Universism

Universism is the name given here to Vidkun Quisling’s philosophy, which included speculation about life on other planets. Its importance in the book lies less in a fully described doctrine than in the path it opened: after Quisling’s execution, some Norwegian nationalist activists found that postwar interest in UFOs could be joined to Universist ideas. The account traces that convergence through the political milieu around Anders Lange, while keeping it distinct from the parallel revival of Norse religion and from later Black Metal interpretations of ancestral myth.

Universism and postwar UFO speculation

The book places Universism within a longer Norwegian right-wing and nationalist interest in UFO lore. It suggests that one source of this overlap may have been Quisling’s thinking about life on other planets. In the postwar vacuum left by his execution for treason, some political activists found that new speculation about flying saucers could fit alongside elements of Universism. The relationship is described as a convergence, not as proof that all nationalist UFO enthusiasts shared one doctrine or organized movement.

That qualification matters to the account. UFO speculation could travel between political and nonpolitical interests: the subject appealed to readers curious about extraterrestrial spacecraft, even when their interest did not begin with nationalism. Universism therefore appears not as an isolated system with a neatly bounded membership, but as one intellectual strand that could make contact with a wider postwar fascination.

Anders Lange and Hundebladet

Anders Lange provides the book’s clearest example of how such ideas circulated. In the 1930s, he served as secretary of Fedrelandslaget, an ultra-patriotic and strongly anti-communist organization. Its best-known figure was Fridtjof Nansen, whose polar expeditions and relief work in the famine-stricken Soviet Union made him a national icon; during the relief effort, Quisling was among his trusted helpers. The account nevertheless cautions against treating Lange as Quisling’s direct successor.

Lange’s own politics shifted over time without losing their racial dimension. In his youth he described himself as a fascist and supporter of Mussolini. After the war, he became a fierce opponent of state intervention in private life, having distanced himself from totalitarian opinions. This trajectory places him in a related political landscape, but does not establish a direct line of ideological succession from Quisling.

In 1948 Lange began publishing Hundebladet, initially an extension of his interest in dogs and kennel-keeping. Its subject matter soon broadened. Lange’s tolerant editorial policy allowed the newsletter to become a meeting point for varied alternative perspectives, including regular items about flying saucers. The book suggests that Lange may have understood this interest as an extension of Quisling’s Universism, while emphasizing the practical result: the publication also attracted readers whose chief concern was extraterrestrial spacecraft rather than politics.

A separate ancestral-religious current

The account sets this UFO history beside, but does not merge it with, the renewed interest in Norse ancestral religion. Bathory’s Blood Fire Death marked a turn from the band’s early Satanic horror themes toward heathen mythological inheritance; the book presents that turn as influential on later Black Metal. Vikernes, in turn, described Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces and framed Norse figures as archetypes of the Northern race. These claims concern ancestral identity and myth, not Universism’s speculation about life on other planets.

The distinction remains important where the two currents approach the same nationalist milieu. The book notes that some contemporary Norwegian organizations held gatherings involving blot, or symbolic sacrifice, and that at least one heathen group, Draupnir, had recognition as a religious organization from the Norwegian government. It explicitly states that Nordic religious practitioners had no specific connection to Black Metal. Public association with the scene, intensified by Vikernes’s statements to the press, instead made it harder for those groups to dispel assumptions that they shared its beliefs. Universism belongs to the account’s history of nationalist and UFO speculation; the ancestral-religious revival is a neighboring, distinct development.