A [Psycho] Analysis of the Leo Dworshak 1932 UFO contact tale(s)

Going through Leo Dworshak’s 2003 account of alleged several UFO encounters in 1932, including a tour by extraterrestrials of their ship, one finds details that just don’t add up. For instance…

While Mr. Dworshak’s litany of his and his brother’s farm living seem genuine, they are fraught with inaccuracies, that one of our fellows (who comes from a long-time farming family of some note) points out.

The two boys, one twelve (Mike) and the older one (Leo) would have been subject to the duties of farming on a regular, grueling day, especially during the August/September time-frame, which is the period just before harvest when farmers prepare for the final days of crop care, to insure the farm remains economically viable.

The period recounted was during the heart of the great American Depression, and the boys (the only help that their father-farmer had at his disposal) would not be allowed to take off for the UFO sojourns recounted, for the amount of time Mr. Dworshak provides. It’s not feasible or realistic.

Moreover, the dinners (pork, mashed potatoes, fresh beans) Mr. Dworshak noted were out of place for depression area farmers, and Killdeer, North Dakota was hard hit by the depression as noted by records of the time.

(That the dinner scraps were given to the farm’s animals also doesn’t ring true.)

Mr. Dworshak relates the financial reality in the last page [71] of his small book:

“Dad … was badly hurt financially by the Depression and lost a large amount of money in a packing house business that failed between  1929 and 1930.”

The boys, having stumbled upon the alleged craft they first spotted in 1932, finally, after a few sightings, get to meet the craft’s insiders and get an offer to enter the craft for a tour.

They had to go through a “process” to eliminate “germs” … and when the alleged extraterrestrials told the boys to take off their clothes to enter the craft – more on this aspect later here – Mr. Dworshak writes that he was glad both he and his brother had taken a bath the night before.

The area was in a severe drought, and baths for anyone would have been rare, and surely for boys not doing farm work (as Mr. Dworshak’s “memoir” indicates).

Once, during a visit inside the craft, Mr, Dworshak writes that he saw clouds, through the shell of the ship, in the night sky and on a monitor of some kind.

The area was, again, in the midst of that severe drought. Clouds would be rare or non-existent.

The farm-life depicted by Mr. Dworshak was atypical and actually errant, considering the context (of 1932 in Killdeer, North Dakota).

But those things aside, it’s the ongoing contact and rumination about the “men” visitors Mr. Dworshak met as a boy and continued to meet well into the 1960s, from which he accumulated  his socialistic-theology about the visitors and their purpose for visiting the Earth.

(Why they chose Killdeer, North Dakota, as they were determined to thwart a possible future ecological Earth disaster, doesn’t make sense. Nothing untoward happened in the Killdeer area during the ensuing years.)

Mr. Dworshak fixates on a group of twelve (and that number for other elements of his “memoir”) who supposedly live among us, trying to offer help with the troubles that beset mankind, but are ignored by those they’ve approached.

The page after page of quasi-new age jargon and thought is not far removed from Adamski’s motivations of his space brothers, or that of other 1950s contactees.

The taking off of clothes to enter the ship, not once when he was a boy but later in life also, is like other sexual-like incidents one finds in contactee stories.

That Mr. Dworshak is reminded of priests – he was a German Catholic – when he was with his visitors can lead one to a surmise, but that isn’t necessary to derive an explanation for Mr. Dworshak’s odd but interesting story.

One needn’t employ the theories of Mimesis by Erich Auerbach to understand the subtext of Mr. Dworshak’s extended hallucination(s).

Mr. Dworshak was afflicted by one of several possible dissociative states or hallucinatory etiologies, including memory hallucination or psycho-sensorial hallucination or vestibular hallucination.

But I think there is the possibility, without having access to Mr. Dworshak’s medical records but considering his age, that he suffered diabetic hallucinosis.

(His reminiscences are also like those who suffer oneirica deliria.)

What we have is a man who is not insane but contained by an event or events in his past that affected him and his memory of something traumatic that happened with him and his beloved brother in 1932, continuing into a period that followed his brother’s death in Korea in 1950.

Nowhere did Mr. Dworshak provide anything tangible or specific he allegedly learned from his visitor friends.

His conversations with his space friends, from another galaxy, over the years were so generic as to be inadequately fanciful (thus the lack mimetic consideration).

Now, should we dismiss, out of hand, his account(s)? That would seem to be the intellectual thing to do, however…

Mr. Dworshak may have had, despite the incongruity and insubstantial body of his stories and remembrances, a true contact with something alien or extraterrestrial over the years, but it seems highly unlikely; his story seems fictional and not in a good way.

Either way, his story is odd and interesting, but not in the UFO sense but, rather, in a psychoanalytic way, much as the Betty/Barney Hill episode is or the Travis Walton “abduction” and others in ufological lore.

What causes persons to recount, not as contrived falsehoods necessarily, such tales as that of Mr. Dworshak is grist for study – not UFO study but psychological or neurological study.

This is one shallow UFO tale that can either be dismissed or accepted as a kind of reality, a reality that has nothing to do with the UFO phenomenon except as a template for mental conditions that provoke UFO reports which interfere with the few actual reports of UFOs that may represent something truly odd and interesting.

RR