Part 2 of this series, taking a cue from Bertrand Méheust, looking at works of science fiction that directly contradict the claims of the main alien abduction researchers of the 1980s and 1990s, Hopkins, Jacobs, and Mack, who denied science fiction contained the specific details recalled by their subjects, is about another story by José Moselli published in 1925.
Read part 1 of this series here.
La Fin d’illa
Fortunately for English-speaking readers who do not understand French, there is an English translation of this work available by Brian Stableford [Illa’s End] . All quotes that follow are taken from that text. With illustrations by André Galland sourced from the original 1925 publication of Sciences et Voyages where the story was serialised.
What follows is a broad outline of the story but with particular attention paid to the specific details from Moselli’s imagination that have parallels with UFO sightings and alien abduction cases that would appear decades later.
Synopsis
- Prologue: Captain Ellis and his whale hunting ship, the Grampus, have sailed out of Norfolk Virginia and are in the South Pacific Ocean.
- With no land around the for 100 miles they discover a large uncharted Islet.
- “a stone lens surrounded by phosphorescent foam”
- At daybreak they investigate the islet on foot. They find it is an artificial construction:
- “a strange shore composed of large blocks of grey stone, similar to pumice stone but so hard that steel could not scratch them, joined together with a cabinet-maker’s finish; no mortar and no cement.”
- It appears to have roads carved into it.
- They find an enormous statue of a human head “larger than the sphinx”.
- They reach the centre of the islet and find unusual glass-like plates with geometric inscriptions on them and a sphere the size of an orange but which weighs “over 100 pounds”.
- Suddenly Captain Ellis is blinded by light reflected off the sphere.
- They retreat to the ship bringing the ball and a metal case containing a mysterious book and leave the area.
- The islet is never to be found again.
- The book changes hands many times; eventually an academic manages to translate part of it and send it away by train. The other part – containing all the answers to the world’s scientific problems – remains untranslated and is lost in an explosion created when the disgruntled housemaid of the academic throws a fragment of the ball into the fire.
- The narration then becomes that of the translated text which is Xie’s diary.
Xie’s Diary
- Xie was once the head of the army of a lost technologically advanced society who lived in a city called Illa.
- Illa was a “cylinder 17 kilometres in diameter and 700 metres high” in the centre is a large pyramid which houses the supreme council.
- Below are dwellings connected by lift shafts and at the pyramids base are “blood machines” a technology that when fed with with corpses of apes and pigs radiates nutrition to the Illian population.
- “osmotic currents pass through the walls” so that Illians no longer have to eat. The machines work well to give Illians an average lifespan of 167 years.
- The city is a technological marvel with magnetic floors that counter the weight of the Illians so that a person with a mass of 100 kilos weighs only 3 kilos. As a result of this assistance Illians have no use for physical strength; they have “thin bones and little or no musculature” and they essentially float around their domain.
- Beneath the city live a race of selectively bred “ape-men”, “brutes, descendants of Africans, whom [Illian] scientists caused to regress toward the primitive archetype”. They are physically strong. They mine metals and operate the “abattoirs” and “blood machines” needed to keep Illa functioning.
- The tension in the story revolves around Rair, a member of the supreme council who in a plot to establish himself as a totalitarian leader of Illa decides the blood machines are not good enough. In order to increase the lifespan of people of Illa to 350 years he calculates they will need to replace its fuel of apes and pigs with the blood of humans. Rair’s wants to use the blood of the Nourans, a neighbouring society 6 hours flight away.
- Rair plans to go to war with Nour. Attacking them without provocation he thinks will force them to surrender the 8400 adult humans needed for his blood machine project.
- He plans to use Illa’s super weapon “Zero-Stone” which is “solidified helium” which acts in much the same way as a small nuclear device to destroy a Nouran army and force them to surrender. The effects of Zero-Stone can be neutralised by “antiradiant suit” or shield.
- Xie challenges Rair’s monstrous plans.
- A huge battle ensues.
- After dutifully commanding an air battle with the Nourans Xie falls out of Rair’s favour.
- Xie is captured and imprisoned. He escapes, eventually leading an uprising of the ape-men to regain control of what remains of a badly damaged Illa.
- He creates a diary of the events and writes down illa’s scientific secrets putting them in a shielded box. He then sets up a timebomb using Zero-Stone that obliterates Rair, himself, Illa and everyone in it.
Specific Details
La fin d’illa contains specific details found in UFO and alien abduction reports.
Remember John E. Mack argued that:
“many of the details they [abductees] report are not known in the culture or, at least until recently, reported in the mass media”.
But in this one story alone published 20 years before Flying Saucers became a thing and almost 40 years before the first published abduction reports from Antônio Vilas-Boas or Barney and Betty Hill there are descriptions of a remarkable similarity to those in abduction accounts that flatly contradicts Mack’s assertion.
For example the city of Illa has many of the characteristics of a giant spaceship. Characters navigating the technological city of Illa observe:
- corridors with luminous walls.
- long tunnels leading to the elevator-shafts.
- “we found ourselves in the centre of a small crypt with walls of luminous metal”
There are doors that open and close out of nowhere:
- “The doorway that had opened automatically in front of them.”
- “One of them pressed a metal button fitted into the wall. A door opened. We went through it, then though a small empty antechamber, and saw another door open in front of us.”
- “Noiselessly, the door closed behind us.”
- “I went through several armoured doors activated by secret mechanisms, which opened and closed without my guards touching them.”
Illumination is frequently described as diffuse lacking a particular source:
- “The drab light emanating from the luminous ceiling added to the horror of the scene.”
- “The blue-tinted light filtering from the ceiling, which gave a pale and livid tint”
- “The phosphorescent walls of the Supreme Council pyramid gave it a fluid and unreal appearance.”
- We were alone with Rair in a sort of windowless bunker, solely illuminated by the cold light radiating from the walls”
The Round Room
Xie’s imprisonment has parallels with the environments described by alien abductees.
- “A door opened in front of me. I was in one of Illa’s dungeons a cell affecting an exactly cylindrical form, about a metre and a half in diameter. One could either stand up in it or sit down, but it was impossible to lie down”.
- “a dinner-plate was fixed in the middle of the ceiling, surrounded by little holes designed to let in air.”
The cell has a camera in the ceiling that observes Xie:
- “That lens, made of an unknown alloy containing a considerable percentage of selenium, permitted the Supreme Council to see everything I was doing, by means of a special apparatus.”
Xie’s capture and the description of another holding cell:
“The cells were perfectly spherical in form—spheres whose walls were made of various metals. In that ball with phosphorescent walls— which seemed to me to be emitting green or violet gleams that were produced by the different metals composing it. Around me, the metal walls continued to shine. The gleams reverberated, forming strange and sinister plays of light, in which I thought I could see visions of the Inferno.”
If we look at abduction accounts from over 50 years after this story was published we see descriptions of what could be the same place.
Hopkins
This is how Hopkins’ subject Steven Kilburn describes the space he was taken into:
- “This room is, uh, whitish. It’s really big. It’s curved on the inside . . .everything has almost that metallic kind of glow to it”
- “The walls around the room are curved, so the inside of the room would be the shape of a saucer. Even the ceiling is curved. It’s like a big oval. Yeah, the room is a big, circular, flattened-out oval.”
Virgina Horton another of Hopkins’ subjects reports:
- “It seems like the room is either spherical—no, the room is like a round room or half of a round room. I don’t see behind me, but what I’m looking at is round, I think, and it’s like the walls are round, too. Round. It has a quality like the TWA terminal at JFK—round, curved walls.” .
Jacobs
Jacobs describes the environment Karen Morgan found herself in:
- “she was strapped into a bench in a curved area while she waited.” .
Mack
- Catherine, a patient of Dr. Mack describes – “a small, oval entryway and the walls come down, curved on the side-like being on the inside of a big egg. Everything is metallic.” .
- “Carlos [another patient] described rooms of varying sizes on the ship as having curved ceilings and passages between them. One room he called “a rotunda; the room is large.” Another had “a lower half and an upper half’ with “a lot of electrical-like ceiling lines, like the veins in a brain. .
Rod-like Instruments in La Fin d’illa
In La Fin d’illa guards are armed with electric rods:
“They were armed with rods made of an alloy of crystal and copper, ending in an insulated hilt. These rods were veritable accumulators. The ape-men only had to touch those they were instructed to fight with their tips. At the same time, they pressed a button concealed in the hilt. The unfortunate touched by the glass rod was immediately subjected to an electric shock of several thousand volts, which felled him in the spot.”
- “He…was armed with an electric rod, and in the darkness I could see the faint greenish light that it was emitting.”
Rod-like Instruments in Abduction Accounts
Compare this description with that given by Randall Nickerson in this clip from ‘Experiencers’ a film1 by Stéphane Allix2. Randall was a patient of John Mack’s and a friend of Budd Hopkins.
- “the one closest to me had this rod-like device”
- “then it hit my neck [the rod-like device] and then I lost, my whole body froze. I couldn’t feel anything anymore..it made a sound, it was electrical, some kind of electrical, like an electrical buzzing sound.”
In the pages of Mack’s Abduction we see the description repeated by Scott [Nickerson’s pseudonym]:
- “some sort of rod “put me under.””
- “They put the dog that was in the hall to sleep, “somehow with the rod”
- “he saw a “round-tipped rod” pushing toward him” .
These rod-like devices appear in other abduction accounts but sometimes as medical devices or even toys.
Hopkins writes this about his subject Steven Kilburn:
- “Steven said that the “doctor” held a whitish, cylindrical object “like a wand” in his hand. I asked how thick it was in relation to Steve’s thumb. “Over twice as thick,” “this tubular implement with a rounded end was placed against his chest.”
- “I see it’s like a rod, it’s like a wand, tapping against my stomach, slowly.”
Hopkins continues:
- “As we shall see when we consider other abduction cases, this short, plain cylindrical device is indeed a ubiquitous tool. Sergeant Charles Moody, taken from his car near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1975, described being touched on his back by a “small, rodlike device” .
For Jacobs’ abductees the rodlike devices are medical instruments.
- “That night Lynn experienced an abduction, during which the aliens told her that they were going to cure her. They passed a portable, rodlike device around her body and then made her stand in a vertical cylindrical machine that had a small window.” .
Catherine a patient of John Mack’s describes rod-like toys:
- “She gives me a metallic rod, about a foot long, or maybe a little bit longer. It’s about an inch in diameter, and there’s a thick, short antenna coming out of the top. It’s silver/gray, and smooth. The antenna is about four inches long, with a small ball at the end.” .
Along the way in Moselli’s story we encounter familiar details found in countless UFO or alien abduction accounts. Not least of which are:
“Flying Shells”
In the story the Illian army has a fleet of “flying shells”. These are housed in a “vast circular crypt” in the bowels of the city – not dissimilar to stories about secret US bases houseing alien spacecraft – they sit on a metal floor and are “lenses about 4 metres in diameter, whose greatest thickness was just under 1.5 metres”.
- “Their walls, made of ultra-light metal, contained an interior propeller whose axle was aligned with the axis of the lens”.
The description of their construction and operation is worth quoting at length:
“Above the bombs, on a metal grille, was the airman’s seat, placed in such a fashion that the propeller blades rotated around him. A simple mobile weight, suspended from a rod, served to steer the apparatus. Changes in the position of this weight, displacing the centre of gravity of the lens, caused it to incline in the desired direction—the direction in which it progressed in the fashion of a quoit launched into the air. The variation of the rotation-speed of the propeller determined its ascent or descent. A little metal cupola was mounted on top of the hollow axle, which held the airman and protected him from the wind produced by the rapid displacement of the apparatus.”
Some other descriptions that will sound familiar to those who have heard about UFOs apparently crashing on earth…3
Flying Shells are difficult to fly and crash easily
- “I couldn’t help pointing out…how delicate the piloting of such machines seemed to be. The slightest mistake, a second’s delay in carrying out the necessary action, and the frail lens would crash.”
- “the flying shells had a very delicate equilibrium, easily broken.”
The flying shells don’t carry fuel, they are beamed energy propulsion Craft4
- “The engines with which the flying shells are equipped are powered by electrical rays produced by our central generator and projected through the air.”
- “It was only a matter of throwing a switch for the invisible energy embittered by the detectors to fill the air.”
They appear as shapes familiar to UFO reports
- “The flying shells, which, according to the position they occupied in the sky relative to observers, alternately resembled lenses, cigars or spheres.”
They have low observability5
- “Every engine was fitted with a compact reservoir able to produce thick vapours, into which it would be possible for the flying shell to disappear if it were too closely pressed by the enemy.”
- “Each flying shell can be rendered invisible by surrounding it with a cloud that our special projectors can traverse and dissipate without difficulty.”
Some have even have invisibility cloaking:
- “Earlier models of flying shells had been constructed of a metal alloy that rendered them completely invisible by permitting light rays to pass through them.
They fly almost silently
- “its propeller humming imperceptibly”
They fly fast
- “with frightful speed, the shell rose up. we were rising up at more than 600 kilometres an hour.”
Flying Spheres
Talk of flying spheres created out of exotic material has been in the UFO news a lot recently6 but the concept is not at all new.
In La Fin d’illa the neighbouring civilization of Nour, the target of Rair’s attack, operate a fleet of spherical aircraft.
The description of the Nourian Aircraft is worth quoting in full:
“in an armoured bunker situated at the base of the Supreme Council’s pyramid, I spotted the Nouran aircraft. They were enormous, near-invisible spheres; one might have thought that they were made of blue-tinted crystal. They were almost confused with the sky, paled by the first rays of the sun, which was still below the horizon. But the spheres were palpitating somehow. They were shimmering like silk agitated by the wind. The Nourans had contrived to discover and manufacture a kind of matter permeable to light-rays, but they had not succeeded in suppressing the vibrations that agitated their machines, and which, thanks to the phenomenon of refraction, rendered them visible.”
These enormous spherical craft also have low observability.
“disks—translucent, as if made of crystal—appeared in the distance. Their contours were only vaguely discernible, but it was easy to identify their location, for the starlight, in passing through them, was subject to a slight refraction. These disks—or rather spheres—were the approaching Nouran aircraft.”
As this series of posts continues, we’ll see how the details and themes in science fiction literature are frequently echoed in UFO and abduction reports.
References
Footnotes
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9065D8AFB530912F ↩︎
- https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_Allix ↩︎
- https://www.c-span.org/video/?529499-1/hearing-unidentified-aerial-phenomena ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam-powered_propulsion ↩︎
- https://tothestars.media/en-gb/blogs/press-and-news/five-characteristics-unique-to-uaps ↩︎
- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html ↩︎
Really fascinating. (I don’t read French, so I especially appreciate your work on Part 1.) Méheust said he would dismiss it all as psychological, except for the physical evidence.
I wonder where Moselli got his ideas.