Debunker or crackpot?

"De otroliga tefaten" is a book in Swedish, written by Eugen Semitjov, a Swedish reporter, illustrator and popular science writer of Russian descent. The book was published in 1974. The author was well known during this period. As a kid, I often confused him with Isaac Asimov!

"De otroliga tefaten" is Semitjov's critical (or semi-critical) look at the UFO phenomenon. It's a fascinating book, and it's a pity that it's only available in Swedish. Semitjov interviews Keyhoe, the Lorenzens, Hynek, the Blue Book boss Quintanilla, Carl Sagan and even Van Tassel. His book mentions all the classical cases: the mysterious airships, ghost rockets, foo fighters, Kenneth Arnold, UFOs over Washington, the abduction of Barney and Betty Hill, George Adamski, the alien attack on the Suttons in Kelly...

Semitjov has interviewed Gösta Carlsson (alias Pollenkungen), who made Sweden's only classic UFO observation in 1946, but didn't tell the story until 25 years later. I admit that Carlsson's story is fascinating: it features aliens who are mortal (!) and a scarab (an ancient Egyptian symbol for transformation). Fascinating for a very different reason is Semitjov's retelling of a Swedish UFO incident in 1953. An airplane hired by Aftonbladet, the newspaper Semitjov worked for at the time, encountered an unidentified object. Naturally, the story became first page news. The article calls the mysterious object a "flying saucer", and the illustration (made by Semitjov himself) does indeed show a saucer-shaped craft approaching the plane, but nowhere is it suggested that it's extraterrestrial in origin. On the contrary, Aftonbladet claimed that it must have been a Soviet rocket. Thus, in 1953 the expression "flying saucer" could still have an earthly connotation...at least in Sweden. (Later, the UFO turned out to be a military balloon, launched as a prank by two Swedish conscript soldiers!)

Sometimes "De otroliga tefaten" (The fantastic saucers) is extremely funny, as when the author retells a bizarre UFO report from the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, where a group of aliens attacked a local store and stole all the candy! I suppose Uzbek sweets are famous all across the cosmos.

Back to mainframe...

During a visit to the Pentagon, Semitjov meets a certain Colonel Maston Jacks who claims that his agency has investigated 20,000 UFO reports - and debunked all of them. Jacks seems honestly annoyed by all the fuzz surrounding the flying saucers: "There is no UFO wall of silence, but somewhere we have to put an end to all this madness". On a more disturbing note, Semitjov also meets one Robert Powell, who wants to create artificial "UFOs" made of plasma and dump them from an airplane over an inhabited area as a psychological experiment! Says Powell: "The biggest problem will probably be to convince the witnesses that it was all a trick. Most will probably refuse to believe it". Our intrepid author interviews several U.S. astronauts, who deny ever having seen the flying saucers...

In most ways, Semitjov is a debunker. His favourite explanation for the phenomenon (apart from mistakes or hoaxes) is the plasma theory. He mentions the Condon Committee in a positive light, and never mentions the conflicts that plagued the committee already from the start. Since Semitjov was a sci fi enthusiast, he couldn't help noticing the similarities between some UFO reports and pop culture. "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is prominently featured in his book, and so is a flying saucer from a 1934 episode of "Flash Gordon". Semitjov discusses the existence of secret aircraft on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and believe that these may account for some UFO observations. The book features photos or illustrations of some declassified projects, including a so-called VZ-9, which really does look like a flying saucer. Semitjov died in 1987, but he would have loved the Stealth bomber!

The problem with Eugen Semitjov is that, while debunking modern UFO reports, he was something of a crackpot in other ways. Semitjov accepted the speculations of Erich von Däniken and others that our planet has been visited by aliens in the past, that the aliens may have seeded Earth and periodically returned to monitor the experiment, and that many Biblical events could be descriptions of ancient astronauts: "Jesus himself is believed to have been sent here by an alien civilization with the purpose of conducting a mass psychological experiment on humanity. The Ascension - that might have been a shuttle which took him up to a starship in orbit around the Earth". OMG. :-(

Speculations of this kind were pretty common in the Soviet Union long before Däniken became popular in the West. Semitjov visited the USSR several times, and found a pro-ancient astronaut article in a Soviet magazine from 1959. Semitjov also has a soft spot for the incredibly weird idea that UFOs are biological organisms living in the atmosphere. Apparently, this notion also existed in the Soviet Union, but I think it's originally American. Reich?

It seems that the official Soviet line on UFOs shifted even more often than the politics of the Communist International. Originally (presumably 1947), the Soviets claimed that the saucers were "capitalist chimaeras" and part of the Western militarist propaganda against the Soviet Union. In 1957 a certain Professor Zohnstein claimed in Radio Moscow that the UFOs were Soviet secret weapons! In 1961, Pravda suddenly claimed that all UFO observations are hoaxes or hallucinations. In 1967, there was another change: the Soviets appointed their very own "Condon Committee", led by one Major General Porfiry Stolarov, who appealed to the public to report UFOs. However, just a few years later, Stolarov's investigation was discontinued, with no official explanation given...

"De otroliga tefaten" is an immensely exciting look at the UFO phenomenon as it looked like from a Swedish horizon circa 1974. Those who actually understand Swedish, should (of course) balance it with the pro-ETH book "Tefatsfolket ser oss" by Staffan Stigsjöö, another classic from roughly the same time period.

Ah, those were the days!