Graham Doar and the collective unconscious: how one author created the UFO phenomenon we know today.

By James E. Elfers The UFO encounter story we know it today arrived in 1949 . Do any of these elements of a close encounter of the third kind sound familiar? Earth man abducted by telepathic, beneficent aliens who impart dire warnings about the fate of mankind? Missing time? Miraculous alien science and medicine? A call for earth to abandon its nuclear ambitions? A galactic police force? A quarantined earth? The December 24, 1949 issue of the Saturday Evening Post introduced all of these concepts in a story titled The Outer Limit by a thoroughly mediocre American writer named Graham Doar. Coming just two years after the first modern UFO report by Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947, Doar managed to combine all of the elements of post war angst, Cold War fears, saucer hysteria, and popular imagination to create the template of virtually every subsequent close encounter narrative. Doar's story was perfectly placed to launch itself into popular culture. The Saturday Evening Post was America's most widely circulated magazine for popular fiction in 1949. Although it published mostly serious stories by the likes of Hemingway and Steinbeck it was not adverse to publishing the occasional science fiction and fantasy story. Many of Ray Bradbury's early stories found their first publication between the covers of The Saturday Evening Post. Doar was an unlikely writer for the Post to publish. As it was The Outer Limit would be his only sale to the Post and the Post would mark his zenith market. Never a prolific writer the rest of Doar's fiction usually turned up in places like Startling Stories and Amazing Stories, magazines that generally did not cross the coffee tables of middle Americans. The story itself is not much by today's standards. American test pilot Major Bill Westfall's plane flies to the edge of space, the outer limit of the title, and literally disappears from the sky. Hours after its fuel supply should have been exhausted the pilot's experimental plane lands at the airfield before his stunned colleagues. The pilot then tells his disbelieving superiors that he had gone in pursuit of a flying saucer and crashed into it. Instead of an Icarus style plummet to earth he found himself in the presence of telepathic aliens who repaired him and his plane sending him on his way after imparting a warning. Earth must stop experimenting with and using nuclear weapons or the earth will be destroyed as a danger to other planets in the galaxy. In fact Westfall has been returned to earth just hours before one such scheduled nuclear test. Westfall informs all who will listen that if the bomb goes off the aliens will carry out their threat and destroy the earth. The reader is left to wonder what the next few hours will bring. Will Westfall's warning be headed or ...? Assuredly no serious or science fiction or popular fiction magazine would publish such a tale today. The impact in 1949 was quite different. For the day, Doar's story was quite novel, as such it soon escaped from the realm of print to the world of popular culture. Doar's story has the distinction of being one of the most adapted science fiction tales of the 1950's. Within a few years of the story's publication it was featured on four different high profile radio anthologies and a pioneering 1951 television show. So thoroughly did the story permeate America's consciousness that almost immediately its elements formed the core of the modern alien encounter story. Within months of its publication the CBS drama series Escape presented the first adaptation of the story on February 7, 1950. Radio was still king in 1950, although television was beginning to make an

impact. Though scarcely remembered today, flying saucers were a big deal on 1950's American radio. Saucer plots appeared on comedies such as Fibber McGee and Molly and The Phil Harris and Alice Faye program. Even the back woods yokels Lum and Abner encountered them in their fictional Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Jack Benny and Bob Hope included jokes about saucers in their programs. While saucers were sometimes played for laughs. Doar's tale was never portrayed as anything other than a deadly earnest drama. Escape was a popular program whose usual focus was gripping adventure stories. The ambiguous ending of Doar's story was a departure from the norm for the series which liked tidy endings. Usually with the villain getting his comeuppance. Escape was a program geared to adults, No one considered Doar's story kid stuff in its day. Starring as Westfall was Frank Lovejoy. Lovejoy made a career out of playing competent and quietly heroic journalists, police officers and military men on both radio and the silver screen. To maintain verisimilitude the script writers sought advice from an actual test pilot and military contractors including Boeing for details of Westfall's craft. Almost a month to the day it was adapted as an episode of Dimension X on April 8, 1950. Dimension X on NBC was the first science fiction program targeted to adults. The debut episode of this ambitious series was in fact an adaptation of Doar's story. Obviously A-bomb scared and Cold War preoccupied adults felt an affinity for the foreboding nature of The Outer Limit. Since Dimension X was ostensibly science fiction, Doar's story was moved to 1965. The next year on October 28,1951 it appeared on the small screen in one of television's first Science Fiction programs for adults entitled Out There. As such The Outer Limit is probably the very first presentation of a close encounter of the third kind on the small screen. Obviously Hollywood wasted no time in adapting whole hog virtually every element of Doar's story into the dramas of the day. Indeed the plot line of countless numbers of bad science fiction films from 1950 onward read as though they came directly out of Doar's pen. Even the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still was influenced by Doar's aliens. Although The Day the Earth Stood Still is based upon a 1940 work by Harry Bates entitled Farewell to the Master, The nuclear disarmament plea of the film has more in common with Doar's aliens than Bates'. Proving that the story had staying power it was next dramatized as an episode on the CBS program Suspense on February 15, 1954. Suspense was without a doubt radio's premier program. Running for exactly twenty years from 1942-1962. It was a weekly habit for millions of Americans. Major Hollywood and Broadway stars coveted roles in the drama. A hallmark of the series was casting actors against type. Lucille Ball as a woman of questionable morals who lured men while dressed in a schoolgirl uniform, Bob Hope in a dramatic, serious role and Danny Kaye as a murderer are just three examples of the sort of casting that made the series famous. For its adaptation of The Outer Limit, Suspense played it straight. Cast in the part of Westfall was all American hero and tough guy William Holden. The message relayed to the audience through this casting was a clear message that the story was to be taken seriously. Jack Benny playing a Martian it most assuredly was not. The final adaptation on November 16, 1955 appeared on X minus One arguably the finest adult science fiction show to ever air on American radio. Again the story is moved to the future of 1965. With the Cold War at one of its hottest states in 1955 a contemporary setting may have made listeners a bit discomforted so the setting was moved a decade forward. By the time the actual year of 1965 arrived, American radio drama had passed away in America and

Doar's story was old hat. Elements of the story such as alien encounters and warnings from galactic overlords were incorporated into regular episode elements of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Perhaps the name of the latter series itself was a subconscious reflection of depths to which the title The Outer Limit had so thoroughly burrowed its way into popular culture. Thanks to the wonders of the internet and the diligence of collectors of Old Time Radio all of the radio plays are available for all to listen. Various websites have either all or most of them. What is striking to modern ears is how earnest these plays are. Even though they were adapted by different writers and in different years. A story today that would not work in a program for children had adults very worried half a century ago. The real story of The Outer Limit is how, with the right timing, even a moderate story can alter the world and enter popular culture. Once enshrined in popular culture the story becomes impossible to eradicate and turns up under a thousand new guises.