PWR288: The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers w/ Dr. Dean Bertram & Samantha Krause
About this episode
The episode explores the cultural origins of the flying saucer phenomenon through the work of Raymond Palmer and the stories of Richard Shaver.
Most people assume their fascination with UFOs is something they arrived at on their own. A sighting. A documentary. A feeling the official story never quite added up. Almost nobody considers that the cultural framework making flying saucers feel plausible and worth chasing was largely the product of one man sitting behind a desk in Wisconsin, editing a pulp magazine called Amazing Stories. Raymond Palmer understood that the line between a story and a belief is thinner than anyone wants to admit. When a welder named Richard Shaver began sending letters claiming an ancient subterranean civilization called the Deros was controlling human behavior from beneath the Earth's surface, Palmer didn't file it away. He published it, promoted it, and let it breathe until hundreds of thousands of readers were no longer sure whether they were reading fiction or testimony. By the time Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting gave the world the term flying saucer, the audience Palmer spent years cultivating was ready and waiting. Tonight, Dr. Dean Bertram, historian and filmmaker behind the award-winning documentary short The Shaver Mystery, and his filmmaking partner Samantha Krause, Wisconsin native and…
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