By Richard Toronto

XIn July 1978, after 22 years of fruitless effort, Trevor James Constable informed me that he was giving up UFO research. "I've given them an overdose," he said of his readers. "It'll take another 20 years to go down. And by that time, I won't be here and somebody else will have carried it on. You have to be coldly factual about these things."

XThe "overdose" he was talking about was the three books he'd published, all of them relating in one way or another to his unusual theory on the origins of UFOs: "They Live in the Sky," "The Cosmic Pulse of Life" and "Sky Creatures." Each book argues that at least some UFOs are biological in nature. Some UFOlogists call them "space animals;" but Constable called them "critters." As proof of their existence, he offered photographs taken with infrared film, which depict his creatures "swimming" through the atmosphere.

XI was surprised to hear as I chatted with Constable, that few researchers have even attempted to duplicate his experiments. In fact, very few UFOlogists have been willing to consider the notion of biological UFOs, and Constable is careful to point out he was not the first to do so.

XThat honor, he said, went to John Philip Bessor, whom Constable described as the "grand daddy of the critter theory." (Bessor, on the other hand, emphatically insisted, "I am not the grand daddy of the idea, simply the originator!")

XDuring the late 1940's, Bessor noticed that many UFOs exhibited characteristics of so-called paranormal phenomena.

X"The 'skipping' motion is comparable to the poltergeist-propelled objects of a haunted house," he said. "Such things often waver or skip in transit. Then, too, ghosts are always '10 feet ahead' of a pursuer...Their sudden disappearance 'in mid-air' is comparable to a ghost's dematerialization."

XFrom this observation, Bessor developed the concept of the "ideoplasm," a primitive, ectoplasmic creature "originating in the stratosphere-ionosphere, capable of materialization and dematerialization."

XThese creatures, according to Bessor's theory, rank alongside oysters and fish in intelligence. His official entry into the bio-UFO field came in the form of a letter to the Air Materiel Command at Wright Air Force Base in July 1947. In it, he outlined his space animal theory of UFOs and spiced his conjecture with historical descriptions of "gelatinous meteors."

XThese gelatinous meteors had troubled early astronomers for years. As early as 1819, Rufus Graves, a lecturer in chemistry at Dartmouth College, described an odd material he found after a meteor shower: a "buff colored, pulpy substance of the consistence of good, soft soap, of an offensive suffocating smell. A few minutes' exposure to the atmosphere changed the buff into a livid color resembling venous blood. It was observed to attract moisture readily from the air." There was an outbreak of a similar phenomenon, resembling purplish blobs in 1973. These blobs were found climbing telephone poles in suburban Dallas, Texas.

XWhatever they are, such phenomena have been around for centuries. Bessor noted that the earliest account he had found was from 1650, at which time the objects were called "nostocs."

XIn May 1977, I was on my way to the Mojave Desert to interview the famous flying saucer contactee George Van Tassel. During the previous year, I'd read Constable's "Cosmic Pulse of Life," with its chapters on critters, which fascinated me.

XI armed myself with four rolls of high-speed infrared film and determined to photograph -- something. Constable had concluded that the rare, unpolluted air of the high desert was best suited for photographing critters. I arrived at the Yucca Valley/Giant Rock Airport, where Constable had experimented in the late 1950s.

XI set up shop on a quiet road just outside Apple Valley near Victorville, and shot off a couple rolls of film, arcing my camera in a 180-degree sweep across the horizon. Because the sun had just set behind the mountains, I had no fear of lens flare spoiling my shots. I labeled the film containers and put them away. Next night, I repeated the experiment. I couldn't develop the film until my return home.

XWhen the negatives were processed, I glanced over them quickly. A dud, I thought, so they hung from the ceiling for a week until a friend came by and took an interest in them.

X"What are these?" he asked. I told him the story. He subsequently took it upon himself to examine each frame carefully, something I should have done.

X"Look at this!" he said after scrutinizing one particular frame with a telephone pole reference point. I saw a torpedo-shaped object reminiscent of Constable's critters floating behind the telephone wires. I was needless to say, amazed. After thoroughly going over each frame with a magnifying glass, I found an even stranger one -- a "flying hamburger" cruising over the desert mountains. Although these were the only two productive frames out of 144, they suggested that Bessor and Constable were onto something -- these things are flitting around the atmosphere, it seemed.

XNothing is mysterious about the workings of Kodak high speed infrared film. Kodak outlines its handling on each box and Constable detailed his methods in all three of his books. I have tried different methods -- using it with and without filters and loading it with and without a changing bag. Without the bag, several of the initial frames will be fogged. For the sake of control, it is advisable to use the bag to install and remove infrared film from the camera, despite its clumsiness in the field.

XMy first small success pushed me to further experimentation. Just for the record (and for the purpose of saving myself continual trips to the high desert) I tried shooting in my own area. I walked barely six blocks from my house to a hill behind a local cemetery -- a quiet spot with an expansive view toward distant mountains, beyond a large marsh.

XShooting in a circle, as I did before, still not seeing anything but clear sky after sunset, I got more results. Since the cemetery was but 200 feet above sea level, I refuted Constable's theory that best results could only be obtained in high mountain areas.

XThen things began to change. Instead of the usual "critter/UFO" shapes I was used to, I noticed I was getting oddball shapes that resembled neither UFOs nor critters. These anomalies-within-the-anomaly resembled funnels. Since infrared film picks up any type of heat source, it appeared I had found either a new type of critter or another phenomenon.

XAnother odd characteristic of these objects was their inconsistent appearance on the film. One frame might contain one or several objects, while the frame before or after it had nothing. On a good evening, nearly every frame contained some new revelation. It was time, I decided, to send some negatives to Kodak for scrutiny. Maybe this would add a new dimension to this.

XI sent Kodak three strips of critter film, but made no claim about their origin. I simply asked if something was wrong with the film. A month later, I got the official answer: no, said the tech person, the film was in good condition at the time it was shot. The effects were caused, the company suggested, by nothing more than drying spots and finger marks on the film -- possibly hasty removal of the film from the film canister.

XThis was hard to swallow, since by this time I had been poring over these things for months, and was well aware of what drying spots and finger marks look like. As a photographer who'd been handling film for 10 years, I considered Kodak's letter a blow to my photographer's ego. So I snapped another roll and sent it to a lab for processing -- the result? More critters. These "fingerprints" were becoming more of a mystery, or maybe Kodak had never heard about space blobs.

XEnter D. Scott Rogo, or I should say the late D. Scott Rogo, parapsychologist. Scott dropped by my house to check over the photographs that were piling up in Constable's favor. After a few questions, he told me his theory.

X"Thoughtgraphy," he said. "They are psychic photos in which the photographer tunes images onto the film emulsion himself."

XHmmm. This might explain the incongruous images that were turning up, like the funnels. I was still unconvinced, however, that all of these could be psychic in origin. Many of them exhibited what appeared to be in motion at the time the photo was taken. At Constables's home in San Pedro, I had seen actual movie film that showed a fish-like critter, complete with mouth and head, moving in the sky. He'd taken it through the window of a jumbo jet en route to California from Hawaii.

XLater, I found out Rogo isn't the only one with a theory about the photos. Donald Cyr, editor of "Stonehenge Viewpoint" at that time, believed the funnel represented a "halo pillar" formed of ice crystals and very rarely seen by modern man. A Santa Monica researcher decided it was a "magnetic ingress point" where gravity and light refuse to work right. And a man from Chicago speculated that I had photographed energy emanating from a fault line in the earth. This appeared to be getting far afield from the original critter work. I wondered where it would lead.

XThe answer soon became painfully apparent -- I got NO results for months; in fact, 1978 was not a good year for ideoplasms. The critters -- at least the more spectacular ones to which I had grown accustomed -- had vanished. Constable advised sticking to my tried and true vantage point behind the cemetery, but even that didn't help. He also told me not to try so hard to capturing the anomalies, that I should "take it easy." Had all this attention made me lose my touch? Or were the ideoplasms really linked somehow to a psychic sense I'd lost?

XMy fears as it turned out, were unfounded. I continued to get results but less frequently and less spectacularly than before. The dwindling of my elusive subjects puzzled me.

XOne piece of photo paraphernalia Constable recommended but I was unable to find was an 18A filter for my lens. At first, I thought this might help, but have since changed my mind. The coveted 18A filter is hard to come by for some reason. It allows only infrared light waves to hit the film plane. Constable ceased using this filter and was getting critter anomalies with Kodak Ektachrome super 8mm movie film with no gimmicks. I have on file, a black and white shot of a small critter, taken unknowingly in Orlando, Florida while I was vacationing there. I have seen ideoplasm photographs taken by tourists purely by chance, on ordinary black and white film.

XThe phenomenon, while far from cooperative, is definitely there.

XJust what determines the frequency with which these anomalies appear on film? And why have so-called critters (gelatinous meteors) been associated with meteor showers throughout history?

XBessor believes the ideoplasms may be taking refuge from upper atmosphere disturbances when they are sighted here on earth. His studies of the books of Charles Fort gave him a clue.

XWriting in M.K. Jessup's "The UFO Annual," Bessor remarked "I noted that the 1870s, '80s and '90s saw record and near record-breaking weather and also a tremendous number of flying saucer reports. This leads me to suppose that there is a cyclic recurrence of periods of freak weather and aerial phenomena. I think we can be justified in assuming that the solar or cosmic disturbances in space which affect freak weather also cause the "flying saucers" to "migrate" to more dense atmosphere, coming within our range of observation. Since 1946, there have appeared in our papers numerous accounts of migrations of fishes into waters previously foreign to them, and of the intrusion of wolves, bears and other wild animals into areas in which they had never before been observed."

XThe matter of critter photography, which appeared to be simple at first, turned out to be more complicated than I had imagined. As Constable taught, patience is mandatory in this work -- patience and persistence.

XThe interested researcher will find the ideoplasm field wide open. The first, positive results are enough to make further investment of time and money worthwhile. Don't wait for scientists to give this a seal of approval. The gelatinous meteors are there for those which a knack to find them and a roll of infrared film.