleration has stopped, and the Brennschluss set, the pilot will no doubt have a hard time getting his breath back as the gravity goes down from 4 g. to 1 g. to zero. At that point the pilot will find everything around him devoid of weight. He may have to drink water that has become bubbles and is floating all around him. Of course he could eat, because bodily functions do not depend on gravity. Men can drink when standing on their heads. But everything would have to be strapped down, including the crew until it was time for the rocket to back down and decelerate to the moon four days later.
On the moon the pilot would not find those craters as such, at least they would not be extinct volcanoes, but peltings that had hit the moon from an outside atmosphere, and left huge circular indentations, some as wide as 150 miles.
Simon Newcomb described the moon as a world without weather on which nothing happens. Apparently that's why there is such a frenzy to get there. It might be the sanitarium of the solar system.
But four days is a long time for such a short trip. Fritz Lang produced a picture years ago in Germany called Frau im Mond and the rocket got to the moon and back in two hours of playing time. George Pal produced Destination Moon in Hollywood in 1950 and cut the round trip down to 90 minutes. Almost any planetarium can give a really comfortable trip to the moon and back and by removing all the fictional sex appeal considered essential in motion pictures, complete the voyage in 45 minutes. In fact Dr. Dinsmore Alter, director of the Griffith Park Observatory, Los Angeles, has taken more than 100,000 persons on such trips since 1935. But magnetic energy engineers believe that anybody who has mastered magnetic propulsion can go from the moon to the earth in two seconds on a flying saucer. That puts the rocket ship realists practically back among the buggy whips.
Illustrations of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision (Doubleday) portraying balls of fire striking wide-mouthed primitive men whose only weapon was a spear were by no means as convincing as Bonestell's astronomically certified illustrations in Ley's The Conquest o f Space, but the net result in both instances seemed to move the whole subject back to the days when Camille Flammarion's features were the life of Hearst's American Weekly. That was in the good old days when agnostics read the magazine sections instead of either going to church or reading the comic sections.
Waldemar Kaempffert, science editor of The New York Times and the author of Science Today and Tomorrow and a history of astronomy, took the view that were it not for the years it took Velikovsky to compile his hundreds of citations and footnotes "a critical reader might well wonder if this quasi-erudite outpouring is not an elaborate hoax designed to fool scientists and historians." Oddly, neither Kaempffert nor any other first-rate critic seemed to observe the deadly parallels between Worlds in Collision and H. S. Bellamy's Moons, Myths and Men, which was published by Harpers in 1938-a year before Velikovsky landed in America after a strange Odyssey that took him from Russia, to Montpellier, Edinburgh, Berlin (where he studied medicine), Palestine (where he practiced it), Zurich, and Vienna before almost burying himself alive in the Low Library of Columbia University only to emerge after ten years with not only Worlds In Collision but Ages in Chaos and The Orbit-a stupendous tribute to the art of learning even if much of it wasn't so in the first place.
But why has the astrohistorical continuity from Bellamy to Velikovsky been ignored by practically the whole critical fraternity? Both set down biblical catastrophes and miracles side by side with cosmic disturbances, except that Bellamy is more enthralled by what the moon did and Velikovsky by Venus.
Bellamy's main concern was not planetary conflicts but the popularizing of Hans Hoerbiger's The Cosmic Ice Theory. He even went into the fall of cosmic material, fragments of which could easily be confused with flying saucers. Hoerbiger's book, incidentally, was snowed under by the First World War, having been first published on the eve of combat. It failed to work itself free of that blizzard until 1925 when the battle for and against his glacial theory started anew.
Indeed, in warming up to Hoerbiger's subject, Bellamy carried the torch as well for Charles Fort without quite realizing it. The Cosmic Ice Theory, which considers the moon as a body composed of ore minerals covered with ice, contends that it was captured out of space not so many thousands of years ago. Bellamy has a very snug theory of the birth of our solar system, which comes out of capture itself followed by a subsequent generative explosion. He shows hydrogen, oxygen, water, steam and ice going through aerial gymnastics through millions of years and reduces one operation to a particularly impressive design. He takes a group of orbital cones. Mercury is deepest inside. Venus is outside of Mercury. The Earth has the next outside position, then the Moon, and then Mars. Bellamy moves the cones from their widest diameters to their points. You see the Earth's capture of Luna, which is the present state of things. Next, coming up, you see the end of Mercury, then the capture of Mars, then the end of Venus, then the end of the Earth. If Mars slips by uncaptured it will finally plunge into the sun and will do that before the Earth does. It will be Bellamy's trick of the light-year, if it comes off.
In the capture of the planet Luna by Terra, Bellamy gave a blow-by-blow description that almost seemed as if he had a ringside seat. Instead of being 220,000 miles away in space and 10,000 to 15,000 years away in time, he wrote as if he were right there when it happened. The moon, it seems, had dodged an open trap many times before its capture. This was due to the fact that it lagged behind the earth in those days. Then it began moving somewhat faster than our earth, and on the next elliptical swoop around it could not resist the earth's superior gravitational pull. It thereby became completely entangled, as if caught in the earth's tendrils, and henceforth was no longer an independent planet. It became a satellite of the earth.
Before its capture it was brighter than Venus and seemingly growing in mass (as viewed of course by earth-bound observers) until it appeared sixteen times its normal size. A sudden shock, according to Bellamy, sent trembling crowds to their knees, a series of throes and tremors sent them groveling in the dust. From above and below came a thundering, rumbling, roaring, raging voice. The houses heard it and crashed. The trees shivered into splinters. The hills reeled, and the earth opened up its womb and fire flashed forth. Dust storms swept over the survivors. Then from the north and the south, waves mountain-high swept over the land, drowning all but a very few in a cold, cold sea.
Thus Bellamy describes the capture of the moon. (Velikovsky applies most of the same stage directions to the tail of Venus
swishing close to the earth, but the general idea is the same.) A little thing, the moon, compared to the size of the earth, but it was big enough to pull the earth out of shape, making it bulge more at the equator, flatten more at the poles, and leaving there barren and ice-bound, where once they had supposedly enjoyed a temperate climate.
Curious, where one writer will prove that the poles had mild temperatures before being squeezed of their human juices by citing examples of prehistoric monsters found buried with grass still in their teeth, others will use these skeletons to prove that the upheavals threw these monsters from their equatorial homelands to the arctic areas.
Velikovsky himself, unaided by melodramatic illustrations, had worked long of course to prove that such things as the opening of the Red Sea, the flood that enveloped all except Noah and his Ark, Joshua and his transfixed sun, and such recordings of the Old Testament, were matched by similar occurrences on many other places of the earth as well. The Exodus became the sufferings of man caused by the gaseous tail of Venus, at that time a comet-a brush which pulled the earth out of shape, and consequently submerged land in some places and raised mountains in others, while pelting the earth with meteorites, flaming rocks and steaming air. (Does it differ essentially from Bellamy's mad moon?)
Velikovsky, like many others attempting to fit phenomena into a plausible mosaic, constantly strove for a figure that would show some order in all this chaos. He settled on fifty-two. By stretching forty years of wandering in the desert and adding twelve years between the crossing of the Jordan and the battle of Beth-horan, he managed to come out with fifty-two years between the crossing of the Red Sea and Joshua's command to the sun to stand still. He found two catastrophes in old Mexico which also had a fifty-two-year span.
When the planet Venus moved closer to the earth and passed on without catastrophe, that was listed as a near miss. When Moses told his people to hallow the fiftieth year, this too was worked out to be really fifty-two years. Lucifer became, through Velikovsky's painstaking research not a fallen angel but a fallen star. He pointed out that the Arab name for the planet Venus was Al-Uzza, giving rise to the suspicion that Venus was a comet before it became a planet-a belief supported by early Greek philosophers, because "comet" is derived from the word "hair" and the tail of the comet looked like the hair of a goddess being blown backward by the wind.
The pressure of such a comet's tail could distort the shape of the earth in passing and make it appear as if the sun had stood still. A rain of meteorites would in all probability follow such a comet's sweep past this earth, and fortify the theory of magnetic research scientists who point out that meteors are composed of metals which make them actually giant magnets.
Velikovsky even advanced the suggestion that the battles Homer described in the Iliad really referred to Venus and Mars. Since that conflict, Mars and the earth approach each other amicably every fifteen years. The earth rotates in twenty-three hours, fifty-six minutes, and four seconds. Mars rotates in twenty-four hours, thirty-seven minutes, and twenty-seven seconds. For all practical purposes this leaves these two planets on friendly, almost synchronized, terms. This alone could account for the suspicion that the space ships, people insist they see, might be guided by nosy neighbors who are just as interested in our planet as we are in theirs.
Velikovsky's first book knocked out Darwin's theory of evolution, which was dying a slow death anyway as a theory, and modified Newton's laws of gravitation, which researchers in the field of electromagnetic energy had modified before either Velikovsky or Einstein got around to it.
Velikovsky and Bellamy suffer a parting of the ways at this point, because Velikovsky saw shifts in planets but no liquidations in the foreseeable future, whereas Bellamy moved all planets in this solar system to an explosive end, the way he believed they began. Otherwise, the two have a lot in common. And both of them fortify those scientists who believe that the planets in our solar system are really giant magnets. Indeed the magnetic research men describe the earth as a big dynamo wrapped in magnetic lines of force. From this they argue that anybody who can master propulsion on these lines of force could fly around the planet with the speed of light, and if he could overcome the repelling lines of say Venus and Terra he could move from one planet to any other planet as easily as we step from a moving stairway to a lingerie department of a department store.
To say Velikovsky may have something in his theory that everything from the sun to the moon is an electromagnetic dynamo, is to ask for the back of the hand from such as Waldemar Kaempffert. Nevertheless, he has.