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“Hoax or manipulation on a planetary scale, the Ummo texts are an enigma without précédent in the UFO file.”
“We are indeed in a situation without precedent.”
Some proponents of the thesis that the Ummites letters are really written by extraterrestrial beings from planet Ummo claim that this case is without precedent.
Here is the real situation. All this has been perfectly known for a long time by the majority of ufologists, what follows is simply a summarized recall.
“While concrete physical evidence of this ancient continent may be difficult to find, many people “know” that they have strong connection to Lemuria.”
In the USA in the 1940's, editor Ray Palmer published a science-Fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. The magazine was in theory a “fiction” magazine, but in 1943 Palmer received a letter from a reader of Barto, Pennsylvania and allegedly coming of the town of Atlantis, capital of Lemuria aka Mu, a lost continent under the floods. This reader in fact elaborated starting from books such as the 1904 book by William Scott-Elliot, “The Story of Atlantis and The Lost Lemuria.”
The letter came from a certain Richard Shaver, had an original alphabet, rebuses, symbols, and famous “soundcepts” of which Jean Pollion much later claimed that it was something existing only in the Ummites letters. Palmer printed this alphabet in the January 1944 issue of his magazine, and started to correspond regularly with Shaver, asking for “more material.”
Richard Shaver was in fact an untrustworthy lunatic which had problems with law enforcement. Palmer and Shaver took this material together in a 1945 short novel, “I remember Lemuria,” and readers of the magazine, the majority being teenagers avid of mysteries, started to think that it was non-fiction. Some readers started to write to the magazine, to testify that they are themselves in contact with the descendant of the Lemurians which had left our planet a long time ago but returned to visit us on board the flying saucers about which one started to speak at that time.
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Above: Richard Shaver in his workshop. All around him, his paintings of which he tells that they are painted in undergrounds tunnels leading to the mysterious world of the Deros.
Others claimed to being reincarnated Lemurians. More material was written, in which “malicious” Lemurians became robots, the “Deros”, enemies of mankind living underground while the “good” Lemurians who had escaped to other planets came back as the friends of mankind, returning to save us from the maligns influence of the evil Deros, etc.
Shaver added much to the stories, claiming that he had been receiving since years orders of the Lemurians through his electric welding station. The story evolved further when he told that a female Lemurian of the name of Nydia teleported to his prison cell and helped him escape, and became his lover.
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Above: Richard Shaver's Hobart welding station.
When the UFO issue in the USA started to be taken with some serious consideration by some scientists, by US Air Force people, civil organizations which started field investigations on the sightings, all this silliness sank in the lapse of memory for the benefit of a more rational approach of the flying saucer problem. Science-fiction itself entered an era in which armies of authors invented extraterrestrial civilizations with their philosophical system, technology, language, alphabet, but these were all clearly understood as fiction based on scientific speculation and not “real stories”, except for a marginal fringe of unbalanced readers.
Many readers of Amazing Stories actually wrote letters of protests, estimating that promoting the obvious Deros fictions as “facts” was ridiculous, that science fiction just as the flying saucers issue deserved an adult treatment and that they were disgusted by are delirious fantasies of Palmer and Shaver. These went so far and the bad reception was so clear that in 1948 the Ziff-Davis group which financed the magazine decided to put an end to the publication of Palmer and Shaver's stories of Lemurian, Altantis and other Deros. Palmer left the Ziff-Davis group and resumed the publication of these stories later, republishing Shaver's exploits in his own magazine The Hidden World in 1961.
Jorge Luis Borgès, writer, poet, and thinker of Argentine nationality, a prolific builder of literary labyrinths heard from his friends of an odd history: there is a certain edition of Encyclopedia Britannica which mention of a mysterious country named Uqbar.
Borgès then writes, in 1944, “Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius”, a novel concerning the country of Uqbar on an imaginary planet of the “third orbit”, some sort of parallel world, which can be regarded as a metaphor of the Earth, whose inhabitants have a language based on a symbolic terms system, Borgès proposing a mini encyclopedia published bit by bits.
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Above: "Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius", by Jorge Luis Borgès.
The fictitious narrator of the story even “enters in possession” of a metal fragment coming from Tlon, and one can get lost entirely Borgès text since he scrambles the tracks sufficiently so that readers may wonder wether Tlon really exists.
Borgès also invents a Tlonian speculative physics inspired of the speculations of physicists of the time, about layers of space-time continuum as one will find later in the Ummo saga. With a little imagination, the reader may think that the physics of Tlon actually precedes the modern string theories, but of course the embryo of string theories existed elsewhere before the Borgès writing. Also, Tlonians use a duodecimal numbering system just like the Ummites will use, later.
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Above: One of the numerous maps of Tlon.
In 1964, French writer Robert Charroux, who wrote articles and books defending the idea that our civilization is under the influence of extraterrestrials which we now mistake for the gods in the past, received letters, typed with a typewriter, by a certain MY, who claims that they originate from extraterrestrial beings from planet Baavi.
The letters describe the civilization of Baavi as organized in a quasi-communist model resembling that of Mao-Tse-Tung's China, with a single nation on the planetary scale, a totalitarian planetary government, a single language with definitely Sumerian flavor. Baavi is supposed to be orbiting Proxima Centauri and to be of the size of Mars.
Baavians of course have underground bases on Earth, in the Maldives island among other places, as will the alleged Ummites. They colonized Mars 15.000 years ago, and of course they have created a hybrid race Martian/Baavian and performed many other exploits.
These extraterrestrials come to see us in flying saucers called vaidorges, having domes with laser guns to disintegrate meteorites, as the Umiites later. Their grammar, their chemistry, their system of measurement and their physics are also described, comprising ideas of varying speed of light in time, of twin universes of which one of them has a reversed direction of time flow, all elements which will be found in nearly identical state in the future letters from Ummo.
Below: Some receive letters from Ummo, as for myself, I received this message from Baavi via email in january 2003:
vaîdorge-bââle-c=17x-ring titanium in helium---liquid -alpha ? (1971 No-Mé)
geo coordinates go Lat--- -- - --lon---- - -- - -
bââvi- keywords >=?
IT IS YOU WHO MUST ANSWER NOW
“I have evidence, alas, that the good man (peace in his soul, for he deceased last year) was somewhat carried out by his conviction and a form of unconcern with respect to the real data.”
In 1965 in Madrid, Spain, there is a “Society of the Friends of the Space Visitors” (Sociedad de Amigos de los Visitantes del Espacio). It is them who will start the Ummo case, but there will be initially a true “draft of Ummo” created by these people. These people were for example “professor” Fernando Sesma Manzano, their leader, who was not at all a professor but a telegraph technician and claimed himself professor of cartography and cryptology without having the least notion of those, a man Villagrasa who was a construction engineer, police officer Garrido, a young lady Araujo which worked with the US embassy, from where supposed connected with the CIA were suggested, and a large bunch of eccentrics who met in the coffee-shop “the Merry Whale” in Madrid to discuss Gnosticism, philosophy, science, extraterrestrials and all other enthralling topics, to “brew some Gurdjeff's”, as one said at the time. Sesma publishes esoteric texts and diffuses the gospel of George Adamski which he regards as authentic contactee of the extraterrestrials.
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Above: The Lion coffee shop in Madrid. It is because the wall had this painting of a happy whale that the place was nicknamed “Ballena Alegre,” the Merry Whale.
So, in 1965, Sesma made it known that he is in contact with the extraterrestrial inhabitants of planet Auco, in orbit Alpha Centauri. Auco is a planet of peaceful civilization, a true Utopia. Sesma claims that he witnessed the landing of a spaceship of planet Auco in 1961. Then, a certain Saliano, in 1962 at the “Merry Whale”, had allegedly shown him letters written by the extraterrestrials of Auco, and all the gullible group marvels at Auco's idyllic philosophical system. The Ummites letters later claimed that Saliano was only one fictitious character invented by Sesma, actually Saliano was an invention acknowledged by an astrologer who was making fun of the credulity of “professor” Sesma and his court of admirers.
Anyways, all this is very successful and the artistic and intellectual Madrid comes to listen to “professor Sesma” and his friends at the Merry Whale. He now even shows an extraterrestrial “stone from space” with hieroglyphs extraordinaire, to show the disbelievers a “hard evidence” of the existence of the extraterrestrials: the stone was given to him by certain San Martin, paramedic at a mental institution, who in turn received it from an extraterrestrial being who descended a flying saucer in 1954.
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Above: Alberto San Martin's Space Stone. Sesma succeeded in the translatation of these nine symbols into “We come from celestial higher realms down to your divided world. Soon the celestial curve will be linked with the land's straight line. But, to avoid the shock, there will be a time of preliminary contacts. The encounter will be happy. You will lean on us and your cross will be less heavy to carry. You will surmount your basic instincts when we all shelter under the same roof. And you will finally know peace.”
But in 1966, planet Auco, the “space stone” became the sort of “evidence” more ridiculous and embarrassing to the delirious nature of Sesma's group than proof of the existence of planet Auco, and groups quickly forgot all this. Sesma destroyed the letters from planet Auco, which were not sophisticated enough anymore to convince anyone except some of his faithful. Then came Jordan Pena, and simultaneously planet Ummo phone calls and letters to Sesma, who writes “Ummo: another inhabited planet,” the founding paper of a new and more fashionable story...
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Above: “Ummo, another inhabited planet”,
by Fernando Sesma.
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Above: One of the maps of Ummo by Jordan Pena.
Actually, the routines of “letters written by the extraterrestrials who visit us” are numerous. There is plethora of such cases starting at least in 1904. There are the extraterrestrials from Alcyones in the Pleiades, there are those of Eduardo Meier, there are the contacts of Raphael Chacon in Arizona with the extraterrestrials of planet Zeti, there are the Rigelians which entrust their technical blueprints to a Cherokee Indian of Northern Carolina, there is Bob Renaud who transmits the knowledge of planet Korendor, “Cordwainer Smith” and his ton of writings dictated to him by inexhaustible inspiration, to the point that he needed psychiatric to stop the flood of thousands of pages, and so on.
If the Ummo affair is put into perspective, it does not seem at all as “without precedent” but clearly it is only one in many variations, one of the more recent and thus logically most refined, of a type of often practiced hoax, in which people of little credibility claimed to be in special connection with the inhabitants of a certain planet. Letters, objects, are often presented as “proof” of veracity of this type of stories. They include extraterrestrial “alphabets” or languages, “scientific data”, technical diagrams, predictions, cooking recipes, thousand details, indications on these extraterrestrials way of life, generally with definitely utopian flavors. “Ummo” is not at all something “unique” or “unprecedented”, as certain defender of the thesis that Ummites are really the extraterrestrials want us to believe. On the contrary, the very same group of people which announced the existence of Ummo extraterrestrials had already indulged in this kind of exercise previously, planet “Auco” being a draft of planet Ummo. Other reasons to conclude that the Ummo case is a hoax are presented elsewhere.
