The Most Excellent Scoriton Mystery

While for the longest time I viewed the topic of UFOs with great disdain, I have always been a complete sucker for anything with the word ‘mystery’ in the title. It turns out The Scoriton Mystery by Eileen Buckle is in fact about UFOs, but that did not keep me from finding it an excellent read. It’s full of unusual events and bizarre characters, it’s engaging and well written, and even 50 years later raises important questions.

Poking gently at the Scoriton mystery with a stick made of Google, it would seem that as a UFO incident it never garnered enough supporters to make into the UFO mainstream. Some of the reasons for that become fairly obvious when you read the book. However, I would argue the work has lasting value as part of Fortean literature and quite possibly as a record of an actual Fortean event (or series of events).

Published in 1967, The Scoriton Mystery is by Eileen Buckle with an assist from her investigative partner Norman Oliver. Both were members of the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) in 1965 when they heard about an unusual encounter experienced by one Ernest Bryant. Bryant had been out walking one evening when a flying saucer appeared in a field in front of him. One of its three occupants identified himself as Yamski and made a series of puzzling statements that seemed to have some connection with the famous and recently deceased UFO contactee George Adamski. The occupants then gave Bryant a tour of their vehicle and parted with a promise of returning with “proof of Mantell”— Mantell, of course, being a pilot who allegedly died chasing a UFO in 1948.* A month or so after the encounter, Bryant saw a strange light in the sky descend to the ground and the next day discovered a few pieces of worked metal in the same area.

Buckle and Oliver set themselves the task of chasing down the facts about Bryant’s experiences. They did so under their own aegis rather than that of BUFORA, being aware of the UFO-political sensitivity of the story. One of the interesting things about the book as a whole is that without engaging in ufological muckraking Buckle includes enough information about persons, personalities and agendas to help the reader understand the complex social context surrounding and shaping the Scoriton mystery. In that regard, her narrative has a light but deft touch and comes close to resembling an account based on participant-observation research.

Buckle and Oliver had a number of tasks before them: talk to Bryant to assess his credibility and flesh out his story; get in touch with Desmond Leslie, who had been Adamski’s co-author and was apparently mentioned by Yamski during the encounter; and examine the pieces of metal Bryant had picked up to assess if they were in fact “proof of Mantell.” So far, we are safely on the royal road from contactee ufology to nuts and bolts ufology. However, Bryant’s conversation with Yamski included a monkey wrench:

“[Yamski] also spoke of the dangers of forces from another planet which were taking people from this world for what he described as procreation purposes. When I asked him how we could expect to know that they had arrived . . . Yamski told me they were already here in the guise of what we termed poltergeists.” (p.63)

Enter the paranormal, stage left! Chatting with Buckle and Oliver in the pub after one of their interview sessions, Bryant told them that Yamski had also mentioned a family that mysteriously disappeared from a house in the nearby town of Yeovil. Were they taken for ‘procreation purposes’? A chapter is devoted to their exploration of that tangential case.

Meanwhile, Buckle took the bits of metal Bryant had collected, the putative ‘proof of Mantell,’ for psychometric readings, because, well, that’s what you do to see if something’s from a downed aircraft, right? This again is an area where Buckle’s touch is deft; she describes her thinking, gives a detailed account of the psychometric readings, and then considers the whole thing analytically afterward. In her own way she’s critical and thoughtful and gives the reader enough material to be critical and thoughtful as well.

Which is a good thing, because the ride only gets bumpier. Further and more mundane analyses are made of various trace evidence until we run up against Scotty, The Atomic Physicist. Buckle’s profile of Scotty and his role in the investigation is superb and presages the key public characters of ufology in the 1990s**. As a reader and assuming that Buckle is writing about a real person she encountered, one can only sit and marvel.

From the initial encounter with the Atomic Scientist, events move rapidly and chaotically as Buckle, Oliver and various other intrepid UFO hunters roam a British countryside bristling with synchronicities and hidden messages. After meeting a visually impaired man with special abilities, EVPs in rhyming couplets (!) start to appear on Oliver’s cassette tapes and seem to hint at some sort of emerging subtext between the two investigators. It’s at this point that UFO purists may throw up their hands, as things are now far, FAR off the royal road of Ufology and well into the forest of despair. However, the rest of us can safely keep reading; Buckle continues to adeptly detail the chain of persons and events involved in the investigation as it unfolds. Oliver’s own analyses are included as a counterpoint.

I would especially note that, while the explanation of synchronicities and hidden messages has been an excuse for some of the most execrably boring writing in the history of paranormal and esoteric studies, Buckle gets it right. She gives enough detail to allow readers to share the sense of wonder felt by participants in the events while managing to avoid pounding rotting mounds of horseflesh into already putrescent lime.

While I found the book an enjoyable read that was thought provoking in many ways, there are a couple of main things I would like to point out.

1. Welcome to Me! Bryant had his experience and that would have been that had he not eventually come onto the radar of Buckle and Oliver at BUFORA. The bulk of the investigation that the book is about is really due to Buckle and Oliver’s insertion of themselves into the story of Bryant’s experience. In a sense they created the mystery as they investigated it. I don’t see them as being bad or wrong or insincere, but their investigation is an interesting variation on the practices of later, more explicit story harvesters like Jacobs, Mack and Hopkins and Robbins. There is something about the UFO mystery, I theorize, that makes you think the story has to be about you.

The cool thing Buckle did that I don’t think many people recognize is to report on events and impressions more or less factually, in detail and in close to real time. That lends her tale of unlikely events more credible to me, because she gives me access to data that would let me assess her credibility. This is consistent with doing good participant observation research - a methodology ufology has not seem to have as yet heard of.

2. Proof or props? Yamski promised ‘proof of Mantell’ and then worked bits of metal appeared in a nearby field. Thinking of stories I’ve heard about the famous Skinwalker Ranch told I believe by George Knapp, it seems there’s a deliberate element of the theatrical to our interaction with certain aspects of radical alterity (aliens). Why did the metal bits that appeared in the field have to be actual Mantell plane debris? Maybe they were to be understood as props in a dramatic presentation. You wouldn’t walk onto a stage and try to rattle a doorknob on a painted door to prove that the play was about a locked room murder; that would just be silly.

3. Theories of agency and power. There are a couple of interesting dynamics in the book but I’ll save discussion of that for another time.

4. Boundaries between various Fortean phenomena. It’s interesting that Buckle and Oliver, out from under the aegis of BUFORA, undertook a wide-ranging exploration of various aspects of the experience they were investigating. This was not entirely inappropriate, given the unique aspects of the encounter. Was their investigation scientific? No. Did they have any credentials or institutional legitimacy? No. Was Buckle clear and concise in her account? Yes. She reported on what they thought was interesting and what happened when they tried to take a closer look at it. She gave what she thought was her interpretation of it at the very end of the book.

Perhaps The Scoriton Mystery is one of those models of small-group UFO investigations that Greg Bishop would approve of. It ignores what Adamski followers cared about with respect to Adamski’s “resurrection” and focused on what Bryant actually reported. Buckle and Oliver weren’t afraid to go down roads that would alienate ufology as they knew it and/or piss off Adamski believers, but from Buckle’s account they kept people from those camps as well as others involved in their ongoing adventures. Maybe we can all be friends.

* Further details on Adamski and other contactees can be found in Aaron Gulyas’ Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist and on that and almost anything else in Jerome Clark’s Unexplained.

** As heard on Art Bell, at any rate.