In one Astounding Story that predates the modern era of ufology, The Island of the Individualists by Nat Schachner (1938), we find many of the same concepts and details that would later appear in UFO and alien abduction reports.
The story features three adventurers from different time periods of human history: Kleon, an Ancient Greek warrior; Sam Ward, a 20th Century American; and Beltan, a man from the 98th Century. They find themselves escaping from Harg, a “totalitarian state, aflame with the lust for conquest” intent on conquering Earth. They steal a rocket ship named the Hetera Alanie and, seeking a safe haven in a distant civilization, find themselves running out of fuel over the Pacific Ocean.
They fall toward an uncharted island obscured by an “implausible vagueness” it “eluded the sight”. The island is ten miles across, a barren lava field devoid of plants or trees.
Telepathic Little People
They encounter an advanced human who sits meditating inside a protective shell of “thought waves”. In a preemption of the Grey alien archetype the highly evolved man is described in this way:
“The man was seated on a cushioned mound, cross-legged, like the ancient fakirs of India. His body and limbs were shrunken and puny, and seemed unable to support the structure of his enormous head. From a spindle neck it rose, swelling upward like a top, from thin, small lips, a flattened nose, to colourless eyes turned introspectively inward, and a bulging, hairless forehead. Only a tiny tuft of hair—a scalplock relieved the aridity of the ballooning skull”.
In another Grey alien similarity the man, named Ens, reads the men’s minds and instantly knows everything about them.
A Flattened Bullet
Kleon, the Greek warrior, becomes frustrated and strikes the thought bubble surrounding Ens with his sword, only to be thrown backwards in a heap. In a foreshadowing of the Carl Higdon abduction story the American’s Colt Revolver is discharged at the translucent shell:
“The steel-jacketed bullet crashed from the orifice, sped true to its mark….The missile mushroomed against the invisible surface in a flare of blinding light, clunked solidly to the ground in a flattened disk”.
Again, like the Grey aliens, these advanced men appear cold and lacking in human emotion. They are unwilling to engage their visitors. “Evolution has its price” one of them exclaims. “We’re obviously below their contempt.”
But, being human, they do recognise their visitors’ hunger, and in another detail similar to the Carl Higdon story, Ens with the aid of a machine buried beneath the lava conjures three “synthetic pellets” or food pills using the vibrations from his mind. They are “Epicurean delights” and satisfy the men’s hunger instantly.
Ens is one of many men who sit in individual mediation all across the island encased in shells created by their own “thought waves”. They are individualists pursuing their own answers.
Cryptoterrestrials?
There’s a hint that the island itself is perhaps a kind of sunken Laputa, a giant machine and that the men are a highly advanced cryptoterrestrial1 race who have secluded themselves masked beneath a web of their thought “vibrations” in a remote part of the Pacific ocean.
Another of these advanced men explains another of their talents: their ability to transfer themselves across space. This is more than Astral Projection, it’s physical travel via “thought-transportation.”
“We could, if we wished, transfer ourselves even to the farthest stars by the mere power of thought”.
“Our minds, through long practice and concentration, have become storage batteries of extremely high potential. We thrust out a steady stream of beam-thought waves to the point in space desired. The potential, at the receiving end is considerably lower. Our bodies, polarised in the direction of the beam, and infused with electro-magnetic vibrations, descend from the higher to the lower potential. The speed is of the order of light.”
“Disintegration rods”
Like the guards in La Fin d’illa the Hargian soldiers hold “stellene-tipped disintegration rods”. A common hand held weapon found in science fiction stories, and later claimed real abduction encounters.
The complete story can be read in the May 1938 edition of Astounding Stories.
Footnotes
- See Mac Tonnies, The cryptoterrestrials: a meditation on indigenous humanoids and the aliens among us, (2010). ISBN:978-1933665467 ↩︎