Meade Layne
parapsychologist
Meade Layne (September 8, 1882 – May 12, 1961) was an American academic and early researcher of ufology and parapsychology, best known for proposing an early version of the interdimensional hypothesis to explain flying saucer sightings.
Early life
Layne was born in Viroqua, Wisconsin and raised in San Diego. Layne sold office supplies, worked as a real estate agent, managed an oil and gas company, and wrote poetry. He claimed to have earned a PhD in English literature. By 1934, Layne's poems had inspired both "Romanza" and "Enchanted Moon", two piano pieces by Barbara Sterling.
Career
Layne was the founder and first director of Borderland Sciences Research Associates. Prior to his public work studying ufos, Layne was professor at the University of Southern California, and English department head at Illinois Wesleyan University and Florida Southern College.
In February 1945, Meade began publishing a mimeographed newsletter titled "Round Robin".
On October 14, 1946, nearly a year before Kenneth Arnold's sighting that coined the term "flying saucers", Layne achieved national notoriety when the wire service carried a story of Layne's claims of a medium who was in telepathic communication with people in a space ship.
The following year, during the 1947 flying disc craze, media again quoted Layne on his "ether ship" theories.
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This entry incorporates text from “Meade Layne” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.