June 1952: Psychic Spies from Space

Mental powers again propel the plot of the Captain Comet exploit Eyes of Other Worlds (Strange Adventures 21, June 1952).

Experiments with a Zener deck — those symbolic cards of basic shapes developed in the 1930s by psychologist Karl Zener to test for extrasensory perception — show that Prof. Zackro’s Midwest University students have suddenly developed perfect clairvoyance.

Noting that one of Zackro’s students guessed an entire deck correctly, Comet instantly calculates the odds against that to be 1,587,348,721 to 1.

“It’s almost as if some outside power had helped her, but – wait a second!”

The superhero’s “futuristic ray-detecting vision” spots beams from the sky striking the students when they answer the questions. Then he learns that two of Zackro’s students were arrested when they “wandered into government land by accident.”

Adding up two and two, the Man of Destiny gets “spying from space” as an answer.

The students are secretly being used by yellow-skinned, gnome-like aliens operating from the dumbbell-shaped asteroid Eros. In fact, they look a little like the Ferengi in Star Trek, and prove to be just as greedy — in this case for Earth’s nuclear weapons, which they plan to destroy to clear the way for planetary invasion.

To that end, the aliens have been using Zackro and his students as “human television transmitters.”

This is the second Captain Comet story in a row to feature a mind-control theme. “Brainwashing” was a hot topic in the 1950s, offered as an explanation for how the Chinese government appeared to make people conform.

Tracing the spy beams to the asteroid, the superhero is confronted by the Erotians, who were expecting him. They force him to surrender by threatening Zackro’s life, and intend to execute Comet with an energy gun.

Overhearing one of the puzzled aliens describe a forest fire as a “huge red wind” that seems to devour trees, the Man of Destiny warns his would-be executioner to abandon his plan. The Erotian ignores him and fires, igniting a book of matches in Comet’s pocket and causing the asteroid’s hydrogen-rich atmosphere to explode in flame.

Captain Comet, the sole survivor, races away in the Cometeer, thinking, “Despite the high level of Eros science, they had never discovered fire! Even their ship motors were flameless — gravity-powered — as I found out! That’s why a forest fire mystified them!”

This tale’s popular culture reflection of American Cold War espionage fears is pretty obvious. Even the “psychic spying” angle had its counterpart in real life.

“Soviet research on telepathy dates from the early 1920s when a program was established at the Institute for Brain Research at Leningrad State University,” Scientific American magazine noted. “The Soviets appear to have been fascinated with telepathy, which they called ‘biological communication,’ as a ship-to-shore way of communicating with submarines without using electronic equipment. They also considered training their cosmonauts to develop and use precognitive abilities to ‘foresee and to avoid accidents in space.’”

Captain Comet’s life was saved by the fact that he was carrying a simple book of matches, but why did he have them? Maybe because a lot of Americans smoked in the 1950s. In 1965, 45 percent of Americans were smokers. By 2015, that figure had fallen to about 15 percent.

Eros is a real asteroid, by the way, discovered 54 years before Strange Adventures 21 was published. Eros’ surface gravity varies because the asteroid is not a sphere but an elongated peanut- or dumbbell-shaped object. It’s full of aluminum, gold and platinum, a fact we learned when the NEAR (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) Shoemaker spacecraft landed on Eros in 2001.

No trace left of the little yellow guys, I’m afraid.

DC Comics on the newsstands in April 1952