The 1936 Strike That Brought America’s Most Powerful Automaker to its Knees

Over 136,000 GM workers participated in a sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan.

ERIN BLAKEMORE UPDATED:SEP 17, 2019

Library of Congress

The General Motors body plant in Flint, Michigan was usually a thankless place, filled with loud sounds and the feverish, dangerous work of turning metal into auto bodies. But in January 1937, the sounds of whistling and conversation filled the air. Instead of toiling over dangerous machinery, workers gambled, wrestled and played ping-pong on the usually busy factory floor. “We made a ball out of it,” recalled Earl Hubbard, a GM worker, in an oral history.

The workers weren’t on vacation: They were on strike. Over 44 days in 1936 and 1937, members of the fledgling United Auto Workers union managed to bring an auto behemoth to its knees in a sit-down strike that became one of the most decisive victories in American labor history. Exhausted by the industry’s dangerous demands and sharpened by the Great Depression, over 100,000 auto workers changed labor history without picketing their plant. Instead of walking out, they simply sat down and refused to leave.

Early in 1935 in Flint, Michigan, the United Auto Workers staged the first successful sit-down, forcing General Motors to come to terms. It was a major victory and the sit-down spread to other areas

Historically, striking workers had risked their lives on the picket lines. Though unions often formed in response to dangerous working conditions, going on strike exposed workers to the danger of physical violence from hired thugs or police that served as companies’ strong-arms. Unions had long struggled to create unions across industries. Instead, craft unions that organized workers across specialties were the norm.

The automobile industry had long discouraged unions. Workers knew they could lose their jobs for trying to organize, and faced corporate spies who reported any pro-union activity back to management. According to historian Timothy P. Lynch, General Motors invested $1 million in surveillance between 1933 and 1936. For many auto workers, unions simply weren’t worth risking their jobs—pay was relatively good, and when workers were laid off they were often rehired at higher rates once a company’s profits rose.

But then the Great Depression hit in 1929. Car sales collapsed, and the industry’s production levels sagged. Automakers slashed jobs, axing thousands of employees with no regard for seniority. Those who did keep their jobs tolerated abysmal working conditions, afraid to speak up lest they be laid off, too. The story was the same across the entire economy, and stoked discontent among jobseekers and workers alike.

Meanwhile, the nation’s largest automaker, General Motors, was actually experiencing an uptick in sales thanks to its aggressive response to the Great Depression. When the economy had begun to spin out of control, GM had slashed prices, cut production of some more expensive models, and laid off huge swaths of its workforce. The moves helped keep GM on top.

By 1936, writes historian Stephen W. Sears, it dominated more than 43 percent of the domestic market, and was the nation’s most profitable automaker. But GM had maintained its grip on the automobile market at the expense of its own workers. After laying off thousands, it hired many back, but didn’t take seniority into account and paid lower wages than before. “Assembly lines were speeded up mercilessly to raise productivity and restore profit levels,” writes Sears.

Workers chafed at the grueling pace, the dangerous work and the company’s habit of laying off workers at will. “I have absolutely seen them hire a hundred men and fire a hundred all the same day,” recalled Ray Holland, a Chevrolet worker, in an oral history. You never knew whether you had a job or not.”

Though the Depression brought suffering for workers, a flicker of hope came in the form of the National Labor Relations Act. Known as the Wagner Act, the 1935 law guaranteed workers the right to organize and join labor unions and to engage in collective bargaining and strikes. It also set up the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency designed to enforce labor law.

The United Auto Workers, a recently formed trade union, had slowly and secretly begun organizing at GM. If the union was to bring the automobile industry together, it had to go after its largest employer—and do so strategically. Organizers decided to focus on the Fisher Body Plant No. 1 in Flint, Michigan, home to 7,000 workers and the place where car bodies were made. Organizers met with Flint workers at their homes and talked them out of walking off the job right away. Instead, organizers planned to stop production through a sit-down strike in January of 1937, after Christmas bonuses had been paid and a new labor-friendly governor was in power in Michigan.

That plan was derailed on December 30, 1936, when workers at the body plant saw critical equipment being lugged onto railroad cars to be sent to other factories. Word was out that the Flint factory was a union stronghold. Workers gathered for an emergency meeting, then flooded back into the plant. The strike was on.

A young striker sleeping on an assembly line of auto seats in the body plant factory.
Library of Congress

Now, men who had worked in the plant occupied it around the clock. They slept on sheepskins, piled-up car mats and makeshift beds, and ate food donated by local grocery stores, farmers and families. Outside the plant, women raised funds, took care of families and even formed human shields to fend off police.

General Motors had been taken by surprise; though it had suspected workers might strike, it wasn’t aware that they would use the new tactic of “sitting down,” or occupying the plant. “Sitting down was a way of ensuring the factories wouldn’t operate and workers wouldn’t be replaced,” says labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian who directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Though GM tried to stop the strike in the courts, and even received an injunction that said the workers were trespassing, the effort backfired. “The strikes were technically illegal, but when you have a mass democratic insurgency you really create new law on the ground," says Lichtenstein.

GM had the law on their side, but they risked public humiliation and legal consequences of their own if they used physical force to evict the workers. Instead, 13 days after the strike began, GM cut off heat in 16-degree weather. When workers went outside to complain, security guards and police rushed in. As tear gas filled the plant, workers fought back, throwing everything from automobile bolts to pieces of roof on the attackers before the police finally fled. Workers dubbed the melee the “Battle of the Running Bulls.”

In response, Michigan governor Frank Murphy mobilized the National Guard. “Law and order must be maintained in Michigan,” he told the public. In the past, news of 1,200 guardsmen descending on Flint to impose law and order would have been devastating to workers, who knew they would be used as a weapon against them. But Murphy was labor-friendly, and didn’t use troops to intimidate workers. Instead, the National Guard became a peacekeeping force that ultimately protected the workers and facilitated negotiations.

Under the order issued by Governor Frank Murphy, the troops are commanded to preserve order, to protect property of General Motors and strikers as well. Here is a machine gun company in full kit and with gun unlimbered. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

“This allowed for the first time for the union and the company to be equal around the (negotiating) table,” historian Jason Kosnoski told MLive.

Eventually, the strike spread to 17 GM plants over 44 days. The spotlight was on GM, which at first refused to budge. The company tried to fight the strike in court, but the strikers ignored an injunction and Murphy refused to enforce it with the National Guard. Then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged GM to negotiate. The combination of those pressures got GM to the negotiating table.

In the deal that followed, the UAW gained union recognition and a promise the company would not discriminate against workers who had struck. General Motors also raised wages by five cents an hour, likely in response to wage hikes by other automakers terrified the sit-down strike would spread to them. Murphy’s refusal to use the National Guard to break up the strike was considered the most decisive factor in ending the strike at GM.

On February 11, 1937, workers paraded out of the plant, victorious. “Suddenly in the distance we heard them singing ’Solidarity Forever,’” recalled Shirley Foster, the wife of a union organizer, in an oral history. “It was an enormous celebration all over the city that night. Flint would never know a feeling like that again.”



Strikers cross off number of days they have been on the sit-down strike at General Motors' Chevrolet auto plant in Flint, Michigan.
Tom Watson/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images

The strikes had lasted for 44 days, left 136,000 GM workers idle and caused 280,000 cars to go unbuilt. Though much of the public was against sit-down strikes and considered labor unionists to be dangerous rabble-rousers, GM’s public image had suffered, too. And labor would never be the same. Union membership ballooned from 3.4 million workers in 1930 to 10 million in 1942, and the majority of the automobile industry swiftly unionized, gaining benefits and pay they never would have obtained without organizing.

“They were the most important strikes in American history,” says Lichtenstein. For decades, he says, industrial unionism reigned supreme, leading to a higher standard of living for working Americans. Today, the UAW has over 400,000 active members and more than 600 locals around the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.Though few actually went on strike in 1936, Lichtenstein notes, they had an outsize impact on American society. “It required a vanguard to show what was possible,” he says. The Flint sit-down strike proved sitting still was just as powerful as walking off the job. 

SEE 

Unionizing Steel

 by

 William Z. Foster

texts

What Means A Strike In Steel

by

 

William Z. Foster

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IN RESEARCHING SIT DOWN STRIKE COVERAGE IN THE PRESS, INCLUDING CANADIAN PAPERS 1937 SIT DOWN STRIKES WENT VIRAL, STUDENTS HELD SIT DOWN STRIKES IN THEIR CLASS ROOMS (WINNIPEG) , IT BECAME A MASS SOCIAL

MOVEMENT DEMANDING SOCIAL CHANGE AND BETTER LIVING CONDITIONS IN RESPONSE TO THE DEPRESSION, THE RISE OF FORDISM BEFORE WWII AND

MASS ORGANIZING AROUND THE CREATION OF THE CIO BY THE LEFT. 

How Skinwalker Ranch Became a Hotbed of Paranormal Activity
Reports persist of UFOs, crop circles, cattle mutilation—and shapeshifting creatures impervious to bullets.

ADAM JANOS JAN 17, 2020
Image courtesy of Prometheus Entertainment

Some have called it a supernatural place. Others have deemed it “cursed.” Terry Sherman got so spooked by the happenings on his new cattle ranch that 18 months after moving his family of four to the property now known by many as “Skinwalker Ranch” in northeastern Utah, he sold the 512-acre parcel away.

He and his wife Gwen shared their chilling experiences with a local reporter in June 1996: They’d seen mysterious crop circles, the Shermans said, and UFOs, and the systematic and repeated mutilation of their cattle—in an oddly surgical and bloodless manner. Within three months of the story’s publication, Las Vegas real estate magnate and UFO enthusiast Robert Bigelow bought the property for $200,000.



Image courtesy of Prometheus Entertainment

Under the name the National Institute for Discovery Science, Bigelow set up round-the-clock surveillance of the ranch, hoping to get to the bottom of the paranormal claims. But while that surveillance yielded a book, Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah, in which several of the researchers claimed to have seen paranormal activities, they were unable to capture any meaningful physical evidence supporting the Shermans’ incredible stories.

The ranch was resold to Adamantium Real Estate, which has since applied to trademark the name “Skinwalker Ranch.”


Had the Shermans been lying about what they saw? Or under the spell of a collective delusion? Without evidence, the stories they told are difficult to believe, but they’re hardly unique. The Uinta Basin of eastern Utah has been such a hotbed of paranormal sightings over the years that some extraterrestrial enthusiasts have deemed it “UFO Alley.” “You can’t throw a rock in Southern Utah without hitting somebody who’s been abducted,” local filmmaker Trent Harris told the Deseret News.

Indeed, according to Hunt for the Skinwalker, odd objects have been spotted overhead since the first European explorers arrived: In 1776, Franciscan missionary Silvestre Vélez de Escalante wrote about strange fireballs appearing over his campfire in El Rey. And before the Europeans, of course, indigenous peoples occupied the Uinta Basin. Today, “Skinwalker Ranch” abuts the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation of the Ute Tribe.

Were the Shermans seeing things that nearby Native Americans had taken note of centuries before?

READ MORE: History's Most Infamous UFO Sightings
Mysterious creatures



A fence that surrounds the main buildings on Skinwalker Ranch.

Image courtesy of Prometheus Entertainment

Not everything the Shermans saw on their ranch was sky-borne UFOs. They also claimed to see mysterious large animals: most notably, a wolf three times the size of a normal wolf that Terry shot at close range multiple times with a rifle—to seemingly no effect.

Then, on the night of March 12, 1997—after the ranch had been sold off—biochemist Colm Kelleher, working with Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science, claimed to see a large humanoid creature spying on the research team from a tree.


As he detailed in Hunt for the Skinwalker, the creature was approximately 50 yards away, watching the team safely from a tree perch 20 feet off the ground.

“The large creature that lay motionless, almost casually, in the tree,” said Kelleher. “The only indication of the beast’s presence was the penetrating yellow light of the unblinking eyes as they stared fixedly back into the light.”

After Kelleher fired at the creature with a rifle, it disappeared. “It was then that I saw it—a single, obvious oval track about six inches in diameter embedded deeply in the patch of snow... It looked unusual: a single large print in the snow with two sharp claws protruding from the rear of the mark going a couple of inches deeper. It almost looked like a bird of prey, maybe a raptor print, but huge and, from the depth of the print, from a very heavy creature.”

READ MORE: Interactive Map: UFO Sightings Taken Seriously by the U.S. Government
The ‘Skinwalker’ in Skinwalker Ranch
JAN 17, 2020


A view of one of the old homesteads from the top of the mesa on Skinwalker Ranch.

Image courtesy of Prometheus Entertainment

Repeated sightings of humanlike creatures have led some to invoke the name “Skinwalker,” a shape-shifting character from Navajo tribal folklore. Among the Navajo, skinwalkers are like werewolves: evil witches who can transform themselves into the creatures of their choosing.

But Sherman’s family ranch was 400 miles north of Navajo Nation. It was next to Ute territory. And when the Utes and the Navajo did cross paths, it was an acrimonious relationship, explains historian Sondra Jones, author of Being and Becoming Ute.

“It was not friendly,” Jones says. “The Navajo were more aggressive people; they took slaves, they had Ute slaves. And there was direct conflict when the Navajo attempted to move up into Ute territory,” at modern-day Pagosa Springs and Durango.
Cursed water, cursed lights

A small river runs through the property on Skinwalker Ranch.
Image courtesy of Prometheus Entertainment

While skinwalkers don’t feature in Ute religion, there are still aspects of the ranch that make sense within the context of Ute lore.

Other strange sightings have occurred directly next door, at Bottle Hollow—a 420-acre man-made reservoir on Ute land abutting the ranch, which was filled with fresh water in 1970 by federal government mandate. In 1998, a police officer saw a large light plunge into the reservoir and then reemerge, flying off into the night sky. One night in 2002, four young (non-Indian) men standing on the reservoir’s shoreline saw a blue-white ball enter the artificial lake.

According to the Hunt for the Skinwalker, the glowing ball dove into the water just a few feet from the shore, then emerged seconds later in a new form: a shimmering, maneuverable belt-shaped shaft of light. “After performing a brief writhing aerial dance, the belt of light zipped away at a high rate of speed, hugging the ground before disappearing below the top of Skinwalker Ridge.”

The appearance of the supernatural around Bottle Hollow makes sense with the context of Ute belief. According to Jones, amongst the Utes “springs and certain waterways were reservoirs of negative power… There were evil spirits or evil sprites that would rise up out of the water and drag you in.”

Commercial Pilot Films UFO Flying Near Plane
posted by Dave Basner - Feb 3, 2020   

Photo: YouTube/WillEase 

Airline pilots see plenty of weird things while flying passengers from one place to another, but most of it occurs in the plane's cabin. However, what one pilot spotted outside of his plane has a lot of people talking. His name is Cesar and he flies Airbus A320s for Viva Air, a low-cost Colombian airline. While soaring over Medellin recently, Cesar saw a strange craft and decided to film it. He then shared the footage on TikTok
It shows a metallic cube that seems to be moving at a high rate of speed, even though it doesn't have any noticeable wings, tail or exhaust.

Skeptics claim it is just a weather balloon and isn't even moving - it just looks to be speeding along because of the plane's motion. Others, however, claim the craft is legitimately from another planet, pointing out the recent revelation of Navy pilots observing UFOs.

As yet, Cesar hasn't commented on what he saw, but he has posted more videos of the sights he sees while in the cockpit. You can follow him here.

What Scientists Can Learn From Alien Hunters
The history of the search for extraterrestrial life sheds light on the consequences of dismissing fringe perspectives, in science and in other disciplines.

SARAH SCOLES SCIENCE 02.10.2020

PHOTOGRAPH: BRIDGET BENNETT/GETTY IMAGES


Aliens—hypothetical beings from outer space—fall into roughly three categories. They could be far-away microbes or other creatures that don’t use technology humans can detect; they could be far-away creatures that use technology earthlings can identify; or they could be creatures that have used technology to come to Earth.

Each of these categories has a different branch of research dedicated to it, and each one is probably less likely than the last to actually find something: Astrobiologists use telescopes to seek biochemical evidence of microbes on other planets. SETI scientists, on the other hand, use telescopes to look for hints of intelligent beings’ technological signatures as they beam through the cosmos. Investigating the idea that aliens have traveled here and have skimmed the air with spaceships, meanwhile, is the province of pseudoscientists. Or so the narrative goes.

Aliens—hypothetical beings from outer space—fall into roughly three categories. They could be far-away microbes or other creatures that don’t use technology humans can detect; they could be far-away creatures that use technology earthlings can identify; or they could be creatures that have used technology to come to Earth.

Each of these categories has a different branch of research dedicated to it, and each one is probably less likely than the last to actually find something: Astrobiologists use telescopes to seek biochemical evidence of microbes on other planets. SETI scientists, on the other hand, use telescopes to look for hints of intelligent beings’ technological signatures as they beam through the cosmos. Investigating the idea that aliens have traveled here and have skimmed the air with spaceships, meanwhile, is the province of pseudoscientists. Or so the narrative goes.



Sarah Scoles is the author of They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers. Preorder on Amazon.COURTESY OF PEGASUS BOOKS


Although these three groups have a common goal—answering the question “Are we alone?”—they don’t always get along. Their interactions demonstrate a concept that sociologists call “boundary-work”: designing and building fences around Legitimate Science, and enforcing ideas about who counts as a scientist, who doesn’t, and why. Those fences are supposed to defend science’s honor, demonstrate scientists’ objectivity, and uphold the profession’s standards. That’s good! We want that! But the fence posts also demarcate a boundary that isn’t objective but is, in fact, a function of time, location, culture, social mores, social fears, and politics. The enforcement of this sometimes-shifting boundary can send people who find themselves on the outside further away from mainstream science, fostering a sense of antagonism and slighted outsiderism. The history of hunting aliens is a good way to understand those unintended consequences of boundary-work in other disciplines. Because even though none of the groups actually knows, or has gained access to, whatever ET truth is out there, science’s ideas about which ET-seeking methods are valid and which are fringey have changed over the past few decades.
Astrobiology v. SETI

In the early years of astrobiology and SETI, the two groups worked more side by side than they later would. After all, they just existed at different locations on a spectrum: Maybe microbes arose on a far-off planet, and maybe those microbes evolved and built radio transmitters. Astrobiology technically just means the study of life in the universe. But that encompasses a lot: Astrobiologists look into questions like how life started, how it evolved, and what environments can support it. To study these questions, scientists can gather data on this planet, drilling into frozen lakes, doing lab experiments involving the chemistry of early Earth, studying geological evolution on Mars, or gaining a better understanding of genetics to get a better sense of what alternatives might exist to our own DNA. They also investigate what life might look like on another world, whether it has existed on other solar-system planets, and how to pick out a habitable or perhaps inhabited exoplanet from astronomical data.


Those queries often come down to biochemistry and the search for particular combinations of elements and compounds—picked up by a rover on Mars or by a future telescope peering into an exoplanet’s atmosphere—that indicates a lurking living being.


SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, falls logically within the scope of astrobiology. But this search, usually for electromagnetic transmissions, is more speculative, since it deals less explicitly with the kinds of chemistry, geology, physics, and biology we can observe in the solar system—and so perhaps beyond—and instead seeks signatures of technology whose nature we don’t yet, and may never, know.

Still, NASA initially supported both sorts of searches (although it called astrobiology “exobiology”). The venerable National Academy of Sciences, in its 1972 recommendations for the search for life beyond the solar system, listed SETI as an important component of exobiology, stating that “SETI investigations are among the most far-reaching efforts underway in exobiology today.” Trouble bubbled up between the groups, though, after SETI became the object of political ire. The search for smart aliens had already proven to be a favorite football for politicians, a frequent contender for cancelation—because of the low probability of success, the speculation required, and the money that they said could be better spent on Earth. For instance, in 1978, Senator Richard Proxmire awarded the nascent project his infamous Golden Fleece Award, for wasting government funds on what he considered a useless, futile endeavor. In the early 1990s, NASA finally began its first SETI observations, part of the project that had been on the drawing board when Proxmire mocked it: then called the High-Resolution Microwave Survey. But the year after the survey began, in 1993, Congress shut down the program.

After the survey’s cancelation, “SETI became a 4-letter S-word at NASA Headquarters,” notes a recent paper by prominent alien-hunting researchers. The National Science Foundation then banned SETI projects from its funding portfolio. Astrobiologists, wary of being put in the same doomed basket as SETI, sometimes inched themselves away, emphasizing the differences between their work and SETI: Little green men were silly. “Biosignatures,” chemical evidence of microbes, were serious. Looking for habitable planets was just what you’d do with a normal telescope. Studying how life arose on Earth has direct relevance to Earth!

The funding ban remained in place into the 2000s, and NASA did not oversee any more big SETI initiatives, putting SETI at the mercy of private investors like Paul Allen and Yuri Milner. And even after that, NASA denied the field some of its most important grant opportunities. “SETI, at least by that name, has always been a political lightning rod,” write the authors.

Part of the feds’ problem with SETI is its “giggle factor.” This, according to a NASA history paper, “wrongly associated it with searches for ‘little green men’ and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” Putting SETI on par with that laughable pseudo-research set it outside the bounds of proper science. And astrobiology wanted to stay firmly inside the acceptable lines, so its practitioners tended to keep their distance from their former allies. You can still see attitudes like this today, such as when famed exoplanet scientist Sara Seager said to Congress, in 2013, “[Astrobiology is] a legitimate science now. We’re not looking for aliens or searching for UFOs. We’re using standard astronomy.”

In their recent paper, the SETI scientists present a case for closing the gap between their work and that of people like Seager, putting SETI back on the astrobiology continuum. And that’s looking pretty possible: The House Appropriations Bill that Congress passed in April 2018 directed NASA to start including searches for “technosignatures” in its broader search for life beyond Earth. In September of that year, interested parties gathered to discuss what that would look like. Information from the SETI luminaries’ paper, arguing that their search belongs back within the sanctioned fold, will soon be considered by a committee that determines astronomy’s priorities for the coming decade. If things go well, “little green men” will be a warm joke, not a harsh slur, in the 2020s.
SETI v. Ufology

Ufologists, though, might argue that they, too, deserve to become legitimized. And that SETI scientists—as well as scientists more broadly—have kept distance from their work, called it silly so they don’t get contaminated by any green-tinged splashback. Why not include them in the continuum? (To be clear, “UFO” simply means an unidentified flying object, not necessarily one that aliens built, and many ufologists don’t take the extraterrestrial connotation for granted, although that connotation is what we’re talking about here.)

Sure, it’s hard to zoom across the vast vacuum of space. Sure, it’s hard to believe that aliens that could zoom that far would care enough about little ol’ Earth to hover over your chatterbox coworker Karen’s house. But is it that much harder than imagining light-years-away microbes growing into sentient beings that broadcast radio waves and beam lasers? Both positions require leaps we can’t yet justify based on the data.

Academic researchers can point to other, very real reasons ufology doesn’t deserve a scientific pedestal: Not much hard UFO data exists. UFOs are by nature ephemeral. What data does exist mostly relies on unreliable personal accounts. There’s no systematic plan of investigation. Ufologists don’t have a theoretical framework for explaining how aliens could build spaceships that come here and behave the way observers claim, or how an alien could survive the trip and the sojourn here. And most UFOs do often turn out to have banal explanations: Venus shifting colors through the thick atmosphere, planes coming your direction head-on, satellite, ball lightning, military projects. Ufology is not science in the way SETI researchers do science.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Aliens

But the two groups haven’t always been so at odds. In the early days, some scientists took an interest in flying saucers (though this was still not the norm). “From the early-1950s through the 1970s, a number of academics took the study of UFOs seriously and regularly engaged with ufologists,” writes Greg Eghigian, a Penn State researcher, in his paper “Making UFOs Make Sense: Ufology, Science, and the History of Their Mutual Mistrust.” Back of Their Mutual Mistrust.” Back then the military had official UFO research programs, and so at least implicitly deemed them worthy of study, even though the conclusions the investigators usually came to amounted to “nothing to see here.” then the military had official UFO research programs, and so at least implicitly deemed them worthy of study, even though the conclusions the investigators usually came to amounted to “nothing to see here.”Scientists also exhibit other logical fallacies, when talking about UFOs, that they would deride in others when speaking of traditional disciplines. None other than Stephen Hawking concluded, for instance, that absence of evidence essentially equates with evidence of absence. In this case, if no one has conclusive evidence of actual alien runabouts, they must not have ever visited this planet. The University of Queensland’s Adam Dodd, who teaches media studies and communication, sees their hand-wavy dismissals as “facework”: saving face, keeping up a reputation, by treating a topic scientists have deemed not-science as not-worth-consideration, demonstrating to your peers that you also deem it not-science and are thus a true scientist. Kind of like prophylactically letting everyone at the cool kids’ lunch table know that you also hate *NSYNC, because you know they do and that hating boy bands is cool.


This boundary-work can frustrate those who find themselves outside the fence, their experiences or interests rejected. We all know what happens when someone—your boss, your mom—waves you off, or debunks you in a way you find patronizing: You get mad. You see an Agenda in their actions. You want to prove them wrong. You go start your own table of people who actually do love *NSYNC and are damn proud of it. “Confronted by the apparent furtiveness of officials, the disdain of most physical scientists, and the seemingly skeptical gaze of behavioral researchers,” wrote Eghigian, “witnesses and ufologists were only reinforced in their judgments that their experiences were being disparaged, that there was a concerted effort to exclude them from official forums, and that they needed to place their trust mostly in one another.” Then, when scientists glanced at the UFO table and saw none of their own kind there, they grew even more likely to say, “Cranks!”
A Seat at the Table

That kind of cycle can send those who doubt The Establishment even farther from it, make them even more mistrustful of experts, and lead them to attempt their own analysis even if they don’t have the training. You can see this same swirl at work in climate-change-denial blogs, in the tweets of non-vaccinators, in the tirades of truthers who say “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.”

When talking about ideas outside the mainstream, scientists and outsiders doing their own, often flawed, investigations have an interest in keeping their distance from each other. For scientists, the professional consequences of close contact with out-there ideas is high. Which, in turn, means that orthodox science probably loses out on some new ideas: the edge cases, the kernels of truth in the nut bin.

The media, broadly, and many scientists tend to call those espousing pseudoscience ideas or conspiracy theories “anti-science” or “science deniers.” And that’s kind of true. But it’s also true that their disagreement speaks to what they and scientists have in common: a desire to find out the truth for themselves, and to collect and analyze their own data, rather than simply trusting what they’re told. Those desires don’t play out perfectly, or scientifically, and much of this denialism is dangerous—slowing action on climate change and incubating measles outbreaks. But it wouldn’t hurt to remember that many “deniers” (at least the ones not making money on deceptive schemes) just want to know what’s really real, or believe they have found out already.

For many, that knowledge construction involves information that doesn’t fit neatly in a spreadsheet or a Methods section: cultural knowledge, emotional knowledge, spiritual knowledge, personal knowledge, group affiliation. And “hard science” practitioners aren’t always great at understanding that those sorts of knowledge influence people’s interpretations of the world, often more than a line-of-best-fit plot. And so while ufologists’, antivaxxers’, and conspiracy theorists’ interpretations of that data may be misguided, dismissing their stories and beliefs—immediately handing them information to the contrary, that it was Venus, that the onset of their kid’s autism was a coincidence, that global warming is here but unevenly distributed—means dismissing them.

Perhaps the alien hunters offer a way for scientific insiders and outsiders to get along. Proper science is now more willing to embrace SETI: Astronomer Jill Tarter, one of the search’s pioneers, received radio astronomy’s highest honor—the Janksy Lectureship—in 2014. The chair of the Harvard astronomy department has repeatedly and very publicly suggested that an interstellar object called Oumuamua, cruising through the solar system, could be a visiting spaceship. A scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center recently proposed new SETI strategies—and included a radical idea: Astronomers shouldn’t cover their eyes to UFO reports. “I think the approach the scientific community could take ... is very similar to what SETI has done so far: find the signal in the noise,” he wrote. “In the very large amount of ‘noise’ in UFO reporting there may be ‘signals’ however small, that indicate some phenomena that cannot be explained or denied.”

Don’t just ignore all the outliers as outliers, in other words: Important truth, if not whole truth, can lurk inside of them too. And in many cases, those are someone’s truths. When “official” people listen to them, those formerly beyond the boundary may start to consider expert analysis more—rather than dismissing it as they were dismissed—even when that analysis says the alien mothership was actually just another drone.

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Chicagoans and University Psychologist Speculate on 'Mothman'

The independent student newspaper of The University of Chicago since 1892.

Chicagoans and University Psychologist Speculate on 'Mothman'

By Tony Brooks 

NEWS

 

  /  

 

January 29, 2018

In 2017, 55 Chicago residents claimed to have witnessed a humanoid creature flying over the skyline of our city. It reportedly resembled a “gothic gargoyle” and had glowing red eyes. What they spotted, or think they spotted, is a phenomenon of folklore 50 years in the making: the Mothman.

The Mothman was first sighted in the small West Virginia town of Point Pleasant in 1967, where dozens of residents claimed to have seen the creature. The year-long mania culminated in the collapse of the Silver Bridge, a disaster which killed 46 people. In retrospect, the Mothman was seen as a harbinger of the collapse. Since then, the Mothman has been a creature of interest to many, spawning a book, movie, and numerous articles and documentaries.

People are interested in the Mothman for different reasons. David Gallo, a professor at the University of Chicago, studies the psychology behind these fantastic beliefs. He has previously studied the cognitive function and memories of people who claim to have had contact with aliens.

“I’m not a paranormal researcher by any stretch, and I’m not an expert in paranormal phenomena,” he said. “It’s really more about looking at the individual differences in cognitive performances and how it might relate to these beliefs.”

Gallo explained that once these sightings begin, they often snowball as people become more exposed to them.

“Now that there’s a lot of news being released that’s capturing people’s attention, that in itself is a cultural factor that might affect how your mind interprets stimuli. You’re more likely to see a Mothman now that you’ve thought about one,” Gallo said.

Lon Strickler, a “Fortean researcher” who has been tracking the Chicago sightings on his blog, Phantoms and Monsters, has described the Chicago Mothman as markedly different from the one supposedly spotted in Point Pleasant. “This group of sightings is historical in cryptozoology terms,” Strickler said in an interview with Vice. “For one, it’s happening in an urban area for the most part and that there are so many sightings in one period.”

The blog includes dozens, many anonymous, firsthand accounts of the Mothman. Some occurred on dark suburban roads, while other reports have the creature gliding above the Lincoln Park Zoo and the Magnificent Mile in broad daylight.

“Upon closer look I was able to see the object was dark grey in color and seemed to have a large wing span,” one witness reported on the website of the Singular Fortean Society. “It started to drift up, but then dived down. It ducked between buildings but then reappeared on the other side. I was standing on Chicago Ave. and Wabash Ave.”

In addition to the blog and the Fortean Society’s website, there are several Facebook groups dedicated to the creature, and multiple articles have been written about the sightings.

Cultural factors are not the only thing at play, though. The human mind might have evolved in a way that makes us susceptible to fantastic beliefs.

“The human mind is a pattern completion device,” Gallo said. “Part of the power of what the brain does is it makes its best guess in terms of what you’re seeing, in terms of what you’re predicting, in terms of what you think you’re remembering. With those predictive powers comes the opportunity for error.”

“I’ll say this, I took my dog out for a walk the other night, and I was a little creeped thinking about all this Mothman stuff. It can’t help but affect you, making you look twice in dark corners and things once you’ve been thinking about it.”

Some of Gallo’s research indicates that those who believe in things like the Mothman might process stimuli differently than those who do not believe. Someone who is more intuitive and less analytical might value different aspects of experiences, making them more likely to hold such beliefs. Gallo does not see this as a problem.

“There’s a tendency for individuals who are more scientifically minded to be very skeptical, and to be perceived at least to be disparaging towards people with these beliefs, and I think that’s unfortunate,” Gallo said. “I think we all hold fantastic beliefs of one kind or another. I want to make sure we’re having a respectful dialogue.”

© 2020 The Chicago Maroon.

Liminal Seattle maps the Northwest’s strange and metaphysical happenings

Experience something spooky you can’t quite explain?

By Sarah Anne Lloyd@sarahannelloyd Jun 15, 2018

Shutterstock

Seattle—not to mention the whole Pacific Northwest—is known as one of the most happening places for the paranormal and weird. The first flying saucer sighting was over Mount Rainier 70 years ago. The ares has long been a hotbed of Bigfoot legends. And our dark, foggy climate makes the perfect backdrop for stories that blur reality.

Enter Liminal Seattle, a collaborative project founded by Hollow Earth Radio founder Garrett Kelly and author and permaculturalist Jeremy Puma. The crux of the effort is a map of paranormal or unexplained experiences people have had in Seattle, coded with icons for various categories: dark forces, time distortions, mythologies, cryptoids, thin places, high weirdness, classic UFO, strange animals, and our favorite, “straight-up ghosts.”

Stories—preferably ones you experienced directly, not the time your uncle’s ex-girlfriend’s dad saw a ‘squatch—are submitted directly to Puma and Kelly for inclusion on the map. “We want genuine encounters only,” read the guidelines. “However, we encourage acts of spontaneous mythologizing. We’ll be able to tell the difference.”

“We’re going beyond the typical ghost stories and alien encounters that everybody already knows about,” said Puma in a press release. “We are looking for ‘conventional’ supernatural encounters, but also ’I saw a crow and it looked at me weird’ type stuff.”

The goal, said Kelly and Puma, is to help break down the taboo of talking about your weird experiences so everyone can have better time exploring our weird world.

“We want folks to dig deep and think of an encounter they felt was too strange or embarrassing to share because people might not believe them,” said Kelly.

Submissions so far range from very specific animal encounters—”I once saw a squirrel sitting on a huge pile of horse chestnuts going to town on a chocolate donut” near Interlaken Park—to the story of a ghost encounter in a Madison Park restaurant. Occasionally, things do veer into “spontaneous mythologizing”: “there’s a water spirit shrine in Cal Anderson park at the weird kiddy pool that’s always dry,” reads one submission. “It’s where the water is supposed to bubble out from.”

Eventually, the goal is to put a printed edition together. For now, the website is there for sharing and analyzing the mystery around us.

Submit your own close encounter at liminalseattle.com—or if you just want to be briefed on Seattle’s paranormal happenings, the pair are running a weekly-or-so newsletter with highlights. The first issue: “Waiter, there’s a cryptid in my soup.”

• Liminal Seattle [LS]

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Fortean Times: 40 years of covers - in pictures
Mon 11 Nov 2013

Fortean Times, the Dennis Publishing magazine that focuses on 'the world of strange phenomena', celebrates four decades in print this month. Despite its unusual content, the magazine has almost 10,000 subscribers and a 98% subscription renewal rate. We look back at some of the best covers from the past 40 years, beginning as The News, the name under which it was published from 1973 to 1976

EXCERPTS MY CHOICE OF PICS FOR MORE GO HERE

THE TWO MAIN POPULAR MONTHLY MAGAZINES OF THE WEIRD, AND STRANGE PHENOMENA ARE THE FORTEAN TIMES UK AND FATE MAGAZINE USA

The News, issue 1, November 1973
Photograph: Fortean Times

“True Detective”: Down the Bayou (Far From Any Road)

By Jacob Mikanowski MARCH 8, 2014


SINCE IT BEGAN airing eight weeks ago, True Detective, HBO’s new murder-mystery anthology series, has enthralled viewers like few shows in recent memory. And small wonder. It’s unlike anything that’s been on television for a long time. In some ways, it superficially resembles other programs in the criminal investigation genre, like Jane Campion’s superb Top of the Lake, BBC’s overwrought The Fall, and FX’s profoundly under-thought The Bridge. But none of those shows share True Detective’s gothic sensibility and narrative complexity. Set in (at least) three time periods, True Detective’s central mystery, the ritualistic killing of a prostitute named Dora Lange, is never its only enigma. The twists and turns in the lives of its main characters, detectives Rust Cohle and Marty Hart — their relationships, their pasts, even the true nature of their identities — remain as compelling as the whodunit at the heart of the story. And then there’s the dialogue, especially Rust Cohle’s, as played by Matthew McConaughey: sinuous digressive soliloquies that touch on everything from applications of string theory to the Nietzschean doctrine of eternal recurrence. They’re as baroque as anything in Deadwood when David Milch was writing it and as weird as anything in Twin Peaks. Just hearing some of this stuff on TV — from the doctrine of anti-natalism to shout-outs to the transgressive horror fiction of Thomas Ligotti to the apocalyptic philosophy of Emil Cioran — is shocking. It’s as if an invisible cultural wall had suddenly been breached, like what would happen if Wisconsin Public Radio ever did a program on the Necronomicon. All of a sudden the psychosphere is in the mainstream.

None of this on its own, though, accounts for the heights of obsessive viewership True Detective has inspired. That has more to do with, on one hand, the strength of the lead performances, and on the other, with the bevy of obscure literary references placed in the script by series creator Nic Pizzolatto. McConaughey and Harrelson are both riveting in their separate ways (not that they have many rivals on the show; in impact and in screen time they dwarf the other players — though Ginger, the red-haired beard-braid wearing biker from Episode 4 is hard to ignore, and Reggie Ledoux certainly makes an impression). McConaughey especially is extraordinary, creating a distinct persona for each time period and succeeding in conveying the impression that he’s at once unsure of his sanity and invariably the smartest man in the room. Harrelson, as his foil, sets off fewer fireworks but still succeeds in garnering sympathy for a character who, especially in the season’s first half, seemed as brutish as he is conventional.

But while the lead actors keep you watching, it’s the trail of allusive breadcrumbs and narrative trapdoors that have transformed criticism of the show into a paranoid art. Repeated mentions of black stars and the mythical city of Carcosa have sent thousands of watchers (myself included) hustling after copies of Robert W. Chambers’s 1895 volume of moody decadent-era horror stories, The King in Yellow; its central motif is a fictional play whose first act makes you curious and whose second act drives you mad. With one episode left, nothing seems more important than knowing the identity of the Yellow King, the shadowy figure who may or may not be Dora Lange’s killer as well as the leader of a sinister cult responsible for a decades-long chain of related killings. That is, unless he’s a rare psychotropic drug or the name of the victim in a ritual sacrifice, or a Cthulhu-esque horror from the outer depths.

Tracking these Easter eggs and clues is undeniably fun, but I think that focusing too much on them might be a mistake. After all, not all of a show’s significance resides in its script. What’s so remarkable about True Detective is the way all the various visual and aural elements in it — the music, the cinematography, the set design, even the filming locations and the history they contain — interlock to contribute to its meaning. To grasp the whole requires taking a look at each of the parts. Doing so reveals a show that isn’t just a mystery or a crime drama, but something more akin to a murder ballad or myth: a work of art whose references cover a startling range of territory and whose resonances reach deep into the American past.

So, begin at the beginning, with the credits. In a way, the song chosen by T Bone Burnett for the title sequence, the Handsome Family’s “Far From Any Road,” contains the whole series in miniature. As I hear it, the song recalls a murder. This puts it in line with ballads like “The Bramble Briar,” “In the Pines,” and “Omie Wise” — folk songs with deep roots, set in wild places, each with violent death at its center. And, like another early ballad — “Barbara Allen” — it’s a story of transfiguration, as well. “Far from any Road” takes place in a wilderness full of rattlesnakes and mountain lions. A man has gone there in search of a night-blooming cactus. The cactus, like the briar in “Barbara Allen,” is the soul of a dead woman — and in this transformation, she echoes the burning bushes in the Aeneid, and the talking grove in the Inferno:

She twines her spines up slowly
Towards the boiling sun
And when I touched her skin
My fingers ran with blood

She might have been the man’s lover, or his victim. Quite possibly both. In the desert, the man dies. Together, their souls are swept up above the silent sands.

The song then opens up the show in more ways than one. It creates a landscape: death and nature; dead women, deadly men; wild places and the spirits inside of things. And if the interpretation above seems far-fetched (it certainly isn’t definitive), it might be worth remembering that the Handsome Family’s work is steeped in the traditions of American folk music, which they brilliantly adapt into a new mode, and that Rennie Sparks, the lyricist, comes armed with a deep knowledge of folklore and myth. In The Rose & the Briar, a collection of essays on American ballads edited by Greil Marcus and Sean Wilentz, she contributes a piece on the song “Pretty Polly.” The essay roams widely across time and space, gathering up everything from serial killers, Salem witch trials, to pagan rituals and Goddess cults in a search for the murder ballad’s meaning. Here’s Sparks, drawing all the threads together:

These killers are invisible men, desperate for meaning and vision, for beauty and sacredness, but unable to see even their own hands without first drenching them in blood. I believe “Pretty Polly” is a magic spell written to dispel the deadness of the heart […] It is a ritual of bloodletting, an appeal to invisible forces, a cry to the goddess to come embrace us with her thorny arms. Polly’s murder works as Joseph Campbell believed all myth worked — as a secret opening, a knife slashed in the veil of experience through which deep knowledge may seep. To those not gifted enough to hear the bean plants talk or to see the fairies dancing, myth may be our only access to places outside our conscious perception of reality.

In Sparks’s telling, the story of the song — of a dead girl killed in the forest sometime in the American past — is an ancient one, reaching right back to the beginnings of American history and even to the origins of religion itself. The murdered woman is sacred, she argues, an emblem of a goddess of nature and chaos and, at the same time, a sacrifice to the male desire to possess beauty and destroy it.

Something similar happens on True Detective. The first thing we see in the first episode of the show is the body of a girl, carried by a man in darkness. Soon, fire spreads across the cane fields. The next day we meet the detectives and see what’s been done to her. Dora Lange (though we won’t learn her name for a while) has been posed beneath a tree, stabbed multiple times in the abdomen, and — most strikingly — made to wear a crown of deer antlers.

If the placement of Dora’s body — seemingly merged with a tree, her body in a kind of weird harmony with surrounding landscape — links the show to old murder ballads, the antlers connect it to something a lot more modern. Or at least, they seem to. Antlers are a bit of a serial-killer cliché (albeit a relatively new one). They feature heavily in Hannibal, the NBC Silence of the Lambs-prequel series which, although stylishly-shot and featuring intriguing performances, feels like dropping six levels in ambition and intelligence when watched alongside True Detective. (It has, nonetheless, broached new frontiers in the art of food-styling on TV and in the process become a runaway hit on Tumblr. True Detective: Top Chef feels like the logical next step). Cliché or not, horns go deep. The coroner on Episode 1 tells Hart and Cohle that the ceremonial presentation of Dora’s body reminds him of Paleolithic cave art, and he suggests that the two of them to talk to an anthropologist. They don’t, but I took his advice and reached for my copy of Georges Bataille’s The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture. Here’s what I found:



Henri Breuil, sketch of the “Sorcerer” from the cave of Trois-Frères, France



It’s a figure engraved in the cave of Les Trois-Frères in Southern France. It was sketched by the Abbé Breuil, the great pioneer of the study of prehistoric art, who first saw the image by flickering lamplight and persuaded himself that it was a god. Breuil described the figure as having the ears and horns of a stag. Bataille thought he was the original shaman, carved at the moment when man separated from the animals and began to search for deities. Margaret Murray, early proponent of the witch-cult hypothesis, thought he was the first instance of the Horned God, whose cult she saw stretching across Eurasia and lurking behind the witches’ Sabbaths of the Middle Ages.

Never mind that what Breuil saw in that cave has never been seen the same way since, or that Murray’s theories have long been discredited. Once you start looking, Horned Gods are everywhere. They turn up all over the place, especially on the fringes of religious history. As Cernunnos, the horned Celtic God, identified on a single carving from ancient Lutèce. As the Lord of Animals from the Gundestrup Cauldron. As Baphomet, the Templars’s goat. In the myth of Artemis and the stag. In “The Wild Hunt.” In True Detective, the Horned God seems to have something to do with the powerful Tuttle Family and their “very rural take” on Mardi Gras, apparently derived from the real-life Cajun traditions of the Courir de Mardi Gras, with its masked mummers and costumed masked riders wearing cone-shaped capuchon hats (briefly seen in a photograph in Dora Lange’s mother’s home). Those traditions in turn tie into a whole web of beliefs surrounding post-Lenten inversion, and pagan, pre-Christian Saturnalia. All throughout, the same tropes crop up again and again: rituals of fertility, confusion between the worlds of animal and man, beliefs that stray into blasphemy and sacrifice and a landscape populated by spirits.



Dora Lange Horned God, Gundestrup Cauldron (c. 200 BC)



One of the things that is so distinctive about True Detective is the way it makes landscape into a character. Much of that has to do with Adam Arkapaw’s painterly, assured cinematography. Before True Detective, Arkapaw worked on Top of the Lake, the Campion-directed miniseries about a vanished child and sexual abuse in a small Southern New Zealand town. Many things about that show were excellent: the lead performances from Elisabeth Moss and Peter Mullan; its ability to explore vulnerability and sexual need in the confines of what was essentially a procedural; Campion’s daring in portraying an embattled attempt at feminist utopia; her ability to infuse all the episodes with mix of compassion and slow-simmering dread. But watching it, I frequently became as enthralled by the scenery as anything else. After binge-watching on Netflix, I’d find myself using Google Maps to explore the locations featured on the show, virtual-strolling around Glenorchy and Lake Wakatipu. I couldn’t get enough from the episodes alone. I wanted to linger.

The same is true with True Detective. The show has gone to so many places I want to revisit: the biker bar outside of Beaumont; that field outside Erath; the crab-fishing village from Episode 3; whichever bars in Louisiana are continuously playing old Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson songs. A lot has been said about the virtuoso camerawork on True Detective, especially the heart-stopping six-minute tracking shot during the raid to the stash house in Episode 4. And the direction is remarkable for the number of times it will find an unusual perspective from which to film — from behind Rust Cohle’s busted taillight, for instance — or locate a point of interest in the margins, as in the strange and poetic shot of men pushing the detective’s car after the sequence in the revival tent.

What I might like the most, though, is when the camera lifts away from the main action and turns to the backdrop, like in the arcing crane shot at the end of Episode 7. When the camera finishes circling around the cemetery being mowed by the newly-revealed scarred main suspect (and I loved the way the setting sun was used to conceal his scars until the last moment), it lifts off to take in the sweep of the surrounding waterlogged countryside of tugboats and marshes, to the sound of Townes Van Zandt’s “Lungs.” At this moment, as at other times when the camera pauses on any of the countless petrochemical refineries the detectives drive by, the photography reminds me of work by Richard Misrach. Specifically, it calls to mind Petrochemical America, his series of photos chronicling the environmental degradation of the part of the lower course Mississippi River nicknamed Cancer Alley.



Richard Misrach, Sugar Cane and Refinery, Mississippi River Corridor, 1998


Staring out the car window, Cohle says at one point: “This pipeline is carving up the coast like a jigsaw. Place is gonna be underwater in 30 years.” And here is Misrach describing one of his photographs:

The industrial pipeline’s backdrop of swampland and twisted trees is a cameo of the tropical ecology that functions like a sponge for effluents from petrochemical waste. Since the 1930s, oil companies have routed an estimated twenty-six thousand miles of pipeline throughout the oil-laden Southern parishes and across the Southern coastal wetlands. A web of canals has been cut through pastures and marshlands. The resulting erosion has been striking, with an area of wetlands the size of Delaware swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico.

Like Misrach’s photography, the cinematography draws attention to southern Louisiana as a wounded landscape, hurt both by the introduction of the oil refining business and the continued human management of the Mississippi River, whose corralling behind levees has doomed the region to a slow death by subsidence.

True Detective isn’t a documentary though, and it draws on the work of other artists to create the gothic atmosphere of the show, which, after all, has more to do with Manly Wade Wellman Appalachian pulp than with John McPhee’s The Control of Nature. Grantland’s Molly Lambert has described the way in which it has made use of the horror-fiction illustrations of fantasy artist Lee Brown Coye for the strange wooden-lattice structures that mark many of the crime scenes. Coye’s work, “based on a childhood experience where he found sticks set up in strange ways at an abandoned farmhouse,” led him to create a whole mythology around the mysterious shrines. Their presence on the show adds a whole dimension of paranoia to the detectives’ exploration of the landscape (the suggestion that these objects were thick on the ground after Katrina is especially chilling). The same is true for the stick sculptures scattered around Louisiana by the Carcosa-cultists. They look like deliberate imitations of the work of the British landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy, and it’s amazing how much menace the set designers manage to imbue into his otherwise bland-as-milk evocations of the English countryside.


Andy Goldsworthy

It makes me wonder what else they could do with Land Art on the show. (Does is matter that the oldest prehistoric earthwork in North America is at Poverty Point Louisiana? That Land Artist Michael Heizer makes similar temple-like earthworks in the Nevada desert? That Heizer’s father, Robert, was an archaeologist who investigated depictions of human sacrifice in Mexico? That Heizer’s friend and rival was Robert Smithson, and that Smithson’s most famous work, the Spiral Jetty, is a giant stone spiral half-submerged in the Great Salt Lake? Is Robert Smithson the Yellow King?)


Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

The Southern Louisiana of True Detective is part truth and part myth. But just by showing so much of it, the show puts us in contact with its real history, even if it doesn’t spell everything out. But there are hints, especially on the margins. There’s the history of pollution, visible in the omnipresent cracking towers and in the condition of Dora Lange’s mother as well as the relative of another victim, a one-time baseball pitcher disabled by a series of strokes. There’s Louisiana’s French and Spanish past, glimpsed momentarily in the Courir and in a stray allusion by Rust to the Pirate Republic of Barataria. And then there’s the history of segregation and racism, barely present except for the suggestion that the schools most of the victims attended were a way around busing — like the “segregation academies” that sprang up in different parts of the Deep South as a response to Brown vs. the Board of Education.

In my dream version of the show, the detectives are historians or archivists. They could work equally well somewhere in the Mississippi Delta or Eastern Poland. The crimes they investigate are buried in the past, and the thing they realize eventually isn’t just that everyone knew, but that everyone was complicit. Coincidentally, while the first episodes aired, I happened to be reading Trouble in Mind, Leon Litwack’s magisterial history of the lives of Black Southerners under Jim Crow. And although I shouldn’t have been, I was shocked by his account of lynching — at how common it was, how popular, and how public. The audiences that gathered for lynchings were huge, and their appetite for suffering — burning and other tortures — as spectacle couldn’t be satisfied by mere killing. Children even played their own games of hanging and being hung. True Detective doesn’t go there — but in the sense it creates, of a past that infects the present, of ritualized violence that doesn’t end even after it officially disappears — it starts to open the door.

For some viewers, True Detective never gets past the limits of its cop-show roots. To Grantland’s Andy Greenwald, the show only works when it focuses on actual detective work. Otherwise it’s a pretentious mess, a clichéd, anguished male-psychodrama in which “darkness isn’t a stand-in for depth or maturity.” For The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, it’s more of the same old thing: “macho nonsense” and “dorm-room deep talk,” a triumph of style over substance, an “ominous atmosphere” covering up a “phony duet.”

It’s certainly possible to see True Detective as nothing more than a collection of tics and gestures — an assembly of country songs, attractive photographs, and loopy speeches, overlaid with some oddball philosophy for the illusion of depth. But I don’t think that’s right. I think True Detective, as a whole, is gesturing at something larger. And I think that dismissing something on the basis of style or genre is a mistake. Offbeat genres like murder ballads and B-movie noirs and cop shows allow for the exploration of things that high art can’t attempt: secret histories, submerged passions, primal fears. Pulp is an art of extreme possibility. There’s a reason philosophers gravitate to weirdoes like H.P. Lovecraft, and why songs like “Pretty Polly” have depths that go unplumbed no matter how often they’re sung.

Old forms can conceal deep meanings. True Detective draws on various strains of American horror — rural noir, Lovecraft’s cosmic nightmares, Chambers’s stories of madness and concealed identity. But what it reminds me of most is something older: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” a short story that Melville called deeper than Dante, and that Greil Marcus has invoked in discussing Twin Peaks.

The story is set in Puritan New England — in Salem, Massachusetts, to be exact. In it, Goodman Brown, a pious young man, ventures into the woods one night on an unknown errand, leaving his young wife, Faith, behind in town. On his walk, he meets an older man who looks much like himself, carrying what looks to be a wizard’s staff. The older man knows Brown comes from reputable stock: his grandfather whipped a Quaker woman through the streets of Salem, and his father set fire to Indian villages in King Philip’s War. Not long after, Brown meets another person from town, Goody Cloyse, who reveals herself to be a witch. Soon, Brown is aloft, flying towards an unseen clearing. All the townspeople are there, celebrating in front of a flame-lit altar which may or may not be full of blood. He recognizes a score of church members, “grave, reputable and pious people, elders of the church.” All the people Brown grew up respecting are secretly in the Devil’s company. The old men are wanton seducers; the young women sacrifice infants. Their waking lives are lies. As the assembly readies to baptize its newest members, Brown cries out — and comes to, alone in the forest, not knowing whether what he had seen was a dream. He lives to the end of his days as a broken man. After his death, Hawthorne writes, “they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom.”

Myth divides the world into the security of civilization and the wilderness of danger. The woods are full of witches and the swamps are full of ghosts. In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne — whose own ancestors were active in the witch trials — undoes the structure of myth, exposing a deeper terror. The Puritans expected the threat to their spiritual community to come from the surrounding forest. The woods were the space of danger: of Indians, of paganism, of witchcraft, and sin. In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne tells us plainly that the woods are never outside. The community that seems righteous is always criminal, and complicit. As True Detective heads towards its final episode, it looks increasingly like the Yellow King isn’t Chthulu or a mysterious swamp god. Instead, the perpetrator is a family, its associates, its churches, schools, police officers and public officials and servants and custodians. Evil is woven into the fabric of everyday life. To some, that might be a disappointment. To me, it harks back to the original American horror story: the discovery that the woods are in the town, and the swamp is in our minds.

We’re all in Carcosa now.

¤

Jacob Mikanowski is a graduate student in European History at U.C.Berkeley.