A Hawk From a Handsaw, Part 2

Note: My article “The Campbell Machine,” which describes one of the strangest episodes in the history of Astounding Science Fiction, is now available online and in the July/August issue of Analog. To celebrate its publication, I’m republishing a series about an equally curious point of intersection between science fiction and the paranormal. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on February 16, 2017. 

Yesterday, I hinted at a series of incidents from the early seventies that the writer Robert Anton Wilson once memorably described as “some mysterious hawks that follow Uri Geller around.” Geller, the Israeli magician and purported telepath, claimed to be in contact with an alien entity that three other men—Saul-Paul Sirag, Andrija Puharich, and Ray Stanford—all believed they had met in the form of a hawk. A few months after an encounter in which he thought he saw Geller turn into a bird of prey, Sirag was startled to see the Kelly Freas cover of the January 1974 issue of Analog, which depicted a man with a hawklike helmet and the last name “Stanford” embroidered over his breast pocket. The story, “The Horus Errand” by William E. Cochrane, follows a psychic named Stanford as he attempts to guide the consciousness of a deceased millionaire through its reincarnation into the body of a newly born infant, only to lose track of his client along the way. (There are faint shades of Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, which had been published a few years earlier.) Egyptian imagery plays a significant role in the plot, with Stanford comparing his task to that of the mythological Isis, who gathered up the pieces of the dead Osiris and used them to conceive their son Horus, while an enormous modern pyramid serves as a backdrop to the action. Decades later, the real Ray Stanford, who was associated with research into unidentified flying objects, provided a sketch, pictured below, of what he said was the insignia on the famous spacecraft seen in Socorro, New Mexico on April 24, 1964 by police officer Lonnie Zamora. It looks a lot like a pyramid.

It isn’t especially surprising to see Egyptian symbolism turning up repeatedly in these contexts. Such images are popular for much the same reason that a character in Foucault’s Pendulum says you find pyramids on both sides of the Atlantic: “Because the wind produces dunes in the shape of pyramids and not in the shape of the Parthenon.” (His friend responds: “I hate the spirit of the Enlightenment.”) But the timing is striking for other reasons. We can start with Andrija Puharich, the parapsychological researcher who first introduced Geller to a large popular audience. In his book Uri, which presents Geller as a kind of messiah figure who derives his abilities from extraterrestrial sources, Puharich describes a few hawk encounters of his own. After traveling to Tel Aviv to study Geller, he quickly became convinced of the other man’s powers. While driving through the countryside on New Year’s Day of 1972, Puharich saw two white hawks, followed by others at his hotel two days later:

At times one of the birds would glide in from the sea right up to within a few meters of the balcony; it would flutter there in one spot and stare at me directly in the eyes. It was a unique experience to look into the piercing, “intelligent” eyes of a hawk. It was then that I knew I was not looking into the eyes of an earthly hawk. This was confirmed about 2 P.M. when Uri’s eyes followed a feather, loosened from the hawk, that floated on an updraft toward the top of the Sharon Tower. As his eye followed the feather to the sky, he was startled to see a dark spacecraft parked directly over the hotel.

Geller insisted that there weren’t any hawks in Israel, and that the birds had been sent to protect them. “I dubbed this hawk ‘Horus’ and still use this name each time he appears to me,” Puharich concludes, and he adds that he saw it on two other occasions.

As it turns out, there are, in fact, hawks in Israel, and based on Puharich’s description—a two-foot wingspan, with gray plumage and a white underside with “darker stippling”—they resembled Eurasian sparrowhawks, which are sometimes observed around Tel Aviv. But the most striking point goes unspoken. Puharich’s book is set during a period of heightened tension between Israel and Egypt, and much of the action revolves Geller allegedly receiving information from a higher power about a pending Egyptian invasion. During a hypnotic trance on December 1, 1971, Geller was given an alarming message: “Plans for war have been made by Egypt, and if Israel loses, the entire world will explode into war.” In a second session, he heard another warning: “In Khartoum and in Egypt there may be many dead. Sadat will be taken by his officers. Syria will attack. Jordan will not intervene. There will be many Egyptian soldiers in Jordan. You, you are the only one to save mankind.” Puharich spent much of his visit praying for peace, and because no attack took place, he strongly implies that Geller’s efforts had something to do with averting it. After the Yom Kippur War did break out on on October 6, 1973, Geller and Puharich consulted their extraterrestrial source, who replied: “The fight and the war will be fought just like an ordinary war. This war had to come, and they shall fight it out alone. You are not needed this time.” Earlier in the book, Puharich writes:

If [a cosmic being] wishes to appear to some earth person, it chooses a form suitable to the local taste. In ancient Egypt the sun god, Ra, for example, was said to appear in the form of a hawk called Hor, or as corrupted by the Greeks, Horus.

But as far as I can tell, neither Puharich nor Geller comment on the incongruity of a cosmic entity reaching out to an Israeli psychic in 1971 in the form of the Egyptian god of war.

If interest in paranormal phenomena tends to spike during times of uncertainty, it isn’t all that strange that it would draw upon Egyptian symbolism in a decade when global anxieties were shifting toward the Middle East. But there’s another incident I want to mention. In 1956, the writers Damon Knight and Judith Merril organized the first Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference, which attracted such authors as Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and L. Sprague de Camp. Also in attendance was Cyril Kornbluth, who brought along a young woman, Jane Roberts, whom Knight describes as “slender and dark, thin to the point of emaciation,” with “enormous dark eyes.” During the conference, Kornbluth invited Knight, James Blish, and Algis Budrys to join him in Roberts’s hotel room. Here’s how Knight, in his book The Futurians, describes what occurred:

I have often wished I had asked Cyril what he really had in mind and what he expected to happen. My memories of what did happen are fragmentary. I remember that after a while Jane was sitting on a straight chair with the rest of us grouped together, and that she went into a trance and prophesied. I have forgotten every word of what she said. Still later we were grouped in a tight circle with our arms around each other; all the lights had been turned out except one dim one; it may have been a candle. Cyril was expressing his misery, and I began to sob, feeling as I did so that I was crying as his surrogate. We left the meeting with a feeling of closeness that went beyond friendship.

Two years later, Kornbluth was dead of a heart attack, while Budrys subsequently denied that the incident had ever taken place. As for Jane Roberts, she later became famous for channeling “an energy personality” that received widespread attention in a series of books published in the early seventies. The personality called itself Seth—which is also the name of the Egyptian god who was the sworn enemy of Horus. Tomorrow, I’ll do what I can to make sense of all this, and I’ll also talk about its relevance today, when a different kind of hawk seems to be on the resurgence in the Middle East.

A Hawk From a Handsaw, Part 2

Yesterday, I mentioned the series of incidents from the early seventies that the writer Robert Anton Wilson memorably described as “some mysterious hawks that follow Uri Geller around.” Geller, the Israeli magician and purported telepath, claimed to be in contact with an alien entity that three other men—Saul-Paul Sirag, Andrija Puharich, and Ray Stanford—believed they had seen in the form of a hawk. A few months after his own encounter, in which he thought he saw Geller turn into a bird of prey, Sirag was startled to see the Kelly Freas cover of the January 1974 issue of Analog, which depicted a man with a hawklike helmet and the last name “Stanford” embroidered over his breast pocket. The story, “The Horus Errand” by William E. Cochrane, follows a psychic named Stanford as he attempts to guide the consciousness of a deceased millionaire through its reincarnation into the body of a newly born infant, only to lose track of his client along the way. (There are shades of Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, which had been published a few years earlier.) Egyptian imagery plays a significant role in the plot, with Stanford comparing his task to that of the mythological Isis, who gathered up the pieces of the dead Osiris and used them to conceive their son Horus. An enormous modern pyramid serves as a backdrop to the action. Decades later, the real Ray Stanford, who was associated with research into unidentified flying objects, provided a sketch, pictured below, of what he said was the real insignia on the famous spacecraft seen in Socorro, New Mexico on April 24, 1964 by police officer Lonnie Zamora. It looks a lot like a pyramid.

In itself, it isn’t surprising to see Egyptian symbolism turning up repeatedly in these contexts. Such images are popular for much the same reason that a character in Foucault’s Pendulum says you find pyramids on both sides of the Atlantic: “Because the wind produces dunes in the shape of pyramids and not in the shape of the Parthenon.” (Another character responds: “I hate the spirit of the Enlightenment.”) But the timing is suggestive for other reasons. We can start with Andrija Puharich, the parapsychological researcher who introduced Geller to a large popular audience. In his book Uri, which presents Geller as a kind of messiah figure who draws his abilities from extraterrestrial sources, Puharich describes a few hawk encounters of his own. He had traveled to Tel Aviv to study Geller, and he quickly became convinced of the other man’s powers. While driving through the countryside on New Year’s Day of 1972, Puharich saw two white hawks, followed by others at his hotel two days later:

At times one of the birds would glide in from the sea right up to within a few meters of the balcony; it would flutter there in one spot and stare at me directly in the eyes. It was a unique experience to look into the piercing, “intelligent” eyes of a hawk. It was then that I knew I was not looking into the eyes of an earthly hawk. This was confirmed about 2 P.M. when Uri’s eyes followed a feather, loosened from the hawk, that floated on an updraft toward the top of the Sharon Tower. As his eye followed the feather to the sky, he was startled to see a dark spacecraft parked directly over the hotel.

Geller insisted that there weren’t any hawks in Israel, and that the birds had been sent to protect them. “I dubbed this hawk ‘Horus’ and still use this name each time he appears to me,” Puharich concludes, adding that he saw it on two other occasions.

As it turns out, there are, in fact, hawks in Israel, and based on a few minutes of research and Puharich’s description—a two-foot wingspan, with gray plumage and a white underside with “darker stippling”—I think they might have been Eurasian sparrowhawks, which are sometimes observed around Tel Aviv. But the most striking point goes unspoken. Puharich’s book is set during a period of heightened tension between Israel and Egypt, and much of the action revolves Geller allegedly receiving information from a higher power about a pending Egyptian invasion. During a hypnotic trance on December 1, 1971, Geller heard the message: “Plans for war have been made by Egypt, and if Israel loses, the entire world will explode into war.” Similarly, in a second session: “In Khartoum and in Egypt there may be many dead. Sadat will be taken by his officers. Syria will attack. Jordan will not intervene. There will be many Egyptian soldiers in Jordan. You, you are the only one to save mankind.” Puharich spent much of his visit praying for peace, and ultimately, no attack took place, with the strong implication that Geller’s efforts had something to do with averting it. When the Yom Kippur War did break out on on October 6, 1973, Geller and Puharich consulted their extraterrestrial source, who replied: “The fight and the war will be fought just like an ordinary war. This war had to come, and they shall fight it out alone. You are not needed this time.” Earlier in the book, Puharich writes:

If [a cosmic being] wishes to appear to some earth person, it chooses a form suitable to the local taste. In ancient Egypt the sun god, Ra, for example, was said to appear in the form of a hawk called Hor, or as corrupted by the Greeks, Horus.

But as far as I can tell, neither Puharich nor Geller comment on the incongruity of a cosmic entity reaching out to an Israeli psychic in 1971 in the form of the Egyptian god of war.

If interest in paranormal phenomena tends to spike during times of uncertainty, it isn’t all that strange that it would draw upon Egyptian symbolism in a decade when global anxieties were shifting toward the Middle East. But there’s one other instance I want to mention. In 1956, the science fiction writers Damon Knight and Judith Merril organized the first Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference, which drew such authors as Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and L. Sprague de Camp. Also in attendance was Cyril Kornbluth, who brought along a young woman, Jane Roberts, whom Knight describes as “slender and dark, thin to the point of emaciation,” with “enormous dark eyes.” During the conference, Kornbluth invited Knight, James Blish, and Algis Budrys to join him in Roberts’s hotel room. Here’s how Knight, in his book The Futurians, describes what occurred there:

I have often wished I had asked Cyril what he really had in mind and what he expected to happen. My memories of what did happen are fragmentary. I remember that after a while Jane was sitting on a straight chair with the rest of us grouped together, and that she went into a trance and prophesied. I have forgotten every word of what she said. Still later we were grouped in a tight circle with our arms around each other; all the lights had been turned out except one dim one; it may have been a candle. Cyril was expressing his misery, and I began to sob, feeling as I did so that I was crying as his surrogate. We left the meeting with a feeling of closeness that went beyond friendship.

Two years later, Kornbluth was dead of a heart attack, while Budrys subsequently denied that the incident had ever taken place. As for Jane Roberts, she later became famous for channeling “an energy personality” that first received widespread attention in a series of books published in the early seventies. The personality called itself Seth—which, of course, is the name of the Egyptian god who was the enemy of Horus. Tomorrow, I’ll do what I can to make sense of all this, and I’ll also talk about its relevance today, when a different kind of Israeli hawk seems to be making a comeback.

Days of Futurians Past

On July 2, 1939, the First World Science Fiction Convention was held in New York. It was a landmark weekend for many reasons, but it was almost immediately overshadowed by an event that took place before it was even called to order. The preparations had been marked by a conflict between two rival convention committees, with a group called New Fandom, which the fan Sam Moskowitz had cobbled together solely for the purpose of taking over the planning process, ultimately prevailing. On the other side were the Futurians, who were less a formal club than an assortment of aspiring writers who had collected around the brilliant, infuriating Donald A. Wollheim. As the convention was about to begin, Wollheim and a handful of Futurians—including Frederik Pohl and Robert A.W. Lowndes—emerged from the elevator and headed toward the hall. What happened next has long been a matter of disagreement. According to Moskowitz, he was initially willing to let them in, but then he saw the stack of pamphlets that the group was planning to hand out, including one that called the convention committee “a dictatorship.” Thinking that they had come only to cause trouble, he asked each of them to promise to behave, and those who refused, in his words, “chose to remain without.” Wollheim later gave a very different account, claiming that the decision to exclude the Futurians, later known hyperbolically as “The Great Exclusion Act,” had been made months in advance. In any event, Wollheim and his friends left, and although there were some rumblings from the other attendees, the rest of the convention was a notable success.

So why should we care about a petty squabble that took place nearly eighty years ago, the oldest players in which were barely out of their teens? (One of the few Futurians who made it inside, incidentally, was Isaac Asimov, who wandered nervously into the convention hall, where he received an encouraging shove forward from John W. Campbell.) For me, it’s fascinating primarily because of what happened next. New Fandom won the dispute, leaving it in an undisputed position of power within the fan community. The Futurians retreated to lick their wounds. Yet the names of New Fandom’s leaders—Moskowitz, Will Sykora, and James V. Taurasi—are unlikely to ring any bells, except for those who are already steeped in the history of fandom itself. All of them remained active in fan circles, but only Moskowitz made a greater impression on the field, and that was as a critic and historian. The Futurians, by contrast, included some of the most influential figures in the entire genre. Asimov, the most famous of them all, was a Futurian, although admittedly not a particularly active one. Wollheim and Pohl made enormous contributions as writers and editors. Other names on the roster included Cyril Kornbluth, Judith Merril, James Blish, and Damon Knight, all of whom went on to have important careers. The Great Exclusion Act, in other words, was a turning point, but not the sort that anyone involved would have been able to predict at the time. The Futurians were on their way up, while the heads of New Fandom, while not exactly headed downhill, would stay stuck in the same stratum. They were at the apex of the fan pyramid, but there was yet another level to which they would never quite ascend. Next month, I’ll be taking part in a discussion at the 74th World Science Fiction Convention, which in itself is a monument to the house that New Fandom built. But the panel is called “The Futurians.”

And it’s important to understand why. As the loose offspring of several earlier organizations, New Fandom lacked the sheer closeness of the Futurians, who were joined by mutual affection, rivalry, and a shared awe of Wollheim. Many of them lived together in the Ivory Tower, which was a kind of combination dorm, writer’s colony, and flophouse. They were united by the qualities that turned them into outsiders: many had been sickly children, estranging them from their peers, and they were all wretchedly poor. (In Damon Knight’s The Futurians, Virginia Kidd, who was married to James Blish, describes how the two of them survived for months on a single bag of rice.) More than a few, notably Wollheim and John Michel, were sympathetic to communism, while others took leftist positions mostly because they liked a good fight. And of course, they were all trying—and mostly failing—to make a living by writing science fiction. As Knight shrewdly notes:

This Futurian pattern of mutual help and criticism was part of a counterculture, opposed to the dominant culture of professional science fiction writers centering around John Campbell…The Futurians would have been happy to be part of the Campbell circle, but they couldn’t sell to him; their motto, in effect, was “If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em.”

Like all countercultures, the Futurian lifestyle was a pragmatic solution to the problem of how to live. None of them was an overnight success. But by banding together, living on the cheap, and pitting themselves against the rest of the world, they were able to muddle along until opportunity knocked.

The difference between New Fandom and the Futurians, then, boils down to this: New Fandom was so good at being a fan organization that its members were content to be nothing but fans. The Futurians weren’t all that good at much of anything, either as fans or writers, so they regrouped and hung on until they got better. (As a result, when a genuine opening appeared, they were in a position to capitalize on it. When Pohl unexpectedly found himself the editor of Astonishing Stories at the age of nineteen, for instance, he could only fill the magazine by stocking it with stories by his Futurian friends, since nobody else was willing to write for half a cent per word.) New Fandom and its successors were machines for producing conventions, while the Futurians just quietly kept generating writers. And their success arose from the very same factors—their poverty, their physical shortcomings, their unfashionable political views, their belligerence—that had estranged them from the mainstream fan community in the first place. It didn’t last long: Wollheim, in typical fashion, blew up his own circle of friends in 1945 by suing the others for libel. But the seeds had been planted, and they would continue to grow for decades. The ones who found it hard to move on after The Great Exclusion Act were the winners. As Wollheim said to Knight:

Years later, about 1953, I got a phone call from William Sykora; he wanted to come over and talk to me…And he said what he wanted to do was get together with Michel and me, and the three of us would reorganize fandom, reorganize the clubs, and go out there and control fandom…And about ten years after that, he turned up at a Lunacon meeting, out of nowhere, with exactly the same plan. And again you had the impression that for him, it was still 1937.