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 n the fall of 1977 I bought a second-hand yellow Renault 16. I christened it “Giselle,” pulled out the rear seat, and fitted a small cupboard-desk in the space behind the driver’s seat. The passenger seat folded down into a bed at night, and with the glove compartment open I was able to find room for my feet. With more a hunch than a plan, I began driving, looking for objects that people might have made to express their ideas about outer space and the future. I followed secondary highways through towns and cities, from British Columbia down the West Coast, eventually circumscribing the United States along a counterclockwise route. Three months and 22,000 miles later I arrived in Toronto with a rough collection of negatives that became the basis of this book.
By the fall of 1978 I was on the road again, better equipped with a 4 x 5 camera and an emerging awareness of a new mythology of gods and technology as relevant to twentieth-century civilization as Zeus and Apollo had been to the ancient Greeks. Giselle was my home for months at a time for several years. I might wake up in Ontario one morning and not shut the engine off until Kansas, on my way to a flying-saucer convention. I lost track of the miles. One day the speedometer needle fell off, and I was delighted to see the end of its nagging. Initially I sought information about backyard rockets and flying saucers from newspaper editors, waitresses, and gas station attendants in the towns and cities I drove through. I would fan out postcards made from some photographs taken during my first trip and say: “I’m studying what people think about outer space. Have you seen anything around here that looks like this?” Many times the discussion that followed would involve the whole newsroom or café in a debate over the possibilities of life on other planets and alien visitations to Earth. Eventually much information for the project was to come from an expanding circle of UFO researchers, science fiction buffs, and sociologists, but luck and driving—the turn of the steering wheel like a roll of the dice—uncovered more than any single researcher. The title, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, had come to me, full blown, in the middle of a dream one night in 1975. I woke up, wrote the words down, and carried them with me in a notebook for two years without attaching any particular meaning to them. It was while rounding a curve on a two-lane highway in Quebec that I found my first rocket. Thrust out over the trees lining the highway, it was held in simulated flight, reflecting the last light of the sun. Deus ex machina! The rocket seemed to strain against its metal pylons, a totem attempting to leap away from the gravity of Earth to the realms of the gods. It was at one and the same time the quintessential product of Western civilization, a daydream of technology, and a symbol of transcendence and freedom. It was nostalgia for the future. 
Charlie LaBranche’s rocket. South Bolton, Quebec. LaBranche hired two local carpenters in 1964 to build the rocket to stand outside his general store. The rocket has brought him years of pleasure. As he says in his thick Québecois accent, “I love to watch the cars come around the corner and fall off the pavement.” The discovery of this roadside rocket galvanized that obscure phrase in my notebook, the fragments of ideas about myth and archetypes that I had begun gathering from the writings of Carl Jung, and my growing need to rechannel my photographic ambitions. Scraps of information previously ignored, from newspapers and chance conversations, began to form themselves into a shopping list for the project. My intent was never to prove or disprove the existence of flying saucers or extraterrestrial beings. The difficulty I have sometimes experienced in communicating this fact is a function of the general confusion about UFOs, compounded by the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for any news about them. Near the end of most interviews the interviewer will lean toward me with a kind of “just-between-you-and-me” attitude, and I know that it is time for The Question. “So tell me, Doug,” I am asked in a gentle and excessively familiar voice, “do you think UFOs really exist?” According to 1978 and 1981 Gallup polls, a majority of the North American adult population believes in the existence of flying saucers controlled by intelligent beings from another planet. Outer space and flying saucers and aliens from other worlds, with all manner of attendant beliefs about their origins and purposes, are firmly rooted in contemporary popular culture. Evangelist Billy Graham has publicly stated that “UFOs are astonishingly angellike in some of their reported appearances.” The dramatic finale of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, witnessed by 120 million Americans on their home television sets, was the descent of a huge flying saucer over the stadium. No one will know for sure if flying saucers exist until the discovery of physical evidence. And yet UFOs will not go away—sightings by reputable witnesses accumulate daily. After studying the UFO phenomenon through newspaper and U.S. Air Force reports, Carl Jung paraphrased Edward J. Ruppelt, the head of the Air Force’s UFO investigation: “Something is seen, but one doesn’t know what.” As I got to know the personalities involved with the UFO phenomena, the edges of fact, conjecture, wishful thinking, and supernatural events began to overlap and blur... |
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By Douglas CurranForeword by Tom Wolfe 62 illustrations, 28 in full color 144 pages • 10 x 9" • Cloth ISBN 0-7892-0708-7 • $35.00 Buy Now at Abbeville.com    
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