There have been a lot of stories in the press recently with titles like 'Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show'. Actually, the TNA files -- part of an ongoing series of releases of UFO-related files -- don't show this at all, as is clear if you read the article more closely.

The cover-up is supposed to have taken place in the Second World War.

Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed.

"But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid.

"The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."

The scientist 'said' this in 1999, nearly half a century after the incident is supposed to have taken place and a quarter century after his grandfather died. So it's only hearsay: there is no evidence from the war itself or from any witnesses that this cover-up actually took place.

Let's take a closer look at the claim itself. The scientist -- whose name has understandably been redacted from the documents (DEFE 24/2013, pages 205-9 and 273-7) -- was an astrophysicist working on software for 'spacecraft thermal engineering', writing from Leicester. According to his account, his grandfather, who died in 1973, was in the RAF during the war and 'was part of the personal bodyguard of Winston Churchill during the times when the Bunkers were in use for protection'. The Ministry of Defence files don't comment on whether this was the case, but as it could be checked easily enough it doesn't seem likely that the scientist would have made this up. (I don't think the MoD was particularly interested, one way or the other.) Though bound by the Official Secrets Act, the bodyguard did tell one person about this incident: his then-nine-year old daughter (which makes the story that much harder to rely upon). Initially, the scientist said that

My grandfather witnessed the discussion of the event both by Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eisenhower in the United States, and the great concern it caused in both countries.

Taken literally, this would seem to suggest the discussion took place between Churchill and Eisenhower in the US, which would mean it took place in or around one of the Allied conferences in Washington or Quebec in 1942, 1943 or 1944. But as far as I can see Eisenhower didn't attend these, and anyway the reference to 'Bunkers' suggests Britain, where he was much more likely to bump into Churchill. So I think we should probably read the above as Eisenhower of the United States.

Here's the meat of the story.

A report from an RAF aircrew approaching the east coast of England sometime in the early 1940's was discussed by leaders in the UK and the US.

The aircraft was intercepted by an object of unknown origin, which matched course and speed with the aircraft for a time and then underwent an extremely rapid acceleration away from the aircraft probably with non-ballistic or non-aerodynamic flight characteristics. Photographs and/or film was obtained by this aircrew showing a metallic arrow-shaped body [but see below]. This even was discussed by Mr Churchill and General Eisenhower, neither of whom knew what had been observed. There was a general inability for either side to match a plausible account to these observations, and this caused a high degree of concern.

After talking again to his mother, the scientist added some further details in a later letter:

1. The RAF aircraft was a reconnaissance plane returning to England to either France or Germany during the latter part of the War.
2. The encounter with the unknown object occurred close to or over the English coastline.
3. The observed object was undetected until it was close to the aircraft. It was suddenly observed by the aircrew appearing at the side of the aircraft at a very high speed; then it very rapidly matched its speed with that of the aircraft.
4. It appeared to "hover" noiselessly relative to the aircraft for a time. One of the photographic airmen began to take photographs of it. It appeared metallic but its shape was not described. (Please disregard my earlier comment about an "arrow-shaped" body, this appears to have been an error on my part).
5. The object very suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace of its earlier presence.
6. During the discussion with Mr. Churchill, a consultant (who worked in the Cumbria area during the War) dismissed any possibility that the object had been a missile, since a missile could not suddenly match its speed with a slower aircraft and then accelerate again. He declared that the event was totally beyond any imagined capabilities of the time. Another person at the meeting raised the possibility of an unidentified flying object, at which point Mr. Churchill declared that the incident should be immediately classified for at least 50 years and its status reviewed by a future Prime Minister.

Finally, the scientist summarised his claim as follows, adding some information about the motivation behind the cover-up not repeated elsewhere:

It is claimed that my grandfather, [redacted] was present during a debate between Winston Churchill and Mr. Eisenhower during World War II involving making a decision about an unexpected incident experienced by a RAF bomber aircrew returning to the UK after a mission into Germany. Mr Churchill is reported to have made a declaration to the effect of the following:

"This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church."

Let's start there. I don't see why there would have been any need for a decision regarding the classification of this incident: it was wartime, and information concerning all military operations was classified unless and until cleared for public release. Of course, the exact level of classification could have been up for debate, but there was surely no great danger that the public was about to learn of an RAF aircraft being intercepted by an ultra-high-tech vehicle of unknown origin.

The bit about it destroying 'belief in the Church' is a bit odd. This is presumably a reference to a belief that this high-tech vehicle had to be of extraterrestrial origin, an idea which is nowhere explicitly addressed in the story above (unless it is the reference to the object as an 'unidentified flying object', a term definitely not in use during the war but which in common usage is often taken to mean an extraterrestrial spacecraft). Some theologians (and Tom Paine) have argued that the plurality of worlds question is problematic for Christianity (e.g. did the crucifixion save all sentient beings everywhere in the universe or did every single inhabited planet have its own salvation event?) But it seems unlikely that this was the first concern that would have popped into Churchill's head. I'm sure he would have read The War of the Worlds at some point; was he not worried about the intentions of this highly advanced alien race? For Churchill to worry about the effect of such revelations on the morale of a war-weary British populace, on the other hand, does sound about right, though people might have found them cause for hope rather than fear.

The weirdly cryptic reference to the consultant who worked in the Cumbrian area (is this really a description you'd pass on to your nine year old daughter?) also leads to the extraterrestrial inference. But I don't see how he could categorically claim that it was impossible for the object to be a missile, because a missile couldn't slow down to match an aircraft's speed and then accelerate again. It certainly implies a high degree of control for a (presumably) unmanned vehicle, but that could have been supplied from a nearby mothership (an aeroplane, not a spaceship!) Still, I can see someone like R. V. Jones making persuasive technical arguments as to why such a vehicle was beyond current technology. (Jones himself would be an obvious choice for the 'consultant', especially given his later interest in ghost rockets and flying saucers, but he worked in London during the war.)

Turning to the purported incident itself, the details are a bit suspect. An RAF photo reconnaissance mission over 'France or Germany during the latter part of the War' would most likely have been carried out by a Spitfire or a Mosquito. There's a suggestion that the aircraft involved had more than one aircrew, in which case it would have to be a Mosquito. But somewhere along the process of retelling the story the idea seems to have crept in that photo reconnaissance work involved pointing a camera out the cockpit window ('One of the photographic airmen began to take photographs of it') which of course was not the case: the cameras were fitted inside special bays and could not have been used in this ad hoc fashion. (Not to mention that all the film probably would have been exposed over enemy territory.) Perhaps this part has just been garbled.

Another detail which doesn't make sense is that the object 'appeared to "hover" noiselessly relative to the aircraft for a time'. I'm not sure how you could tell from inside a multi-engined aircraft whether something outside wasn't making a sound. This is a description common to many (post-war) UFO accounts and I'd suggest that in this part of the story contamination has set in: this is what UFOs sound like (or rather don't sound like), so even if it's not plausible the detail is added, quite probably subconsciously. Much like the whole phantom airship thing, in fact.

Which brings me to my last point. Previously, Churchill's known involvement in the history of the UFO phenomenon essentially consisted of two episodes. The first was the Sheerness incident in 1912, when as First Lord of the Admiralty he oversaw an investigation into the possible overflight of a naval base by a German Zeppelin. This was something he was inclined to believe in, at least if his comments to the Committee of Imperial Defence are to be believed. So I tend to think that thirty years later his tendency would similarly have been to suspect perverted Nazi (but still human) scientists rather than extraterrestrials. Of course, there was the Cumbrian consultant to convince Churchill that nobody on this planet could have been responsible for what the RAF PR crew saw. But if he was so convinced, and on the evidence of the scientist's mother's father's story he was, then why -- in Churchill's other known UFO connection -- did he fire off a memo in 1952, during his second premiership, asking 'What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?' Didn't he already know that the truth was disturbing enough to shake the foundations of religious belief?

No, as it stands this story fails a few basic sanity checks and no confidence can be placed in it. The scientist who told it to the MoD seems to have been sincere enough, but I have the feeling that somewhere down the line a leg was being pulled.

Having said all that, the question of wartime UFO sightings by Allied aircrew ('foo fighters') is a very interesting one, which I must one day look into ...

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

'To-day and To-morrow' was a series of over a hundred essays on 'the future' of a diverse range of subjects, which were published in pamphlet form by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. between 1924 and 1931. The authors are equally varied: some were acknowledged experts in their fields, others seem to have been chosen for their ability to provoke. Some of the 'To-day and To-morrow' essays have since attained classic status; most have been forgotten. But as a whole they are an impressive testimony to a vibrant, wideranging (and idiosyncratic) kind of British futurism, and I think they deserve more attention. Some of them have been reprinted from time to time, and if you're rich you can buy nearly all of them in collected volumes through Routledge, but otherwise there are so many they are are hard to track down. So I've tried to compile a definitive list of the series' titles (which are mostly classical allusions) with links to online sources for the texts and some sort of author biography, where available. Google Books has many of them, but only snippets or previews, so I've linked to other sources where possible. Additions and corrections are welcome.

Physically, they were very small books (pott octavo, to be precise), easy to slip into a pocket, and numbered only a hundred pages or so, in large type and generous margins. Their price was 2/6, about the same price as a cheap novel, but five times the price of the later, hugely successful Penguins. So they did not attract a mass readership, but do seem to have been much read by the chattering classes. (See Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009), 139.) Many of the titles went through multiple impressions. And at least one was discussed in the House of Commons.

As I said, some of the essays are still well-known, at least to historians of science: for example the first two in the series, Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924) by chemist J. B. S. Haldane, and Icarus, or the Future of Science (1924) by Bertrand Russell, the philosopher. Daedalus was Haldane's first book. His prediction in it of universal ectogenesis (i.e. the artificial creation of life, true test-tube babies) was its most startling feature, but he also discussed eugenics, the problems of peak oil and peak coal (Haldane's answer is, in part, wind power: he foresaw a Britain 'covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains'), the creation of food from coal and atmospheric nitrogen, and so on. Russell was already famous (hence another book by him in the series, What I Believe, published 1925). Icarus was a bit more glum than Daedalus, as the titles perhaps suggest; he spoke of race suicide (of the white races, that is, due to birth control), the end of liberal ideas such as a free press, a despotic world state (though he thinks it would become more benevolent as time passed), the control of personality through hormones (possibly to create a compliant underclass). The apparent dominance of biological themes in many of the books is interesting. The 1920s were the great days of physics -- Einstein was a worldwide celebrity because of his theory of general relativity; the cornerstones of quantum mechanics were being laid in Germany; in the United States, Hubble was showing that the Universe was far bigger than anyone had imagined. But judging from 'To-day and To-morrow', it was evolution and its implications which gripped the imagination of the reading public. It's true that there are books on physics (Archimedes), chemistry (Hermes) and cosmology (Eos). But there are a number on aspects of biology (e.g., evolutionary psychology, Down's syndrome, the body of the future, Darwinism itself), and evolution seems to feature in many of the books, even when they ostensibly have nothing to with it. For example, Gerald Heard's Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes (1924) apparently makes the argument that fashion is evolution at work, that 'evolution is going on no longer in but around the man, and the faster because working in a less resistant medium'.

Another example of futurology from the series which is remembered today is J. D. Bernal's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929), particularly for its discussion of space travel. Rockets, solar sails, hollowing out asteroids to make space colonies -- Bernal spheres -- and ultimately interstellar colonisation. That's pretty heady stuff, and its not the sort of discourse we would usually associate with early twentieth-century Britain. But how unusual was it? Not that unusual, it can be argued. Olaf Stapledon published the wonderful Last and First Men the following year, which makes The World, the Flesh, and the Devil look stodgy and unimaginative by comparison. The British Interplanetary Society was founded in 1933. H. G. Wells had his Space Gun on screen in 1936; and much earlier, his First Men in the Moon. The British Empire even expanded into interstellar space in 1900. There was also (at least one) earlier example of spacemindedness in 'To-day and to-morrow', Hanno, or the Future of Exploration (1928), by J. Leslie Mitchell. I'm not sure what Mitchell's qualifications to discuss exploration were: later he was a key novelist in the Scottish Renaissance (again, as with Bernal, Haldane and Heard, this was his first book -- which says something for the judgment of Kegan Paul's editors). He served in various bits of the Empire in the Army and the RAF so perhaps that's it. I haven't read Hanno, and it's only available online in Google Books's snippet view, but judging from the word cloud it doesn't just talk about darkest Africa and Antarctica. Some of the most common phrases are 'extraterrestrial', 'Martian', 'lunar', and the names of several lunar craters and mares. So why haven't I heard of Mitchell before? (Not to mention André Maurois's 1927 parody of what sounds like a 'lunar panic' and subsequent war against the Moon, The Next Chapter.)

Some entries are important in the history of military strategy, or at least the airpower parts of it: Basil Liddell Hart's Paris, or the Future of War (1925), and Haldane's Callinicus: A Defence of Chemical Warfare (1925). Paris falls pretty squarely into knock-out blow territory, a position Liddell Hart had mostly retreated from by 1939. Callinicus was infamous for its argument that poison gas was actually a humane weapon, since during the last war it had a low mortality and high recovery rate, compared with explosive and bullets. Haldane also favoured the knock-out blow line of thinking, though it wasn't his main concern. (He did downplay the risk of gas attacks on cities.) But again, there are other relevant titles which are less well-known. For example, Aeolus, or the Future of the Flying Machine (1927), by Oliver Stewart. While he didn't discount the possibility of a knock-out blow, Stewart did believe that air defence was possible (and he was a Great War fighter ace as well as an aviation correspondent). Or what about Janus: the Conquest of War (1927), by William McDougall? As a psychologist, maybe McDougall doesn't seem likely to have had a lot to say about aerial warfare. But as I've argued, he was perhaps the first person to propose a fully-fledged international air force. So there are interesting things here, when you look beyond the well-known titles. (Sadly for me, one title was advertised but seems not to have been published: Mercurius, or the World on Wings by C. Thompson Walker, billed as 'A picture of the air-vehicle and the air-port of to-morrow, and the influence aircraft will have on our lives'. Sigh.)

But I don't want to leave the impression that 'To-day and to-morrow' is just about science and technology. The future is presented as being much more than that. There are books on the future of Canada, of music, of Shakespeare, marriage, crime (and miscreant youth), Oxford and Cambridge (and another just on Oxford), humour, swearing (both by Robert Graves), psychical research. There's one on the future of Futurism (the kind with the manifesto) and another on the future of prophecy. There's C. E. M. Joad on the future of morals (Thrasymachus) and Sylvia Pankhurst on the future of international language (Delphos). Vera Brittain wrote on the future of monogamy (Halycon), J. F. C. Fuller on transport and on America (Pegasus, Atlantis), Arthur Keith on 'the problem of race' (Ethnos). An expatriate Scot who left for New Zealand some sixty years before was recruited to write about his former homeland, but another key member of the Scottish Renaissance was given the chance to respond in another volume. Anthony Ludovici wrote Lysistrata (1924), which one reviewer described as an anti-feminist but pro-feminine tract; Dora Russell provided a counterblast in Hypatia (1925), though her feminist credentials may have been undermined by being listed in the publisher's catalogue as 'Mrs Bertrand Russell'. So broad was the range of subjects that some don't seem to fit at all with the rest at all: dragons? aid for the best-seller? Then there's what isn't discussed. A decade later, you might expect such a series to be dominated by international affairs: the future of the League, the future of Germany, the future of dictatorships (which is the sort of thing the Penguin Specials were about, pretty much). There's not much of this here. It was a more peaceful time. There was plenty of anxiety but it was caused by problems seen on the horizon. And as for authors, the most famous British futurist of them all is missing -- no H. G. Wells! (Though an early biographer of his, Geoffrey West, is there, writing on the future of literary criticism.)

After more than a hundred volumes (I have 103 listed, though I may have missed some), 'To-day and to-morrow' came to an end. Interestingly, despite the very British flavour of many of the books, they were simultaneously published in New York by E. P. Dutton (which seems to have added a couple of its own), which perhaps suggests an even greater appetite for speculation about the future in America than in Britain. Certainly, the writing, publication and reading of these books tells us something about the way the future was constructed in those countries in the early 20th century. Max Saunders, who is in the English department at King's College London, has a research project going on 'To-day and to-morrow'; a conference was held a couple of years ago. Even in putting this post together, I can see there's a lot potential there, and I'll be looking out for any resultant publications!

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept?

Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al (and more directly, from today's lecture notes), goes something like this. Total war consists of:

1. total aims: e.g. the destruction of an enemy nation
2. total methods: e.g. bombing cities
3. total mobilisation: e.g. conscription for both the armed forces and for labour
4. total control: e.g. censorship, dictatorship

More briefly, total war is the subordination of every other consideration (law, custom, morality, etc) to the prosecution of war. Total war is an ideal form of warfare, something which can be approached more or less closely, but which can never actually be fully attained. Well, hopefully not, because that would be bad.

So what would total peace look like? I don't think it can simply be the absence of total war; that's just peace generically. Total peace must be total in some sense.

One approach might be to say that total peace is the subordination of every consideration to the prosecution of peace. But why would this be necessary? Perhaps as a sublimation for the martial impulse, a moral equivalent of war. William James called for 'gilded youths' to be conscripted in 'the immemorial human warfare against nature', that is to say to do dirty and unpleasant jobs such as mining, construction, roadbuilding, which would knock some sense into them and make them better people. James was inspired in part by H. G. Wells, who himself later had similar ideas. For example, in his screenplay for Things to Come (1936) he imagined a peaceful future civilisation which turns its energies towards the exploration of the Universe, by way of the construction of a giant space gun.

But it's hard (for me, at least) to imagine any real society devoting itself so totally to peaceful pursuits. Fear and greed are, unfortunately, more powerful motivating forces than altruism or even curiosity. Indeed, even in Things to Come the rationalists have to face down a rebellion which fears where progress will lead and wants to tear down the space gun.

So perhaps a total peace is more negative: the subordination, in peacetime, of every other consideration to preparing for total war. Like total war itself, this would be a never-realised ideal. But, also like total war, there are times when it is approached more closely than at other times. One such period might be the Cold War. But to the same extent that total war became unthinkable after the advent of nuclear weapons, so too would total peace become unnecessary: if the war was actually fought, it could not be won, and so the preparations for it would have been pointless. And how total can the Cold War be said to have been? Most people in the West, at least, lived out their lives without being greatly affected by it.

Another period when a total peace might have occurred would have been before the Second World War. Think civil defence, peacetime conscription, the coordination of labour to maximise armaments production, the building up of bomber forces. In Britain, at least, these initiatives were only secondarily intended to prepare the nation for total war. Their primary aim was to deter an attack altogether. So perhaps total peace was actually the (inevitably, only partial) reorganisation of society to try to prevent a total war from starting in the first place?

Random thoughts have a low probability of being useful, however. More considered thoughts would be welcome!

I've been reading a curious tome by Robert William Cole, called The Struggle for Empire. It's curious because the empire of the title is the British Empire, or rather the Anglo-Saxon Empire, and the struggle takes place in interstellar space. And because it was published in 1900! It has a good claim to being the first space opera ever written.

The basic plot is as follows. It is the year 2236. The Anglo-Saxon Empire rules, not just the Earth, but the entire Solar System and many stars beyond. Its only rival is Kairet, a planet orbiting Sirius which has a vast empire of its own. The two empires have co-existed uneasily until now, but Sirian settlers on a distant planet called Iosia clash with the Anglo-Saxons who nominally control it. The Anglo-Saxon Empire sees its chance and declares war. It assembles a huge fleet of warships and dispatches it towards Sirius. But deep in interstellar space, it encounters an even bigger Sirian fleet. The Earth forces are shattered, and fall back on the Solar System. Neptune is besieged. A titanic battle at Jupiter leads to the destruction of two of its moons and the scorching of its sky. Anglo-Saxon warships entrenched on the Moon ambush the approaching Sirian fleet, causing severe losses, but cannot prevent the bombardment and destruction of the imperial capital, London. But now an English scientist unveils a new weapon which makes Sirian warships fall from the sky. This decisively alters the course of the war: the Sirian fleet is destroyed, and Earth forces penetrate to Kairet and destroy its capital. The Sirians agree to pay a huge indemnity, and their ships are prohibited from leaving their system. The interstellar war has lasted for five years, and the struggle for empire has turned decisively in favour of the Anglo-Saxons ...

A world war early in the 20th century set Britain, Germany and the United States against France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Italy. It was a long and bloody war. Britain was ultimately victorious, 'but not until some millions of her brave sons had perished on the field of battle'. Britain absorbed most of the colonies of its enemies. The French and Turkish 'races' dwindle or were absorbed; Russia shrinks to almost nothing. A Federal Union dominated by the Anglo-Saxon peoples (Britain, Germany and the United States) now rules the globe. This is suggestive of Joseph Chamberlain's calls for an Anglo-Saxon alliance.

The conquest of space was effected by the development of anti-gravity (by means of 'peculiarly constituted currents of electricity' through wires wrapped around an object). The discovery of new forces -- Dynogen, Pralion and Ednogen -- provide limitless energy. And an engine which can act on the ether which pervades all space provides the means of propulsion. Pioneers rush to explore and settle the solar system, and now most planets are as populous as the Earth. Eventually bigger 'interstellar ships' are built, and the process begins again on an even grander scale:

Dim accounts had been handed down from generation to generation of a certain great man named Napoleon Bonaparte who once nearly conquered the world. Now there were thousands of Bonapartes endowed with colossal intellect, vast energy, and boundless ambition, each burning to wrest for himself a world from the great Unknown. Provinces and countries were not even thought of; they desired to rule over a planet, a system, a universe. There was present everywhere an intense fever for acquisition; men burned with desire to plunder in these new regions. Vast expeditions were fitted out and started off for the regions of space. Many of these were never heard of again, but some came back with wonderful tales of what they had seen and found.

Later it is explained that these expeditions sometimes fought and killed each other, but because their crimes took place in the deepness of space they were never brought to justice. I think Cole is evoking a parallel with the settlement of the American 'wild west'; at least, I don't think frontiers in the British Empire were ever that lawless, even in mythology.

Space warfare is very reminiscent of naval warfare, circa 1900. There are battleships, cruisers, destroyers and torpedo boats. Flags wave from their upper decks (at least when in a planetary atmosphere). All have rams, and the bigger ships have anti-torpedo netting. Cannon firing explosive shells seem to be the primary armament (the guns are airtight, though this seems to be more to prevent air escaping the ship than to enable combustion). But there are also new weapons, terrible new superscientific weapons. A force which can destroy the cohesion of matter. Ednogen waves which can kill any humans they touch. A means of interfering with the engines of enemy warships. There are new defences, too: 'receivers that could annihilate these forces should they impinge upon them'.

The ether of space and a kind of matter that could be made to radiate in elliptical waves were the basis of these terrible forces that were about to be wielded by the two great races for the destruction of one another. However, since neither they nor the interstellar ships had yet been used in actual warfare, the leading authorities expressed considerable doubts as to what would really occur in the heat of a great engagement.

Which was also like contemporary naval warfare -- there hadn't been a great fleet action since 1866 (Lissa), the early days of ironclads.

Cole's new weapons sometimes have unintended effects. Most spectacularly, the liberal use of Ednogen and other forces at the initial battle in interstellar space creates an enormous vacuum in the ether, which (stretching coincidence somewhat) travels through space to arrive at Jupiter at the same time a Sirian fleet is engaging a smaller Earth force (drawn up into a sphere for defensive purposes). But because of the vacuum, the propellers which normally move the ships through the ether spin uselessly: 'Every ship lay helpless like a log, moving along under the impulse of the momentum it had already acquired'. But worse than that, the vacuum -- for some unexplained reason -- causes two nearby moons to expand and explode, annihilating both fleets and creating a fiery mass of vapour around Jupiter which kills thousands of civilian settlers. The whole book is like this, a strange mixture of classical, pre-relativistic physics and big-if-not-well-thought-through ideas. There's no sound in space (presumably ether is too thin for soundwave propagation), and Cole is aware of the need for insulation to control heat. Earth has been terraformed by tilting its axis to make southern England pleasantly subtropical. Wireless telegraphy exists, but only has a range of about 300 million miles. Matter can be detected through the waves it sets up in ether. The speed of light is, of course, not a cosmic speed limit, so ships can just keep accelerating: after 85 days of travel the Anglo-Saxon fleet is a good chunk of the way to Sirius.

One of the big disappointments for me was the astronomy and the exobiology. There's no sense whatsoever of the alien, the other. All of the planets are blandly Earth-like, where they are described at all. Even Jupiter and Neptune are just other places for humans to settle on, with air and trees and water. That's somewhat excusable, since it wasn't yet clear to astronomers just how un-terrestrial the gas giants are. But Cole missed an opportunity to inject some variety and colour into his account. The two moons destroyed at Jupiter aren't even named; and it would have been interesting to see what the Anglo-Saxons made of Sirius's white dwarf companion, discovered in 1862. Even more surprising is Cole's lack of interest in extraterrestrials. As far as I can tell, they are all physically identical to humans. Nothing is described of Kairet's culture or history or language, aside from a couple of words. Even some of the solar system's planets have intelligent life on them, but all we are told of these is that 'the natives were quite harmless'. This surprised me, given the huge success of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds only a year or two previously, which featured quite alien aliens. I think the reason for this is that Cole is really interested in the struggle for empire in 1900 AD. The harmless natives and the fertile landscapes are simply part of the backdrop to the imperialist project and great power rivalries, and aren't of any intrinsic interest.

That raises the question of whether Cole had any specific geopolitical parallels in mind. I don't think so -- aside from the obvious fact that the British Empire rules the stars as well as the sea, surely a cheery prospect for a late-Victorian imperialist. Kairet doesn't seem like a good match for any of Britain's rivals at the end of the nineteenth century: its fleet is too powerful to be France, its empire too extensive to be Germany, its methods too colonial to be Russia. In fact, the empire which it matches most closely is the British Empire itself. It's a mirror image. The war between the Sirians and the Anglo-Saxons doesn't quite begin like any of Britain's recent troubles. A clash in some distant outpost of empire is kind of like Fashoda (1898), but that involved official expeditions. Trouble between settlers and outlanders is more like the war against the Boer Republics, which was then in its early days, but they weren't great powers. I don't think it's really worthwhile looking too closely for close parallels: Cole is just taking the idea of generic imperial struggle to its ultimate conclusion. In fact, at some points he almost suggests that it's not worth the bother -- though admittedly that's when it looks like the Anglo-Saxons are going to be crushed by the Sirians. It's not quite 'Recessional'.

I've been a bit critical of Coles' powers of description, and it's true that he's no Shakespeare. But he's better than many writers of his ilk, and can be quite evocative when it comes to space battles. I liked this description of the final defence of Earth:

Hither and thither the flashes and streams of fire darted across the sky, now overhead, now low down on the horizon, but never ceasing for a moment. Not a sound came from the battle area; its progress could only be ascertained by observing the movements of the lines of fire. Sometimes the ships were so crowded together in one spot that the sky was illuminated by a frightful glare; then they would spread out, darting their lights all over the heavens. Soon the refuse of battle began to fall down on to the earth: mangled bodies, burnt wrecks, and clouds of thin hazy smoke. When daylight arrived the ships were invisible, but the horrid rain still fell. Night came on, and the long luminous streaks made by the searchlights and the flashes of white and purple flame from the guns reappeared. Huge battleships came dashing along glowing like meteors, singly, in lines, in columns. These were met by other lines of light, and then the surrounding space scintillated like a fine display of fireworks, and in a few minutes the rain of battle came pouring down on to the terrified spectators.

And, on the subject of gore, note this description of damaged battleships which have returned to Earth for repairs:

Their outsides bore the ghastly traces of the terrible contest. The twisted metalwork was covered with blood, human bodies were lying about in the pierced compartments torn almost to ribbons, and arms, legs, and headless trunks were squashed between bent metal plates and rods, or rammed up between the machinery.

Nice!

I borrowed this book a couple of times while doing my thesis (in the facsimile edition put out by Routledge/Thoemmes Press in 1998, together with The War of the Wenuses and Edison's Conquest of Mars) but didn't read it because, well, I had work to do! I wish I had now, because it really does lie within the precursors to the knock-out blow literature I read for research. Not only is London destroyed from the air/space, as noted above, but its inhabitants evacuate the city beforehand and the government (or at least the War Bureaux) moves to a mineshaft for protection from bombardment. And when the Anglo-Saxons return the favour, there's a hint of the knock-out blow: 'But the [Sirian] people soon had enough of the slaughter and destruction, which they had no means whatever of preventing, for they had been taken totally unawares, and so the Government sent envoys demanding conditions of surrender'. At the very least it would have merited inclusion in a footnote.

Finally, who was Robert Williams Cole, and what impact did he have? The answer to the first question is nobody knows, and to the second, apparently none. None of the standard sources have any information on him, except that he did write three other novels in the following decade, including a more standard Germany-invades-Britain story called The Death Trap (1907). The name could well be a pseudonym. George Locke, in his notes for the Routledge/Thoemmes Press edition, suggests that the publisher of The Struggle for Empire was a vanity press, which anyway didn't survive long. All I've been able to dig up on the internet is that it was mentioned in The Academy, A Weekly Review of Literature and Life of 31 March 1900 (p. 278) as one of the new books received (link). And according to an advertisement in the 5 May edition (p. 378) of the same periodical, the Birmingham Daily Gazette had this to say:

Mr. Cole possesses an unbounded and vigorous imagination, which carries his readers over all obstacles. His story is entertaining.

It's a shame that he didn't have enough readers to inspire imitators; it would have been interesting to read more early British space opera by other authors, and to see how they stacked up against some of their modern heirs.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell's maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi's more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick's brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I've seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor's old observations to compile MEC-1. So it's no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn't live to witness Mariner 4's flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I recently rewatched one of my favourite science fiction films, The Day the Earth Stood Still -- the 1951 original, of course, not the currently-screening remake (which I have yet to see, but tend to doubt that it will improve over the original in any area other than special effects). I can't remember when I last saw it, but it must have been before I started the PhD because otherwise the climactic scene would have leapt out out me and smacked me in the face, as it did the other day ... (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

The whole scene is shown above, but I'll quote the speech made by the alien Klaatu to the leading scientists of Earth (emphasis added):

The Universe grows smaller every day and the threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all -- or no one is secure. This does not mean giving up any freedom except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves, and hired policemen to enforce them. We of the other planets have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets, and for the complete elimination of aggression.

The test of any such higher authority, of course, is the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets, in space ships like this one, and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression we have given them absolute power over us. At the first sign of violence they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk.

The result is that we live in peace, without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war -- free to pursue more profitable enterprises. We do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works.

So the robot Gort is an interplanetary policeman, whose function is to deter and punish any breaches of the peace with the use of force. The reason why this made me sit up straight is that it's yet another post-Hiroshima, space-based rehash of the international air force idea. (See, for example, Robert A. Heinlein's Space Cadets, published in 1948.) The international air force was a popular topic of discussion in the interwar years; the basic idea being that national air forces would be disbanded, and instead all countries would contribute towards a multinational force which would use airpower for collective security. (Exactly how was a matter for debate; some writers contended that it would need to use the full power of the knock-out blow, while others thought that it could get by with just fighters, since any aggressors would only have converted airliners to use as fighters, relatively easy to shoot down.)

The language and ideas of the international air force proponents are very much like Klaatu's: they too used the police analogy extensively, and I can easily imagine somebody in the 1930s saying 'There must be security for all -- or no one is secure'. Here's William McDougall, a British psychologist, writing in 1927:

The institution of such an international air-force might, then, well lead to general abandonment of national armaments, and might initiate an era of universal peace. For, given the condition that the International air-force were the only one in existence, resistance to it would be hopeless, and no nation would attempt it.

Klaatu would have understood where McDougall was coming from; it's the same hope for an end to war, now motivated by the fear of nuclear weapons instead of bombers and expanded to an interplanetary scale rather than an international one. Obviously the point was not so much that Earthlings needed to worry about aliens interfering in our affairs, more that we needed to set up an international police force of our own.

But I do wonder just how credible a threat is a fleet of flying saucers flown by robots who can be pacified simply by speaking the words 'Klaatu barada nikto'?

I've got an article in the current (November 2008) issue of Fortean Times (named, of course, after Charles Fort). It's not at all airminded, it's not really historical either -- it has more to do with my shady astrophysicist past. It's about the famous Betty and Barney Hill abduction incident in New Hampshire in 1961 -- that's alien abduction, supposedly. In a hypnosis session a couple years later, Betty recalled being shown a star map on board her abductor's craft, supposedly of nearby space. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish used the latest astronomical data in a prodigious effort to match the map to real stars near the Sun. And eventually she found a good match, which has been touted by some ufologists as scientific proof of the reality of alien visitation, possibly from Zeta Reticuli.

Except that nobody ever checked Fish's model against new astronomical data gathered over the last three decades, in particular the parallax observations made by the Hipparcos satellite in the early 1990s. When you do this, the Fish interpretation falls to pieces! Using her own assumptions and the new data, six of the fifteen stars chosen by Fish must be excluded, which is no match at all. And that's what my article is about. So I think this makes me, officially, a dirty debunker. Or maybe a noisy negativist.

I have an erratum: a footnote I added late in the editing process didn't make it through. It should have come after the word 'collapse' in the fifth sentence in the last column on page 51:

Since writing the above, I have been made aware of an unpublished and thorough analysis of the Fish interpretation by Charles Huffer of MUFON, which also uses Hipparcos data to reach conclusions similar to mine.

Anyway, I promise there will be some aeroplaney stuff soon :)

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about a childhood hero of mine, on the tenth anniversary of his death. Today, I'm writing about another one, and it's a happier occasion: it's Sir Arthur C. Clarke's 90th birthday!

Clarke has always been my favourite of the 'big three' post-war science fiction writers: he evokes a sense of wonder at the universe that was mostly missing in Asimov and Heinlein, as much as I loved their stories. From the decaying billion-year-old city of Diaspar in Against the Fall of Night (1953), to the giant interstellar interloper in Rendezvous with Rama (1973), to the last visitors from home in Songs of Distant Earth (1986), Clarke's universe is indifferent to humanity's presence, but it's precisely our human qualities which make its immensities explicable and bearable. It's terrific stuff, at its best Wellsian and Stapledonian, and just talking about it makes me want to go re-read it all again ...

I was casting around for some way to connect Clarke to the themes of this blog. I could have speculated on the parallels between the British Interplanetary Society, in which he was heavily involved from the 1930s to the 1950s, and aviation advocacy groups like the Royal Aeronautical Society or the Air League of the British Empire. Or there's his wartime work for the RAF on ground control approach radar. Or the way his experience of being billeted in the bombed-out East End in 1941 apparently inspired him to write a chapter on space warfare which he later used in Earthlight. Or the fact that the first publication of his famous idea for communication satellites in geosynchronous (or 'Clarke') orbits was in a letter on potential scientific applications of V2 rockets, which appeared in the February 1945 issue of Wireless World -- at a time when V2s were still falling on London!

But then I found that in March 1946, RAF Quarterly published a prize-winning essay by Clarke on "The rocket and the future of warfare", which was outside Clarke's usual range of topics, but well within mine -- just too perfect a fit to ignore! But it's not available online like his satellite stuff, and nobody around here has the RAF Quarterly. Luckily it was reprinted in Ascent to Wonder, a compilation of his more technical papers, so I made an impromptu trip to the State Library this afternoon to check its copy.

Clarke begins with some technical background on rocket propulsion, and draws up four classes of rocket, both manned and un-manned: short-range (e.g. Katyushas, bazookas), medium-range (e.g. Me 163, Wasserfall), long-range (e.g. V2 or A4, A9/A10), and infinite range (i.e. spacecraft). He suggests that the advent of anti-tank rockets may spell the end of tank warfare, since now a few soldiers can destroy the largest tanks. Buried rockets could even be used as anti-tank mines. He is greatly impressed by the amount of firepower carried by rocket-equipped aircraft, noting that a fully-loaded Mosquito is equivalent to a cruiser with 6-inch guns. And foreseeing a great future for air-to-air rockets, Clarke suggests that

a possible line of development is the heavily armed "destroyer" fitted with rocket-launching turrets. The rockets would be aimed by radar and detonated by proximity fuses when they approached their targets. The larger projectiles might even be guided, either from the launching plane or from the ground.

But, moving into the medium range category, these would soon be replaced by aircraft which are themselves rocket-propelled. Clarke sees these as an almost insuperable threat to bomber streams, since they are so fast; massive barrages from defending destroyers might be one defence, but a better one would be speeds too high for interception.

The speed of attack is steadily increasing and the 3,400 miles an hour of A4 is merely the beginning. Against such speeds men can never hope to fight. Skill and courage and resolution -- in the end all are of no avail, for there comes at last a time when only machines can fight machines.

And conventional bombers would not have a chance against unmanned, ground-controlled rockets, homing in on the infrared emissions from their engines. At sea, rockets will probably replace fighters as air cover for fleets, meaning the end of the carrier. At long ranges, rockets have tremendous potential as offensive weapons -- probably more cost-effective at short ranges than conventional bombers -- the more so since there is currently no defence against them once they have been launched:

The only defence of any kind would be the guided rocket, and one can visualize the development of small machines capable of accelerations of 100 g. or more and homing on radiation, radar or even local gravity fields.

But even so, there'd be only seconds in which to intercept the incoming rocket. Clarke even ponders 'atomically propelled rockets [...] flying under continuous thrust at very high accelerations along constantly "randomed" paths'. These would be even harder to intercept, since their ultimate destination would not be clear until it was too late. He sees little point in the development of rocket bombers (i.e. capable of returning to base to rearm for another mission); single-use rockets can carry a greater proportion of explosive load. Finally, in the 'infinite range' category -- spacecraft -- Clarke pretty much dismisses chemical rockets as useless for anything other than scientific exploration. But if atomic power were to be used for propulsion ...

The least of the achievements we may expect to see is the establishment of stations in closed orbits at heights of a thousand miles or more, circling the world in periods of a few hours like artificial moons. The Germans were indeed planning such stations, and they present an attractive solution to the problem of world surveillance and control.

This is getting pretty long, so I'll stop there for the moment, and save Clarke's analysis of the bigger picture for another post. Just a few closing observations.

Many of the details of Clarke's predictions didn't pan out (such as the super-Defiant rocket turret fighters), but that's an occupational hazard of technological prophecy. It's interesting (to me at least) that he dismisses the bomber, until now the premier weapon of mass destruction, but replaces it with the rocket, which will always get through, will tempt its possessor into making sneak attacks, and so on. From the language he uses, I don't get the feeling he has read much of the airpower prophets of previous decades, though he does mention Seversky by name; and surely he would have been well up on his Wells.

It's a bit odd that Clarke barely mentions the jet engine, another recent invention which as it turned out, has been far more widely used than rockets. Aside from the fact that the essay competition was specifically about rockets in warfare, I suppose Clarke might have assumed that anything jets can do, rockets can do better -- or at least faster, which seems to have meant much the same thing to him.

I was surprised by all the references, accurate for the most part, to experimental German weapons. I would have thought that details of these would still have been secret so soon after the war's end. Obviously that's not the case! The reference to German plans for space stations seems a bit of a stretch, though this page suggests there was some basis for it, and certainly von Braun continued to be obsessed with the idea of orbital battle stations.

Next up: radiation war, battle integrators, and -- surprise, surprise -- yet another incarnation of the international police force idea.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It's 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started -- but never finished! -- was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can't have been older than 12 so it's not exactly sophisticated ...)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I'd even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn't quite worked out the way I'd envisaged it -- yet -- but of course, I'm in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There's a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun's proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry -- including leading the V2's development team -- von Braun's obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders -- a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.

Von Braun wasn't the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier's Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven't for a long time so I'll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. [...] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party's manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change ... sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a 'Race for Space' between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward -- if impressive -- technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn't have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it's hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it's good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I'll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan died. He had been a hero of mine since childhood, since I first watched Cosmos. I would kick the rest of the family out of the lounge room, close the door, turn off the lights, pull the beanbag up to the TV as close as possible, and let Carl show me the Universe and its history. From Empedocles and the water-thief, to the discovery of volcanoes on Io; from Lowell's dreams of Martian cities dying beside canals choked with dust, to Wolf Vishniac's death in Antarctica while paving the way for the search for life on Mars; the Big Bang, the Tunguska Event and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I can't have been much into double digits when I first watched Cosmos, if that; heady stuff indeed for a young boy. His own joy in the search for knowledge was palpable, infectious, inspirational -- to the extent that I cannot understand how anyone could ever feel any differently. Here's a short clip from one episode of Cosmos, "The edge of forever": more metaphysics than physics, but if you've never seen it before, it will give you an idea of his style; and if you have seen it before, it will transport you again. It still sends shivers down my spine.

Not only did I adore Cosmos the series, and Cosmos the book, I also inhaled his other books: The Cosmic Connection, Broca's Brain, The Dragons of Eden; and later, Contact, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Demon-haunted World. Carl hugely influenced my basic worldview: rationality is our best tool for understanding the world, secular humanism our best antidote for the fact that we can never be perfectly rational. We are not at the centre of the Universe, which is anyway indifferent to our presence; but we are sentient, and that is a precious thing, or ought to be, to ourselves and perhaps to others.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Carl's love for astronomy also helped steer me into pursuing astronomy as a career. From about the time I saw Cosmos on, I had a burning desire to become an astronomer and explore the Universe too. I nearly did too; I started a PhD and was nearly a year into it when I realised that (a) I wasn't very good at it and (b) I wasn't enjoying it very much. That's not Carl's fault, of course, but astronomy was such a hard thing for me to let go of, having made it a part of me for so long, and that's partly a testament to his eloquence and his passion. To cut a long story short, I switched to an MSc as a sort of consolation prize, while pondering what to do next. And it was during this time that I learned of Carl's illness. He continued to work and to write. A friend, a fellow astro postgrad, saw him speak at a conference in Hawaii and reported that he looked distressingly ill.

Ten years ago today, I sobbed like a child into my girlfriend's arms, and I must confess that I am tearing up even now. (Having Vangelis's "Heaven & Hell Part 1" playing in the background probably doesn't help.) Carl Sagan is gone, and he is sorely missed, but his influence will remain -- at least for as long as I live, and I suspect for much longer than that.

Other memories of Carl which have crossed my personal blog horizon: Bad Astronomy Blog, Centauri Dreams, Respectful Insolence, Cocktail Party Physics, Butterflies and Wheels, a great one from Larvatus Prodeo, and most poignantly of all, from his wife and collaborator Ann Druyan. These are all part of a larger blog commemoration effort (the results of which can be seen here), and the blogless can join in too.

Image source: Wikipedia.