The accidental UFO poetry of Project Blue Book
As Chuck Schumer agitates for "maximum alien exposure," a look back at the the U.S. government's early and quaint UFO-monitoring project.
If you have any doubts we’re living in the End Times, or at least a version of it: the New York Times says that “gut-level hatred” now defines U.S. politics from the halls of Congress to the aisles of Walmart. Yet last week, we finally discovered something we can all agree on: aliens. Chuck Schumer, Josh Hawley and a big bipartisan crew are hard at work on legislation to make sure All the UFO Records are handed over to a Senate Review Board. (By the by: “UFO” is like saying “rad” or “gnarly.” Don’t embarass yourself! All the cool kids call ’em “UAPs” now.)
It’s made me wonder what my late friend, the poet David Clewell, would think about all this. I think he’d be wickedly amused. I also think he’d be sitting in his study right now, writing out a draft of a poem on a legal pad about this whole situation. I think it’d grow into a multi-section wonder, like so many of his poems. I think he’d staple together all those legal-pad pages as he did, tweaking individual words and lines, and then he’d hammer out an Official First Draft at his typewriter. (He called his computer “the demon box,” and only checked his email every few days.) And that poem would somehow make sense of the nonsensical.
The Truth is Out There. Clewell chased it, always.
Maybe Clewell would agree with me, though, that some of the most valuable UFO stuff is already archived and online, including at the National Archives, which has significant holdings around Project Blue Book. First called Project Sign (or Project Saucer) it was launched by the U.S. Air Force in 1947. The following year, it morphed into the delightfully named Project Grudge before finally becoming Blue Book in 1949. It kept that moniker for the next 20 or so years, collecting 12,618 first-hand UFO reports before the program was terminated in 1970. About 700 of those cases are still unexplained.
Any good poet teaches themselves to slip off their foggy Know-it-All glasses so they can actually see before they start what Clewell called “The Work.” What makes Project Blue Book so compelling is the foggy glasses hadn’t been donned yet, by anyone — witnesses didn’t know what they were looking at so they just described what they saw without an overlay of UFO cliches. That’s why so many of these first-hand accounts are so strange and wonderful, almost like poems in the raw. (I kept the agents’ typos and strange use of language intact for this reason.)
Here’s one of the earliest eyewitness reports, received in 1947 from a guy in Utah named Fred Nash:
While Mr. Nash was hunting for deer on the morning of 16 Oct, he heard a throbbing noise or steady purr. Upon looking up he saw an object resembling a flattened football some 500 feet directly overhead. The object was silver and black, a silver stripe down the center (from front to rear) and on both sides of the center the object was black. It appeared about 9 inches long, 6 inches wide and 3 inches thick and was traveling in a straight line in a northerly direction a little to the west toward Salt Lake City, Utah, at an estimated rate of 300 mph. There was no visible sign of exhaust, but from the rear an opening could be seen in the center. Mr. Nash thought he saw a movement like a "paddlewheel." The object sounded as if it were jet propelled and seemed to be driven from the rear. Mr. Nash stated the sound wasn't like that of an aircraft engine, nor any time of gasoline engine, though there was a defnitely throb or “put,” “put,” “put”. He said if it were a gasoline engine, it was muffled. It made a sound of steady clicking, like a “shirt tail flapping in the wind.” He thought the clicking might have been a camera. The object was in sight approximately 4 seconds or longer.
The agent wrote that “character investigation of Mr. Fred Nash seems to indicate reliability. He is a Used car dealer and an airplane mechanic and is in business for himself. Nash is a member in good standing of the Latter Day Saints (Morman) [sic], having done foreign missionary work in Hawaii.”
The agent added a caveat that Nash claimed “excellent eyesight,” but “his estimation of distance was found to be faulty. Agent asked Nash how high a certain tree was — Nash stated it was ‘over one hundred feet high.’ Agent estimated the tree to be about 40 feet hight as compared to a power pole which towered above it.”
The next year, as part of Grudge, an agent spoke with a witness in St. Louis, who described an encounter with an aerial object, using hyperspecific language fit for stealing for a poem:
Object was apparent size of light plane (observer states object would have taken newspaper at arms length to obstruct view of it). Dark reddish brown. Observer stated object appeared buff colored. Shape of object like ray fish wihout tail, somewhat triangular. Object covered 60 deg of arc in 45 seconds. Object reflected glint or reflection from right side. Straight flight, but was rolling or oscillating from side to side.
Again, this description is free of the cliches would become standard once UFOs entered the popular imagination through pulp novels, comic books and B movies. You really get a sense of how odd this thing sounded and looked.
By the late 1960s, thanks to folks’ assumptions about what they were looking at, eyewitness accounts lost a lot of their richness and depth. Their perceptions flattened and became rote. The Air Force, ever efficient, began using a simple mutliple-choice questionaire when it interviewed people, reducing their experiences down to data points.
There was a part at the end where you could add a bit more detail, but there wasn’t much room to write — Project Blue Book became more and more like a high school examination Blue Book.
It’s interesting that Project Blue Book closed up shop right after the Moon landing. And that not so long after that, Hollywood produced less shaggy, more thoughtful films about space travel and UFOs, including 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The genre’s continued to get more artful and unsettling (District 9 and Under the Skin being two standout examples).
Though it’s OK for art film directors to make movies about aliens, it’s still mostly taboo for poets to write about them. Clewell wrote about UFOs constantly; the cover of Now We’re Getting Somewhere features a bunch of Roswell Grays. He also fearlessly wrote poems about adjacent topics that overserious poets won’t touch. A sampling: The Conspiracy Quartets, Jack Ruby’s America, and Lost in the Fire, a collection that’s all about spontaneous human combustion.
As Clewell always explained, though — and you know this if you read his work — you write about Outer Space because you want to write about Earth. You write about aliens to better access the human. One of my favorite examples of this hat trick is “The Face on Mars,” a poem that’s really about how much he loves his wife.
You can watch him read it here, near the end of the clip:
The truth is out there. Josh Hawley and Chuck Schumer think it looks one specific way. David Clewell would say the truth is that there is no “they,” out to get you. Emily Dickinson, Ernesto Cardenal, Stanley Kunitz and Jack Spicer would agree with that, and maybe add that the truth can look all kinds of ways. It all depends on the time of day, the slant of light, the temperature, the amount of tea you’ve consumed. Sometimes the truth is buff-colored and manta-ray-shaped. Sometimes it makes a “put, put, put” sound. Sometimes it manifests as a late-night interview with a wingnut talking about the face on Mars, which shocks you into realizing how far you’ve fallen away from a sense of wonder, navigating this sand trap called middle age. Sometimes the truth is don’t need to binge on declassified documents to restore that sense of wonder; you just need to remember what you love.
Super duper thanks to this new crew of subscribers: Jessica D., Katherine M., Rachel B., Mad Anthony Jane and Summer N. Thanks also to Lisa for buying me a coffee. As they say here in New Orleans: ’ppreciate ya!
Thomas has some new things on deck over at Memory Hall: Silver Tray, “Writings About Music from STL and the STL Diaspora,” and. Artica Ever After, “an Open Source Oral and Textual History of Artica, Circa 2002-2023 A.D.” The latter launches August 7, two months before Artica 2023.
I saw a UFO yesterday. And another last week. My first sighting was 70 years ago. Now it happens most every day. I like them. Many have fur which has not been widely reported.
The connection of UFO sightings to poetry is super interesting, and I love how that one eyewitness description reads almost exactly like a poem. I had even to stop myself from rearranging into one! I've never heard of Clewell before, but loved reading "The Face on Mars" and the way you connected your ending to it and finding truth in what we love.