audiobook for personal listening, made of online 
ebook of, LOOKING FOR ORTHON.

The story of George Adamski,
the first flying saucer contactee,
and how he changed the world.
book from 2001, of colin bennett. 

Numbers read are mainly original page numbers.Word errors may occur due to scanning errors.

Foreword.
in a thousand years time, if there are still people studying history, some is sure to ask, what is the most important thing that happened in the
twentieth century? What will be the answer to that, I wonder? Almost certainly it will be quite different from anything we would think of today. In
that case, an unlikely guess is more likely to come true than a likely one.
So Colin Bennett is on the right track in suggesting something that few
would suggest—that the defining moment of the twentieth century will
prove to be 12:30 pm on Thursday, November 20, 1952, when George
Adamski met Orthon, a long-haired youth from Venus. It happened in the
Californian desert in the presence of witnesses. From that moment the cat
was out of the bag, the space people were among us and nothing has ever
been the same since.

That is a provocative thesis. But evidence has been building up over
the near-fifty years, from 1953 and the publication of Adamskis worldwide best seller, Flying Saucers Have Landed, which he co-wrote with
Desmond Leslie. Since then images of the UFO and the space alien have
continued to haunt us. The effects of this on popular culture are to be seen
everywhere and, as Bennett points out, UFOs and space imagery has long
outlasted the various fads and fashions that have since arisen. In the modern imagination the UFO is a constant, not just a spacecraft but a reminder
that the world is not as rational as our educators pretend.
The prophetic Carl Jung was quick to see what was happening. In
1959 he published a startling book on flying saucers, accepting their reality and interpreting them as signs and portents of the ancient gods, duly
returning to change our way of thinking and initiate a new age. It was
Jungs perspicacity, among other things, that led me in 1967 to write The
Flying Saucer Vision. I just could not resist drawing attention to a phenomenon which, even though it was changing peoples minds and lives—
introducing new interests and perspectives—was scornfully ignored by the
Authorities. It was not just state officials who hated and mocked at any
mention of UFOs. Colin Bennett is quite right in what he says here, that in


the world of art and literature, during and after Adamskis time, talk of
UFOs and related subjects was in no way cool, hip, PC or the proper
thing. Right-wing types disliked it for upsetting established patterns of
thought, while the intellectuals saw it as a plot to divert attention from
their revolution. This has always been considered a radical subject, and
for good reason, and that is why writers of Colin Bennetts quality are
attracted to it.
I really enjoyed this book, the authors wit and wisdom and the spirit
in which he deals with the great events of our time. His story is about the
current revolution in cosmology—the way we understand the world—and
the switch from the old categorical judgmental approach to a more accepting and inclusive view of reality. He begins with George Adamski, and
why not? He was an impressive old rogue, like Madame Blavatsky and in
the same tradition. Such people, according to Plato are the kind whom the
gods choose to enlighten us. I am sure that is right, and that changes in our
minds are brought about by the gods, in their due seasons and often
through highly dubious characters.
John Michell.




Introduction.
in 1952 a Polish immigrant who worked in a restaurant on Mt. Palomar,
California, claimed that he had made contact with an extraterrestrial
being in the Nevada desert. It wasn’t the first time in history that a human
being had made such a claim, nor would it be the last. But this particular
meeting has reverberated to this day, influencing the very core of our contemporary culture.
The immigrants name was George Adamski. Over the years that followed he would document his claim with photographs of flying saucers,
dozen and dozen of photographs, in fact, and three books on his quite fantastic adventures. The first of these, Flying Saucers Have Landed, pub-
lished  in September 1953 in conjunction with the British writer Desmond
Leslie, quickly became a bestseller and brought Adamski worldwide
fame.

Flying Saucers Have Landed is a masterpiece. It is a story of about
our perception of history, the nature of technological power, and just who
or what exactly governs the forces of modern belief. Its textual planes are
like the distortions of a mediaeval map. Just one of its achievements is that
it makes the ordered Cartesian perspectives of conventional literature look
as if they have a similar distortion. In doing so, it suggests that perhaps the
UFO itself lives between the folds of such cultural warps as did the sea
serpents of old maps, appearing on most unsuitable and inconvenient
occasions to baffle, hypnotize, and infuriate.

To understand the Adamski phenomenon, we must ask whether a text
is a mere something enclosed between pages, written by clever people
with refined skills, or whether it should be considered as a life form in
itself. One thing is certain: if we ever lose such bad and mad books as
those of George Adamski, we will lose a delicately-balanced psychic
pond-life as holy and valuable to us as the rain-forest or the midwife toad.
Many people who met George Adamski commented on his considerable charm and his good appearance and address. These things certainly
helped him on his world tour of 1959, during which he met Royalty and


leading figures in military and intelligence, and acquired a mass of followers in many countries. He managed to enter power structures with ease,
just as did the travelling astrologers and alchemists of old. The occultists
Paracelsus, Agrippa, and Albertus Magnus, all tell that when one world
enters another and goes out again,after no matter how brief a stay, it
is never possible to get the furniture back in place. That is because
thinking never really ceases to be a form of dreaming. For good or ill,
when we imagine, we create a form of life, that is a seeding of
pictures and possibilities, a watering of secret hopes, private fears,
and hidden ambitions.

Despite his often comically hypocritical denials, Adamski was
a classic magus. In this, he was right in the center of a war not of
facts versus fiction, but of possibilities and allowances. In the million acres of nonsense published  about occultism, few realize that
nothing is created by the sorcerer so much as allowed. It is a dim soul indeed who does not want to see the
world turned upside down. There can be such a hidden subversive pressure
built up in psychic realms that there is seepage of part-worlds through a
membrane to a social realization. Using these ideo-associative forces, an
almost penniless Adamski pulled together high-level folk in a manner
almost impossible to achieve by any other means. The occultist, like the
pornographer, merely sets fire to imaginations. He knows what people
really want. In this, the occultist is a ruthless salesman.
Adamskis experience was the first modern powerful suggestion, with
early technological trimmings, of a prototype “pan-dimensional  reality,
and we had better get used to that situation, because a hybrid state of
affairs is the microcosm of our Entertainment State.2 The thousand-channel consumer society hardly deals with the mechanical objective realities
of the previous hard-wired society. The death of a soap character is just as
important a “causation  as economic need or social stress. In this intermediate state, live aliens, the prototypes of which are the “Space Brothers 
whom Adamski met in the Nevada desert.
It should come as no surprise that he angered the scientific establish-
ment of his time. He was accused of being a compete impostor, yet time
and again that cap would not stay on his head, being always thrown off by
some impossibly bizarre sighting, curious incident, or magnificent coincidence that would somehow, inexplicably, give his extraordinary theories
and claims some shred of credence.

Yet, despite the success of his books and his rise to fame, by the early
1960s Adamski had become a deeply disappointed man. Through scandals
and accusations of every kidney, his worldwide support had dwindled, and
many of his closest friends had deserted him. He died aged 74 on the 23rd
of April 1965.

Did Adamski really encounter an extraterrestrial? Or were his first
and his subsequent contacts and his many films and photographs all hoaxes? Was Adamski an impostor, or indeed a madman, who was out to fool
the world? Or did he trip into some parallel reality that we are only dimly
aware of? This book contends that whatever the truth of the matter—and
the truth is not as easy to untangle as the skeptics would like—the influence of George Adamskis claim was enormous, and the term flying
saucer will be forever associated with his name.
Just one of the strange things about these strange aerial forms is that
is that a half-century after his death, they are still with us in the form of
the UFO, or Unidentified Flying Object. The crescent-shaped disks that
American pilot Kenneth Arnold first saw flying by Mount Rainier in 1947,
make flying saucers older even than Rock n’ Roll. Strangely, the flying
saucer has not aged with this world.

Though Adamski received ridicule in plenty for claiming to have contacted beings from other worlds, nevertheless, his dome-shaped flying
saucers, along with the bikini bathing suit, remain with us from the time
of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Korean War. It could
be said that Shakespeare didn’t do too badly considering he could not


write about politics, sex, or religion. The UFO does very well therefore,
considering it has nothing to do with Race and Class, Drugs, Economics,
War, or Terrorism. It has, of course, always been strong on entertainment
value, stronger even than science, and far less destructive. In the time
since the birth of the UFO, everything has changed, from jokes to the
color of socks, but not the battle-royal between believers in UFOs and scientists and skeptics.
This battle appears at times to be a fight between different sets of
wall-papering circus-clowns, and fifty years later this rather simple
extended joke does not show any sign.atall of running out of steam. Few
jokes last that long, and thus both saucers and bikini both are magically
suggestive icons, pure unadulterated image-stuff which has triumphed in
time. Both are beyond all sense, fact, and rationale, those tyrannical elements of an old and fading Industrial Time. The “facts  of the late 1940s
and early 1950s are gone; the scientific theories have been largely superseded, the clothes, conversations and cars of over fifty years ago have van-
ished, but the “flying saucer  and the swimsuit shaped like a Pacific
nuclear practice range is still very much with us.

Perhaps both the bikini and that which we now call the UFO stayed
with us because we like reminding ourselves that the world is never quite
completely real. To many who feel that they live under the claustrophobic
oppression of a “factual  culture that is practically destroying all land, sea,
and air, that is a comforting thought. We bind such things to our hearts
like pressed leaves whose personal code tells us that both Matter and
Experience are conspiracies. As such their plots can be subverted, and the
good news is that there are rumors of guerrillas in the hills, tales of lights
in the forest at midnight, and if we believe George Adamski for even a
second, we may even see a White Rabbit or two, if we keep our eyes open.
Though Adamski has become a much-derided figure since his death,
perhaps he will have the last laugh, if only because his doughnut and hamburger-shapes are still up there on a thousand and one nights of the world.
It is as if the Mount Palomar restaurant of his life-long friend Alice K.
Wells had exploded into the air and was still coming down with countless
scores of the hot-plate favorites Adamski himself must have sold to many
ankle-socked and short-panted school parties from all over America.
 13
Some of these young visitors might now struggle to recall the face of the
man whose dome-shaped flying saucers are like a rain of frogs. They still
have housewives running into police stations, truck drivers consulting
psychiatrists; they still produce anger from scientists, denials from governments, and very strange behavior from the Intelligence Services and
the “disinterested  Armed Forces of the major nations. On occasion even,
a blond male sylph of the kind to which Adamski appears to have been
partial, still steps out of a landed UFO that has been detected by radar,
leaves ground-impressions, and has been seen by multiple witnesses.
Adamski is therefore a battlement ghost from the immediate post-war
world, appearing at the stroke of midnight to remind us of the disturbingly
yet exciting possibility that what we call “reality  may be far more scandalous an affair than previously thought. This is both the awe and fear at
the heart of the UFO experience. Frequently baffled and even insulted is
that very intellect which gropes for its fundamental nature. As with the
Oswaid Syndrome, the UFO reveals events and implicit connections,
movements of people, materials, and ideas, which hint at a world-order so
outrageous it is almost beyond all belief. The UFO culture that thrived
after Adamski still reminds us of the night-side of both Man and Nature:
we experience a phenomenon that is infuriating, subversive, and quite
impossible in its behavior.
But ultimately what it most important about George Adamski is that
he structured one of the most blatant acts of visionary cheek of the twenti-eth century. Far cleverer men have done far less. Though towards the end
of his life he became a confused man, and was driven to making up lots of
stories, he sounded many alarm bells within deep cultural bedrock. In
telling such tales, like many world-shakers, Adamski broke all the rules,
and the world couldn’t quite get all the pieces back again.
In this sense history has extremely difficulty in getting rid of Adamski
and his deliciously silly stories. We haven’t done with him yet. We need
him if only because his views are quite wonderfully absurd. He is therefore nearer the truth of Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, and Alfred Jarry than
the truth of the strange form of Theosophical Christianity that he followed. While the UFO is with us, we are stuck with him as one of the
Founding Fathers of Ufology. Like the proverbial tin-can tied to a cats tail,
he rattles through our dreams, shaming, embarrassing yet thrilling us still

with a perverse intellectual eroticism which is absolutely irresistible. Such
folk as he are healthy reminders that the truth may not be nearly as sober
as we would like it to be. He suggests to us also that the old box of tricks
we call “reality  may prove finally to be that fraudulent old rascal we
always secretly knew it was.
The question might well be asked as to why, in an age dominated by
democracy and scientific rationalism, hasn’t all this nonsense about flying
saucers been put into the museum, along with the Left, the Twist, the
Class-War, the Revolution, Punk, and Flower Power? From one point, at
least, its attraction holds no secret: most of us love to see Authority baffled, chasing its tail, its tools of control and oppression no longer of any
use. The flying saucer, like the modern UFO, never held persons or places
in great respect, appearing to a group of starving peasants in Mexico just
as readily as to an airline pilot over the Atlantic. It is also still capable of
generating new interest sectors, new shapes, and new roles of its developing self, such as different kinds of abduction scenarios. As soon as media
or the various military or technological establishments either ignore it, or
put it down, it streaks across the sky, frightening motorists and cows in
fields. It appears on radar, leaves ground traces, and as soon as comes the
scientific denial, it is seen by policemen on bicycles, pilots in the Gulf,
and housewives pegging clothes on a line. One thing is sure: the UFO
greedily dines off all explanations, whether earth-lights, searchlights, little
green men, creatures from other dimensions, super-bees, or intelligent
cabbages.
When we view the shattered life that Adamski weaves between his
books, we glimpse multiple dimensions of establishment and military
intrigue, and Intelligence allied with conspiracy. Like many visionaries,
his life was finally a broken affair, fragmentary and incomplete, and
almost as unbelievable as a Cottingley fairy photograph. But if humanity
ever loses such heroism born of Adamskis deep refusal to believe in the
world as received, it will be lost forever. If he had ever looked down from
his tightrope, he would certainly have fallen, another victim of the breathless cheek of the sheer intellectual eroticism of all prophecy and vision. If
most people are terrified by the unusual, those whose lives are committed
to thought (as Adamskis life certainly was), are equally disturbed by the
everyday mundane scale of affairs. They see any social conformity as a



vast imposture, just as evil as more obvious moral demons.
Adamski had something in him of the dark genius of the covered
wagon and riverboat rascals of Mark Twain and Herman Melville. Like
Howard Hughes and L. Ron Hubbard, he brought down fire, if not from
heaven, certainly from an elemental somewhere. But unlike Hughes and
Hubbard, he didn’t make any money, and so America ignored him. But
America will have to face Adamski sooner or later, and bring him, if
reluctantly, into the pantheon of scarred American heroes.
Like many with a streak of genius, he didn’t really know the difference between work and play, dream and religious impulse, inspiration and
rational thought. But his faulty intellectual grasp saved him: it allowed
him to play with all these things, and in playing he chanced upon something that talked to him. But like Francois Seurel in Aiain-Fourniers novel
Le Grand Meaulnes, Adamski was to lose the enchanted house in the forest that once he saw. Like Ahab, the quest finally consumed him, and like
Hemingways Old Man, he was left with only fragments of wonder as a
magical defiance of time and decay.

When we say that what Adamski saw was created by his “imagination,  we show how far our world has fallen, not progressed. We seem to
have forgotten that there is nothing at all which is not conceived by the
imagination, and that includes “fact  in itself. In forgetting this, we have
lost the long trail between the ravings of visionaries in back rooms, the
launch of a space station, and the death of a President. If Adamskis life
can do anything at all, it can teach us how to rediscover that trail.


CHAPTER 1,
When We Imagine, We
Create a Form of Life.
george Adamski was born in Poland on the 17th of April 1891 of par  Joseph and Frances Adamski. When he was two years old, his
family immigrated to Dunkirk, New York, where he grew up in poor circumstances. An FBI memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover of the 28th of
January 1953, mentions three sisters,3 but no brother. This is odd because
on occasion Adamski talked of a younger brother who he said was a
priest, and who came to Palomar Gardens to see him occasionally.
Adamski had little education, and he took what was one of the few
options open to him, and joined the army. Most sources mention that
from 1913 to 1916, he served with K troop of the 13th US Cavalry in the Mexican war. This
was probably the last war in which romance and heroism
played against a landscape and climate full of the excitements of
revolution and high adventure.

His early youth was charged therefore with overwhelming excitements and they may have
permanently supercharged his later life and created a need to
relive some of its vital inspirations. He was certainly blooded
by a fantasia of historic names.
He pursued Zapata and Pancho Villa no less, serving under General Pershing, whose aid-de-camp was a
young second lieutenant by the name of George Patton. His Arlington
gravestone mentions his National Guard unit, the 23rd US Guards, and
his “active service  status is confirmed by the mention of World War I,
although he did not serve in Europe.
As Hemingway might have said, a man who fired the old Springfield
rife at the dusty hordes of Villa and Zapata is a man to have a drink with.
Certainly, as one of the last horse soldiers of America, Adamski would
have looked good and menacing on a cavalry steed patrolling the Mexican
border in the years just before the Great War. His features, staring out
from black and white photographs of the era, are more Greco-Fiorentine
than Polish, and in a good light, he could be Tommy Lee Jones doing
Aristotle Onassis in a new episode of The Godfather. Adamskis face is a
piece of interesting simulation in itself; he looks like a desert man—his
sinewy leonine body and his Indian-chiefs features match the desert rock
and scrub in which he would make his first contact with a “spaceman.  In
grainy photographs, he looks risen from the desert itself. As a young man,
in the many Italian restaurants of the young Al Capones bootlegging
America, George Adamski might well have been quickly and quietly ushered to the best table, be given no bill, and asked no questions.
On Christmas Day 1917 Adamski married Mary Shimbersky, a
devout Catholic. After his marriage, in that same year, he was honorably
discharged from the army. In 1918 he worked as a government-employed
painter and decorator in Yellowstone National Park, and also in a flour mill
and in the cement business. Part-time, he served also with the National
Guard until 1919.
During the time of the Prohibition (1920-1933), Adamski claimed
that he bootlegged alcohol, which if true, is a claim that puts him in some
very good company indeed. “During the Prohibition I had the [Royal]
Order of Tibet,  he would tell contactee Ray Stanford a quarter of a century later. “It was a front. Listen, I was able to make wine. You know, we’re
supposed to have the religious ceremonies; we make the wine for them,
and the authorities can’t interfere with our religion. Hell, I made enough
wine for half of Southern California. In fact, boys, I was the biggest bootlegger around If it hadn’t been for that man Roosevelt, I wouldn’t have
[had] to get into all this saucer crap. 


his was almost certainly an example of Adamskis rough humor,
which according to Lou Zinsstag, the co-author with Timothy Good of
George Adamski: The Untold Story,> he had in plenty. There are dangers in
being too puritanical about human beings. A priest in a private and relaxed
moment is surely free to say that he could have made a lot more money if
he had put some of his congregation on the streets instead of in the pews.
“When asked about his profession or means of livelihood,’ wrote
Zinsstag of Adamski, “he replied that for some years before he settled in
Mount Palomar he gave popular lectures on astronomy and philosophy, in
New Mexico, Arizona and California. He called himself a kind of wandering teacher, visiting settlements during the winter months, when farmers
had little to do and were pleased to see him. ‘There was no TV then,’ he
said, “and people were grateful for lectures or entertainment of any kind. 
In the late 1920s Adamski settled at Laguna Beach, California. Here
he taught a form of oriental mystical philosophy combined with very
strong Christian fundamentalist overtones. This view was based partly on
the Theosophical teachings of both Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant,
who was President of the Theosophical Society from 1907. This view was
influenced also by Rudolph Steiner, who taught a Christianized view of
Theosophy.
Adamski called his particular version of his kind of belief “Universal
Law.  The spaceship chief he would meet during one of his trips into
space claimed to have been carefully watching him during his formative
years, and was therefore fully aware of the kind of spiritual teaching he
developed during the inter-war period. The chief addressed him as a
“prodigal son,  referring to what Adamski himself called “Universal
Law,  this being a kind of cosmic moral paradigm which binds together
the entire animal, mineral, and vegetable universe: “As Earth men consider this law, they will see and understand how all is working from the
low to the high, which is the universal purpose; and not from the high to
the low. Yet the power expresses from the high even unto the low that the
low may have the strength to rise unto the high. There is eternal blending,
but never division.’ 6
A further example of the Sunday school content of these lectures
illustrates what Adamski thought was a “scientific  approach to “philosophy.  The big chief speaks: “In the full conception, all manifestations of


ll forms are like beautiful flowers in a vast garden where many colors and
many kinds bloom harmoniously together. Each blossom feels itself
through the manifestation of another. The low looks up to the tall. The tall
looks down to the low. The various colors are a delight to all. The manner
of growth fills their interest and intensifies a desire for fulfillment. 
If we feel comfortably superior to this kind of simple-minded philosophizing, it must be borne in mind that there is considerable evidence
that Adamski practiced successfully as a healer. There are three examples
of this given in Gray Barkers Book ofAdamski, showing that he certainly
gave great comfort and spiritual uplift to many stricken with often fatal
illnesses. Lou Zinstagg also gives an example of Adamski correctly analyzing a young boys eye defect in the presence of a doctor, who was
impressed.
In Adamskis own words, his life was dedicated almost entirely to
“metaphysics, psychism, and religion.  In this he was certainly a prototype of many hippie-style teachers who were to come after him in the
1960s. The “Natural Law  principles that he forrnulated were rather like
our own “New Age  conceptions though mawkishly expressed, more often
than not. At worst Adamski was a time-waster, at best he showed good
environmental sense, reflecting the views of Rachel Carsons Silent
Spring. He mirrors also the early “green  view of such writers as Jack
Kerouac, the American novelist, and the occultist and chemist Jack
Parsons, one the founding fathers of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who
wrote Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword.8
Though he was not a particularly clever or well-educated man,
Adamski blended a strong intuition with limitless enthusiasm and a powerful commitment to a hybrid belief system. He had also some rare char-
acteristics for a deeply religious person: a passion for evolving technology, accompanied by a good grasp of scientific politics at a time when the
two were not seen to be connected. In his time, Christianity was still
essentially a pre-industrial belief system. The language and metaphors of
mainstream Christianity in the 1940s and 1950s were still those of the
Book of Common Prayer, and even young preachers were hardly one
remove from an Eighteenth century pastoral society. Though somewhat
naive, and desperately unconventional, Adamski was nevertheless one of
the very first writers to think about modern space science and ancient



heology in Christian terms.
If some of his “spiritual  writing in connection with technology
appears daft beyond belief, then at least he was one of the first people to
think about such connections at all. He knew his Bible back to front, and
was certainly the first to offer the kind of religio-scientific speculation that
was to launch hundreds of books after his time. He discusses the UFO
visions of Ezekiel some ten years before Joseph Blumrichs The
Spaceships of Ezekiel and Von Danikens Chariots of the Gods appeared.
A passage from his third book, Behind the Flying Saucer Mystery, shows
the techno-theological view Blumrich and Von Daniken inherited:
“Evidently the early church came to believe the cherub was an angel
because it was described as flying on wings. They had no knowledge of
the nature of the space travelers and assumed that the ships were firebreathing animals of some sort. They couldn’t conceive of mechanical
constructions made to navigate the heavens. I imagine the automobile
would have been described as another type of angel or cherub, or perhaps
as a demon or devil. 
It is as well to remember here that the idea of “objective reality  is a
late and rather callow arrival on the historical scene. Certainly Shakespeare
would not have understood it; for him Mind and Nature were a seamless
robe. The important thing to realize here is that Adamski, despite his love
of what he called “science,  lived quite happily for the most part in the
visionary anthropomorphic world of the Old Testament, in which the idea
of “fact  had not arrived. Thus the accusations of “impostor  which would
later be thrust upon him are neither right nor wrong: in his terms, they were
meaningless. If in William Blakes eyes, John Miltons sin was to make the
Bible more glamorous and dramatic, then in modern eyes, George
Adamskis sin was to try and update it. And in doing this he certainly convinced many of his followers that the forces that bound together the
Ancient world for millennia still existed, but in a fragmented and broken
form that indeed mirrored the pattern of his own life.
Perhaps Adamski felt a little like Moses when he came down from the
mountain: the rawness of the “actuality  was perhaps too potent. This pure
concentrate had to be staged, lit, and produced in easily digestible
episodes. Thus did media begin. In choosing to tell stories, Jesus as a
teacher did exactly the same thing. Thus we do not have that old stea


age “factual contradiction,’ beloved of simple-minded skeptics, but a
belief system whose developing processes are spread over a wide and
extremely fuzzy spectrum. Adamski got there, and then the event slipped
through his fingers. What is a man to say of such an experience?
A comment by Gray Barker, in his Book of Adamski, sheds light on
Adamskis transparent homespun Christian honesty on the one hand and
the source of some of his fabrications on the other: “Something real,
though weird and fantastic, happens to an individual and he tells the world
about it. People come from miles around to hear the story, and then want
to hear more. The saucer ‘contactee’ may similarly concoct further
accounts, not wishing to disappoint his public.
The consequence of accepting such a situation means that we must
recognize a new kind of event in the universe. We might call this kind of
event a fast transient. Acceptance of such an event means that we may
replace the old yes/no paradigm with “perhaps  and the working/not
working paradigm with “working/not working very well. 
There was never a man and woman born who did not at some time tell
a tale about themselves, elaborate on a personal experience, if only to put
themselves in the best possible light. If we do not have some love for ourselves as well as other people, we often become sick in body and mind.
All thought begins in the great Imagination, and in the context of evolving
life and experience, every single one of us can be caught out by a past
statement, opinion, letter, or even publication. As weary researchers in
Artificial Intelligence sadly admit, the mind does anything but reason by
“facts.  It “reasons  by hypocrisy, downright confusion, mistakes, selective amnesia, and often monstrous self-deception. The ultimate nightmare
of the democrat and rationalist is that when all this anomalous noise is filtered out, the mind becomes little more than a car park papered over with
ancient copies of 7V Guide. When that happens, the living are indistinguishable from the vast hosts of the dead.
There is a photograph of Adamski taken in the inter-war years showing him preaching from a lectern and surrounded by plaster images and
paintings of Christ that by most standards would be called kitsch. Though
he looks certainly like a young carpetbagger about to abscond with the
collection box, by any and every account of friends, associates, and coworkers.


workers, his craggy and formidable looks belied his nature. From his
thousands of followers over the years, there has not been a single complaint of the vicious physical and financial exploitation we have now
come to expect of many of fringe-religion preachers throughout the
world. Yes, his co-author Desmond Leslie remarks on his more than
occasional stubbornness, Lucy McGinnis his secretary for many years,
talks of his ego, and Zinstagg is often suspicious of many things he said
and did, but it doesn’t amount to much as criminal fraud and deception
are concerned.
Adamskis first book, Wisdom of the Masters of the Far East, was
published by the Laguna-based Royal Order of Tibet in 1936. This was the
first in a series of booklets and pamphlets he was to write, and despite
their often naive thought and expression, they gave him quite a following.
Telepathy: The Cosmic or Universal Language and Science of Life Study
Course were both developed continuously after 1936 and sold as a mail
order course of 12 lessons, one per month. Much of this material was
broadcast by local radio stations KFOX Long Beach, KMPC Los Angeles,
and various Beverly Hills stations.
In 1940, being beyond the age for military service, Adamski moved
with his wife and a group of his students in “Universal Law  to Valley
Center Ranch, which was along the route to the foot of Mount Palomar,
whose peak is the site of the world-renowned 200-inch optical telescope.
There the group, united by a common religious interest, formed a small
self-help farming community, hoping to grow enough produce to support
themselves and sell to others.
Adamski continued to lecture, often drawing large crowds. But in
1944, the Ranch was sold and he and his friends, followers, and
“Universal Law  pupils “moved a few hundred feet up our mountain  to
live a candles-and-kerosene existence. Life was very hard in these mountain communities of the American West; given the war situation, every
possible resource was either in short supply or restricted. But Adamski, if
not all that practical (Desmond Leslie remarks on his technical inability, was anything but a shirker, doing manual work and any odd jobs that
came along.
Perhaps the only equivalent Britain had to this kind of community in
those days was the Findhorn community in Scotland founded by Peter


Caddy and his wife Eileen in the 1950s. “There have been stories in the
press about a small community where the elemental world of plants and
animals co-operate with fairies, elves, and gnomes in creating a land
where nothing is impossible and legends are reborn,  commented Paul
Hawken in his book The Magic of Findhorn."
In the Adamski context the “Don Juan and Tolkien combined  atmosphere sounds familiar. But for the Palomar community there were to be no
40-pound cabbages, 8-foot delphiniums and roses blooming in the snow,
as at Findhorn. The wonders were late in arriving, but arrive they did.
 Often we see the Saucers flashing overhead,  wrote Adamski in 1955,
describing what could be seen from his mountain home. “In fact in recent
weeks the space ships have been seen by many in neighboring towns and
cities. We are content to know that they are above us, and in the skies of
our earth. We hope that in the not too far distant future all peoples in our
world may see and know them for what they are; and we hope that many
of those whose words we would convince, who do know now and would
keep silence, will speak out in the interest of all mankind. 
The mountain commune cleared rough virgin land, and constructed
some basic accommodation for the many people who came up the mountain to see Adamski and hear his lectures. After much effort, a kibbutz-style kitchen and living unit were built, the former cut into the side of the
mountain, and equipped with “outdoor chairs, benches, and picnic-style
tables  and a charcoal grill. In the early 1950s, there was as yet no electricity or water, but a freshwater stream, which ran down the side of the
mountain, was tapped and piped into a poo  with an outlet. Eventually
lavatories and electricity arrived, courtesy of a friendly contractor.
Adamski also worked with his wife selling ice cream, hot dogs, and
hamburgers in a restaurant owned by his close friend and follower, Alice
K. Wells. This restaurant served mainly the visitors and tourist parties who
were going to Mount Palomar Observatory high on the mountain. Lou
Zinsstag makes the apt comment that she never understood “why, in a
democracy, this fact did so much to damage his image.  Perhaps the world
still thinks as Shakespeare thought, that only those on the top of the social
scale are capable of having intensely significant experiences. Certainly
Adamski was conscious of his social and personal disadvantages in early
20th century America. Just as today, if you are somewhat swarthy, have a



strong foreign accent, and sell hamburgers, you are nobody, whether you
believe in flying saucers or not.'
“Although I have lived in America since I was one year old, I still
have an accent,  wrote Adamski. “And I have no college degrees. Then,
too, there is much manual labor to be done around Palomar Gardens, and I
did it. Some people cannot associate such things with a scientific atmosphere, nor see that the practical can make a very steady basis for scientific
and philosophical outreaching. So they try to discredit me. But I have
never been deterred. 
Naturally enough, Adamski was always very sensitive about the
“hamburger vendor  title some popular newspapers had given him. Even
as late as 1999, the British X Factor magazine condescendingly refers to
his “hot dog stand.  From this remark, we assume that for sound philosophy, first-class restaurants are absolutely essential.
None of the apocryphal accounts of Alice K. Wells’ modest establishment square with the description by Lucy McGinnis of the cafe as a place
where “hundreds of people from every part of the world came and went,
month in, month out. 
Adamski says in Behind the Flving Saucer Mystery that even if the
four-seat tale had been true, it would not have been to his discredit, for
“America is built upon the little fellows who made good.  Though he
protests in the same book that he was not “employed in any capacity at the
Palomar Gardens Cafe,  there is evidence that he certainly helped out
there quite often if not actually being “employed,  since the commune he
lived in hardly supported such a relationship in any case. He certainly
lived on the cafe property with his wife, and the owner Alice K. Wells was
a woman dear to his heart who helped create the George Adamski
Foundation. He felt obliged to defend her and her enterprise: “Palomar
Gardens was far from being a ‘hamburger stand, for it had been twice
publicized in Holiday magazine.  Be all this as it may, the restaurant was
quite obviously the center of his social life, if only because his two telescopes were nearby.
In Behind the Flying Saucer Mystery'> Adamski gives a cameo of his
life at this time as he acted as an unofficial public relations officer for the
Palomar Observatory. “The observatory had no one to give out information, so many people would ask questions at the cafe in regard to its operation. I often conversed with guests in the cafe dining room, on astronomy
and other topics. When the spacecraft arrived, I was in a position to
answer many questions and to give free lectures for service clubs. 
Between working at the restaurant and doing his duty as a first-aid air raid warden during the Second World War, he continued his lifelong inter-
est in astronomy, and a 15-inch telescope came his way, which he housed
in a slotted cupola. This Newtonian reflector was a miniature version of
the great telescope on the top of the mountain, and financed by pupils’
donations, sales of his books, and lectures and broadcasting.
But the telescope he used to shoot most his famous flying saucer photographs was a much more useful tripod-mounted 6-inch Newtonian
reflector. This had been given to him by a “friend and student  some time
in the late 1920s, and the firm which made it, Tinsley Laboratories, was
long gone by the late 1940s. The bulky plate-camera attached to it was
therefore ancient but nevertheless still fine technology for its day. This telescope often stood in the parking lot by Alice Wells’ cafe. With it he
recorded things that the great telescope far above his hotplate either could
not, or even did not want to see. As far as Adamski is concerned the accusation of being a “fantasist  comes usually without reference to those
operational 19th-century fantasies without which Palomar observatory
could not have been built in the first place.
Although Adamski states specifically in Flying Saucers Have Landed
that he was not associated in any way with the Palomar Observatory, both
his miniature equipment and his preoccupation created a peculiar and
undeniable symbiotic relationship between himself and Palomar. Perched
on “our  mountain he acted as a warning sprite on a path of initiation to
the machine high above him.
Writers on any subject at all must not only take into account bare
“facts,  they must be aware of simulacra and the alignment of symbols,
the cross talk between irony and image. All these things make up the vital
fabric of individuals and events. Students of complimentary simulacra
might well take note of the contrast between the face of a human being
and the face of Palomar Observatory. Undoubtedly, Palomar has what
Norman Mailer would call a WASP face: nothing could present a more
clean and respectable bourgeois face than the serene white edifice of the
worlds largest optical telescope. At 5,600 feet, it rules over the landscape



of California, a mighty Apollonian symbol of reason and mechanical triumph over Nature. Compared to this powerful image, the gypsy features
of Adamski are of Dionysus as Joker, with a hint of the sulphurous
alchemical features of chaos and old night. If these pan-dimensional
matches have anything at all to teach us, it is that we must learn once more
to read the long trails of cross-referencing metaphors. The almost-false-hoods of this trail will lead us away from the almost-truths of economics,
finite social function, and scientific purpose.
The Palomar telescope itself, with its 20-ton Pyrex mirror, was quite
obsolete before it became operational in 1948. It cost six million dollars,
took 18 years to complete, and it stands now in the 21st century rather like
a gorgeous 19th-century folly   It is a veritable cathedral of early industrial-age technology, beautiful as Chartres, yet as useless as an old mineshaft
beam-engine, or a Communist five-year plan. But certainly in 1953,
before the age of computers, space, and radio astronomy got into their
stride, there was nothing to challenge Palomar as the supreme symbol of
clean-limbed scientific and technological success. The great observatory
represented the unsullied innocence of the science of 17th century optics
brought to almost decadent perfection. It was one of the last great white
hopes before oiled sea-birds were to litter the globe, the nuclear clock
neared midnight, and “big  science was pitched headlong into its first polluted mid-life-crisis and not a few greasy fingers were caught in the scientific till.
Those post-modern thinkers who reason by metaphor and simulacra
rather than by linear “factual  propaganda, will have noted this conjunction of the great Palomar observatory and George Adamski. Little did this
powerful symbol of rationalist aristocracy know that it had a blue-chinned
knave toiling away at a hot grill below-stairs who was going to half blow it
away. For_all the world, it was as if the great house of Palomar had given
birth to an unwanted son and had ordered him to the castle-kitchen to
cook burgers for visitors to the great dome on the hill. Apparently there
were moments both confusing and amusing when tourists from far-flung
domains encountered Adamskis cupola, his pseudo-Palomar, and were
offered cut-price deals on frankfurters and cola by what many assumed to
be the Chief Astronomer.
The opinion the Palomar astronomers had of Adamski is reflected in 


an FBI report of 1953. The unnamed astronomer condescendingly refers
to Adamski as an “astrologer,  and mentions that during World War 2 ,
Adamski called himself a reverend and conducted Easter services in the
valley. As with the blinkered “mere seller of burgers  remarks, the attitudes so well portrayed in Thomas Hardys novel Jude the Obscure are still
alive and well. C.P. Snow in The Physicists'7 mentions that Otto Hahn, the
German physicist who split the uranium atom, and who stayed behind to
work with Heisenberg, once called Einstein “the butler. 
Adamski is one of those individuals quite common in history whose
“facts  don’t add up. Like Adolf Hitler, he was a kind of metaphysical
Pied Piper, though fortunately on the reverse side of the moral coin. It is
not of much use to find a lie Adamski told in 1946, a tall tale he told in
1952, or a re-editing of experience that he published as “real  event. Like
Hitler again, he is both phenomenon and man, and in his tumultuous wake
follow extraordinary events and ideas, strange people, and bizarre conflicts and accusations that still rage today. In this sense, George Adamski
was a most extraordinary individual who drew to him forces that were
equally extraordinary.
It seems that right from 1949, hamburger vendor or not, his life and
opinions aroused military and scientific interest quite beyond all normal
levels of expectation for a penniless man. Perhaps a man should never
assume that he is so small and harmless that he has not been registered on
the screens of Big Brother. Military men and scientists couldn’t resist him,
if only to savage his reputation. In drawing antagonism out of all proportion to the threat he represented, he was a living representation of that
strange homeopathic theory which states that the more diluted the mix,
the more effective is the power of the application.
But perhaps those who create new metaphors that Authority does not
like are infinitely more dangerous than those who plant bombs.
On the 9th of October 1946, Adamski with a group of his followers
observed a “gigantic space craft  hovering above the mountain ridge south
of Mount Palomar, towards San Diego. A local radio station that broadcast
sightings confirmed the observation by others. A few weeks later he met a
“large group of people  from San Diego in Alice Wells’ cafe, and a discussion began about this sighting. Six “military officers  (he does not say


which branch of the American Armed Forces) were dining there also, and
they listened intently to the discussion. One of them spoke up, saying, “It
is not as fantastic as its sounds. We know something about this.  Adamski
asked what they knew, but they would not tell him. Yet “they assured us all
that the ship we had seen and were discussing was not of this world. 
The much-publicized Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24th 1947
quickened Adamskis interest. A few weeks after this event, accompanied
by four friends, he watched scores of lights turn, bank, and maneuver in
the night sky. The lights would reverse their path, and on occasion
“appeared to have a ring around the central body, or dome.  One light
became stationary, shooting out two powerful beams of light, one towards
the south and San Diego, the other North toward Mount Palomar. Another
light appeared to be acting as a kind of leader before they all faded away
like a squadron of passing aircraft.
Tony Belmonte, a soil conservation employee who was living in a
trailer on the same property, said he counted 184 of the lights or objects.
He also told Adamski that a group of men from the Dempsey Ranch in
Pauma Valley on the west side of Palomar had counted 204 of these lights
or objects. Shortly after, two scientists on the way to the observatory came
to see Adamski and asked if he had seen the lights, and he told them he
had. They told him that Tony Belmontes count was accurate. Adamski
commented that “They would divulge little more than to assure me that all
indications pointed to them being interplanetary, because they did not
belong to our government. 
On a rainy day late in 1949, four men came into Alice Wells’ restaurant. Two of the men, G.L. Bloom, and J.P. Maxfield, were scientists from
Point Loma Naval Electronics Laboratory. The other two (one in uniform,
possibly naval), Adamski does not name, but he does say that they were
from what he terms “a similar set-up in Pasadena. 
These men told Adamski that although they had 48-, 18-, and 12-inch
telescopes, they wanted to see what he could do with his six-inch one.
Though they said that this would be voluntary unpaid work, they did mention the Kenneth Arnold sighting, and pointed out a specific area of the
moon, which they said they would like Adamski to concentrate on.
“They asked me if I would co-operate with them in trying to get photographs of strange craft moving though space,  wrote Adamski, “since I
had smaller instruments than those at the big Observatory. They said they
were going to the top and ask for the same co-operation from the men at
the big Observatory. 
Thus right from the start of the post-war period, big systems and
organizations, both military and scientific, were beginning to get interested and involved in what people like Adamski were saying and doing. Thus
encouraged by the attention he was getting from serious and responsible
folk, he bought new film and started a new watching regime. It was not
long before he succeeded in getting two good pictures while observing the
very area on the moon originally pointed out to him by the scientists.
It was professional editing practice in these early days of books on
flying saucers to dramatize real-life situations in a lurid B-feature script
manner, quite unlike the cold and clinical technique common today.
Donald Keyhoes earliest books, for example, are full of over-scripted purple passages. While Adamskis books are not nearly as bad, the following
scene from Flying Saucers Have Landed is straight from a Dashiell
Hammett film script of the time: “I cannot remember the exact day except
that it was during the time radio reports were being broadcast of a flying
saucer landing in Mexico City.’ While we struggle to beat that for an
opening sentence, we read on: “I had just tuned in the 4 p.m. news from
KMPC, Beverly Hills, California, when Mr. Bloom stepped into the place.
He sat down beside me, next to the radio, and told me to be quiet and listen. After it was over, he made an odd remark. ‘They did not give all of the
truth. There was more than that to it.’ 
Adamski continues in a style that has been parodied countless times
over half a century of films, radio, and television: “Then I knew that he
knew more about it, but he would not talk.  He then says that he met some
“government men  in Mexico a year later and they told him that indeed a
space ship had landed, but the story had been suppressed because of fear
of a rising panic amongst Mexicos “superstitious  population. Before
Bloom left, Adamski handed him prints of the two photographs he had
taken, asking him to let his colleague Mr. Maxfield have a look at them.
On the 21st of March 1950, some months after the Bloom visit,
Adamski gave a lecture to the Everymans Club in La Mesa, California.
Sanford Jarrell, a reporter from the daily San Diego Journal was present,


and gave the lecture a front-page report the next day. However, he did not
mention the two prints the Point Loma scientist had taken away with him,
a matter he had privately discussed with Adamski. On the 22nd, the San
Diego Union and Tribune smelt out the story, and contacted Adamski,
who in turn referred them back to the Point Loma scientists. The newspapers could get nothing from the Navy Laboratory, and so they asked the
Pentagon. On the 29th of March, by way of Copley Press Leased Wire
from Washington, the Pentagon denied everything.
The two scientists concerned were important enough to have full
autobiographical entries in American Men of Science, 9th Edition, Volume
1. In 1957, the then editor of Flying Saucer Review, Waveney Girvan
wrote a letter to the employment superintendent of Point Loma asking
about the whereabouts of Maxfield and Bloom. The reply stated that the
former no longer worked at the laboratory, but Bloom was currently
employed. A further letter inquiring of Bloom personally whether he had
indeed been interested in trying to obtain photographs of saucers in 1949
remains unanswered to this day.
After his success with two good photographs, Adamski got virtually
nothing for the next year and a half. Often sleeping in a hammock slung
nearby, he describes very beautifully, in terms of temperature, climate, and
animal and bird life, the nights he spent watching during these many
months. From the summer and fall of 1951 through 1952 he took something like 500 photographs, of which only a few were suggestive of any
kind of craft. In July 1951 Fate magazine published an article of his,
which helped him financially and also initiated many inquiries about his
pictures, for which he reluctantly asked a small payment.
To this day, there is no proof that any of these photographs were forgeries. Adamski says himself that he “had no desire to prostitute so profound a subject nor make a mockery out of so unprecedented a happening.  In any case, the plates he used were very old-fashioned plates even at
that time, and the obsolete equipment he used did not easily lend itself to
experiment without leaving over-obvious traces of interference. All his
print developing (or “finishing  as it was called then) was done by an
expert on this vintage equipment, a Mr. D.J. Detwiler, who lived in
Carlsbad, about 40 miles from Palomar Gardens.


Through 1951 and 1952, Adamski began to receive reports of saucers
actually landing in desert areas not all that far from Mount Palomar. He
made many trips to such areas, but without result until at last his patience
was rewarded. It was about 12.30 “in the noon hour  on Thursday, the
20th of November 1952, that Adamski said he met a man “from another
world.  Six months later, after plenty of time for reflection, all the witnesses to this encounter signed affidavits as to the truth and reality of this
event before a Public Notary in the Arizona County of Navajo.

CHAPTER 2,
Meeting in the Desert.
“In Californian desert on the 20th of November 1952. Two cars speed
out from Desert Center down the Parker Highway. Lucy McGinnis,
Adamskts secretary, is in the first car, together with Alice K. Wells, the
owner of the much-abused restaurant. Lucy McGinnis was to part from
Adamski some years later in a welter of profound disagreements, but
Alice K. Wells was so impressed by the desert encounter that she was later
to help form the George Adamski Foundation that exists still today.

George Hunt Williamson and Al Bailey are with their wives in a
second car. Though Adamski does not know the two married couples very
well, all are manic saucer enthusiasts and Adamski admirers. The party
are on a saucer hunt. They intend to visit places where it is rumored that
saucers have been seen both in the air and landing. Just after a pleasant
picnic lunch prepared no doubt by the industrious Alice Wells, the group
sights “a gigantic cigar-shaped silver ship, without wings or appendages
of any kind.  Their wonder is increased when they see that many very
earth-like aircraft surround this ship. With his mind full (even in 1952) of
daunting rumors about abductions (which he calls kidnappings), Adamski
tells the others to stay back. He is sure the occupants of the ship are trying
to contact him, and he does not want them scared off, and neither does he
want his friends exposed to possible danger. Lucy (together with Al
Bailey), driyes him to a spot about a half-mile away, which he feels is a
suitable spot to set up his camera. Al Bailey helps him set up his 6-inch
telescope.on its tripod, and Adamski also prepares his own Kodak
Brownie camera. Lucy and Al Bailey then drive back to where the rest of
the group are observing events through binoculars.
Soon after the “spaceship  disappears, Adamski notices a “flash in the
sky  and a “beautiful small craft  appears, “drifting through a saddle
between the two mountain peaks and settling into one of the coves about

half a mile from me.  As quickly as he can, he photographs the object with
his telescope-camera, separately loading 7 films. He puts the sealed
frames containing the exposed negatives in his pocket, and tries for further
shots with his Kodak Brownie (aperture a slow 1/25th of a second). The
first Brownie shot he published in Flying Saucers Have Landed, and
shows the craft just before it took off.
With yet more conventional aircraft circling round as if looking for
the saucer, Adamski takes another three shots with his Brownie, more to
capture terrain than anything else. After he has done this, he becomes
aware of a human figure by the entrance to a ravine about a quarter of a
mile away. The figure beckons to him, asking him to come over to where
he is standing.
Adamski goes up to the figure under full observation by his companions, although they were some distance away. Alice K Wells looking
through binoculars, sketched the figure at the time, and this drawing is
reproduced in Flying Saucers Have Landed.
The communication with what Adamski calls “a human being from
another world  was by hand signals and telepathy. Adamski regarded
telepathy as an acquired skill, and had taught it as a technique for nearly
thirty years. Given this method plus a few spoken words, a surprising
wealth of information passed between the two. Circling the sun with his
fingers, Adamski indicated the nearest orbit of Mercury, the second orbit
of Venus, and the third orbit of Earth, pronouncing this name as he did so.
The “man  (whom we shall now be called Orthon after the name given
him later by Charlotte Blodget, one of Adamskis followers and the editor
of his second book, (inside the Spaceships), then indicated the second
orbit of Venus, and this is the very first indication of anything Venusian.
Adamski then pronounced the word “Venus,  and Orthon, speaking for
the first time, repeated this name. He therefore either accepted Adamskis
name for the planet, or acknowledged that he knew that this was the name
humanity had for the planet.
There then follows a familiar exchange. Orthon “says  that the coming of extraterrestrials is in friendship. He indicates that they are worried
about nuclear bomb tests in the atmosphere, and says “Boom  Boom  
without being prompted by Adamski. The images then communicated


become religious, and the thoughts of Orthon on this subject are curiously
similar to Adamskis own ideas on “Natural Law, footnote.
Fortunately this aspect of the conversation does not last very long, for
Adamski does not write well when talking about his favorite subject.
When he becomes objective however, he does show a talent for deft, clearly factual description, reminiscent of the classic naturalists style of the
nineteenth century. This is most evident when he describes Orthons
clothes and figure, and when he describes the scout-ship. It is “translucent
and of exquisite color,  and its shape is more like “ta heavy glass bell than
a saucer.  He describes the three-ball landing gear, how the hull flashes
prismatic colors in the desert sunlight, and also how the craft (which
appears to be rather light in weight), rocks in the wind. He is aware also of
shadows moving within the ship, and for a “fleeting second,  a “beautiful
face appeared and looked out. 
Orthon bears an almost exact resemblance to many such beings seen
in similar circumstances in the fifty years that have gone by since that
time. “He was round-faced,  wrote Adamski, “with an extremely high
forehead; large, but calm, gray-green eyes, slightly aslant at the outer corners; with slightly higher cheek bones than an Occidental, but not so high
as an Indian or an Oriental; a finely chiseled nose, not conspicuously
large; and an average size mouth with beautiful white teeth that shone
when he smiled or spoke.

Adamski is quite overcome to the point of embarrassment. His previous careful objectivity suffers melt down. He waxes lyrical: “,the beauty
of his form surpassed anything I had ever seen,I felt like a little child in
the presence of one with great wisdom and much love, and I became very
humble within myself,from him was radiating a feeling of infinite
understanding and kindness, with supreme humility. 
Orthon refuses a handshake, but places the palm of his hand against
Adamskis hand: “The flesh of his hand to the touch of mine was like a
babys, very delicate in texture, but firm and warm. His hands were slender, with long tapering fingers like the beautiful hands of an artistic
woman. In fact, in different clothing he could easily have passed for an
unusually beautiful woman. 
Adamski ignores a warning not to get too close; his right shoulder
comes slightly under the bottom skirting of the machine, and his arm is


fully jerked up as if by an electric shock. In pulling him away, Orthon
somehow slightly injures his own hand, and red blood flows. Fearing for
his precious negatives more than Orthons injury, Adamski takes the
frames from the right-hand pocket of his jacket. Orthon, seeing this, asks
him if he may have one of the frames, and Adamski agrees.
Orthon then goes into the ship via a sliding door. Adamski then hears
fragments of a kind of conversation with another being “and the voices
were as music, but the words I could not understand. 
The craft takes off, and Adamski, with an almost completely numb
arm, signals to the others to come over to him. Almost speechless with
astonishment, they pack up the equipment and prepare for the journey
home, George Hunt Williamson taking his famous plaster casts of the
Venusians footprints in the sand. Again, while they are doing this, numerous conventional man-made aircraft remain present overhead. A giant
USAF B36 jet bomber, of all things, joins them2° This was probably out
from Edwards Air Force Base.27 A half-century later, Edwards has
acquired as many UFO rumors as Area 51 at Groom Lake.

The planes circle, turn and bank, and their motors “resounded in the
still desert air,  coming so low that they cast shadows on the ground
around the group. If these shadows included that of the B36 then the combined sound must have been quite a devastating experience to this group
of people, who had absorbed enough excitement for one day.
George Hunt Williamson and Al Bailey asked Adamskis permission
to give an account of the whole business to an Arizona paper, and they all
agreed. The Phoenix Gazette and the Oceanside Blade Tribune ran stories
of the encounter in November. Photographs were included of the foot-
print-casts and of the group, but unfortunately Adamskis photographs did
not turn out well. We can reasonably assume that these accounts by news-papers were the original sources that encouraged a friend of the British
writer Desmond Leslie to suggest that he get in touch with Adamski.
About stories such as this, analysts always chant the “facts  mantra.
They like their “realities  to be old industrial things, easily separable into
fact and fiction. But the desert contact scene is pure Carlos Castanada
the desert, the waiting initiates, the magician, and the vision in the sky.
Linking all these things is that string of complex deceptions of many
shades, from “solid  to aetherial needed to mount transformation of belief


and certainty within both group and individual. The dynamics of this situation are much older than “fact. 
Adamski himself comes out of it all just as surprised as everyone else.
Perhaps his first thought was of how the trading society he lived in would
react to his claim that he had just got something for nothing.
Perhaps he had also the Castanada-like thought that he had started
something he might not be able to finish.
Twenty-three days later. Early morning on Saturday the 13th of
December 1952. The day dawns bright-and clear over Palomar Gardens.
Adamski, acting on a hunch, takes time off to prepare his 6-inch telescope. Again, he hears the sound of military jets as they zoom overhead.
At nine o’clock, he sees a flash in the sky, and focuses his telescope upon
it. In a sky suddenly empty of planes, he sees an “iridescent glass-like
craft flashing its color in the morning sun   He quickly shoots four pictures with the craft hovering within a hundred feet of him.
A very strange thing then happens. A “porthole  opens and a hand
reaches out to drop down the negative frame taken by Orthon on the first
meeting on the previous November 20th. Not exactly a hi-tech gesture, not
very well mannered, nor respectful, to say the least. It was a gesture certainly not caring of damage to the negative, which bounced off a rock,
denting the carrier  All Adamski gets after that is a very slight wave of the
hand before the craft leaves.

The jerky frames of this incident would do credit to a Charlie
Chaplin film; one can imagine Adamskis face as he stood by his oldfashioned plate-camera telescope watching the hand reach out as if
throwing away kitchen-waste from the porthole of an ocean liner. His
sentimental romanticism does not seem in the least disturbed by the
rather off-hand treatment. But this absurd comic touch could be a measure of the truth of the occasion. Perhaps all thinking entities have a touch
of Chaplin, whether they live in caves or spaceships, or whether they look
like lizards, owls, or moths.
One cannot help thinking that if Adamski were making all this up, he
would have made his story more plausible. It is notable that this incident
contradicts the cozy view of “sublime  beings obeying his “natural law 
of charitable boy-scout principles. Absolute seriousness means robots, and


thankfully, both Mind and Matter may be fuzzier than we ever like to
think. Both thinking and behavior are always near a chaotic absurdity. On
this incident alone, some have condemned Adamski as an impostor. But
the last thing a real smart operator wants is trouble. Yes, he wants to win,
he wants to utterly convince, but he knows also that he will be destroyed
by the law of diminishing returns if his story becomes just a little too fantastic. If this part of the Adamski story was designed, it was designed not
to sell.
But sell it did.
Although it was a Saturday and the demands of the restaurant were
pressing, Adamski asked to be taken (presumably by car—he did not drive
himself) some forty miles to Carlsbad to hand his plates over to his photographic finisher, Mr. D.J. Detwiler, who unfortunately was out at the time.
But Mr. Detwilers wife took the negatives, promising that her husband
would develop them that evening and return them himself to Palomar at
noon the following day.
Both Detwiler and Adamski must have been absolutely astonished
when they saw the prints. Adamski had succeeded in capturing images
that despite fifty years of controversy have entered cultural bedrock. A
half century has gone by, but even ten-year-olds scream for toys much like
Adamskis three-ball-undercarriage “bottle-cooler  UFO which he photographed on this date, December 13, 1952. Despite all that has happened
since that time, these black and white images are still hauntingly beautiful,
symbols of mysteries beyond mysteries that have entered the universal
imagination.
Adamski kept the print in the dented frame for a few more days
before having it developed by Mr. Detwiler. He was surprised to see that
his original shot had disappeared, and the print showed a strange writing
and a cross-section of a saucer-shape with, strangely, a reverse swastika to
that on the right-hand shoe-print cast take by George Hunt Williamson.
There were even stranger events on the 13th. Referring to the immediate departure of the craft, Adamski says: “Dropping below the treetops,
its path of travel took it very close to the well and one cabin on the upper
part of the property, and there it was seen and photographed by others


whom I had previously alerted. 
There may have been “others,  but the only one we know of is ex-sergeant-instructor Jerrold E. Baker. He was then a young Palomar wannabe,
newly discharged from the USAF. Adamski, for once dropping his Mary-on-a-donkey voice, said later of Baker that he was behaving “like one of
the family  and “helping himself to everything, freely and in abundance,
but without money to pay for anything.  Now thats the George we like,
hurt out of the back-bedroom Day-Glo chapels of his mind, and getting
ready to kick the ass of a freeloader.
With a hint of trouble in Paradise, our interest is revived.
According to Adamski, young Baker arrived “late one night  in
December 1952. On the 13th of that month, using no doubt his USAF
training, he arranged with Adamski to try a UFO shoot with his Brownie
at the same time as Adamski shot with his famous six-inch tripod-mount-
ed camera-reflector, some distance away. Two very different cameras from
two different positions registering the same phenomenon would be evidence as good as any. 

According to Bakers signed statement made on the 13th of December
and published by Gray Barker, his sighting lasted two minutes, and it
appears that he shot exactly the same machine as Adamski describes
above. During this time, he observed that the machine had portholes and
the three-ball “undercarriage  now familiar the whole world over. He stated also that it made no sound, moved as if under intelligent control, and
had a slight odor, probably of ionized air or ozone, a common feature
reported by other UFO witnesses. Baker stated: “I saw a circular object
skim over the tree-tops from the general direction of the area where the
Professor was located,it then hung in the air not over twelve feet high at
the most, and about twenty-five feet from where I was standing. It seemed
as if it did this knowing I was there waiting to photograph it. I quickly
snapped a picture and as I did it tilted slightly and zoomed upwards over
the tree faster than anyone can almost imagine. 

Baker got one shot himself, reproduced in Flying Saucers Have
Landed, and Adamski says he got four, three of which are reproduced in
that same work. According to Baker again, the pair hurried to Carlsbad to
Mr. Detwiler, who always developed Adamskis pictures.

Oddly, Bakers account indicates that the pair were very close chums,
but in Flying Saucers Have Landed, Adamskis late 1953 account of the
13th of December 1952 contains no mention of Baker, or his shot. This is
strange, since Adamski chose to publish Bakers photograph in this same
book and give Baker credit for it in the text accompanying the published
photograph.

There then begins one of the first great celebrated Ufological controversies containing a great a spectrum of confusions. James Moseley, in the
October 1957 issue of his Saucer News, gives the fullest detailed information on the Baker saga. Moseley, who for years has been one of the bright-
est commentators on the UFO scene, discusses the rather suspicious
Bakers friendship with the very suspicious Frank Scully,32 who wrote the
legendary 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers.3

 Scully appears in the
Appendix to Flying Saucers Have Landed, and we shall meet him later,
where his adventures and friendship with the equally suspicious Silas
Newton are described by writer Karl Pflock.

Baker wrote to Moseley, and Moseley acquired Bakers letters to
Scully, and also to Desmond Leslie. He published parts of these letters
together with a statement by Irma, Bakers wife, in the October 1957 issue
of his Saucer News. From this evidence, Moseley concludes that George
Adamski was a con-man, a master trickster who hoaxed pictures, books,
stories, and just about everything else. But as far as Moseleys great regard
for Bakers evidence is concerned, Moseley reprints a paragraph from one
of Bakers letters34 to Frank Scully that shows Bakers deep and complex
uncertainty about the whole and entire business.

We might well compare Bakers previously quoted statement of
December 13, 1952, with the following, made on January 29, 1954, and
published by Moseley in the October 1957 issue of his Saucer News: “He
[Adamski] has taken the most astounding photographs obtained thus far
on the elusive saucers. This man claims he has spent untold hours watching and waiting, both day and night, to obtain the pictures. This is not true.
I know that he knows exactly when a spaceship is coming, and is there at
the precise instant to snap the picture. It is a planned, purposeful action,
not the mere chance which he implies. Why the necessity of the deception? Is it as he claims? Perhaps yes; but more likely no. 
Surely the absolutely astonishing thing here is that Baker admits that


saucers appear and Adamski photographs them  Whether Adamski knows
if they are coming or not is surely of secondary importance. How
Moseley, no fool by any means, could base his negative arguments against
Adamski on such evidence by his major witness is quite astonishing.
Moseley of all people should have known that when in the ring with
an opponent like Adamski, the last thing to do is hesitate.
Bakers question—‘“Why the necessity of the deception? —has a
haunting poetic ring to it, and it is a question which still burns as fiercely
today as it did a half century ago. He might well have asked himself about
the necessity of his own deception. In another statement published by
Moseley, Baker claims that Adamski took the Brownie shot himself and
offered it to him, saying that he could become world-famous with such a
picture and could write a book. Baker in a letter to Desmond Leslie
(August 4, 1954) says, “I readily admit that I fell victim to a hoax. 
Baker, for one reason or another, became steadily more suspicious of
Adamski after the 13th of December 1952. He made matters worse by
forming an alliance with one Karl Hunrath, another Palomar wannabe,
who had arrived soon after Baker. Hunrath claimed to be an inventor, took
residence, and announced according to Adamski, that he was staying
“indefinitely, with no money to pay for his expenses.  Hunrath had been
one of Adamskis more intelligent correspondents for some time, but he
appears to have fallen in life, and had decided to take his last sacrificial
offerings (in the form of various electronic inventions) to the mountain, in
best biblical fashion.

As the atmosphere became worse amidst the mountain group, Baker
and Hunrath stalked around looking for models that Adamski might have
used for trick-photography. They did not come across one, but found a
curious circular wooden frame lying around behind Adamskis cabin one
day. The crude frame had one-inch strips of copper hammered to it in a
circular fashion. But the pair must have been disappointed when Adamski
told them that this was his TV aerial. It certainly sounds like one of the
crude TV aerials of the time, some of which were sold in self-assembly
kits and looked just like the object described.
Model or not, we are now getting to a stage where things on the
mountain are rapidly deteriorating. Relations are re-aligning, falling apart,
and there is bitterness and intrigue. Tempers are so high that even bits of



wood and copper are suspect, ready to be transformed into countless UFO
confusions, rather like the donkeys head of Bottom in A Midsummer
Nights Dream, which is quite a suitable play for the Palomar community.
In all likelihood, the truth about this business is that Adamski, who
was certainly at least bisexual, developed early on a strong physical affection for young Baker that was spurned. When Baker aligned himself with
the rather nasty woman-hating Hunrath, and rejected Adamski lock, stock,
and barrel, the multi-level affair blew up in all their faces, made probably
worse as far as Adamski was concerned by Baker announcement that he
was getting married. The result was that an angry and blushing Baker
(who, in turn, may have been equally uncertain about his feelings as
Adamski), took it out on his former friend, claiming that he was an
imposter. If Adamski did take the Brownie shot and offer it to Baker, it
was in all probability the act of a dazed and confused would-be lover to an
equally confused protege. In any case, the uncertain mess produced terrible guilt feelings on both sides. Adamski, a somewhat lonely bisexual, was
looking for a familiar—an androgynous sprite to put his arm around, and
an angry and insulted Baker fled to the side of the unpleasant Hunrath, if
only for protection.

We notice that Baker is angry about the Brownie shot alone. He doesn’t say anything about the photographs Adamski took by himself about the
same time on the 13th of December.

As we shall see later, just one of the wonderful things about the study
of the UFO phenomenon is that it spreads such a wide spectrum of confusion and uncertainty that what is commonly called “reality  appears to be
shot through with holes like a French cheese. It also defeats the strongest
of oppositions. For example, the fairy webs created by the magus
Adamski settle on the eyes of skeptical arch-demon Moseley, who after
meeting Adamski personally, places a first foot square into the enchantments of a very slippery slope: “I have been convinced that he [Adamski]
is a kindly man who would do no harm to no one,his book has entertained thousands, and injured no one.  In typical accordance with the
Adamski effect, Moseleys other foot follows rather quickly.
Astonishingly, just like his chief witness Baker, Moseley lets Adamski off
the hook: “I am not saying—nor is Mr. Baker, that George Adamskis
account is necessarily untrue. 

well how about that? The shrewd and clever Moseley has to admit
that in the case of the UFO, even a thousandth of a swallow would make
for infinite summers on countless mountains.
Moseley, like many UFO researchers, makes a most basic mistake in
his methodology. He is delighted when Al Bailey, one of the original
desert witnesses, says that he didn’t see Orthon or Orthons ship. But the
point is surely that Al Bailey says he DID see the big “mother ship  that
appeared minutes before Adamskis contact. If such unbelievable things
exist, why spend so much time arguing about the “authenticity  of Orthon
and his ship? If the contact was a hoax,-then again we ask Jerrold Bakers
question: why the deception? And perhaps we ask ourselves an even more
terrifying question: Are the deceptions and the appearances linked?
As our journey through the life of Adamski continues, there will
emerge strong indications that they are.

In the days following the 13th of December 1952, the plot thickens
yet again. George Hunt Williamson was also in residence at Palomar at
this time, and the three men—Hunrath, Baker, and Williamson—had
resolved prior to this date to form the George Adamski Foundation. This
was a measure of how close this group of men were in the first halcyon
days of their friendship, and how much at first they believed in the claims
of George Adamski.

However, apart from his growing difficulties with Baker, Adamski
soon found out that Hunraths gifts to the gods took the form of electronic
equipment, with which he said he could attract saucers and make them
crash. Adamski blew a main fuse, and ordered Hunrath off the property
immediately. Hunrath in turn ordered Adamski off the property, and for a
minute it looked as if blows might be exchanged, but Hunrath thought better of it, probably because, as Bakers wife Irma recalls, Adamski was
much stronger and bigger than Hunrath. According to Irma, Hunrath was
a violent and hateful misogynist, and probably resented deeply the affinity
between Irma and Baker as much as did Adamski. Adding to the conflict
was Adamskis ill-concealed liking for intense relationships with young
men such as Baker, who according to Irma, had rather a weak personality.
Irma says? herself says that Adamski at this time was “like a woman
scorned. 


Yet another problem was George Hunt-Williamson, who despite
entertaining everyone with Indian traditional dances, was in a deeply
depressed state. He had temporarily deserted his pregnant wife for “psychic  treatment by Adamski, who was supposed to rid him of low spirits.
For much of December 1952, Hunt-Williamson lay prostrate, with “Indian
spirits  speaking through his vocal chords.
This witches’ brew bubbled over early in 1953 with the departure of
all three original founding fathers of the George Adamski Association
leaving the mountain in a cloud of accusations and counter accusations
involving possible theft of mail and money. According to Irma Bakers
account, there were tearful, paranoid, and almost violent scenes. Hunrath,
when collecting the mail from Escondito, was almost attacked by
Adamskis faithful secretary Lucy McGinnis, and the police were called to
the incident.

In the middle of this divine comedy involving flying saucers, psychics, saucer-zapping machines and good old human hatreds, Lucy
McGinnis called Irma on January 12, 1953, and asked her to call the FBI
to Palomar Gardens. Lucy said that she was terrified that the three founding fathers would return to do “the Professor,’ Alice Wells, and herself
much harm, as well as downing some USAF planes in the bargain.
That very evening men from both the OSI and the FBI arrived. Little
did they know that sixteen days later they would again trek up the mountain to admonish Adamski, who had been boasting in Alice Wells’ restaurant that his views on flying saucers had been sanctioned by the FBI.
According to Irma, the agents listened astonished as an angry
Adamski showed a side of his nature very much removed from the “kind
and loving man  reported by Jim Moseley. For once Adamski acted consistent with his looks as he poured scorn on Hunrath, Baker, and even
George Hunt-Williamson. His accusations against Hunrath were straight forward national sabotage, which no doubt the “government men  (as they
were called at the time) fully understood. But they possibly were somewhat baffled by Adamski claiming that in addition, Hunrath was practicing “occultism,  and had been possessed by a “beast.  To add to this delicious Fortean mix, Adamski accused Hunt-Williamson of being a “fake 
psychic. While trying to take all this in, the agents had also to cope with
Adamskis suggestion that young Baker was possibly a secret agent, one

of their own brood, no less 
These mountain scenes are the gestalt of the UFO: men and women
wrestle with both ideas and themselves; they struggle for command of
both technology and spiritual elevation. All these things were part of the
magical Californian summers that were to come. The battle between
Adamski and the founding fathers had all the rainbow spectrum of
Californian inspirations. In the generations to follow, machines and madness, inspirations and visions would fill almost the entire West Coast with
millions of Orthons, many with long blond hair and a good number indistinguishable from one another in both appearance and gender. By simulacra again, if the aggressive and nature-despoiling Hunrath is the coming American holocaust of Vietnam, George Adamski is part of the
American mountain bedrock, and the guardian of his saucers in his lair,
for all the world a fallen Prospero.
Eventually, Baker was to leave his mountain and live a mundane life,
probably dreaming forever of summers lost. As for Karl Hunrath, in 1953,
he found a new partner, one Wilkinson, for his saucer-zapping activity.
Apparently the pair went to Mexico, and like many of the young mountain-sprites of the coming Summers of Love, they were never seen or
heard of again.

Fifty years later, these flying saucer contacts of George Adamski still
intrigue. The incidents of the 20th of November and the 13th of December
1952 still have something in them for everyone. The phenomenon has
even produced its own “objectivity  to satisfy the most discriminating of
interested parties. Of late, Timothy Good has unearthed information that
supports Adamskis claims. /n George Adamski: The Untold Story, Good
tells us:37 “On the 3rd of August, 1956, the U.S. Air Technical Intelligence
Center, in‘reply to an inquiry from researcher Richard Ogden regarding
the Desert Center Contact of 20th November, 1952 (during which
Adamski and the other six witnesses had said that Air Force planes were
flying over the area at the time), stated: ‘In response to your letter of July
18, 1956, we are enclosing a summary of Project Bluebook Special
Report No. 14, which was released in October, 1955. The full report statistically covers all reports up to that date, including a report by an Air Force



pilot on November 20, 1952, from the general vicinity of Desert Center,
California. 
Later Ogden wrote another letter requesting further information, but
was told by Major T.J. Connair Jr, USAF Adjutant, that it was not Air
Force policy to release details of its UFO investigations. As a result of his
inquiries Richard Ogden was rewarded with a visit from the FBI. 38
Good then quotes from a USAF Project Bluebook file, which relates
to a Teletype message concerning a sighting at Salton Sea, California, on
the 20th of November, 1952, which was the second year of Captain
Edward J. Ruppeits reign as the director of Project Blue Book, the official
Air Force investigation of UFOs:

UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT SEEN PILOT LOCKHEED AIRCRAFT
B50 5626, ON A ROUND ROBIN FROM DAVIS MONTHAN. OBJECT
SEEN AT 2005 MOUNTAIN TIME 10 MILES EAST OF SALTON
SEA, ALTITUDE 16000 FEET. AIRCRAFT WAS ON A HEADING OF
275 DEGREES AND SIGHTED OBJECT AT 1100 O’CLOCK TO HIS
POSITION. OBJECT WAS STATIONARY AND WAS CHANGING
COLOR FROM WHITE TO RED TO GREEN. STARTED IN MOTION
IN N.W. HEADING AND DISAPPEARED LIKE TURNING OUT A
LIGHT. THERE WERE NO [word not legible] OR PROPULSION OR
LOCOMOTION AND THE PILOT WAS UNABLE TO DESCRIBE THE
SIZE OR SHAPE.
NOV. 22, 1952

It must be borne in mind that at 16,000 feet, practically the whole of
California can be seen. That this “unidentified object  was in the same
area on the same day as the Adamski sighting suggests it might well have
been there at “12.30 in the noon hour,’ when the Adamski party made
their historic sighting.
Many juries have convicted on lesser circumstantial conjunctions of
time and space.



CHAPTER 3,
Saucer Nights
on Palomar.

After  these close encounters, the shooting of photographs, and the angry
confrontations, it must have been somewhat unnerving for any uninitiated visitor to hear Adamski and the members of his group talk about utterly
fantastic things as if they were talking about bags of groceries.
“I wonder how many realize that he (Adamski) was a member of the
interplanetary Council,  says Alice K. Wells, in her obituary.3° “This is a
group of men of high Cosmic Conscious Awareness that evaluate the conditions of our system and keep their representatives informed of the
changes. The Brothers who travel in ships and those here on this planet are
liaison men that carry this information. Due to George Adamskis unwavering loyalty in carrying out his every commission, the Council decided
to grant him a new body through which to work. 
Undoubtedly, these cloud-worlds were as real to the group as wages
and economies were to others. Fred Steckling, a friend and colleague of
Adamski, and author of Why Are They Here?* was no exception: “I have
had the pleasure of talking to some of the space visitors. They were introduced to me while in association with George Adamski. These people,
men and women, are physical human beings. Their bodies are identical to
ours from the medical point of view. The only difference between them
and us is that they are more enlightened, living according to natural laws,
and not by man-made standards and ideas, as we do. 
Even the highly perceptive Desmond Leslie, Adamskis co-author on
Flying Saucers Have Landed, was vulnerable, and steps onto the same
enchanted ski-run as Fred Steckling. Leslie in his tribute, says that
Adamski “believed that he had reincarnated from another planet through
karmic reasons to give his teachings, and I find that quite acceptable. 

It is a measure of the power Adamski had over people that he got the
tough-minded, strong-willed and brilliantly intelligent Leslie to “accept 
the anodyne reasons why the spacefolk did not take him on a trip in a
saucer. “He refused to ask me on a ‘contact’ with him,  writes Leslie, “and
at the time it peeved me greatly. But I realized later that I was in no fit
spiritual state for such an experience and had I been taken aboard a saucer
I doubt if I’d have been a very successful prophet afterwards for my ego is
highly susceptible to spiritual aggrandizement. Many who have genuine
contacts have gone very odd, forming new religions and in fact doing
everything the Brothers desire least. 42
From most accounts, it sounds as if Adamski claimed many more visits from the space-folk than are mentioned in his books. He drops them
into remarks and conversations as if they were visits to the local library.
He told the Danish writer Hans Peterson} that in December 1958, while
his train was delayed near Kansas City, a spaceman picked him up in a car,
and drove him a short distance to where a craft hovered above a grove of
trees. According to Peterson, Adamski said: “I had the experience to be
(sic) lifted up into the space craft while the ship was hovering. It feels as if
something is surrounding you like a transparent or plastic curtain, yet you
can’t touch it and you don’t see it, and like a magnetic force, it lifts you
just like an elevator into the ship. 

When we say that some people live in other worlds perhaps we mean
that such worlds are not really “far away  but are worlds ancillary to ours,
structures which fit almost, but not quite. Two worlds or more existing at
one and the same time within a single persons consciousness can be a difficult situation to manage. Lee Harvey Oswald (with his many observed
doppelgangers) had trouble doing it, so did the “thoughtphotographer 
Ted Serios,44 the poet W.B. Yeats and the magician Aleister Crowley, to
mention but a few.
These secondary worlds are plausible, coherent within themselves.
But when they struggle for prime time, their temporary domination makes
them appear as perfectly naturalistic localizations, but in a totally absurd
setting. Nothing more suggests Dalis melting clocks than Adamskis
meetings with people from Mars and Venus. And perhaps nothing more
suggests what a wartime B-29 bomber looked like to a Melanesian mind


than the following, which if done deadpan before a single microphone in a
Lennie Bruce club of this era after midnight would have been a riot. It also
might have convinced Adamski that he was in the wrong business:
“During the year 1958, I had the pleasure of attending a meeting comprised of people from Mars, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune.
It was a friendly get-together, devoted mainly to discussions of some of
our everyday problems. The subject of eating was introduced, and I asked
for more specific information, since so many questions regarding this
topic are coming to me. Their answer was simple and precise. They told
me they usually purchase the cheaper cuts which can be boiled with vegetables like my mother used to cook when I was a boy.’

45
Adamski spent the 1950s delivering such stuff all over America. When
radio and television stations were not asking for him, he did the rounds of
clubs, institutes, and professional associations. He would speak between
showing his slides, photographs and sometimes his moving footage, and
the results more often than not were a dreadful mess because, as Desmond
Leslie points out, Adamski at most times “tried to say too much at once. 
But then he was a lot better at taking questions from the floor:
Question: How can I meet a space person and get a ride in one of
their ships?
Answer: I honestly cannot answer this question. I am met when and
where a meeting is to the advantage or convenience of the Brothers.
Question: Do the space people use money as a medium of exchange
on other planets?

Answer: No. Their means of exchange is a commodity and service
exchange system without the use of money,
Surprisingly, there was an enormous appetite for this kind of thing,
both in America and abroad. After 1953, Adamski established a vast
worldwide network of correspondents, admirers, and other contactees.
Most joined his “Get Acquainted Program,  the “acquainted  part of this
meant forming relationships and dialogues with the space-folk. He
launched a regular newsletter for updates on cosmic contacts, and many
groups in different countries were formed to discuss his views and disseminate the latest information.
While many derided him, the photographs and the moving footage
 49
would make them think again. Those contactees who did not have such an
extensive collection did not stand nearly so great a chance against criticism. Howard Menger for example, though he claimed a few photographs,
did not succeed in rivaling Adamskis fame.
Throughout the fifties, life was never dull when Adamski returned
home to Palomar from his travels.. Many lost souls would take the spare
beds, and would-be sorcerers apprentices and other wannabes would
arrive and beg to work with “the Professor.  Just like Baker and Hunrath,
prototype hippies arrived to empty the larder and spend their time contemplating the infinite rather than work. This was the time of Ken Kesey*  of
course, and if Adamski had not been of a different generation to him and
his followers, perhaps lights and amplifiers would have strewn the sides of
Mount Palomar.
But not even Ken Kesey had spaceman dropping in uninvited for
dinner.
Time: an evening in the early 1950s. Place: Mount Palomar.
Adamskis extended family are about to have dinner. A light knock on the
door announces the arrival of “tall fine-looking man  who, says Adamski,
“stood there asking for me.  After an hour of perfectly normal conversation, mainly about space matters from an Earth perspective, the spaceman
reveals things which Adamski says no one on Earth could have known
about space except, of course, he himself, who had been there in the ships.
After the man leaves, others present say that they do not think the man
was a spaceman and so the matter is dropped.
For once, it is good to know that there were some skeptics on Palomar
Mountain. However, sometime later, Adamski says that during “‘a recent
meeting with the Brothers  (showing again that he was wont to meet them
more than he ever let on), he had met this same man and learned a little
more about him. This man “was in charge of the schedules on which ships
from Saturn arrive.  In other words, he was a kind of interplanetary busgarage manager. But we are not told about the interesting aspects of such a
fascinating job, since even a list of Saturnian commuter timetables would
dwarf all possible Earth interests. We can imagine the reaction of harassed
Earth folk in a busy passenger hall if the schedule-clerks spoke like this:
“The reason you identified me at that time was not so much from what I

said but because your soul and your mind were as one and it was your soul
that recognized my soul. 
One asks: do the space brothers ever take time off from this rubbish?
Do they ever give anyone a break? Do their toilet attendants and whores
speak like this? Or their criminals, policemen, or the grocers who sell
them their always wholesome food? If they do, then their more “pure 
world contains a level of boredom that would atrophy the testicles of a
woolly mammoth.
With a senior staff like this, asking where your baggage has disappeared to in a Saturnian departure lounge would be like the Dormouse
asking the address of the Mad Hatter.
Equally interesting were the visits of the numerous very human
beings who were drawn to Adamskis domain. In 1960, Henk Hinfelaar, a
New Zealand co-worker from the “Get Acquainted  program published a
letter concerning one of many USAF pilots who came to see Adamski in
the early 1950s. Lucy McGinnis had written this letter originally to Hans
Peterson, the co-worker in Copenhagen. She says: “A young pilot who had
been to the cafe a number of times and had talked with GA, came in for
lunch one day. He told about piloting an American plane to Australia
where he landed on a vast airfield. He said that a gigantic spacecraft was
already there. He was introduced to a group of scientists from another
planet and told he was to take them to a scientific meeting in Scotland. 
Undoubtedly, Adamski made Mount. Palomar one of the Magic
Mountains of America, something the great telescope above him with its
vision of an empty lifeless universe had failed to do. Up they came to see
him: the dreaming and the free, the credulous and the criminal, the eccentric and the walking wounded of America. One wonders if a call goes out
through Nature to subvert the very foundations of machines and kingdoms
whose time has come. Like human beings and like kingdoms, machines
too can suffer the death of a thousand cuts. Few now believe the 200-inch-telescope story of a dead heavens any more. The great machine is now a
mass of almost useless clockwork. Its successor, the Hubble space-telescope, produces passable bathroom wallpaper pictures, but none are as
fascinating as those of George Adamski, nor as fascinating in turn as some
of those who made their way to his domain.



CHAPTER 4,
Enter Desmond Leslie.
Desmond Leslie was an Irish aristocrath  who owned a castle in Ireland in which he had lived for 
considerable periods of his life. An ex-fighter pilot, he was a second
cousin of Winston Churchill, and he was both a novelist48 and a playwright.

According to Bryant Reeve, the author of the 1957 book Flying Saucer Pilgrimage, Leslie told him
that he first tried to write a fictional account about his own conviction
that aliens had contacted Earth many times in the past, and had left
definite traces of their presence.
But as soon as he started the research, he became convinced that
what he had found was not fiction, but fact. Leslie, in his own account in
Gray Barkers Book of Adamski, said that he sent his manuscript to many
publishers who promptly rejected it.
It so happened that at that time, a western US newspaper publicized
Adamskis meeting with a man from Venus. Adamski had originally
intended to write up the details of his contact in a series of “small booklets  in order to try and respond to the many inquiries he was getting from
all over the world. Leslie heard through a friend about Adamskis desert
contact a week after it happened, and he wrote to him immediately. This
letter requested also copies of Adamskis photographs that Leslie said he


would like to use for his book. Adamski sent a selection of his photographs (including the controversial Baker photograph), refusing all pay-
ment for them, at which Leslie was astonished. A few weeks later,
Adamski sent his manuscript, asking Leslie to suggest a publisher. By that
time, Waveney Girvan, who worked for the publisher Werner Laurie, had
accepted Leslies book. Leslie suggested that it be a joint work with
Adamski, and Girvan, though worried, agreed to publish it. Though the
two writers were not to meet until 1954, Flying Saucers Have Landed
duly appeared to much acclaim.
The books two narrators—Leslie writing Part I and Adamski a brief
Part 2—could not have been more different in style, approach, and content.
Leslie could have written his Book I of Flying Saucers Have Landed
in a library; his views are historical and academic. He makes no personal
fantastic claims, and neither does he tell us anything at all about his own
past life. Here lies the strength of the books strong set of ironies: few
other UFO books published since have anything like the quality required
to stand alone as literature. In California, Adamski had found his landscape; he was no longer an immigrant Pole with an accent. Leslie, on the
other hand, though he found a new world intellectually, remained as he
always had been, both socially and personally, forever the astute and fastidious observer.

On the other hand, the whole flesh and blood of the flying saucer
dimension permeated Adamskis very being; his internal and external
landscapes contained almost nothing but a titanic struggle to grasp the
phenomenon and to tell of its nature.
Thus two narrators, dramatic participant and observer, are cross-referenced by two vastly different textures and many dimensions of two widely
differing personalities. Adamski is complex, Leslie is straightforward;
Leslie has an extremely high intelligence, Adamski has something far
older; Adamski has found what he is looking for, Leslie is still searching.
The men also differ therefore in culture and social class, in nation, personal circumstance, and indeed in age itself.

The highborn Desmond Leslie was close to very high-powered
groups of British leaders who had in the 1950s made significant comments on the subject of flying saucers. The members of this group, some
of whom we shall meet later, were to be strongly influenced by Flying


Saucers Have Landed. The book served not only as an organizing focus
for many disconnected thoughts and influences, it represented also the
first modern chance of a possible reply to burgeoning rationalism, then in
1953, reaching the very highest level of social-scientific confidence.
The book also had what might be termed an annoyance factor. With
Adamskis 55 pages of bizarre experiences tacked on the end of it as the
somewhat intimidating Part 2, Flying Saucers Have Landed was guaranteed to drive scientists (never popular figures at the best of times), into a
frenzy. An editor might have thought that this could well provide an amusing spectacle to a nation never enamored of its very own and quite unique
progeny. There might also have been the consideration that both books
gave some feeling of magical revival to a pre-sixties world which lived
with the real threat of nuclear holocaust before it had been given time to
recover from a holocaust made by conventional weapons.

In his book, Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient West, Raymond Drake
looks back from 1974, and weil expresses the atmosphere in which Leslie
and Adamski wrote their prophetic book over twenty years previous. The
following text is rather like a piece of reconditioned linguistic circuitry in
which a battery of Left dialectics have all been replaced by a new metaphysical view:
“The legends of spacemen warring with fantastic weapons evoke
within our souls some atavistic memory beclouding our secret lives,elated we gaze at the familiar world around us with new eyes, tired old Earth
glows in heroic splendor, the fragments of ancient wisdom synthesize into
a marvelous, exciting panorama,All we have learned appears inadequate,
as though down through the centuries the truths of our universe were willfully suppressed, leaving us conditioned by dogmas sadly out of date.
Conventional histories recording the follies of mankind now seem trivial,
the squabbles of rival religions become sterile; those classical authorities
founding our Western civilization misled our fathers as our modern culture misleads us today,we demand our cosmic heritage to attune our
souls in thrilling to those Celestials from the stars.
Drakes view might be compared with the following passage by Leslie
from Flying Saucers Have Landed which shows us Desmond Leslies vital
inspirations at the time: “,it comes as a rather painful shockto
any  who rashly peruse the more ancient literature of races that perished

tens of thousands of years ago, to find a strong suggestion that there existed previously not one, but several humanities greater, wiser, more moral,
and more advanced in certain aspects of natural science than ourselves.
Now what, in the name of this Age of Darkness and Superstition, has all
this got to do with flying saucers?

“I think it has lot to do with it.
“Can you see, in imagination, a highly developed being in his space
vehicle uttering the correct vibration which will make the propelling
forces obey and thrust him through the void to out atmosphere? He uses
gentle, harmonious forces that do not push and shove and heave and
rend. And when we have won a little-more true knowledge we may be
able to do likewise; at the moment we have only learned how to kick
things out of the way. 

Publisher Werner Laurie certainly took a risk. The first manuscript
pages of Flying Saucers Have Landed could not have looked very promising. The first part, Book 1, contains a trumpeting and rather pretentious
Foreword, and a Note, which mentions the works of H.P. Blavatsky and
Annie Besant. Daunting names, with Annie Besant almost unknown in
Britain and Blavatsky viewed as a formidable and dangerous woman
rumored to be a complete impostor. The titles of their works mentioned by
Leslie must have been even more off-putting: Secret Doctrine by
Blavatsky, and Man, Where, Whence, and Whither? by Besant. Book 2, by
Adamski himself looked even more risky as it contained a description of
an actual contact with a space “god  who stepped out of a flying saucer 
But in those long-gone days, just before television took the larger part
of the reading public away, editors could afford to take risks, and the gamble worked. Most probably it was the more user-friendly titles of the separate parts of Book I that started the 17 shillings and sixpences flowing. In
the harsh British winter of 1953, half-crowns and ten-bob notes flowed
into bookshop tills that looked like small juke-bexes and which rang bells
and clacked like large Victorian typewriters. But after all, facing a 1953
winter with coal shortages, ration-books, all able youth in uniform, and
the increasing threat of nuclear conflict, what dull soul could resist chapters entitled: “The Flying Saucer Museum,  “Flying Saucers Before The
Flood,  “Power and the Great Pyramid,’ and “The First Space Ship on
 55
Record ? For those still unconvinced, there was “Saucers in Celtic
Prehistory,  “Saucers in Sanskrit,’ and the fascinating question “Are
Vimanas Flying Saucers?  “Vimanas  being the airborne form of the
Hindu god -chariots, no less. It all made a change from listening to “talks 
on the BBC Light Program, which broadcast the traditional British radio
fare about vicars, bicycles, and last years carpet slippers. Flying Saucers
Have Landed could also be read while looking forward with infinite
patience to the first black and white television sets becoming available,
when vicars, bicycles, and carpet-slippers and other British wonders
might actually be seen in all their glory.

Thus for 1953, Flying Saucers Have Landed was a somewhat
advanced prototype multi-dimensional text and with a quite original and
refreshing transatlantic feel to it. A thread links two narrators of differing
nationality, culture and education, across a great gulf of personality, education, and society. Leslies Book I has many dimensions compared with
Adamskis Book 2: though it is historical and essentially speculative, it
brought together revolutionary and tremendously exciting new views of
world history and human culture. This inspired firework display of new
ideas was a successful counterpoint to the very simple straightforward
telling of an experience by Adamski, who did not claim to be a writer in
the fullest sense of the word. This strange combination worked: the reading public of late 1953 put down Graham Greens The Third Man, Norman
Mailers The Naked and the Dead, James Jones’ From Here to Eternity,
and innumerable War memoirs, and read Flying Saucers Have Landed.
In 1953, many were hooked immediately on Leslies unprecedented
mix n’ match style, which at times comes near to a kind of literary vision
of a much later multi-media age. We have history, and the closely focused
present day in terms of a burst of spleen against Dr. Donald Menzel (the
prototype for todays super-skeptic Philip Klass), We have a scream about
politicians, accusations about a conspiracy of silence, topped up by sightings from those who possessed good sane bourgeois credentials.
Leslie quotes seven well-authenticated UFO sightings published originally by Time and Life magazine international on the 5th of May 1952.
He combined successfully his skilful re-editing of the ideas of Charles
Fort   with the power of a new prestigious mass-market magazine. The
fully referenced information also impressed a very literate readership. The


seven sightings Leslie gave as examples were all from groups of well-educated technologists. The first example was to become one of the classic
UFO sightings, retold in great detail many times since 1952. At 9:10 pm
on the 25th of August 1951, Dr. W.I. Robinson, professor of geology at
Texas Technological College, stood chatting to two of his colleagues in the
backyard of his Lubbock home in Texas. They were Dr. A.G. Oberg, professor of chemical engineering, and Professor W.L. Ducker, head of the
department of petroleum engineering.

On a night which was clear and dark: “Suddenly all three men saw a
number of lights race noiselessly across the sky, from horizon to horizon,
in a few seconds. They gave the impression of about thirty luminous beads
arranged in a crescent shape. A few moments later another similar formation flashed across the night. This time the scientists were able to judge
that the lights moved through thirty degrees of arc in a second. A check
the next day with the Air Force showed that no planes had been in the area
at the time. The scientists agree that in order to explain the silence of the
objects, it must be assumed that they were at least 50,000 feet in the air; in
which case they were going not 1,800, but 18,000 m.p.h.
Other sightings are given by a leading American astronomer, a group
of five technicians from the Office of Naval Research, some technical writers for the aerophysics department of North American Aviation, the captain
of aDC3 airliner, and the crew of a B29 bomber over Korea in 1952.
Up to this point in Flying Saucers Have Landed, there are no signs of
mystical Tibetans, secret doctrines, or sparks of cosmic fire. But they
arrive with a vengeance in “Flying Saucers and Sound,  “Saucers for a
Song,  and “Saucers over Atlantis. 
All this disparate matching, texture, and direction resulted in a book
quite unlike anything written prior to 1953, apart from Charles Forts 1919
Book of the Damned, which has by 1953 become an obscure out-of-print
book. Like Forts book, which has now been rediscovered, Flying Saucers
Have Landed has the right to claim masterpiece status, with textual planes
rather like the distortions of a mediaeval map. There is also the early warning of a “post-modern  nature, that the ordered Cartesian perspectives of
Ordnance Survey may almost certainly possess similar distortions. As
Charles Fort pointed out, many anomalies of which the UFO is but one


variety, live between the folds of such cultural warps as do the banished sea
serpents of old maps. These still appear to baffle, hypnotize, and infuriate.
This is of course, the traditional fairy role, as pointed out by Jacques Vallee
in Passport to Magonia,2 and Patrick Harpur in Demonic Reality.>
Clara John was the editor for Flying Saucers Have Landed. She was
certainly a master of her profession. Even though by different and sometimes unacknowledged hands, the Notes to each chapter and Bibliography
are fully integrated, and refer to one another rather like a prototype computer menu. Given two very different writers, and a subject that is moving
in all directions at once, securing such a tight organization for the book
was no mean achievement. The Notes at the end of each separate Chapter
refer to Adamski in the third person, and were almost certainly written by
Desmond Leslie for both Books 1 and 2. These Notes also form part of a
commentary on the main text which act as a kind of sub-textual stabilizer
to Lesleys often wild speculations; they ground him by means of good
solid references. Thus the whole editorial apparatus contributes in no
small way to the impression of the book as a fascinating mix of ever-varying planes of reference within past, present, and future. Within this mix
there is a cross-referenced fine shading between “fact  and “fiction  combined with objective references from many authors, both past and present.
The Notes to each chapter contain a brilliantly inspired mix of ancient history, contemporary newspaper reports, quotes from mystical tracts and
non-Christian religious texts. This was a heady cocktail for Britain in
1953, where some streets were still lit by gas-lamps, some direct-current
public mains electricity still existed, and the nearest thing to an avantguard author was Terence Rattigan.

This technique was lifted by Leslie almost whole and entire from
Charles Fort, but to give Leslie his due, in the Foreword he does acknowledge his debt to this author. What Leslie did (which Adamski would hardly have been capable of) was to take Forts occasionally cumbersome style
and give it a popular update. The result was a reader-friendly streamlining
in which John Worral Keelys perpetual motion machine and the mystical
power of the Great Pyramid follow breathlessly on the heels of saucer
sightings over American atomic weapons establishments.
In a special sense, Flying Saucers Have Landed is a  book about books. The bibliography alone
is a treasure house of lost, forgotten, out of-print, and abandoned texts of a beleaguered underground culture. Just
one of the charming things about Leslie and Adamskis book is the way it
sent book-hunters in droves looking for such titles as Alice Baileys The
Consciousness of the Atom (1922). Other titles for dedicated bibliophiles
included Noahs Ark by W.J. Crow, Some Human Oddities by E.J.
Dingwall, and The Self-and its Sheathes by Annie Besant, who was always
a sucker for wonderfully unconscious titles. Other books are about the
“riddles  of prehistoric Britain, Atlantis, Indian religious mysticism, The
Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the obligatory “Tibetan  religious teachings. Many of the books mentioned may have been on Adamskis own
shelves, including the Theosophical Publishing Societys The Solar
System by A.E. Powell (1930), and The Pyramids and Stonehenge by Sinnett (1924).

Throughout many generations the ideas in such books had retreated
before science and industry like fairies and elves had fled before
Christianity. There they remained half-glimpsed forms beyond the outer
rim of the cave-mouth fire of the mainstream culture. There, like frozen
viruses under polar ice, they waited their opportunity for a climate
change. When it came, narrow streams of such obscure and almost forgotten books moved rapidly towards the delta-mouth of Leslie and
Adamskts creation as if they were masses of Charles Forts damned and
rejected knowledge under sudden marching orders.
Flying Saucers Have Landed literally reincarnated such fustian material, brushed off its tomb-dust, and introduced it to the brave new world of
what we now call image-bites. As such it was one of the first New Age
books, and without it such influential books as Bergier and Pauwels’
Morning of the Magicians, John Michells Flying Saucer Vision, and
Robert Anton Wilsons illuminatus would have been impossible. To a large
extent, Leslie did what Charles Fort did some forty years previously, but
Leslie was'a far better salesman. He goes at breakneck speed for almost
every piece of whimsy at once, literally showering such gems like free
gifts at a supermarket convention. No wonder Leslie got on with Adamski.
In essence, the dynamic young ex-fighter pilot was an American manque;
there was to be no fustian British thought for him.
Much of the source material used by Desmond Leslie to build a new
vision of the world had lain almost unnoticed in mainly limited editions and


privately published works,the annals and collections of papers
of obscure privately published works,the annals and collections
of papers of obscure folk-societies and occult groups, and
individual students of all matters esoteric.
The Nazis had looked in these same directions too, and had found
power there, but used it for evil and destructive purposes.
Many of the people who were involved in this obscure literary
undergrowth were almost unknown 19th and early 20th century scholars or
academics. Quite a few of these books were written not by professionals, but
by people of private means, many of whom abounded in a very different age
to our own. These people were in the main like the optical astronomers
of the Nineteenth century, looking for particular orchid-gardens in a
leisurely manner rather than being pressured for results as is the way
in our own society.

Therefore rather as Shakespeare used Holinshed, and Chaucer used
Plutarch and Boccaccio, Leslies achievement was not only to bring
together this most obscure material, but to synthesize it dramatically, and
in his case, relate it all to the modern technological manifestation of the
“flying saucer. 

In 1954 the British publisher Frederick Muller issued Flying Saucer
From Mars, an extremely well-written book5  by Cedric Allingham that
included photographs of an Adamski-type saucer, which he said that he
had taken near Lossiemouth Scotland on the 18th of February 1954.
Allingham shows that he also was influenced by the books of Charles Fort
and his work is one of the earliest discussions of Flying Saucers Have
Landed. He was one of the first to appreciate what Leslie and Adamski
were talking about, particularly the connection of Leslies material from
the past with Adamskis “contact  story. Flying Saucer From Mars is useful again because there is a discussion of some immediate reactions to the
publication of Flying Saucer Have Landed the previous year. Though the
top American scientist Donald Menzel had published the extremely skeptical Flying Saucers in 1953, Menzel didn’t stop the idea of saucers just
catching the final era of what Allingham calls the “ the music hall comedians,  who sang of “flying saucers, teapots, and other phenomena.  There is
perhaps is no single modern phenomenon that is still looked upon as
futuristic, yet can be traced back to the time of the “music hall. 
Here is Desmond Leslie, writing in the 1970 revised edition of Flying
Saucers Have Landed: “Ever since the cliche ‘flying saucer’ was coined,
the greatest and most exciting mystery of our age has been automatically


reduced to the level of a music hall joke. The comics of Vaudeville and the
comedians of State and Science banded together, most successfully, to
encourage humanity in its oldest and easiest method of escape—to laugh
at what it does not understand. 

It is interesting to note that of all people Arthur C. Clarke, writing in
the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, made a strong attack on
Flying Saucers Have Landed, calling it “deplorable,  and “a farrago of
nonsense.  Clarke, then hardly known as the famous fiction writer he
would become in later years, thoughtthe photographs were all faked.
However, he added: “If flying saucers do turn out to be spaceships Messrs.
Leslie and Adamski will have done quite a lot to prevent people of intellectual integrity from accepting the fact.  In other words, the tribal chiefs
want to get their hands on the cargo first. In another passage Clarke says
that the perspectives in the photographs are wrong. But Allingham points
out that by that time Leonard Cramp in his classic Space, Gravity & The
Flying Saucers’ had shown undoubtedly that the proportions were without
a doubt correct. The then young radio astronomer Professor Bernard
Lovell (he of later Jodrell Bank fame) suggested that the best thing to do
with the complete edition of Flying Saucers Have Landed “would be to
take it up as ballast in the first space-ship and dump it overboard in space. 
The reigning Astronomer Royal, Sir Harold Spencer Jones FRS, who
wrote an article entitled “Now Bury These Flying Saucers,  endorsed this
opinion. In this, he said, “it is time the question was closed forever. 
By comparison, the review in The Observer of the 4th of October
1953 by Charles Davy was intelligent, well-balanced, and left the question
of truth or falsehood open. A letter of October 11th from G.G.J. Cooper
introduced the question of lampshade similarity. Charles Davy replied:
“One might have thought that anyone who wanted to support a tall story
with faked. photographs would have managed to make them look more
plausible—more like an imagined space-craft’ and less like a lamp. 
The material in the longer Book 1 by Leslie quite overwhelmed the
provincial and conservative British scientists at the time. Neither the education nor the scholastic background of these very British scientists had
prepared them for such wide and original thinking. One can appreciate
their difficulty. The harsh public schools of those days and the experience


in many cases of two World Wars were experiences enough. By the time
of the 1956 Suez disaster, and the utter failure of the first British
space program, the aging senior British scientists of Adamskis time
belonged to a totally exhausted generation.
Given such reactions in Britain, it is strange therefore that interest
in Flying Saucers Have Landed took root in what appeared to be somewhat
infertile soil. But  as  always, the surface of a society is deceptive.
Even in dour Britain, there were live underground streams  running rapidly
towards the more receptive times of the 1960s.

In the 1950s, interest in occult philosophy, fringe religion, and metaphysics in general was perhaps at its lowest ebb in European history. Many
valuable libraries, manuscripts, and much historical material had been
destroyed by the two Wars, and the gradual cultural marginalizing of all
matters esoteric had been going on since the decline of 19th century spiritualism and the public perception of the behavior of such characters as
Aleister Crowley. The young men and women who came out of the armed
services and voted against Churchill in the 1945 election formed the rump
of a new class whose practical and rational views were mainly left-of-center.
Even those who were not of this political persuasion, nevertheless
believed in science and thoroughgoing rationalism as tools with which to
construct a new society. Neither Left nor Right wanted anything to do
with esoteric matters, which in Britain in particular had never been liked
nor understood. To almost all of this generation, the occult was a standing
historical joke, hardly entering serious British discussions; at best, it had
something to do with Catholics, upper-middle-class eccentrics, tanned
faces well south of Calais, or at its worst, it was associated with the Nazi
philosophy of mystical racism. With Crowley and Blavatsky long booed
off the cultural stage, the talk after 1945 was of economics and socialism,
of “realism,  and the demystification and demythologizing of elite social
structures and antiquated Victorian ideology.

The first phase of this decision to change experience as received was
brilliantly successful. In Britain, there arose the Welfare State, a quite revolutionary concept of socialism and society. It seemed that in the face of
this achievement alone, applied scientific thinking was indeed historically
triumphant, and many of the old ghosts sowing historical and philosophical confusion had been banished forever.


But the deeper reason for the success of Flying Saucers Have Landed
was that many utilitarian rationalists still had bad dreams. The problem
was the Nuremberg trials of 1945. It was impossible to describe Nazi
crimes by conventional legal concepts. The events as examined could not
be rationalized, could indeed be called hardly “criminal  at all. There was
therefore hesitancy on behalf of the prosecutien (exploited by the still
defiant, if somewhat deflated, Goering) for two reasons. The first difficulty
was that most of those on trial appeared to be genuinely bewildered by
what had happened, as if they were coming out of a dream. The second
was that as the trial proceeded, it became very clear that a highly astute
native German intelligentsia (including some men of genius such as
Walter Heisenberg), had been involved in forming an operational ideology
that had caused the death of over 30 million people.
Plainly, what was on trial was not violence as conventionally accepted. The Fabian utilitarianism of even brilliant men such as QC Hartley
Shawcross hardly equipped them to examine motive, when that motive
involved intellectual corruption of an order whose scientific “objectivity 
was a new kind of demonology, although previously Churchill, with his
usual far-sighted vision had described Nazis science as “perverted. 

Perverted it was, if only because it justified the sort of medical experimentation on human beings that can hardly be described, and that was quite
invisible to the normal processes of Law. Such a thing was also invisible to
the normal processes of historical examination as expressed by traditional
academic historians such as Trevor Roper or Alan Bullock, with their
extremely limited social-democratic view, and even the far more venturesome William Manchester and William Shirer, who both thoroughly
despised metaphysics. Concrete empirical methods were no tools for analyzing an inspirational force that passed through all moral walls as easily
as Strontium 90, which by the time of Nuremberg, was steadily entering
the bones of both the guilty and the innocent alike.

This feeling of unease as the Nazis were tried and hanged almost as
simple-minded horse-thieves, was a justification for Desmond Leslie to
take a second look at esoteric matters that had long since been thought
historically dead. Though it was certainly not directly intended as such,
Flying Saucers Have Landed can now be seen as part of a counter-culture
reaction against Marxism and the puritanical terrors of the beginnings of


the Cold War in Europe. Both Right and Left were against all free creative
imagination, whatever form it took. Though the Nazis accepted the power
of imagination via Wagner and Neitzsche, they perverted it, while the
Communists attempted to destroy it utterly. Thus like Alice in Wonderland,
Flying Saucers Have Landed has an implicit political background.
Though Leslie lacked Charles. Forts depth, range, and literary skill,
he had nevertheless an ability to combine complex irony with bizarre
humor. Other highly influential books such as Morning of the Magicians
and the books of Brinsley Le Poer Trench were inspired by Leslies
achievement in turning obscure folklore into modern cultural dynamite.
The whole approach in Flying Saucers Have Landed is bright, lively, and
most informative, though the book lacks Forts poorly hidden political
anger and bitterness at non-recognition of his undoubted genius. Certainly
it struck a brilliant light in those depressing pre-1960s days, which were a
kind of “no-mans land  between the end of World War 2 and the far happier world of the 1960s.

Although sophisticated books on UFOs such Flying Saucers Are Real
by the American writer Donald Keyhoe had begun to appear in 1950,
Leslies approach attached the saucer phenomenon to history and the
development of ideas. This was something that Keyhoe, as a very dour
and practical ex-Marine pilot, was not inclined to do. He rejected all contactee claims as outrageous lies, and threw Adamski out of the group he
headed, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.
Leslies book was also much more dramatically appealing than The
Riddle of the Flying Saucers, the first British book on flying saucers by
Gerald Heard published in 1950, Heards otherwise intelligent and interesting account is marred by his theory that the crews of the flying saucers
were nothing less than intelligent bees  Believing this, Heard, unlike
Desmond Leslie, could hardly include contact stories or abductions. For
the same reason, he could include no historical background, and the reaction to the suggestion that the pyramids were built by super-intelligent
bees can be imagined. These were just a few of the reasons why in comparison, Flying Saucers Have Landed became by far the better seller. This
tells us something about humanity in general and avid buyers of such
books in particular:
abductions by humanoid forms perhaps, but by bright bees, no 


At the end of Leslies Chapter 20, “The First Spaceship on Record, 
the time is ripe for the entry of one of the most celebrated White Rabbits
of the 20th century, one George Adamski. After quoting from the Brahmin
Tables, Desmond Leslie gives George a build-up straight out of Ben Hur:
“T now hand over the tale to George Adamski, who is the first to be able to
give us a documentary record of his experiences and impressions on coming face to face with a man from another planet. Adamski was not afraid
when he saw the shining vehicle come down, nor when the tremendous
realization burst upon him that he was-standing face to face with a living
spiritual being, a man like ourselves, a human brother from another globe
of existence.

“And so we who are of the same flesh and mould as Adamski can
look up with joy, rather than fear, when from time to time other fragments;
other people; Sparks from the same FLAME, flash for a moment into the
orbit of our perception, knowing that, like ourselves, they are working out
the full lesson of their worlds in the slow, aenonic, struggling ascent
towards union in the Central Mystic Sun. 

Finally, the man himself comes on stage: “I am George Adamski,
philosopher, student, teacher, saucer researcher. My home is Palomar
Gardens on the southern slopes of Mount Palomar, California, eleven
miles from the big Hale Observatory, home of the 200-inch telescope, 
In contrast to Leslies florid descriptions and often quite breathless
enthusiasm, is Adamsk1s almost monosyllabic style. Such a contrast had
hardly been achieved before in one book, at least with such aplomb. The
cool and calm nature of Adamskis entrance (after such an introduction),
comes as a pleasant surprise. Expecting some kind of crazy monster of a
mad eccentric, instead we encounter a home and a life; we meet friends
and acquaintances. Again, in contrast to Leslie, we meet many folk of differing opinions. Present is the landscape and atmosphere of the California
mountain communities; there are cameos of its life and characters; its
weather, climate, and atmosphere are well drawn.

From the very beginning Adamski raises an almost aboriginal sense
of something about to happen in this region of the world. And UFOs apart,
after 1945, something tremendous did happen. From Los Alamos to Los
Angeles, there developed what was tantamount to a new Renaissance in


culture and scientific thinking. Brains drained off from bone-headed traditional cultures whose speed of thinking was at the rate of cavalry before
the advent of the tank.

The bizarre contrast of personality, background and style of the two
authors is surprisingly effective. The Adamski experiences come over as
an intense personal dramatization of one of the historical periods
described previously by Leslie. The result is a surprisingly successful
unity: read Adamski and you have to take Leslie with you, and vice versa.
It creates an intriguing tension in the reader; the ideological jumps of
Leslie we can handle, but the physical jumps of Adamski, well, perhaps
we are not nearly so sure.

But Adamski writes surprisingly well. His voice is clear and extremely matter-of-fact. He was obviously a stable person, almost devoid of hysteria, depression, or the schizoid-tensions of fundamentalist believers.
When he describes his first contact with what he believed was a man from
an extraterrestrial spaceship, the mystic in him is awed into silence, and
his description is plain and naturalistic, deft, and most careful. His point of-view is outward looking; he mentions people and places by way of
illustration; there are meetings with a wide social range, and opinions are
exchanged. He travels, corresponds, and has good personal relationships.
He has, for the most part, a balanced temper and a patient and scholarly
disposition. He lived very happily within a busy commune-style society,
of which almost all spoke well of him; neither does he appear to be devious or secretive.

Thus there is no psychological base for saying that Adamski was the
kind of unscrupulous fraud he has been accused of being by many who
have not given him his proper due. He was simply not complicated
enough for the kind of sophisticated multi-dimensional duplicity involving many photographs and films of what would certainly have had to have
been extremely sophisticated electromechanical models. Neither was he
technically devious enough to accomplish the simultaneous and complete
deception of no less than six witnesses to his initial desert contact. We
must take note here of a good rule derived from Charles Fort, and not
make any explanations more fantastic than the thing they are trying to
explain. However, by his description of the desert contact, we can see the
source of the problems that were to plague Adamski for twenty years, and


bring him near to poverty and despair. He was simply an absolutely
appalling optimist, and a rather camp sentimentalist to boot, amongst
other things.
But he related a tale that the world was never to forget.



CHAPTER 5,
Orthons Shoes and
Mr. Silas Newton.
flying Saucers Have Landed does not end with Adamskis story of the
IBet desert contact on the 20th of November 1952. Both the
Postscript and Appendix contain a mix of mad comedy and intrigue, and
the latter contains unexploded bombs, some of which have only just detonated after ticking away for half a century.

The Postscript certainly sounds as if it was written by Adamski. It
gives an account of the prevailing situation regarding the interpretation of
the marks on the soles of Orthons shoes, of which plaster casts were made
by George Hunt Williamson at the time of the desert encounter. As ever
Adamski is wonderfully unconscious of himself as a human being. He
says without the least hint of comic irony that great efforts have been
made to interpret these marks, as well as the strange writing on the photograph whose frame was dropped from the spaceships porthole on the 13th
of December 1952. And he adds without the slightest blush: “I learn that
not one of the workers feels within himself that he has been fully successful in learning the messages to be passed to Earth men. 

It takes some nerve to initiate a crazy game of interpreting the marks
made by the shoe-soles of a being who claims he came from Venus in a flying saucer. It must have taken even more nerve to believe in it himself, as
Adamski did, certainly. Though his sense of humor was not all that strong, it
is difficult to believe that he did not smile to himself on occasion as he introduced this game to the world, and sat back and watch the world work on it.
The mad metaphysical comedy he created in three dimensions is straight
from the pages of Joyce or Sterne, with a touch of Edward Lear. Had the
whole thing consisted of such, then at least we would have had a classic that
could have been put on the shelf alongside Ulysses or Tristram Shandy.


But Flying Saucers Have Landed was a book that refused to be put
into a passive role. Part of its appeal was that it was a fabric of living
expression more than a simple text that could be hung on some “literary 
wall as a decoration. It took from an out-dated context what some saw as
traditional fairy stories and placed them centrally in fighter-cockpits and
returns from aerial radar. It therefore made the fantastic haunt the glistening new instrumentation of the post-war age, connecting ancient sightings
with modern rocketry and spaceflight, and ancient mysteries with contemporary scientific speculation. To add to this considerable achievement,
month after month scores of “objective -verifications of the claims of the
book were appearing in the outer world like a kind of supertext springing
from its inked pages. ;
Thus with increasing sightings of UFOs themselves, the book was
being updated as it was read and absorbed. Adamskis deft style helped
this assimilation. Its disarming effect was ideal for leading readers up
that garden path which is the entrance to the drama of Orthons shoes.
The following passage from the Postscript, for instance, is naif Borges:
“ ..the footprints with their markings, and a photo of the dropped print
with its markings is being included here, with a partial list of suggested
books, including the dictionary which gives very modern definitions of
the individual marking as they are named in mathematics, astronomy,
and other sciences. 

No one appears to have noticed, but as a sideline, on the evidence of
the above, George Adamski appears to have invented Trivial Pursuit 
The intellectual eroticism of all this delicious insanity was quite irresistible. With books flying into the sky and back, and dictionaries being
brought in to shed light on shoe-soles, the Orwellian machinery predictably turned its head from screaming about communist dangers, and
chanted automated denials about the flying saucer phenomenon. But it
was no good. Like all good subversives, the saucers turned up in strength
and in places where they were least expected.
During his tour of Europe in 1959 Adamski showed a film of the
development of a “gravity-canceling’’ motor said to have been made
from interpretations of the “instructions  on the back of Orthons shoes. A
certain Basil Van Den Berg, a South African engineer, claimed that he had
successfully constructed such a motor. When interviewed by South



African writer Philip J. Human (sic), Van Den Berg showed an impressive
folder full of calculations and blueprints, and also some mechanical parts.
He claimed to have been inspired by a man from Venus who visited him at
night, and to have seen through a magnifying glass that the marks on the
boots were holographic. This effect was visible even on a copy that
Adamski had sent to him at his request. Major governments were interested in Van Den Bergs device; Mexico, for instance, offered him unlimited
money and resources, but like many such an inventor, Van Den Berg disappeared never to be seen again.
Even the Appendix of Flying Saucers Have Landed does not let up. It
consists of a description of an official USAF “briefing  in a Quonset hut
with, among others, a confidence crook, a magnetic mystic, the author of a
famous book on flying saucers, and the cameraman who filmed The Ten
Commandments, no less  As Cecil B. De Mille himself might have said,
could we ask for more?
Adamski is very much the shadow-guest at this conference. He
threads through the lives of the main guests in one way or another. The
heading is worth quoting in full:
Meeting at Veterans Administration, Quonset T-26.
1 June 1953.

Air Force Reserve Officers.
Object-Briefing on flying saucer activity.
Led by Al. Chop, former Public Relations Head for Project Flying
Saucer for Air Corps, Washington, D.C., also Public Relations Head for
Pentagon having to do with release of all publicity and official statements
re flying saucers.
Meeting for purpose ofbriefing these officers on known facts re flying
saucer phenomena and to instruct officers on kind of information and
observation the Air Force is seeking.
The date of June 1 st, 1953, puts this “briefing  smack between
Adamskis desert encounter of November 20, 1952 and the publication of
the British edition of Flying Saucers Have Landed in late 1953. But
Adamski was not at this conference (he is referred to in the third person)
and neither was Leslie. Therefore a reader does not know who wrote this


Appendix, or what sources (other than memory) were used in its compilation. It sounds very much like an eyewitness account, and written up by
someone who knew his or her job. Frank Scully was certainly there, and
he could have given a written report to his friend Adamski for inclusion in
Adamskis forthcoming book, whose publication must have been common
knowledge by this time. If Scully did such a thing, then he had to do it
very quickly because Adamskis manuscript had to make its way across
the Atlantic almost immediately in time for Werner Laurie to include the
report on this meeting as an Appendix. But again, if it was written by
Scully, it is odd that he was not credited; as the inclusion of the name of
this well-known author could well have increased the sales of Flying
Saucers Have Landed.

For a “briefing  for “Air Force Reserve Officers,  Quonset hut T-26
certainly contains an odd bunch, even by Scully-Adamski standards. One
Harold Sherman is there, described as a “metaphysical teacher and lecturer.’ Harold was a “channeler,  this being a receiver of psychic messages.
He belonged to a council of “elders  who were connected to US. “contactee  circles at this time, and who held meetings at Giant Rock.5? One
Harry Myers, an “Instructor, Hollywood High School,  is present, together with Gene Dorsey, a “Hollywood business man. 
If all these people were indeed “Air Force Reserve Officers,  then we
have here an intriguing view of the air defense personnel of America at
this time 

Giving a marvelously American touch to the proceeding is no less a
person than the aforementioned cameraman, Pevernell (“Pev’) Marley,
who was married to Linda Darnell, a famous Hollywood film actress of
the time. Marley had been a combat cameraman during World War 2 , and
he showed some of Adamskis photographs to Al Chop. Marley is quoted
in reported speech, as saying: “Adamskis pictures, if faked, were the
cleveresthe had ever seen, rivaling a Houdini. Marley pointed out that the
shadows on these saucers, and also on the ground, corresponded to such a
remarkable degree that they could not be faked, and that to fake such pictures would require costly equipment which Adamski, obviously, does not
possess and which, even then, could not assure such a result. 
Jim Moseleys October 1957 special “Adamski expose  issue of
Saucer News contains the following comments by Moseley about this


meeting: “Mr. Al Chop, who, it has been noted, is quoted at length in the
appendix (sic) of the book, told me (Jim Moseley) in a personal interview
that he is misquoted, and that he has considered suing Mr. Adamski
because of this fact. Similarly, in a phone conversation with me, Pev
Marley denied having made the statements attributed to him, and also
denied the rumor, circulated by Adamski and a few of his admirers, that
Marley had blown up one of the Adamski scout ship’ photos and, found,
in the blow up, the head of a man looking out of one of the ‘portholes.’  
This kind of ufological Punch-and-Judy show still runs on its metalloid ways of time past and time future. With regard to heads out of port-
holes, Adamski himself replied, in Gray Barkers Book of Adamski, to a
correspondent who claimed that he could see faces in the portholes of one
of the ships shown in one of Adamskis photographs. Adamski says, perhaps tongue in cheek, that in his opinion, these heads are in the correspon-
dents imagination  Thus we have almost-heads almost looking out of
almost-portholes in what some people say are almost-photographs. It is
the “almost  component here which is far more interesting than any old
iron-age “truth  or “falsehood. 

These head-and-porthole sketches of fragile human concepts are
pieces of pudding thrown out of the nursery windows of human consciousness. Where and upon whom they land is anybodys guess. The trouble is
that the grown-up concepts of quarks and Big Bangs are equally good
dumplings, and they most probably come from those same mad and unhygienic nursery-kitchens that serve up all human certainty as bombe superb.
Somewhere in the pushes and pulls of these intermediate states is
the mystery of the UFO. Perhaps the terrible truth is that since humanity at
large can act in a way that is as daft as the proverbial brush, then we can
well expect other conscious life forms to be just as crazy as we are. Our
puny instrumentation will not register that, of course. Any alien phenomenon may have a thriving entertainment culture running alongside, or even
replacing a techno-scientific one. That is just one shock we will probably
have to brace ourselves for should contact be made. To be revealed as
mere toys on a screen would not do wonders for our ego. We may not be
offered up for slavery, exploitation, experimentation, or even food.
We may just be used as a joke.


Perhaps the most fantastic character present at the briefing is one
Silas Mason Newton, the “magnetic expert  mentioned in Scullys book.
Thanks to the research of writer Karl Pflock, we now know a lot more
about Newton, who was a friend of Pev Marley, and whom Pflock reveals
as “one of the great unsung con-men  of the 20th century. Newton was in
the Adamski loop, and he most probably conned Frank Scully over the
alleged Aztec crash. In December 1952, due to True magazines revelations about his activities, Newton was arrested by the Colorado authorities
and charged with fraud. In December 1953, six months after Chops briefing, he was convicted, and could therefore possibly have read a first edi-
tion of Flving Saucers Have Landed from his prison cell.

Newton was thus between the Devil and the deep blue sea at the time
of this briefing. However, true to his doubtful profession, he appears
relaxed he as he corrects Chop when Chop replies to Marley saying that if
Adamski got photographs of UFOs, then Palomar should have got them
too. Newton points out that the Palomar telescope could not cover the lowaltitude areas covered by Adamskis instrument. He adds that, in his opin-
ion, the flight of the saucers is along the San Andreas fault-line and these
vehicles are utilizing the earths magnetic field as a form of motive power.
Newton was a clever and sophisticated individual with both humor
and vision. He certainly had enough nerve to play the UFO game for all it
was worth and see where the game led. But perhaps in doing this, he got
more than he bargained for.

On July 11th, 1998, Pflock met an anonymous source who handed
him 27 pages of lined paper “torn from a bound journal or school copy
book  on which was a spidery handwriting. The source said that this was
Newtons hand, and dated from the last years of Newtons life in the early
1970s. The source added that Pflock could read the manuscript in his presence, take notes, but not make a copy. On a later occasion, Pflock com-
pared the manuscript with the handwriting on Newtons will and they
were identical. Newton says that the whole Aztec story  in Scullys book
was a hoax initiated by him and others. The reason for this hoax was
apparently to try and get a whole lot of new investment interests in
claimed bits and pieces of stolen alien technology from crashed ships.
Interested parties would be told that this technology could locate oil.
But as his tale continues, Newton realized that he had unwittingly


aroused interest sectors quite beyond his expectations.
Sometime during the year 1950, two men visited his office. They
claimed that they were with a “highly secret  government agency. They
laughingly poked holes in Newtons saucer stories, but told him to continue
his storytelling, as it just might help him with his legal problems.
According to Pflock, taking evidence from the manuscript before him,
Newton took this to mean two things: “,the big brass had something they
wanted to hide and my game would help them to do it. Those fellows sure
wanted me to think it was a real saucer and I did think it was and still do. 
Newton was of the opinion that since the FBI deferred to state and
local authority, he was helped by the mysterious organization the men said
they represented.

The last time Newton saw these two men was on December 9th, 1953.
They again asked him to stick to his saucer story. Newton responds: “I
told them I knew there was something to all that flying saucer business
and I was so sure I would keep using it. What I did not say was that I could
see plenty of opportunities for games to work with fellows like Adamski
and the others. Sure, I would play along. 
This kind of thing was what made an essential part of Adamskis life
rather like an echoing canyon built of stories.
Authentic modern mysticism  is now hardly to be found in established religions. The churches, rather like a major portion of the literary
and arts sector, separated from the technological culture long ago and lost
the game of intermediate states. Secular mysticism is found in such fleeting sprites as those seen by Adamski, summoned almost by some enactment of metaphor alone. Pale transients, like Woody Derenbergers Mr.
Indrid Cold, or John Keels Princess Moon Owl, or Adamskis Orthon,
appear to come from paper-thin temporary almost-worlds. As characters,
they are like a painting by numbers with some of the numbers missing,
just like a text file that has been stored in the wastebin of a hard-disc for
some time. Like Keats Psyche of his poem of that name, many of these
part-forms don’t appear to have enough energy to keep up the schedule of
proper world-appearances, and die as disintegrating systems-doodles.
Like Keats Psyche again, they are possibly intercultural, not interstellar,
that is if the concept of interstellar is not intercultural in the first place.
Western thinking in general has great difficulty with these intermediate forms and partial states of being. Such an order of matter is excluded
(rather than unknown) from science, banished to those far regions (either
microscopic or interstellar) where rationalists always locate their mysteries, if only to daunt inquisitive heathens, the uninitiated, and, of course, the
great partly-washed.
But the spiritually aware would also like their mysteries far-off, at
some similar conceptual distance, held in some Hindu or Tibetan fastness;
there they can be romanticized and managed. But rationalists and mystics
both do not like unbelievable things in the air immediately above an Air
Force Base. In that embarrassing situation things have got beyond all control, and that would never do.



CHAPTER 6,
Cargo Perspectives.
of Earth culture, never mind possible alien societies. To trust the waving
of arms (and alleged “telepathy  in the bargain) so literally and precisely
as Adamski does, contains far more risks than say, trying to translating the
“Friends  TV series into Eskimo. A bottle of brown HP sauce on a
Blackpool boarding-house table in the North of England is a symbol that
is the entry to an entire universe; how do we begin to translate such a thing
to a Turkish fisherman, still less a Peruvian herdsman? An interesting consideration is that if Adamski were practicing a deception, he would surely
not have left himself and his actions so open to ridicule. A more devious
man would have cleaned up the entire act, and made it more convincing.
The highest probability is that a man who so willingly risks making himself the laughing-stock of an entire civilization is telling it how he saw it.
This is just one example of the kind of game that snared Adamski.
These things make the whole of his experience rather like an early threedimensional model of a “web  world in which old-fashioned space and
time have been replaced by a gaming information-flow. In this medium,
“up and down  and “truth and falsehood  have been replaced by the kind
of scale of hard and soft fantasies, as portrayed by the film, The Matrix.
There are those scientists who think that a really advanced “intelligence 
might well exist in a semi-disembodied game-world in which that old
industrial analogue we called “objective reality  might be replaced eventually by virtual simulations. Fifty years after this contact we are in a
much better position to understand how an apparently serious and profound experience is just as much a series of double-takes, screen flashes,
and cultural advertisements as is any other kind of experience, including
the so-called “objective  scientific experience.

During the Second World War, the natives of the Melanesian islands
built decoy airstrips in the bush, complete with bamboo radio shacks
sporting wooden aerials to receive messages regarding delivery of goods,
that is “cargo.  Often GI radio commands such as “Roger, out  were preserved as an oral tradition, and telephones made of white flowers became
the objects of ritual obsession. On many Pacific islands, the ejected wingtanks from World War 2  fighters became objects of veneration, as did B
29 propellers and even tins of jam left behind in abandoned USAF stores.
Research anthropologists also report that fragments from ancient US
Army rations are still used as a kind of host in “cargo-cult  ceremonies.


What are we to think of the designs on Orthons shoe soles, knowing
that happened?
Stuart Swezey, writing in the Amok Journal, comments on the reaction of Melanesian natives to the sight of black American troops on active
service towards the end of World War 2 : “These black men could operate
the radio transmitters which beckoned the falling cargo from the ancestors
and seemed to the oppressed islanders to be dealing with the white man
confidently, and on equal terms. Life magazines brought by the GIs contained photographic proof that in America people lived surrounded by
refrigerators and cars in the kind of consumer paradise that the islanders
had been striving so far unsuccessfully to obtain. 
These observations provide an intriguing view of Adamskis comically confusing claims about the “fertile  planet Venus. They also make us
suspect that our iron age “fact versus fiction  differentiations may eventually become largely meaningless. In Inside the Spaceships, on one of
Adamskis trips into outer space, Ramu, who has spoken English from the
very start, (what we would give to hear the accent ), describes a city on the
moon. This is a perfect “cargo  picture: “We have to construct a few hangers near the cities for convenience in landing with the supplies we bring to
the population here—everything not available locally for their needs. In
exchange, they furnish us with certain minerals found on the moon. 
This trading-mechanical view of the activities of what is most probably a super-intelligence do not so much prove Adamski wrong as being his
way of trying to interpret what he is seeing in comprehensible terms. We
might compare Edward Rices transcription ’ of a Melanesian “interpretation : “Before the war an American was hauled very high in the sky in a
net. He came to Vila. He spoke American wisdom. We didn’t understand
what he means, true or untrue. He stood on something white, like a plate.
In a minute, two minutes, he went to America. We didn’t know his name,
but we called him Nabnab, Mr. Nabnab, which means fire, Because
always, hes just playing with volcano smoke at Tanna. When the wind
blows that cloud somewhere, hes just sitting up on that cloud. 
Any contact with a different kind of intelligence will show such distortions, if only because all thinking is constructed of such projections. A
Melanesian native does not “see  a tiny computer chip with 32 legs any
more than we do not “see  a moon with cities on it. Anyone who has ever


been a professional teacher at any time will know that trying to make certain people see what they are not mentally capable of seeing is a daunting
experience. That richness of connection that enables conscious recognition of a spectrum of resources varies greatly. We have a complex techno-
logical and scientific culture built on the mysteries of magnetism, electricity, and radiation, the fundamental nature of which remains completely
unknown. No matter how we try therefore we surely cannot help recognizing that what we live amongst are mental structures most of which are cer-
tainly as comic as Mr. Nabnab.
Adamski exhibits a kind of Old Testament literal acceptance of the
situation he was undoubtedly faced with. He is not in the least suspicious
or frightened when on their very first contact Orthon admits to him that
humans have been abducted, just as were slaves in the past. This violation
of human rights does not seem to worry either himself or Orthon; the
golden glow and the overall feeling of wisdom and clear cosmic certainty
remain. Neither does it occur to Adamski that he might be in very grave
danger, although he gets a hint of trouble when he touches the rim of the
ship and is badly shocked as if by contact with a high voltage.
After all these years, the truth about the Adamski experience is
becoming gradually more clear. It was almost certainly the classic cargocult situation, with humanity for once in the “inferior  position. This of
course no more denies the “reality  of Orthon to Adamski any more than
it denies the “reality  of the black troops to the Melanesian natives. As
Harvard psychiatrist John Mack has pointed out, to Westerners “contact 
would represent “a Narcissistic blow of unimaginable proportions  that
the ego would do anything to avoid, even when faced with undeniable evidence. That may well be the best single reason for not only the subsequent
cover-ups, but also for many of Adamskis confusions that disappointed
many on his very last tour of Europe in 1963, which was not a happy event
for him. On that tour, he was asked in understandable human cartoon fashion, what Orthon was going to do next, when would he contact again, and
where was he now? He was in the impossible position of natives asking
(many years after World War 2 ) just when the B29 Superfortresses were
going to return to the island with free tins of US Army rations.
The natives were not in the least bit interested in the B52s making
sky-trails above them. Because a B52 didn’t look anything like a B29, and



didn’t land in any case; they were looking for a piece of that America that
was born with Glenn Miller and died with President Kennedy. Goodness
only knows what they would think, say, if a modern film unit on location
in their area shot a mock-attack by a reconditioned Japanese Zero fighter
on a privately rebuilt B29 say, for a TV advertisement. A full understanding of this situation would be very difficult, if not impossible for the
natives. They would have to interpret vast social, economic, and technological changes all of which moreover are dust to ourselves in any case.
The Japanese and American societies that built both the Zero and the B29
lasted for less than decade, and as live-eultures once upon a time, these
societies have vanished forever.

Therefore while watching such possible filming, to the Melanesians,
the events observed would have “reality,  but from our own point of view,
they would have no “reality  at all. The events described are to us manufactured events, and Melanesians have no concept of the idea of manufac-
ture in the sense we understand it. In addition, the idea of “advertisement 
and the idea of filmed reproduction, actors, and airborne props would add
to the confusion. Such an observed “mock  combat with no real damage
done would perhaps lead Melanesians to the idea that they were seeing
some kind of advanced ritual dance. In terms of Western consumerism of
course they would be right. But of course that would be as far as they
would get. After a little thought, most of the confused natives would surely
come to the conclusion that everybody was telling outrageous lies to
everybody else, which is as good a definition of consumerism (and media)
as anything else.

Time, technology, and belief were compressed into an even smaller
spectrum by other Polynesians who preferred the B17 Flying Fortress as a
god-vehicle. The B29 Superfortress that succeeded the B17 became a
“false  god, one that was faster and higher and far less frequent. The frontline combat life of the obsolescent B17 in the Pacific theatre was no more
than some nine months. Slices of world-history do not come much more
narrow than that. Thus the Polynesian “god  came and went in an almost
imperceptible flash of light and inspiration before thousands of the Boeing
B17 “deities  were piled up on uninhabited islands awaiting the pre-war
cutting torch. Of course, venturesome natives in outriggers would come
across such islands and would return to tell the weirdest tales that the gods

were dead. However, in wandering amidst the wreckage they would come
across the occasional tin of plum jam, sausages, or even bread. That these
things could still be eaten proved the immortality of the gods.
Ten years later, anthropologists found fragments of fossilized pork
sausages being offered up as hosts in religious ceremonies while congregations prayed for the future return of well-stock B17s to the island.
To this day these isolated Pacific cultures run their societies on such
assumptions. Though “false  to ourselves, many Polynesian societies run
smoothly on these beliefs, and they have gradually transformed all traditional moral, legal, and social norms.

That such patent falsehoods have become psychological and sociologically operational is a very grim reminder that such things may have
happened to humanity in the past and indeed are still happening.
Such a psychology of confusions must be considered when approaching claimed contact and abduction experiences. Aimost all of these experi-
ences have a common element of deep absurdity that cannot be
approached by the simple-minded skeptical eugenics of seeing such things
either as real or unreal.

Thus just like a character in a novel, Adamski was put in a position
where he had to create follow-through stories cut to fit human cartoon
“what happens next  expectancies. His story book universe was hence
complete, inside and out, echoing the Elizabethan playwright Marlowes
version of Mephistopheles’ answer to Faust: “Why this is hell, nor am I
out of it.’ That, of course, is the only answer to a request from a
Melanesian for an explanation of why neither the B17, the B29, nor the
Zero are any longer seen fighting it out in Melanesian skies, or why there
are hundreds of dead gods on scores of islands.

In turn, our biggest mistake with regards to “contact  may be that we
expect a recognizable scientific culture. There are no prizes for anyone
who suggests that science, being a culture amongst other cultures, will
decline, inevitably. An even bigger problem with “contact  will be the
alien 2, 3, and 4 ad infinitum situation. There is a bewildering variety of
known human Earth cultures, all in different stages of any and every kind
of development, including decline. By simple analogy, it is more than reasonable to expect the same variety within more “advanced  beings. It follows that the relationships between the differing levels will again mirror
this same wide variety. It is therefore extremely unlikely that “contact 
will necessarily be with a single isolated strand of alien life. For ourselves
the time between sails and funnels was a long time, and the cultural difference between crews of sail and steam (never mind the coming aircrews),
is profound. But for the Pacific tribes in their pre-industrial setting, it was
no time at all. The various “crews  of different vehicles of different ages
were to a Melanesian a set of different images, not products in the Western
sense. Each image for them is not necessarily a function or a logical consequence of a preceding image, as is the case with a structured “product 
that has a technological development in industrial time. Images to a
Melanesian are associative, not sequential. Therefore, we have to consider
that a truly “alien  psychology may have no sense of simple sequential
Western “constant improvement  time, just as a Melanesian does not reason that a sail crew came before or after a steam crew.

This is not completely unfamiliar to us. The 1960s culture looked
back to a pre-industrial age, and science itself looks forward to a time
when a great “everything  is explained. These are modern myths, quite
identical to Genesis in form, content, and psychology.
Neither is the Melanesian idea of time and change as mere sceneshifts in a universal theater unfamiliar. Wartime airplane crews on tempo-
rary stations scoffed at being asked by Melanesians if they personally
knew a certain white man who had “come out of the sea  long ago.
According to missionaries, the story of this (probably shipwrecked) man
had been told for several hundred years.

But like mirrors placed face to face, there are mutual astonishments.
When Captain Cooks reports eventually came back to 18th century
England, the excitement aroused by Cooks descriptions of idyllic native
life in the far Pacific’ was a spur to burgeoning ideas that would form the
Romantic Movement. Even Rousseau threw away his watch when he
heard of a life without tasks, structures, interpretations, or even discoveries. By the 1960s, many of the long-haired sons and daughters of the
scoffing bomber pilots were all looking for the secrets of the Melanesians
as the Melanesians looked for the secrets of their fathers.
Being alive means to a large extent being confused. Confusion



defines both the thinking process itself and the highest intelligence. Those
who are not confused to some degree are not thinking. Only the skeptic
and grocer are certain, with their finite inputs and outputs, their profit and
their loss. But both maintain certainty only by ignoring the advertisements
for the goods, and almost unconsciously neglecting to ask questions about
where the goods come from.

The brain “reasons  not by old industrial ideas of “objective facts 
but by mistakes and amnesia, by images and suggestion, by the most outrageous self-advertising and by hypocrisy and blindness. Out of such rub-
bish came both our morality that raises us above the animals and our creative imagination that gets us into such terrible trouble with the gods.
When contact occurs (if it has not happened already, even many times
in the past, and perhaps is still ongoing), we will inherit “their  confusions
and uncertainties as the poor things will undoubtedly inherit our own. This
will make the universe appear not only very strange, but as the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane said long ago, possibly stranger than we could imagine.
With Haldanes thought in mind, here are two examples of almost
Melanesian absurdity, high strangeness, and cultural confusion combined,
but working all together in our own society. Timothy Good says: “,a
German scientist who worked at a top-secret U.S./German space research
center whose name I cannot disclose, alleges that the director of the center
was himself an alien—and furthermore of specifically ‘Venusian’ origin.
This knowledge was restricted to a quorum of scientists at the center, and
my informant stated that the director provided them with information
which proved invaluable to their research. 


Adamski himself had often claimed that Professor Hermann Oberth,
the pioneer space scientist whose students included Wernher von Braun,
had received direct extraterrestrial assistance.72 The “space travelers  he
says “work in industries and government positions throughout the world.
They may also be found in the armed forces of every nation, working in
divisions of science, communications, medical corps, etc. where they are
not required to be trained for slaughter of their fellow men. 
To express such a positive sentiment in the same breath as he mentions name of Nazi fellow-traveler Oberth and ex-SS man von Braun,
shows perfectly that mixture of childish innocence, optimism, and naivety
with which George Adamski attempted to organize his beliefs and his life.



Concerning such cultural confusions, the ideas of Charles Fort, that
remarkable researcher and philosopher of the unexplained, is useful. Fort
saw humanity in general, and scientists in particular, as deep-sea fish trying to account for the fall of wreckage from a huge ship that has exploded.
The fish have no concept or a five-year diary, a wooden leg, an umbrella,
or a split steel door of a cargo hold, never mind the myriad of other
unidentified objects descending into their particular bandwidth of perception. Yet, as Fort would say, if fish think at all they will systemize, they
will interpret, just like the astronomers; they will, like scientists, produce
accuracies and certainties beyond the sun and moon. These will be based
upon scraps of inconceivable cosmic wreckage, some electrical bits of
which might even respond with a last bleep or two, producing endless
fishy scrolls of prophecy and revelation concerning aquatic destiny.
What the reactions of a fragment of live coral, or a passing eel
would be to such a Voice from on High is anybodys guess. “I’m in the
state of mind,’ wrote Fort, “of a savage who might find upon a shore,
buoyant parts of a piano and a paddle that was carved by cruder hands
than his own: something light and summery from India, and a fur overcoat from Russia. The higher idealist is the super-dogmatist of a local
savage who can hold out, without a flurry of a doubt, that a piano
washed up on a beach is the trunk of a palm that a shark has bitten, leaving its teeth in it. 





CHAPTER 7,
The Ufonauts are the
Liars, Not the Contactees.


it is rather strange that George Adamski chose to end Flying Saucers
lene Landed in December 1952. He does not take the opportunity to
include in the 55 pages sent to Werner Laurie describing what he says happened to him on the 18th of February 1953. It seems there was still time to
update his manuscript that would be published in September of 1953.
However, he waited until the publication in America’ in 1955 of
Inside the Spaceships to announce not a “new  contact, but one that had
occurred before Flying Saucers Have Landed was published some two
years before. Paradoxically, this adds to the authenticity of Adamskis
claims. A greater commercial advantage would have been gained if inside
the Spaceships had been conceived as a straight sequential “update  of the
first book. But the man himself is at one with splintered planes of crossreference: instead of telling what happened next, he tells us what hap-
pened before his last punch line 
There have been suggestions that Lucy McGinnis had a considerable
influence on the writing of /nside the Spaceships. This is somewhat
unlikely, considering the backspacing in time. If the conventionally minded Lucy had helped write it as a piece of faction, she would surely have
tidied it up and made the events described a perfectly sequential commercial answer to any inevitable “what happened next?  question. Any other
self-respecting editor would have screamed at Adamski to do this.
A serious investigator must never equate breaks in the consistency of
received information with “untruth.  Contrary to the view of the more
behaviorist of artificial intelligence researchers, the mind works by very
fuzzy paradigms, and not simple yes/no circuitry. Life would be far more
simple than it is if we assumed that a congenital liar and a proven fraud


could not have had a perfectly valid UFO sighting. Skeptics, we must
remember, reject photographs because they are too clear on the one hand
or too obscure on the other. It is therefore often more than useless to play
slippery-slope “evidence  games with skeptics. Witnesses who have more
than one UFO sighting also come under suspicion, as do those who have
books about UFOs on their shelves. Few skeptics offer any ideas about
how the things from the books get into the sky, and vice versa. Those who
have seen a UFO ? and who have had the misfortune to write about such
things beforehand are also “unreliable  witnesses. But those who have a
“tendency to believe  (what a wonderful and magical tendency that is ),
well, they are the most “damned  witnesses of all.

A really sophisticated investigator must consider that such inconsistencies, and unlikelihoods as encountered in the Adamski story might well
be a measure of truth rather than the reverse. If the stories of his encounters were being consciously rationed out for us, they would have been far
easier to assimilate than if done in a less fuzzy manner. As the two books
stand, however, Adamskis conceptual dyslexia (which we shall meet on
other occasions), acts as a long camera-pull from the first book to the second, and the overlapping in time part-superimposes the two. There is no
better example of the way in which his mind works. It sheds light on many
inconsistencies encountered in his work. His confusions are an effective
mirror of the interplay of mind and character, substance and idea, and the
way such things communicate in terms of mimicry, self-deception, and
simulacra.

A good example of this fuzzy process at work is the FBI report on
Adamski dated January 28, 1953.78 The mistakes and inconsistencies it
contains could have been plain incompetence combined with a covert plan
to catch Adamski out. Certainly there were those who wished to entangle
him in contradictions and plain lies, in the manner of Silas Newton, who
as we have Seen, was certainly an FBI fellow-traveler and informant.
In the 1953 report, the agent records that Adamski said that a ladder
descended from what appeared to be “‘a small stairway in the bottom of
the craft.  and a “ space man came down the steps.  However, researcher
Karl Pflock ? has pointed out that when Flying Saucers Have Landed was
published some nine months later, there is no such stairway described, and
the “space man  appears at first with no saucer in sight at all. When we


think that this descending ladder would have made a far prettier story, we
are left with two intriguing questions. First, if it was a better description
why did Adamski leave it out of his later account?
Here the suspicion centers on the agent himself, because there is
included in this same 1953 report an astonishing piece of misinformation.
Either the agent concerned was superbly incompetent or he was making it
all up as he went along, which is exactly what poor Adamski was accused
of doing. The agent has Adamski saying that his wife Mary was with him
during the desert encounter  For Adamski to say this would have been to
lay up so much dynamite for himself it is well nigh impossible to believe
that he did say it. Certainly the six witnesses who signed affidavits would
have denied such a presence immediately, and Adamski knew that in making statements to the FBI he was iegally liable. As has been said, Mary
hated her husbands saucer interests, and was therefore the last person on
earth to go on a saucer hunt. Again, if Adamski did say his wife was present, then he took the unbelievable risk of the agent asking to see Mary
then and there, and having to face the direct consequences of denying her
presence—if indeed at that time Mary was resident at Palomar at all.
There is a blanked-out section in the report before the phrase “, and his
wife Mary,  and all would be explained if “Mary  was the name of the
wife of one of the two other men witnesses. However, their wives were
both named Betty.

Timothy Good, in conversation with me, believes such inconstancies
were mistakes made by the agent. But if so, they were rather blatant and
quite consciously specific mistakes. The agent might have misunderstood
Adamskis heavy Polish pronunciation of “Betty  for “Mary,  but that is
some assumption to make. In the light of this, how much credibility then
are we to put on the report of the presence of the descending “ladder  mentioned by the agent and not mentioned by Adamski in the later published
text? That these mistakes were also made in the presence of an accompanying USAF officer from the OSI8  (who presumably made his own report) is
even more difficult to believe. It would be interesting to unearth this separate report to see if this officer, in turn, made the same mistakes.
If this example illustrates the quality of material reaching Edgar
Hoover, then much doubt is cast on the reliability of FBI reports. In the
succeeding years, this situation was to effect American culture in many

areas other than those dominated by the UFO.
Another example of how some think Adamski was so naive as to risk
total disaster within hours is afforded by a letter to the Fortean Times 
from the Hon. Mark Dowding, the grandson of Lord Dowding. Mark
Dowding claims that his father, Derek Dowding, told him that while giving Adamski a lift in his car, Adamski said, by way of passing comment,
that he had fabricated the whole flying saucer story. The car journey must
have been in 1959, and it must have been made to or from the station on
the one night Adamski lectured in Tunbridge Wells at a meeting presided
over by Lord Dowding himself. To haye made such a devastating comment in passing to man he had only just met, and to have risked not being
blown out of the water by such a remark, is almost impossible to believe,
if only because at this time, Adamski was in the middle of his European
tour. That Derek Dowding was an ardent skeptic (in reaction to his father,
we suppose), and was also a Royal Air Force Attache to the Pentagon in
the 1950s, is very interesting.
Yes, the skeptics might indeed be correct when they say that such folk
as contactees make mistakes, and suffer from all kinds of personal selectivity and psycho-social amnesia. But Adamskis personal witness burns
its way through this fuzzy mess, as other testimony burns through the
Roswell haze and the mysteries of events in Rendlesham Forest in
Britain.83 Something truly fantastic and significant happened in the
Californian desert in November 20, 1952, as at Roswell*4 on July 4, 1947,
and in Rendlesham Forest in December 1980.
There is, of course, a third alternative, which most baffled and skeptical researchers avoid. If a locus of lying witnesses and psycho-social fab-
rications can sculpt a part-reality complete with disappearing actors, partial events, and disappearing evidence, then we have a phenomenon which
pales in comparison to the mysterious UFO. But perhaps in our
Entertainment State, we should no longer try and “solve  mysteries, so
much as try to enter their peculiar dimensions.
The same post-modern thought that what we perceive as “real  may,
on close inspection, consist of countless incomplete scripts is only just
beginning to enter ufological discussions. In this respect, Inside the
Spaceships offers us a mystery to enter rather than solve. It is to enter a
drama scripted by Kafka and Borges, filmed by Goldwyn-Meyer, and performed by the Marx Brothers. That Adamski was not at all Jewish is therefore quite remarkable.
We now enter one of the great fairy-stories of the 20th century.
Time: sometime during the early evening of the 18th of February
1953. A hunch tells Adamski to leave the “quiet starlight and peace of
his mountain home.  He obviously does not think the world knows yet of
the troubles on the mountain. He decides to travel into Los Angeles, a
“city of lights and noise, of rush and restlessness . He tells us that he has
not come to the city “for excitement,  (as if he did not have enough of that
on the mountain), but has been drawn there by “the kind of urgent impression described in Flying Saucers Have Landed.  6 He checks into a small
familiar hotel, and from then on, the scene is pure noire:
“After the bellboy had brought my suitcase to the room, received his
tip and departed,  writes Adamski, “I stood uncertainly in the middle of
the floor. It was only about four o’clock in the afternoon and since I literally did not know what had brought me here, I felt rather at a loose end. I
went over to the window and stood staring out at the busy street. There
certainly was no inspiration there. 

Coming to a sudden decision, he goes downstairs to the cocktail bar. A
waiter who knew him well, and who was fascinated by flying saucers,
greets him. The waiter says that a number of people who knew Adamski
from his radio and TV programs also knew that he stayed in this particular
hotel whenever he was in town. In the manner of fans, they had asked the
waiter to give them a call if he should appear. An almost reluctant Adamski
agrees. A small crowd assembles, and he discusses saucer matters with
them. He dines out of the hotel, and when he gets back, he decides to ring a
woman friend he knows. The woman, a previous mountain-student of his,
is glad to come and see him, for she says she has certain personal problems
she wishes to discuss with her friend and teacher. He buys a newspaper,
goes to his room to avoid being recognized again, but is restless waiting for
the girl, as her journey will take an hour or more.
Humphrey Bogart should have done it. Adamski meets the girl, reassures her, and accompanies her to the corner where she takes a streetcar.
His restless feeling persists. He looks at his wristwatch. It is 10:30.
What happens next is straight out of a prototype version of The

Matrix, and laugh as we may, it is a scene which has haunted the Western
media imagination ever since—the Men in Black. Though he didn’t create
this archetype all by himself (rumors about such had been circulating
since 1949), Adamski did have a hand in it, which is achievement enough,
and let any scoffers try and do nearly as much. He probably got bits of this
modern legend from his friendship with Frank Scully, and from knowledge of Alfred K. Benders experience with his International Flying
Saucer Bureau that was formed in 1952. Allegedly, three Men in Black
smashed this organization to pieces in 1953, through harassment. But note
that the following Adamski incident was certainly written before Gray
Barkers 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers that was
inspired by Alfred K. Benders story.
Two men approach Adamski. They look like “average young businessmen.  One is over six feet in height, has a ruddy complexion, black
hair, and the “kind of sparkle that suggests great enjoyment of life.’ The
other younger man is shorter, has grayish-blue eyes, sandy hair, and
smiles as he addresses Adamski by name. This man extends his hand in a
certain manner, and Adamski is overjoyed to realize that this is the very
signal given by the Venusian he met in the desert on the 20th of November
1952. The younger man invites him to accompany them, but only if he has
the time to do so.

The men, now silent, leave the lobby with Adamski walking between
them, and turn into a parking lot. No less than a “four-door black Pontiac
sedan  pulls up, at which point Adamski shows that he must be the most
optimistic man who has ever been born: “They had not spoken during this
short time, yet inwardly I knew that these men were true friends. I felt no
urge to ask where they proposed to take me, nor did it seem odd that they
had volunteered no information. 
Never has being taken for a ride by four silent strangers who say they
are from outer space been so inspiring: “I sensed a power which made me
feel like a child in the company of beings of vast wisdom and compassion.  Eventually the taller man speaks: “You have been very patient, The
speaker smiled and indicated the driver. ‘He is from the planet you call
Mars. I am from the one you call Saturn. 

The bizarre group travel for at least an hour and a half along “smooth
highways.  It is dark, but Adamski senses that they are entering desert
country. The car turns off the main road and travels along a rough track for
nearly a quarter of an hour before the Martian says “We have a surprise
for you  
A spaceship comes down and soon standing there beside it, giving
greetings to Adamski is Orthon, the man from Venus he met on his original
desert encounter  Orthon is now speaking English more fully, “with only a
slight trace of an accent.  Since there is no such thing as English without an
accent, we are left wondering what he sounded like, and how, in the three
months between encounters, he learned almost perfect English.
There begins a series of incidents reminiscent of Jules Verne. Orthon
says he has been doing some running repairs, and promptly empties out
onto the sand what appears to be a small amount of molten metal from a
small crucible. This is cool enough, however, for Adamski to wrap some
in a handkerchief, much to the amusement of the space brothers. He
claimed to have this sample to the end of his days.
Purely for the sake of convenience, Adamski now says he will name
the rest of the space men. The Martian he calls Firkon, the Saturnian is
named Ramu.
He now enters the ship.




CHAPTER 8.
The Dolls House Machine.
At first we are surprised and a little disappointed. Here are things we
recognize and know. The interior is almost as mechanical-industrial
as Jules Vernes submarine, Nautilus. There are hangars and power-supplies, lifts, ramps, and battery-chargers; there is even the charming touch
of a small blacksmiths forge of all things, wonderful news for the nut and-bolt theorists, although as an indication of the shaky stage-flat of a
conspiracy, it is just as wonderful. There is no organ to play, as in Vernes
submarine, but then this is not so much a space ship, more a dolls house
full of early consumer expectancies. Adamski describes the chintzes and
the glassware lovingly. It is as if he felt that they were the final compensation for the many years of his drop-out past, when he scraped a living
preaching mainly in those trailer and clapboard communities that were the
prototype communes of the 1950s.

At times his description of the interior of the space ship makes it
appear like the reject footage of South Pacific. We suspect not so much his
sanity, more his consumer maturity. Led by Ramu and Firkon and Orthon,
our gullible hero enters a shopping center full of window-busts come alive
in a kind of gay version of a Flash Gordon film. In this camp ship, eversmiling male drones in ski-suits stand at antique Buck Rogers control panels full of buttons and flashing lights. The whole scene is a B-feature combination of the lurid post-war covers of magazines such as Astounding,
Unknown, and Marvel.
But we before we dismiss Adamski, we again have to bear in mind that
a Melanesian native taken aboard a cruise liner would likely suffer a similar
distortion of critical-focus. When Yali, a native who had seen service in the
Australian army during the World War 2 , saw ritual masks in a Queenslan



been saying to you is in conflict with many things your people have been
taught to believe as truth. This, in itself, is of no importance, since that
which was learned yesterday serves only as a stepping stone towards the
greater truth we can learn tomorrow. That is the law of progress. Once on
the right path, it cannot be otherwise. It is essential always that men work
and strive together with open minds. 
If this is spiritual enlightenment, then perhaps we should go down on
our knees and praise the impure. On such occasions, Adamski as hero
and likeable rascal both, disappoints us. In /nside the Spaceships, he
actually puts the phrase “natural law  into the mouth of the Big Chief,
not mentioning that “natural law  was taught by himself for thirty years
all over California 
It is disappointing that Adamski took himself so seriously. He would
have earned much more credibility if he had asked the paste-up old queen
whether he did weddings and barmitzvas. The Big Chief is so awful he
could be almost real. If Adamski wanted this kind of thing, he needn’t
have bothered with flying saucers at all. Downtown Los Angeles in the
1950s would certainly have catered to his needs. But certainly his readers
loved this vapid setting, just as the man himself was impressed with the
saucers Turkish-brothel decor, the trailer-trash furniture, and the airport lounge food and drink. The Star Trek chat about magnetic drives should
have alerted Adamski just as the Melanesian Yali became alert to the
duplicitous and confusing messages from missionaries.
After supper, the two robed geisha-girls do a kind of Muppet-dance,
and then change to go on duty as pilots of the ship, if you please.
The only thing missing in this saucer is the pianist from Casablanca.
There is an early mall-quality about these early contactee experiences. Adamskis religious writings express a leveled-off spiritual profundity, “instant  as the new technology of frozen burgers in the new
Bel Air ice-box, personally delivered by a man straight out of Death of a
Salesman. Contactees of this period almost invariably talk about space
“gods  as if they were neighbors just dropped in for mid-morning coffee. Fred Steckling, Adamskis number one preaching convert, claims he
met spacefolk all over the world, and his words echo the voice of his
teacher: “Our space brothers know so well how difficult it really is for
102  
us, the adults, to teach the little ones the value of life, our friends from
other worlds never poison a childs mind as we so often do. By imposing
our dislikes, opinions, and assumptions upon others, we violate the very
basic law of Christianity ’
This is cool mall-sanity taken to its limits. Emotionally, most early
contactees were such wide-eyed mall creatures. They appear to have
undergone transformations in which their higher feelings have become
pure Muzak. Profundity is instant, sterilized and packaged; awe, being far
too disruptive, is banned in the weather-proof mall of their new “consumer  beliefs; dread is banished from both its well-managed interior and
the advertisements which hold the entire stage-set together. At times the
whole Adamski personality becomes as gnomic as an evangelical text for
a junior Sunday school. As a man, we cannot help feeling on occasion that
a man such as he might have been programmed as the perfect prototype
customer for the burgeoning consumer society. This “society  was beginning to flex its junior muscles in the early 1950s with a narrow-tuned
bandwidth of response identical to that of the first television soap operas.
With this in mind, we can now perhaps get a much better idea than
Adamski what Orthons mission was all about.
“Contact  may indeed be contact with a highly developed information
field that has the power to change metaphor. An advanced intelligence
may have evolved far beyond industrial “hard fact  into pure advertisement-stuff. This would be an infinitely more powerful instrument of persuasion and control than “fact.  With our burgeoning experience of cyberspace, we can now see that this may well be the direction an advanced
intelligence might take. Alien life blood may well be based on image-suggestion rather than exchange of factual information.
In accordance with the emerging “mall  nature of Adamskis era, the
bland responses of the “space folk  exhibit as little radical curiosity as does
Adamski. himself. He would have been a difficult man to fool over the grocery bill, the tax demand, or the garage repair. But most contactees do not
seem to mind that the “voices from space  seem to lack any old gods, idiot
gods, or plain daft and silly gods, all of which the Greeks had in plenty.
Neither do their gods have any chronically ill, or mad, or any difficult
young; nor do they have any renegade souls, and they lack all sign of any
downright bloody-minded subversives. They lack all humor also; Adamskis
  103
crews have an irritating Zen-like calm, and the “messages  given to him
have the depth of the instructions on the back of a stir-fry pack.
Thankfully, there are a few hints of trouble in paradise, but this is
expressed with the sort of emotional force that censors neighbors who do
not clean their windows often enough or leave broken-down pick-ups in
the road, jacked up on bricks, and minus a wheel or two. There are also
hints as to what happens to those very few space-gods who have not seen
the light. These misguided spirits are subjected to spiritual eugenics;
Helen and Bryan Reeve, the authors of Flying Saucer Pilgrimage, speak
of “housecleaning  in the “higher vibratory regions  of outer space as easily as talking of washing their curtains and chair-covers, and with just
about the same range of emotions.
These “space folk  who speak so casually of “magnetic vibrations 
and “etheric matter-transfer,’ are therefore nice chintz-cushion and flock wallpaper gods. They are very definitely not the bleeding-to-death, treacherous, or kick-in-the-backside gods of Shakespeare, Neitzsche, or Mount
Olympus; these “space folk  gods are the nice boy-scout deities of patio
and lawn. They are the guardian spirits of regularly washed curtains, and
neat hedgerows, the gods of a landscape tamed, and their rare petulant
bleats could be from Donald Duck at extremely low ebb.
It is extremely odd that Adamski did not “contact  the elemental
beings of his own mountain home. Given his early hippie prototype “New
Age  views, this is surprising. The beings he meets are not from rock,
cloud, or forest. They are mechanical-industrial and electromagnetic to a
fault. They are the “gods  of an age that in Adamskis time was already
was dying on its feet. Fifty years later with an intense suspicion of mechanistic science, we see that what Adamski saw was far too optimistic. The
message was that the “future  would form a seamless blend between science and progress; his beings as projected are successful scientists who
are “spiritually  advanced at the same time. None of this came about, and
technology shrunk to invisibility.
If Adamski was duped, he was duped by feedback of his own best
expectations.%
But his simple-minded romanticism sees no dangers in the absence of
the tortuous paradoxes of all higher mental complexity. In the mall-like
space ship, there is no blood on the paradigms. It would appear that
104  
Adamski has entered his own gestalt, a kind of mall-simulation. All parties
in the exchange appear to have become mall-products themselves. As
shown in their book, Fiving Saucer Pilgrimage, the Reeves in particular
have almost shrunk their “gods  to medicinal house-goblins, who give
moral precepts about as valuable as wart-cures. We are talking of course of
the early 1950s, when the first malls were being built, and being built in
prosperous America alone. Such things had not yet reached Europe, whose
war-shocked consumer-gods at that time had not yet come out of the closet.
When the early British “space gods  do appear%  they are still the rather
tired and weary rough-hewn deities of hill and grove, ready reluctantly to
bow out somewhat reluctantly for Adamsk1s synthetic dolls.
Thus “contact  may not be in terms of either “greys  or spindly War
of the Worlds machines spouting laser death-rays, but in the cool form of
that powerful suggestion-virus called the advertisement. “Advanced  life
might be indeed as vaporous as a mere power metaphor that dines on
belief batteries as inevitably as cattle chew the cud.
Poor Adamski again. His hosts didn’t ask him to sign his name in
blood, they just asked him to believe in the clapboard frontage of their
five-and-ten-cent store, and not ask who or what was signing the checks.
February 19, 1953 at 5.10 am. The spectacular evening ends with
Bogart back in his lonely room in the existential city: “I sat on the edge of
the bed for a full hour,’ writes Adamski, “reviewing the experiences of the
night. And even as they went through my mind I could not help but reflect
on how fantastic the thing would seem to my fellow man. Nevertheless I
must tell of it,  could scarcely believe in the reality of all that had happened in the past few hours. Yet I knew what my eyes had seen and my
ears had heard, and that without doubt it had been a completely physical
experience.
As a.nian dedicated to Theosophy, Adamski might have born in mind
Emmanuel Swedenborgs warning: “When the angels begin to speak to a
man, he rust beware, for they will prattle of such outrageous nonsense as
would never be believed. 
April 21, 1953. The same strange feeling. By this time, Adamskis
manuscript must have been ready to fly across the Atlantic to Werner
  105
Laurie. Same hotel, same chatty waiter. Lo, a smiling Firkon arrives, and
like a chief scout, gives him a special code word. Adamski finds a cozy
booth just for two, and Firkon orders a peanut butter sandwich on whole
wheat, black coffee, and a piece of apple pie. Again, we wonder about
Adamski sometimes in this respect. He seems to like being smothered by
“well proportioned  young men, invariably handsome and with an air of
confident superiority. In their presence, he is reduced to a wide-eyed childish wonder. All over the world, he prefers small out-of-town hotels for his
accommodation, saying that these are suitable places to meet “the boys, 
as he always refers to visiting “spacemen. 
Biographer Lou Zinsstag notes Adamskis ill-concealed excitement
when, in a Swiss bar in 1959, he sees a tanned man wearing dark glasses
with his blond hair brushed over his forehead. She checks discreetly on
Adamskis hotel visitors, and finds that he has regular callers, all male. If
we believe they were all spacemen, we’ll believe anything, for after all,
Adamski describes the space folk as “creative men and women who take a
delight in styling and making clothes.  There are other telling gems, such
as the rather blushing admission from Desmond Leslie in the Cosmic
Bulletin of the Adamski Foundation: “1 don’t suppose he will mind me
telling this, now he has cast off the fine old body, but he once showed me
the most extraordinary birthmark. His navel was not like a human navel at
all. It was a huge solar disk with deeply cut rays extending out about six
inches all around it from waist to groin. What this signifies I have no
idea—unless it is truly the sign of a ‘Child of the Sun.’ 
Back in the Los Angeles hotel, the food may be good, but the conversation leaves a lot to be desired. Says Firkon, between bites: ““We of other
worlds who have been living unrecognized amongst you can see clearly
how identity with Divine origin has been lost. People of Earth have
become separate entities which are no longer truly human in expression as
in the beginning they were. 
Then into same black Pontiac. Different mother ship, but same dialogue and the recurring Adamski theme: a greeting from a handsome man.
This man he names Zuhl, and Zuhl is as disappointing as Firkon. He gives
out more pasteurized talk about the Divine Father, some Barnum and
Bailey bits about Jesus, and a haughty Martian “lady  speaks early-middle-Barbarella: “You Earth people do not desire to show such cruelty
towards one another. This, as you have been told before, is merely the
result of your self-ignorance, which in turn blinds you to the laws of the
Universe of which we are all a part. 
After that, more rail balconies and elevators come as a relief. Adamski,
when he ceases his constipated religious mouthing, can be interesting. He
describes a laboratory straight out of Mary Poppins, full of the kind of
“control panels,’ “graphs,  colored lights, and screens seen on the lurid
covers of Astounding science-fiction magazine of those days. The control
panel, from the days of the earliest railway signal boxes to the array in front
of the “pilots  of the Space Shuttle, is a unique twentieth-century motif.
One day, just like the gargoyles of Chartres and Notre Dame, the changing
shapes and complexity of these ever-evolving desks and boxes will be read
as indicators of the ideology of power and social control. They too will be
seen as the shapes of thought and being, intellectual achievement and
moral order of Nature as it was lovingly conceived once upon a time.
Control panels are the religious relics and mythological tableaux of an age
of technological uncertainty, just as the increasingly nervous late mediaeval
universe was full of theological fear. The walls of Occams enclosed universe were to fall before the trumpet-blasts of early experimental science;
much later, Francis Bacons “objective  view was greeted with the same
kind of spleen Adamski-type ideas now still receive.
Very few authors can combine factional “techno  fairy-tales in the
typical “naive  Adamski manner, and make also a work of valuable literary concept art in that genre we now call pan-dimensional. Adamskts life
and personality both are pure image-stuff, fodder for Warhol and Dali
dreams. Like the contactees Howard Menger and Frank Stranges, he
accepts without question ludicrously comic and deliciously crazy experiences. He does not laugh, question, or criticize, and never is he suspicious.
On a screen in one of the space ships, he is shown a close-up of the surface of the moon, and sees a “four-legged and furry animal  scurrying
around. He was a sucker for any programmatic agenda. Today he would
perhaps be honored as a media-freak; he was just waiting to be filled up
night and day with new dreams, and explode them all over the planet like
metaphor-spores. If computers, mixed media, and twenty-four track mixing desks had been available, he would have dragged the lot up the mountain and blown the mountain apart.
If we roar with laughter, we might bear in mind that without human
living rain forests like Adamski, we are all dead.
Of course, he went far beyond the stage of eccentric entertainer. His
boxes of tricks did not stop traveling from faction, to fact via fantasy, and
then back again by way of fiction. This process of discovery is a classic
alchemical progress. In this, he achieved a collective discovery of himself.
He didn’t need acid or marijuana. He cared little for alcohol, money, or
even fame; he tripped on new images alone. They were the manna of his
intensely spiritual life. If he was chosen for this kind of experience, then
this is the reason why.
As such, he took in anything and everything. He is a loincloth native
fascinated by cheap trash as well as high mysteries;99 the most elementary
gimmickry has his eyes bulging. He praises seats that are raised by a foot
pedal, the “pilot suits  of the women, the silent sliding doors, and the colored screens that are displaying information from the scout-discs that are
roving the earth.
The spaceship nears the moon, which is shown on a “screen  to have
fertile valleys. But when we are about to give up hope for poor Adamski,
there occurs one of those frightening moments when he gets the technological future right on target. We must remember that he predicated the
existence of the Van Allen belt of space-radiation, and later astronauts
confirmed the outer-space “fireflies  he said that he had seen on his trips.
Now this untutored cheeky chappie who broke all the rules almost gets it
right about future computer programming, VHF telemetry, and digital
communications.
There are remotely-controlled scout discs going in and out of the
motherships, and six girls by means of “keys like an organ  feed instructions and flight data  to them, which they retain. Pretty early stuff for
the time of the composition of /nside the Spaceships, whose American
edition appeared in 1955,
But just as we are getting interested in all this, just as it begins to gain a
little of what we might call verisimilitude, yet another “master  more camp
than the first arrives to give more jukebox religion. But what this particular
master said was to prove ominous for Adamski: “Now that we have been
108  
together in this way, you can the more easily at all times make contact from
your mind to ours. Remember always that space is no barrier. 
This means that there is going to be telepathic communication. This
was the idea that was to drive Adamski nearly insane before he died, and
cause the collapse of much of his worldwide support. But as far as any
possible alien intelligence was concerned, the changes in metaphor had
been initiated. The story-virus had spread throughout the world, and the
world was not the same place after the appearance of Flying Saucers Have
Landed. As for the conspiracy, it had disappeared, enfolded within a
deception within a deception. Eventualty Adamski was left high and dry
with a few threads of possibility within possibilities. From this thin fabric,
he tried to sculpt the faces of the gods and their tale of tales.
The Argentinean fantasist Jorge Borges, alive and well at this time,
and not all that far away, would have loved all this had he come across this
cutting-edge of a new culture, but if he knew of it, he ignored it. The great
writers of Adamskis day ignored it also. They were absorbed in largely
obsolete literary conventions and unaware of the “pan-dimensional  texts
those “non-literary  writers such as Adamski were weaving out of myth,
popular culture, and the newly emerging technological imagination. Thus
did the very last generation of great writers miss out on the first wave of
quite unprecedented changes in the world. Writers such as Norman Mailer
and Tom Wolf are almost contemptuously silent on the flying saucer, as
were Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouoac, and surprisingly, Timothy Leary.


CHAPTER 9,
The Last Contact.
september 1, 1953. Adamski feels that “great urgency  again. The publication in Britain of Flying Saucers Have Landed is only weeks away,
but he does not talk about how he looked forward to that event. No, he is
back in the same Los Angeles hotel, a glutton for punishment. He dines
out again with Firkon and Ramu, but this time there is no apple pie, just
sandwiches and coffee, and the jovial waiter is nowhere to be seen. They
are served by a cordial waitress who interrupts only to fill their coffee
cups. The coffee was certainly needed, for there is yet more consumer metaphysics about Divine Laws, the Creator, and something called All-Knowledge. The content gets slightly more interesting however, because
for the first time, Adamski asks hard questions about the death of Captain
Mantell, a National Guard pilot who died chasing a UFO in his P51
Mustang, for instance. But Adamski gets some evasive answers. By the
time he returns to his hotel he is now a junky, and can’t wait for his next
fix of mall-religion, USA.

“Not long after  this meeting, he is again traveling to Los Angeles,
filled with joyous anticipation like “ta child before Christmas.  But again
there is the ominous note, now amplified: “The mental communications
from my friends of other planets were becoming more and more definite
as time went on. 
Ramu greets him at the usual hotel. Firkon couldn’t make it, and
Ramu apologizes for him. Same Pontiac, same Saturnian scout ship, but
this time, Ramu says that the visit has been requested by the master himself, and that the whole of the trip will be not a tour, but a long session
with the master. In the face of this awesome prospect of another ballbreaking speech, Adamski must have been not a little relieved at meeting a
posse of beautiful Saturnian women. But just as Ramu says “There is
quite a bit of activity on the part of your air force tonight,  the master

arrives to break it all up.
All of Adamskis “masters  have a serious problem. They must be
amongst the most boring and crass-brained individuals ever born. This
one in particular wouldn’t make the ratings at a downtown Salvation Army
bun-for-a-prayer meeting just before the addicts and the drunks are thrown
out and the cops are called. He is possessed by a kind of green blooming
pond-algae of the mind for which a sock on the jaw might have come as a
relief to him and all concerned. Here he is in full flight, giving all earthlings the usual kicking: “A great fallacy which has grown on the people of
Earth is the custom of dividing into many parts that which should never be
divided. You have multiple divisions in forms and teachings, many firm
likes and dislikes, all of which serve only to add to the state of confusion
on your planet. 
In other words the master does not like those wonderful conflicts,
paradoxes and tragi-comic catastrophes that alone make life worth living.
His hostility to fuzzy-minded hairy-arsed humanity is a seamless piece of
moral Muzac. If this candy was produced by a “higher intelligence,  then
it could be nothing more or less than a comic mimicking of Adamskis
own religious philosophizing for the purpose of entertainment alone.
These ruminations about the Earth, Man, and the Supreme Intelligence
come to an end with the kind of sentiment that has led the world to
absolute disaster on countless occasions. Ramu, speaking of the master,
says, “he is one of the most evolved beings stiil functioning within our
system. Just to be in his presence is to grow in love and understanding. We
are all fortunate. 
Adamski asks Ramu if the master contacted him telepathically and
asked him to come along on this occasion. “Yes,  answers Ramu, “your
own ability to receive is growing. 
We now know how “fortunate  this growing ability was for Adamski,
because eventually, these space-chapel voices in his head were to almost
destroy him, mentally, physically, and professionally.
All these mighty confusions were, as we shall see, the stuff of personal tragedy involving interaction with the great visionary and technological
schemes of his time and culture.

Almost a year later: August 23, 1954. The last contact. Flying Saucers
Have Landed has now been published, and both Adamski and Desmond
Leslie are in great demand. On this date, the visiting Desmond Leslie is
away lecturing in Los Angeles. Adamski says that he tried to get Leslie
aboard, but the space brothers wouldn’t have him. What a disappointment
for Leslie. He missed the farewell cake and the sexy dance, which made a
wonderful change from impenetrable discussions about Universal
Brotherhood, Holy Writ, and the Age of Aquarius. Unfortunately on this
trip the master is back, and gives forth a blast about the “right path.  If this
is “enlightenment  then the Earth is in far greater danger than even
Adamski ever thought.
Another perfect Bogart scene. Adamski finds himself back in his
lonely hotel room in deep withdrawal. This time the fix hasn’t worked so
well. The pushers are holding back and increasing their prices. There is a
monkey is on his back; it won’t go away, and the new world he has found
is starting to eat him alive. We can hardly blame him. He was on the edge
of an emerging cosmos where all events and significances were to become
disposable, “virtual,  or “hyperreal.  Some thirty years later, Baudrillard
describes well the Los Angeles to which Adamski travelled from his
magic mountain to meet his space men and women:
“Los Angeles is a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing
more than a network of endless unreal circulation—a town of fabulous
proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and
nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion machine, needs
this old imaginary makeup of childhood signals and faked phantasms for
its sympathetic nervous system. 
And so, as Adamski leaves his metaphysical city, the story of these
trips comes to an end. However, in “An Unexpected Postscript  at the end
of Inside the Space Ships, Adamski makes a move straight out of Citizen
Kane. He describes dashing into his publishers “even as the presses are
rolling on this book,  possessed by yet another funny feeling.
April 25, 1955. The frame of reference “‘all day yesterday  gives this
whole episode the feeling of a surreal time sequence in a science fiction
novel. Unable to sleep, Adamski tells us he caught a coach to Los Angeles

but this time he carried his own Polaroid camera, apparently with the
space folks prior permission. An unnamed “Brother  he has not seen
before greets him at the hotel, but warns him that the magnetic fields
inside the space ship might interfere drastically with the pictures. Once
inside the ship, this Brother takes the Polaroid, saying that he will take the
pictures while Adamski has a chat with Orthon, who has appeared almost
on cue. Three of the pictures taken with this camera appear in the British
Edition of Inside the Spaceships, published in 1956.
What a story. And it has not been done. The life, the vision, and the
contacts—neither film nor television makers have touched the confusions
and the tragedy. Writing in 1970, Desmond Leslie comments:George,
dammit  I once expostulated. Do you swear by all thats sacred that you
are telling the truth?’
“*Desmond, he answered quietly, ‘You know my religious beliefs?
One of these days I shall have to face my Maker. Do you think I’d dare
face Him with a lie like that on my conscience?’
“There was no doubting the mans sincerity. 
However, even telling Leslie that “Those guys were human just like
you and me  on occasion Adamski would hedge his bets, if only to confuse, as was his way. When he last saw Leslie shortly before his death in
1965, he was still unwilling to admit anything other than a flesh and blood
series of contacts. But Leslie does admit that on one occasion, Adamski
said “no one of us could be taken to another planet in our system and see
the home world of its inhabitants in his present bodily form or condition. 
Much rich comedy has been provided over the years by many and varied attempts at constructing a single, elegant, unified solution to the UFO
problem. Explanatory offerings have been as mad as anything Adamski
had to offer. They range from “earthlights  resulting from geomagnetic
strain and electromagnetic pollution to J. Allen Hyneks swamp gas explanation for the 1966 UFO sightings over Michigan. The very British “psycho-social  explanations (now fortunately howled off the international
stage) have been particularly hilarious. If we reverse the psycho-social
equations, then we have a much better focus. Laboratory rats may not be
the only creatures within an experimental maze. Certainly contact with an
alien Intelligence will rid us of all previous ideas of what intelligence is


and how it works.
If we dismiss Adamski, it must be remembered that from his time
onwards, the Western world became a huge dolls house, just like the
inside of his space-ships, and gradually the entertainment-media complex
becoming integrated with the military-industrial complex. Those who
scoff at the idea of “fairy kingdoms  might well consider that our own
Entertainment State is such a kingdom come about. Some cynics would
say that the inside of the media-entertainment head is identical to the interiors of Adamskis space ships, both are dolls house machines with plenty
of blood around if we happen to open the wrong door. If there was such an
alien invasion, it was a long time ago now, and it was silent, overwhelming, completely effective. It is still striking deep inland from its beach-
heads, and building new dolls for new walk-on parts in cyberspace.Through people like Adamski, invading agendas reached their targets, and
the future was born.
We don’t have to be Internet addicts to see “agendas  as pure disembodied information fields that are alien lifeforms in themselves. Adamski
was in all likelihood seduced by a phenomenon that was pure manipulated
suggestion, the kind of web-like information-field that will replace eventually all pulleys, levers, and even our beloved electronic pulsations. His
achievement is that he was one of the first to introduce the world to levels
of post-industrial power as pure suggestion, performance, mimicking and
virtual products, which last not more than a minute of old crankshaft time.
In the sense that he introduced ideas of power and control as cool things
and not old-Hitler hot, he was a highly significant first modern.
The age was changing in Adamskis head, and one such head is
enough. Time in that sense exists in very few individuals. Like Yali of
Melanesia, he was to be left marooned and confused; time dropped him
and he could not complete his stories. But perhaps initiation of the first
stories is sufficient; after that, the mission of such a manic information animal as Adamski is complete. His offspring were the eggs of a story-
virus. Death comes only when the story cycle has lodged within the host.
Then our teller of tales must go on to other story cycles beyond the sun
and moon. Like Shakespeare, he leaves his fast-breeding stories behind as
a form of immortality.
Adamski created a permanent pan-dimensional masterwork: his

books, his films, and his photographic collection. Seen as a whole, this
complex is as good as any in the twentieth century artistic portfolio. Just
like his distant mentor, Charles Fort, Adamskis images serve as modern
protective talismans against all solutions, singular or final, partial or elegant. He is a major constituent of the strange power of the UFO. Even
young skeptics of a very different generation jump up and down like
natives round a beating drum and take extreme counter-ritualizing measures against his very name.
Meantime, contactees keep faith. They worship bits of very odd
metal, unusual plastic, strange implants,and even a tasteless biscuit or two
for similar protection against old industrial Fact. Against the Western twilight, they hold up these hosts and watch the sky.












CHAPTER 10.

Entertainment State is Born.
it can be seen by now that 1953 was a vintage year for Adamski. The
American edition of Flying Saucers Have Landed appeared in late
1953, and it received as much popular acclaim as it had earlier in Britain.
Adamski was certainly a busy man at this time. He was meeting his space
folk and taking trips in flying saucers, and having trouble with the FBI,
largely, it must be said, provoked by himself. He would return from outer
space to his mountain home, and for light relief, he would have endless
rows with his former worshippers.
There was no let-up. During this crowded year, Adamski was also
privileged to receive a visit from none other than the renowned Captain
Edward J. Ruppelt, head of the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book that
investigated UFOs. Ruppelts almost forgotten story of his visit to Palomar
appears in the pages of the 1960 edition of his original 1956 book, The
Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Curiously, this new edition does
not mention the date of its publication, but on page 270, Ruppelt mentions
that Adamski met Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, “last week.  Since
this meeting occurred on May 18, 1959, we can assume that Ruppelt was
in the middle of revisions of the new edition of The Report on
Unidentified Flying Objects, which appeared finally in 1960, a very short
time before he died of a heart attack at the early age of 37 years.
The Adamski story was not mentioned in the first edition of 1956, and
therefore Ruppelt is looking back some seven years from 1959 to “one
day in 1953  when he walked into the “four stool restaurant with a few
tables  where he saw Adamski working as a “handyman  in the crowded
restaurant “serving beer and picking up empty bottles.  It is a very long
focus pull, but Ruppelt gives us an invaluable cameo of Adamski at this

time.
Ruppelt of course was visiting incognito, if only because he knew
(and so did just about everybody else) what Adamski could do with just
the smallest piece of story-protein. What he would have said and done had
he known that he was serving beer to Captain Ruppelt of Project Blue
Book can well be imagined. The visit would have been transformed immediately into some “full official admission  of a final proof.
Ruppelt continues: “There was no doubt who he [Adamski] was
because his fame had spread. To the dozen almost reverently spoken
queries ‘Are you Adamski?’ he modestly nodded his head. Small questions about the flying saucer photos for sale from convenient racks led to
more questions and before long the good ‘professor’ had taken a position
in the middle of the room and was off and running. 
Like many a stout heart before him, Ruppelt, of all people, falls for
the charm: “To look at the man and to listen to his story you had an immediate urge to believe him. Maybe it was his appearance. He was dressed in
well worn, but neat, overalls. He had slightly graying hair and the most
honest pair of eyes I’ve ever seen. Or maybe it was the way he told his
story. He spoke softly and naively, almost pathetically, giving the impression that ‘most people think I’m crazy, but honestly, I’m really not.’ 
As Adamski launches into his story of the desert contact, Ruppelt
continues: “Now, even those in the crowded restaurant who had been
smirking when he started his story had put down their beers and were listening. This is what they had come to hear. You could have heard the
proverbial pin drop. 
After the story comes a very precious and magic moment which
Ruppelt must have remembered all his life: “At the urging of the crowd in
the restaurant Adamski took an old shoe box from under the counter. One
of his party [George Hunt Williamson], that day, had just happened to
have some plaster of paris [bought previously by Jerrold Baker on the
orders of Lucy McGinnis] and the shoe box contained plaster casts of
shoe prints with strange, hieroglyphic-like symbols on the soles. Next he
showed the sworn statements of the witnesses and the crowd moved in
around him for a better look. 
To think that Ruppelt saw all this for himself is amazing. But if he let
  
the spirits of Twain and Melville into his head for a brief moment, he just
as quickly threw them out. As mundane guilt fills him up, he rains on
Adamskis parade: “As I left he was graciously filling people in on more
details and the cash register was merrily ringing up saucer picture sales. I
didn’t write off the trip as a complete loss, the weather in California was
beautiful. 
The year 1953 also saw Helen and Bryant Reeve, a bright, good-humored professional couple from Detroit, becoming deeply impressed
by Flying Saucers Have Landed, and its combination of personal and historical views. Bryant Reeve, an engineer, was on the verge of retirement,
and had plenty of time to co-write with his wife Helen, Flying Saucer
Pilgrimage, which appeared in 1957. This book casts light on the kind of
life Adamski lived in the mid 1950s, and includes some interesting
cameos of the visits to America of Desmond Leslie. It illustrates also the
atmosphere in America when flying saucer fever raged in the years just
before the legendary mass-sighting of lights over the Capitol building in
Washington in 1952.
There had been some quite spectacular saucer sightings in Detroit in
1952, and in 1953, there was a sighting significant enough to be included
in the 1968 Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, the much-criticized report commissioned by the University of Colorado and headed by
physicist Edward U. Condon. In March, 1953, the pilot and radar operator
of a USAF F-94B Starfire fighter were directed by Ground Control
Intercept radar at Selfridge Air Force Base to intercept unknown targets
over downtown Detroit. The crew reported “tiny specks in the sky, which
appeared to look like a ragged formation of aircraft.  The radar returns
then showed the objects moving over the citys central section. The crew
expressed great surprise when the objects did not resemble aircraft, and
the pilot started his calculated interception run “without afterburner  at
500 mph, The ground radar had both the fighter and the objects “painted
as good, strong targets  and the pilot reported that the objects “seemed to
get a little larger all the time.  The radar operator of the aircraft also began
to get good returns and “thought he was picking up targets  when the
objects disappeared both from view and the airborne radar.
Most surprisingly, the ground radar still continued to get “loud and


clear  returns even when the aircraft itself was right in the center of the
targets and turning in “every direction. 
After three minutes the objects disappeared from the GCI radar and
the fighter returned to base.
As one of the leading lights in a growing group of saucer enthusiasts, Bryant Reeve was interested in the kind of high-quality report the
Detroit sighting represented. Enthused, he tried to telephone George
Adamski at home in Palomar Gardens in November 1953, just after
Adamskis second trip into space. He-was most surprised to learn that
the now famous man did not have a listed number there. Undaunted, the
Reeves wrote to the Palomar address, and Adamski replied, accepting an
invitation to lecture at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and insisted on
receiving expenses only. The Reeves organized a group of some forty
sponsors to finance a press conference and two lectures. The exciting
day came when the group met the man himself: “There he was at the
railroad station: tall, distinguished looking, gray-haired, wearing a beret
that rivaled Field Marshal Montgomerys. 
Thus did Adamski enter Detroit. The great industrial city in those
days was the biggest and the best car-manufacturing center in the world.
General Motors led the way in linking glamour and technology. The
world licked its lips as the latest “flivver simply dripping in chrome 
came off the production lines indeed looking a little like a space ship
itself. In advertisements, early prototypes of Jane Mansfield and Marilyn
Monroe draped themselves across Pontiacs and Chevrolets, making the
citizens of other nations feel that they lived in dog kennels and picked
their nose all day.
Like Dallas and Vegas, Detroit in the early 1950s was alive with new
imagery and new money. Nobody bothered about what was later called
the environment, and little interest was aroused by the growing problem
the French were having with guerilla insurgents in Vietnam. Lee Harvey
Oswald had just started shaving and the great American protest generations of the future still attended segregated schools. Those who watched
Creature from the Black Lagoon in the cinemas and the Korean War film
Battle Taxi at the drive-ins probably gave little notice to the Washington
crusade of Republican Senator Joe McCarthy. But the young Lee Harvey
  
Oswald may well have paid more serious attention to the execution of the
Rosenburgs in Sing Sing in 1953 for allegedly giving Soviet Russia some
secrets of the atom bomb.
In an essay in The Anomalist, Karl T. Pflock comments: “Even in
the spreading shadow of the early Cold War. Things in America were rosy
and optimistic. Anything seemed possible—for Everyman as never before
in history. Everywhere one looked,-itseemed a quick and big buck from
War surplus, everything from boots to airplanes and ships. Uranium
prospecting. And oil. And of course, flying saucers. It was a time ripe for
confidence tricksters and slick operators, and there were many opportunities and angles for them to work, some a bit more exotic than others. 
Reporters from major Detroit newspapers were at the Adamski press
conference, and a reporter from a newspaper in Windsor, Canada, had
made the long journey. After cocktails and luncheon, the hard-boiled
skeptics (as Bryant Reeve called the reporters), began their “inquisition. 
Reeve describes the scene, which had echoes of the kind of treatment
Adamski was to receive on his European tour five years later in 1959:
“The scene was unforgettable. George Adamski sat at the head of the
table. Back of him were “blown up  pictures of his telescope and his
saucers. The news hounds deserted their chairs, crowded round him, and
literally rained questions on their unpretentious victim. Questions were
fired so fast that they overlapped each other. From our viewpoint every
approach, every ruse was being used to trip him up. 
Adamskis public performances were not always good, but on this
occasion he surpassed himself, impressing everyone by remaining perfectly calm, unruffled, and most courteous. This earned him good front-page
coverage, and even the skeptical reports were mild. However, the good
publicity did not impress the radio stations, which in those somewhat pre TV days were still very important, having that popular community feel of
early media that has almost vanished from the world. Bryant Reeves
describes radio producers as saying the entire subject of flying saucers was
“too incredible, apt to make us a laughing stock, can’t risk it. 
However, Ross Mulholland, a presenter of WWJ, a large Detroit radio
station, was reluctantly persuaded by one Laura, a member of the Reeves
group, to grant Adamski a five-minute radio interview. Adamskis media

performances always surpassed his public appearances in dynamism and
power, and now given a live audience (how media time passes), he took
the entire place over. Here, as told by Bryant Reeves is a time capsule
from the long-lost days of spit-and-sawdust American Radio. At “one
P.M. : “Mr. Adamski went on the air with all the excitement of a premier
performance. A thrill stole over the broadcast room. Technicians and
helpers paused in their work to listen—almost in awe to this simple man
who told of his contact on the Californian desert with a man from another
world. 
Ross Mulholland took questions from the floor and even from the on duty radio technicians. The five minute dead line came and went almost
unnoticed. Other scheduled programs were cancelled. Only station
announcements and short commercials cut into the interview. The program. ended one hour and twenty-five minutes after it started.
After this success, there was some disappointment at the first lecture,
entitled “What Is The World Heading For?  When Adamski was off-color,
he could be the most boring man in the world, dispensing his own brand of
gnomic theosophical preaching, the mental level of which was barely
above the advice column of a parish magazine. However, when he talked
about science, astronomy, his photographing of flying saucers and his contact with men and women from other planets, he could be electrifying.
Like Ray Palmer, the great science fiction editor of the 1940s and 1950s,
Adamski, though he was getting on in age, was in touch with the burgeoning pop-mythology of that new and exciting technology that was going to
be the making of America. If he did not communicate particularly well,
that he communicated at all put him way ahead of dull scientists in an age
when image, not fact, was becoming really important. When he spoke of
contact with space beings, he was similarly inspired. This is just one of the
reasons why some say that his experiences were authentic. When he
dropped his religious spouting, there emerged a new energetic body language, a fresh urgency to his expression. It was observed to be a natural
change, the kind of effect seen when a man speaks who has been almost
moved out of his wits by some half-hidden event of the past. His language
became brimful of those very images that were lacking in his religious
expression. He went straight to the point with an incredible modern
adventure story and audiences often came away deeply affected. In every

sense, he extended new technological expectations to infinity, not as a science-fiction writer, but as someone who gave a new live dimension to
what was becoming a worldwide phenomenon.
Adamski lectured to a new prosperous techno-industrial class with
nothing of the doom and gloom that possessed Britain at this time. By
comparison, Americans had few stifling class restrictions or the burdens
of hereditary structures. In the 1950s, Americans were the worlds winners, and they knew it. Adamskis audience was young, the Presley phe-
nomenon was raging and fired by B-feature films (some of which have
since become classics), and Americans enjoyed a new prosperity the like
of which the world had not seen before. They were also stoked up by the
books on saucers written by Frank Scully and Donald Keyhoe, published
some three years before Flying Saucers Have Landed. Countless rumors
of crashed saucers, recovered alien bodies, and military intrigue were
also rife.
Fifty years later the debates still rage about all these things; like nothing else, their mythology is still quite intact. A few days before Princess
Diana died, the London Evening Standard published a prophetic cartoon
by illustrator “Jak  showing a landed Adamski-type saucer with a lowered
entrance ramp. Elvis Presley stands on the ramp, welcoming Diana as she
walks up to go inside. It is indeed strange that the folk of 1995 (the year of
Dianas death) felt still so powerfully related to an image well nigh fifty
years old.
There were many new agendas heading for the minds of Adamskis
new young American audience, of which the newborn ufology was but
one. The fledgling public relations firms that were later to become mighty
corporations were flexing their muscles and starting to use what was then
the new technology of broadcast television and high-definition widescreen Technicolor feature-films. The various new agendas stalked their
way to this audience for all the world as if they were B-feature viral life
forms themselves. Here was a first true “media  generation, and the forces
that were to govern such a thing were historically unprecedented. Society
was beginning to be stalked by ideas rather than old-fashioned enemies;
clusters of show-business images angered, depressed, or frightened them
rather than the physical threats of old. There was beginning to arise a cult
of images, devices, and products in this new-born Entertainment State,

which made all previous history look threadbare and depressing, with all
its Wars, Leaders, Priests, and Serious Issues heading rapidly for the
reject-edit can of history. The aims of what General Leslie Groves, who
was in charge of the Manhattan Project, called “big science  had not yet
been questioned; the Vietnamese war, the greatest disaster in American
history, had not yet occurred, and the diseases of happiness had not yet
been suspected, chartered, or experienced. As America looked to space,
Flying Saucers Have Landed was just the kind of mad techno erotic fix
that the young in particular identified with.
But somebody or something within quite a different process altogether was trying to divert this audience from certain kinds of imaginative
contagion. At this time, many writers of UFO subjects, contactees or otherwise, detected attempts to control agendas, be they intellectual, consumer, or technological in nature. In a 1959 article entitled “Who is trying
to Stop the Truth from Coming Out?  published in Flying Saucer Review,
Adamski stated that after the publication of /nside the Spaceships there
was a serious attempt in Detroit to bribe him into saying that the book was
fiction. The offer was $35,000, a considerable increase on the first offer he
had of $25,000. In this article he continues: “I was visiting the Scully
home in Hollywood, when Frank [Scully] told me grimly that he had been
offered $25,000 to sign a statement saying his book Behind The Flying
Saucers was fiction. 
Both maverick anthropologist Carlos Castanada and writer Whitley
Streiber, who wrote of his “visitor  experiences in Communion and other
books at the end of the 20th century, had the same problems. Metaphors
are in every way advertisements, and attempts to change metaphor are
always surrounded by the kind of dangers no simple mechanical criminality could arouse. Forces beyond all belief are summoned.
Soon-after the appearance of Flying Saucers Have Landed, the astute
Leslie sent Adamski a letter in which he said: “I don’t know what has happened, George, but all the mediums have suddenly disposed of their
Indian guides, etc., and have replaced them with space people traveling in
Vimanas. 
This letter shows just how much both Adamski and Leslie were helping to change metaphor with their influential book; it was a kind of focus
for a lot of subterranean thinking at this time. The material world itself

cannot help but spring from change of metaphor, and later, as we shall see,
just like the work of Mesmer, this virus was to enter much higher realms
than that of the parlor psychic.
If Charles Lutwidge Dodgson had published his Alice in Wonderland
as a “real  experience he would have found himself in exactly the same
trouble as Adamski. As any good advertising expert knows, “fiction  itself
is another name for that psychological management system intended to
place the experience of imagining at a controllable distance. The technique is as old as humanity. To see the Garden of Eden story or the
Odyssey as “unreal  not only serves as an understandable defensive technique, it also solves a lot of intellectual, religious, and cultural problems in
one. But take such controlling fictional framework from a story, and within the very bedrock of Nature, deep alarm bells ring; some automated
process tries to stop such an “escape  of stories from the prison house of
their inked pages. Quite ordinary folk wake in the morning full of anger,
determined to put a stop to what they consider to be a violation of decent
moral and intellectual sense. As in the Lee Harvey Oswald story, backbedroom cartoon figures step out of their frames and head for their targets
trailing wires and smoke. They then press their paper-triggers and promptly disappear, like Oswalds many doubles.
A rich fantasy life is vital for product-success; it helps create the prototypes that barrel down American runways and not any other countrys
runways. Neither Marx nor Lenin ever recognized or understood postindustrial forces in which the UFO would play a considerable and lasting
part. Their inability to see such things caused the collapse of Americas
greatest enemy without so much as a shot being fired, or almost. In this
framework of high importance we can see that image making as powerful
suggestion is just as politically important as profiteering, espionage, or
economic planning.
Of course, there may be another explanation other than the crude idea
of simple fabrication of stories and, indeed, hoaxes by individuals such as
Adamski. He, and others like him may forever be the prey of a process
that chooses them precisely because they will most willingly create new
episodes to follow from the first “genuine  episoce. After they have
become hopeless addicts, they become fast breeders of story-protein,
which may be the whole object of the enterprise. The world is run by

story-techonology, not facts, which are historically arriviste contraptions,
doomed as reject footage of Mario Lanza, an episode of J love Lucy, or a
physics text book of 1955. In this, Adamskis mythological engineering
was identical to that inspired by still small voices in the head heard by the
great world prophets of the past. By telling tales that competed with
prime-time consciousness, he became just as valid as the Camelot target
represented by President Kennedy. Plant a bomb, and the State knows how
to deal with you without even thinking about it. Say you met a man from
Venus and a far deeper State anger is erase out of all proportion to your
non-existent physical threat. 
In this, thing have not changed since the death of Socrates.
Adamskis second Detroit lecture, entitled “My Experiences,  was a
great success. He changed from bleating obscure religio-philosophy to
relating an external drama, and remained in control, even when the deep
booming voice of a local Detroit character “Singapore Joe  Fisher came
from the audience. Fisher was a British world-traveler and lecturer. He
asked: “Mr. Adamski, what about sex on Venus?  To which Adamski
replied like a character straight out of Herman Melvilles The Confidence
Man.“ Well, sir, if you went to Venus, I do not believe you would have to
learn any new tricks  
A reception had been arranged by the Detroit sponsors at a nearby
hotel, and at the request of many, Adamski was asked to speak impromptu. Here again he made the same old mistake, and talked almost exclusively about religion, to the disappointment of all present, according to
Bryant Reeve. Adamskis bizarre evangelical ufology was a turn-off to
most. He had the brilliantly mad childs junk-book approach of Frank
Stranges, combined with the surreal comedy of Orpheo Angelluci, with
more than a touch of the “techno  fairy tales of Howard Menger. A future
time bored with, and suspicious of, complementary conscious descriptions of our time will look to the books of these authors as apocryphal
texts. They will be regarded as the Dead Sea Scrolls of consumerism,
along with Beatles’ lyrics, and Presidential denials. Venusians apart, this
is just one of the precious and vital things about the Adamski phenomenon; it tells how groups form, how beliefs are manufactured, and how a
kind of possession occurs in terms of firm conviction. There is also

pathos and tragedy; towards the end of his life, Adamski suffers a kind of
mental decay yet captures on his last film, shot at Silver Spring, perhaps
the most significant footage in all ufology.
Adamskis sponsors and his audiences were always most worried
about the almost-believable experience being often just sentences away
from unbelievably exact details of Venusian kitchen-practices, and ultrasonic dry-cleaning, no less. In this, he was a human simulacra of the UFO
form itself: infuriating, refusing to be defined. He was one thing one
minute, quite another the next; to raw audiences of those days he must
have seemed something of an elemental sprite himself, just arrived from
the very spaceships that looked a little like the shiny cars and toasters, or
was it the other way around?.
Here again we are reminded of Melvilles The Confidence Man, and
Adamski at this time did indeed have something of the covered-wagon
atmosphere about him, which appealed to a popular American audience.
The effect of dispensing homemade potions was enhanced by him blithely
including in talks bits and pieces from an encyclopedic “factual  knowledge culled in the main from the popular science journals of his day.
When this exotic combination was mixed with a terribly mawkish
Christianity, it formed a stream of cross-referenced mythologies that quite
a few found hard to take. But then this is no more than a nice man in a
clerical collar talking about bicycles and modulating quickly into miracles
wrought by a man who walked on water and came back from the dead. If
we don’t like or accept the Venusian “etheric magnetism motor,  then we
certainly like the walking on water, or at least half the planetary population does. In this we manage mysteries rather than solve them. The
same scaling occurs generally through what we now call ufology. Daylight
discs and nocturnal lights, yes, but abductions, no; humanoid forms, yes,
lizard forms wielding scalpels, no.





chapter 11,
Management of Mysteries.
it was possibly at meetings like the one in Detroit that Adamski began to
form a solution to what was beginning to be a recurring problem. Why
not try and integrate these things, combine them into one unified story?
The publication of /nside the Spaceships in 1955 shows that he tried to
solve the problem, but in a very awkward way. He put whole paragraphs
of his bland and monotonous “Universal Law  philosophy into the mouth
of the unnamed commander of the spaceship—so much so that this commander at one point, uses that exact phrase himself  To some critics, this
sort of thing was the final proof that Adamski was a complete fake.
Carl Jung thought he had got to the bottom of it all when he remarked
to Lou Zinstagg that he was inclined to think that Adamskis photographs
were genuine, but that his “his story is an invention.  But here Jung seems
to have forgotten the principle of alchemy he so famously enunciated
some year previous. In his essay on “Transubstantiation in the Catholic
Mass  he stated that “the symbol becomes intercalated into the cycle of
corporeal changes.  Certainly any human group models, experiments,
rejects, modifies, and comes into contact with other groups who are doing
exactly the same things but in different directions and from different evolutionary standpoints. The mind reasons by the resulting mess of dirty
noise, making experience anything but a singular united linear fabric.
Rather is mind a multi-dimensional boiling cauldron, and almost anything
may form*out of such blending and choosing, such wishing and creating.
In William Empsons paraphrase of Wittgensteins philosophy, “anything
that can be imagined can happen.  Thus do we manage our wonders and
our fantasies rather than “disprove  them.
But even the great Jung had difficulty in stepping out of some paradigms of limitation. He said to Lou Zinstagg that Adamskis Orthon
had quite defeated him. Of the famous contact scene in Flying Saucers
Have Landed, he observed: “When I got to the beautiful young man
with the silken hair I could not go on reading. This sounds ridiculous to
me—like a fairy tale.  Since Jungs great gift to mankind was a deep
analysis of the meaning, function, and psychoanalysis of the fairy-tale,
this remark is surprising. 
It is certain that Adamski re-structured his belief-system, as represented originally by his self-published fictional book Pioneers in Space, to
try and make it work off the page into life itself. When this happens in the
laboratory, men and women get the Nobel Prize. When it happens within
the software of pure vision, they are usually vilified, accused of cheating,
fraud and exploitation. It is the difference between someone writing about
fairies and saying they saw one in a wood. Our culture has lost entirely
Jungs idea of an intermediate state between the two. In this sense,
Literature itself is all about a form of purely natural mind-control; as long
as things don’t spill out of the culture-dish, we can safely enjoy ourselves.
It is likely that Adamski went from fiction to fact not in an attempt to
deceive, so much as to create. The transparently honest Lucy McGinnis,
Adamskis secretary for many years, saw this process in action. She told
Timothy Good that, indeed, she was worried by the similarities between
Adamskis earlier “fictional  work, Pioneers of Space, and the “factual 
work Inside the Space Ships. She added, “It never bothered me to the
extent that I made an issue of it, because, you see, I could have made an
issue of it if Ihadn’t seen those ships.  
This triangulation between almost-fiction and almost-fact, with personal experience in between, makes up a rare moment regarding individual identity and cultural formation. On one hand, McGinnis is aware of a
book that was cast as fiction. On the other hand, she is aware of another
later book in which that fiction has been edited as fact. The two sides of
this equation would cancel themselves out if she had not seen the ships
with her own eyes. It is as if the ships were made of the very flow of information from the first book to the second. If Jung had been more patient
and looked more closely, he of all people would have detected that process
within the whole Adamski affair. Lucy McGinnis was privileged to see
such a complete triangulation between almost-fact, almost-fiction and

uncompromising personal visionary experience.
The British writer Nick Pope, who was in charge of UFO
Investigations for the Ministry of Defense, is a more recent author who
has experienced such a triangulation. He went from being a “hard 
Ministry of Defense man into a kind of no-mans land, then on to pure fiction, with rumors of his own “abduction  in-between. Thus fifty years
later, Pope, like Adamski, traveled through all three information-dimensions with the bonus of a claim as equally fantastic as that of Adamski.
After a few weeks, Adamski was invited back to Detroit. This time,
despite bad weather, he filled 4,700 seats of the 5000-seat Masonic
Temple, which was festooned with banners bearing his name. But again,
his performance was disappointing. He had never had any training in this
business of proper public presentation as the PR man had yet to arrive
properly on the historical stage. Also, the halls in those days were just
halls. They had practically nothing of todays modern sound systems, and
even fewer audio-visual presentation aids. America at this time was still
very much a hailing-distance culture, and Adamski appeared nervous and
ill-prepared. As was not uncommon in those days, the single complicated
projector was nowhere near powerful enough to properly present films and
slides to a mass audience. Things were not improved by Adamskis lack of
knowledge about how to present himself and his material to such a large
public audience. At this stage in his life, he had no proper assistant in
attendance, no manager, and no personal presentation advisor.
According to Bryant Reeve, Adamskis insistence on reading out in
full a long and complicated letter nearly brought things to a complete halt.
Even an amateur conman would have done far better this. By far the most
reasonable assumption is that Adamski was being his fumbling self and
telling the truth as he saw it. Bryant Reeve observes that Adamski was
somewhat relieved when he caught his train to New York.
In mid-1954, Desmond Leslie came to California to meet his coauthor for the first time. In October he traveled to Detroit to meet the
Reeves group. Bryant Reeve was impressed immediately by this “fine,
tall, cultured young Irishman.  Leslie was grabbed quickly by radio station WWJs Ross Mulholland, and again an electrifying live broadcast was

made, some tapes of which still exist. Leslie then packed 1,200 folk into
the largest auditorium of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and amused everyone with his witty tales of encounters with stiff British astronomers. He
also raised smiles with his equally amusing tales about even stiffer
English skeptics, whose essentially Victorian minds were still with
Kitchener at Kartoum, as most of them still are.  2 Amusing as all true
Irishmen are when speaking of the English, he described them as viewing
anomalies as if they were hordes of the great unwashed about to break
into the front parlor. Apparently he was also inspiring when he talked
about how the English had no concept for the mysterious.
All this of course required brilliant wit and sophisticated skill.
Compared with Adamskis fumbling efforts, Leslie performed with a brilliant wit and sophistication that satisfied many doubters of the authenticity
of the saucer phenomenon. In the course of this same lecture, the
“Saucerer Royal  (as the Reeves dubbed Leslie), talked about saucers
being photographed during contemporary nuclear weapons tests, and he
touched also upon areas of contemporary saucer interest, including topics
which the definitely non-discursive Adamski rarely broached. In this sense
Adamski lost out. He already had his Theosophical-Christian “solution  to
the saucer phenomenon, and therefore talking about what went on in
Hangar No. 27 of Muroc Air Base in any detailed modern analytic sense
would have been as irrelevant to him as asking Jesus about the back of his
left earlobe.
Leslie was to meet the Reeves again a year later, when he lectured in
Colombus, Ohio on October 26th, 1955. There he gave the audience the
latest saucer reports from Britain, including one very English account of a
gardener being knocked off his bicycle by a saucer. Again, in the Leslie
manner, he put the saucer “problem  in an historical perspective quite new
to most American audiences. Says Bryant Reeve of Leslie: “, he brought
out the point that if he had talked about television one hundred years ago
he probably would have been put in a straitjacket; two hundred years ago
he would have been burned at the stake for witchcraft.







september 1, 1953. Adamski feels that “great urgency  again. The publication in Britain of Flying Saucers Have Landed is only weeks away,
but he does not talk about how he looked forward to that event. No, he is
back in the same Los Angeles hotel, a glutton for punishment. He dines
out again with Firkon and Ramu, but this time there is no apple pie, just
sandwiches and coffee, and the jovial waiter is nowhere to be seen. They
are served by a cordial waitress who interrupts only to fill their coffee
cups. The coffee was certainly needed, for there is yet more consumermetaphysics about Divine Laws, the Creator, and something called All Knowledge. The content gets slightly more interesting however, because
for the first time, Adamski asks hard questions about the death of Captain
Mantell, a National Guard pilot who died chasing a UFO in his P51
Mustang, °  for instance. But Adamski gets some evasive answers. By the
time he returns to his hotel he is now a junky, and can’t wait for his next
fix of mall-religion, USA.
“Not long after  this meeting, he is again traveling to Los Angeles,
filled with joyous anticipation like “ta child before Christmas.  But again
there is the ominous note, now amplified: “The mental communications
from my friends of other planets were becoming more and more definite
as time went on. 

Ramu greets him at the usual hotel. Firkon couldn’t make it, and
Ramu apologizes for him. Same Pontiac, same Saturnian scout ship, but
this time, Ramu says that the visit has been requested by the master himself, and that the whole of the trip will be not a tour, but a long session
with the master. In the face of this awesome prospect of another ballbreaking speech, Adamski must have been not a little relieved at meeting a
posse of beautiful Saturnian women. But just as Ramu says “There is
quite a bit of activity on the part of your air force tonight,  the master

arrives to break it all up.
All of Adamskis “masters  have a serious problem. They must be
amongst the most boring and crass-brained individuals ever born. This
one in particular wouldn’t make the ratings at a downtown Salvation Army
bun-for-a-prayer meeting just before the addicts and the drunks are thrown
out and the cops are called. He is possessed by a kind of green blooming
pond-algae of the mind for which a sock on the jaw might have come as a
relief to him and all concerned. Here he is in full flight, giving all earthlings the usual kicking: “A great fallacy which has grown on the people of
Earth is the custom of dividing into many parts that which should never be
divided. You have multiple divisions in forms and teachings, many firm
likes and dislikes, all of which serve only to add to the state of confusion
on your planet. 

In other words the master does not like those wonderful conflicts,
paradoxes and tragi-comic catastrophes that alone make life worth living.
His hostility to fuzzy-minded hairy-arsed humanity is a seamless piece of
moral Muzac. If this candy was produced by a “higher intelligence,  then
it could be nothing more or less than a comic mimicking of Adamskis
own religious philosophizing for the purpose of entertainment alone.
These ruminations about the Earth, Man, and the Supreme Intelligence
come to an end with the kind of sentiment that has led the world to
absolute disaster on countless occasions. Ramu, speaking of the master,
says, “he is one of the most evolved beings stiil functioning within our
system. Just to be in his presence is to grow in love and understanding. We
are all fortunate. 
Adamski asks Ramu if the master contacted him telepathically and
asked him to come along on this occasion. “Yes,  answers Ramu, “your
own ability to receive is growing. 
We now know how “fortunate  this growing ability was for Adamski,
because eventually, these space-chapel voices in his head were to almost
destroy him, mentally, physically, and professionally.
All these mighty confusions were, as we shall see, the stuff of personal tragedy involving interaction with the great visionary and technological

Almost a year later: August 23, 1954. The last contact. Flying Saucers
Have Landed has now been published, and both Adamski and Desmond
Leslie are in great demand. On this date, the visiting Desmond Leslie is
away lecturing in Los Angeles. Adamski says that he tried to get Leslie
aboard, but the space brothers wouldn’t have him. What a disappointment
for Leslie. He missed the farewell cake and the sexy dance, which made a
wonderful change from impenetrable discussions about Universal
Brotherhood, Holy Writ, and the Age of Aquarius. Unfortunately on this
trip the master is back, and gives forth a blast about the “right path.  If this
is “enlightenment  then the Earth is in far greater danger than even
Adamski ever thought.
Another perfect Bogart scene. Adamski finds himself back in his
lonely hotel room in deep withdrawal. This time the fix hasn’t worked so
well. The pushers are holding back and increasing their prices. There is a
monkey is on his back; it won’t go away, and the new world he has found
is starting to eat him alive. We can hardly blame him. He was on the edge
of an emerging cosmos where all events and significances were to become
disposable, “virtual,  or hyperreal.  Some thirty years later, Baudrillard
describes  well the Los Angeles to which Adamski travelled from his
magic mountain to meet his space men and women:
“Los Angeles is a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing
more than a network of endless unreal circulation—a town of fabulous
proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and
nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion machine, needs
this old imaginary makeup of childhood signals and faked phantasms for
its sympathetic nervous system. 
And so, as Adamski leaves his metaphysical city, the story of these
trips comes to an end. However, in “An Unexpected Postscript  at the end
of Inside the Space Ships, Adamski makes a move straight out of Citizen
Kane. He describes dashing into his publishers “even as the presses are
rolling on this book,  possessed by yet another funny feeling.
April 25, 1955. The frame of reference all day yesterday  gives this
whole episode the feeling of a surreal time sequence in a science fiction
novel. Unable to sleep, Adamski tells us he caught a coach to Los Angeles


but this time he carried his own Polaroid camera, apparently with the
space folks prior permission. An unnamed “Brother  he has not seen
before greets him at the hotel, but warns him that the magnetic fields
inside the space ship might interfere drastically with the pictures. Once
inside the ship, this Brother takes the Polaroid, saying that he will take the
pictures while Adamski has a chat with Orthon, who has appeared almost
on cue. Three of the pictures taken with this camera appear in the British
Edition of Inside the Spaceships, published in 1956.
What a story. And it has not been done. The life, the vision, and the
contacts—neither film nor television makers have touched the confusions
and the tragedy. Writing in 1970, Desmond Leslie comments: George,
dammit ’ I once expostulated. Do you swear by all thats sacred that you
are telling the truth?’
Desmond, he answered quietly, ‘You know my religious beliefs?
One of these days I shall have to face my Maker. Do you think I’d dare
face Him with a lie like that on my conscience?’
“There was no doubting the mans sincerity. 
However, even telling Leslie that “Those guys were human just like
you and me  on occasion Adamski would hedge his bets, if only to confuse, as was his way. When he last saw Leslie shortly before his death in
1965, he was still unwilling to admit anything other than a flesh and blood
series of contacts. But Leslie does admit that on one occasion, Adamski
said “no one of us could be taken to another planet in our system and see
the home world of its inhabitants in his present bodily form or condition. 
Much rich comedy has been provided over the years by many and varied attempts at constructing a single, elegant, unified solution to the UFO
problem. Explanatory offerings have been as mad as anything Adamski
had to offer. They range from “earthlights  resulting from geomagnetic
strain and electromagnetic pollution to J. Allen Hyneks swamp gas explanation for the 1966 UFO sightings over Michigan. The very British “psycho-social  explanations (now fortunately howled off the international
stage) have been particularly hilarious. If we reverse the psycho-social
equations, then we have a much better focus. Laboratory rats may not be
the only creatures within an experimental maze. Certainly contact with an
alien Intelligence will rid us of all previous ideas of what intelligence is

and how it works.
If we dismiss Adamski, it must be remembered that from his time
onwards, the Western world became a huge dolls house, just like the
inside of his space-ships, and gradually the entertainment-media complex
becoming integrated with the military-industrial complex. Those who
scoff at the idea of “fairy kingdoms  might well consider that our own
Entertainment State is such a kingdom come about. Some cynics would
say that the inside of the media-entertainment head is identical to the interiors of Adamskis space ships, both are dolls house machines with plenty
of blood around if we happen to open the wrong door. If there was such an
alien invasion, it was a long time ago now, and it was silent, overwhelming, completely effective. It is still striking deep inland from its beachheads, and building new dolls for new walk-on parts in cyberspace. 
Through people like Adamski, invading agendas reached their targets, and
the future was born.
We don’t have to be Internet addicts to see “agendas  as pure disembodied information fields that are alien lifeforms in themselves. Adamski
was in all likelihood seduced by a phenomenon that was pure manipulated
suggestion, the kind of web-like information-field that will replace eventually all pulleys, levers, and even our beloved electronic pulsations. His
achievement is that he was one of the first to introduce the world to levels
of post-industrial power as pure suggestion, performance, mimicking and
virtual products, which last not more than a minute of old crankshaft time.
In the sense that he introduced ideas of power and control as cool things
and not old-Hitler hot, he was a highly significant first modern.
The age was changing in Adamskis head, and one such head is
enough. Time in that sense exists in very few individuals. Like Yali of
Melanesia, he was to be left marooned and confused; time dropped him
and he could not complete his stories. But perhaps initiation of the first
stories is sufficient; after that, the mission of such a manic information animal as Adamski is complete. His offspring were the eggs of a story-
virus. Death comes only when the story cycle has lodged within the host.
Then our teller of tales must go on to other story cycles beyond the sun
and moon. Like Shakespeare, he leaves his fast-breeding stories behind as
a form of immortality.
Adamski created a permanent pan-dimensional masterwork: his

books, his films, and his photographic collection. Seen as a whole, this
complex is as good as any in the twentieth century artistic portfolio. Just
like his distant mentor, Charles Fort, Adamskis images serve as modern
protective talismans against all solutions, singular or final, partial or elegant. He is a major constituent of the strange power of the UFO. Even
young skeptics of a very different generation jump up and down like
natives round a beating drum and take extreme counter-ritualizing measures against his very name.
Meantime, contactees keep faith. They worship bits of very odd
metal, unusual plastic, strange implants,and even a tasteless biscuit or two
for similar protection against old industrial Fact. Against the Western twilight, they hold up these hosts and watch the sky.



CHAPTER 12,
The Sub Plot: Flying
Saucer Pilgrimage.

 October 1954, Bryant Reeve took full retirement, and he set out with
his wife Helen for Mexico. This was to be the first part of their “Flying
Saucer Pilgrimage  which was eventually to produce their book of that
name. They contacted groups in the Mexico City area that had a saucer
interest, and within a short time they became well known, appearing in
newspapers, and on television. They even appeared for two minutes in a
Luis Bunuel film of all things, Ensayo de un Crime (Rehearsal for a
Crime). They were also elected charter members of the newly formed
Mexican Society of Interplanetary Investigation.
All this made them “celebrities  in Mexican eyes, aided by their
known friendship with George Adamski and the publication of the
Spanish translation of Flving Saucers Have Landed. The Reeves appeared
on a television program “Mesa de Celebridades  (The Table of the
Celebrities), to be questioned about “platillos voladores  (flying saucers).
This was presented from the roof-garden restaurant on top of the
Continental Hotel in downtown Mexico City, and it was a prime-time program watched by the cognoscenti and “smart set  of all Mexico. The
astute Helen herself scored particularly well when asked about the possibility of the whole saucer business being a mass hallucination. She replied
saying that if such a thing could happen, then would be a bigger mystery
than the saucer business itself.
Thus all was going well for the Reeves in Mexico until one day they
picked up their mail and found a letter from none other than George
Adamski himself. He said that he would be coming to Mexico for a vacation and rest on March 21st, 1955, most probably because he had just
completed /nside the Spaceships.

The “saucerers  of the Mexican and English Speaking Group duly
met Adamski at the airport. Bryant Reeve says that Adamskis arrival was
the beginning of: “, a series of bizarre events that proved the old adage—
‘anything can happen in Mexico.’ Some of these happenings so nearly
resembled a fantastic light opera plot that even while they were occurring
they seemed to us more like fiction than reality. As we all seemed to be
playing parts in this amazing drama; we had to pinch ourselves at times to
make sure we were really awake. 
On top of this Mexico effect, the Reeves also received in full the
“Adamski effect  often observed by those who entered his orbit.
Desmond Leslie was himself quite familiar with this effect. During
Leslies stay at Palomar, for example, there was hardly a dull moment,
with many incidents straight from the pages of John Fowles’ novel, The
Magus. In the summer of 1954, Desmond Leslie visited Adamski and
stayed at his house in Rincon Springs on Palomar Mountain. One
evening, while walking nearby, Leslie says, “I noticed a very bright ball
of light rising from Adamskis roof, about a quarter of a mile away. It rose
rapidly, rather like a silvery gold Very Light, and continued to rise until it
disappeared from sight. 
The following evening Leslie saw a similar effect while sitting on the
patio with Adamski and Alice Wells. He felt at the time a “curious cold
feeling  come over him, and he felt also that someone was behind him,
and watching him closely: “I swung round in time to see a small golden
disk between us and the Live Oaks fifty feet away. Almost instantly it shot
up in the air with an imperceptible swish, leaving a faint trail behind it,
then vanished. George grinned solemnly. ‘I was wondering when you
were going to notice that ’ I was amazed. 
Leslie has the same problem as Nicholas Urfe in The Magus. The
time-space equations do not quite fit the movement of ideas and materials,
people and events. But then neither do normal space-time equations fit the
physical schemes of the major American assassinations. Seeing such
things, as he did with Adamski sitting beside him, Leslie, like Urfe, might
well have asked who was pulling the strings? Is Leslie a liar, or had
Adamski himself rigged all the stage machinery required for these strange
effects? Or are we on a kind of modern Prosperos island, with the
mechanical explanations far more fantastic then that they would seek to

explain? Or are the explanations themselves a function of the deception?
Lou Zinsstag, wrote of meeting Adamski in 1959: “, the few days I
had spent with George had given me the insight that I was dealing with an
extraordinary person. I already knew that there was another side to this
man, a mystical one perhaps, and that there was probably another story to
his story. 
We can understand what Zinstagg is taking about when her Dutch
friend Rey d’Aquila received in clear a telepathic test-message sent by
Adamski himself to all members of his “Get Acquainted Group. 
Apparently, in the Adamski style, the message was banal, and Zinstagg is
dismissive, but she does not seem at all impressed that it got there at all. This kind of “definitely provable  event was to dog Adamski all his
life, baffling all but his most severe critics, who often got out of an embarrassing predicament by denying everything and anything. But just one of
the problems in dealing with Adamski was the sheer number of high quality reports coming in quite independently. The following statement by
astronaut James McDivitt made in Omni magazine in 1980, is particularly
significant. While a USAF jet pilot in 1951, he said that for “..several days
in a row we sighted groups of metallic, saucer-shaped vehicles at great
altitudes over the base, and we tried to get closer to them, but they were
able to change direction faster than our fighters. I do believe that UFOs
exist and that the truly unexplained ones are from some other technologically advanced civilization. 
The Mexican and English Speaking Group planned the inevitable
press conference, but made the mistake of using the Reeves apartment for
this. Adamski was besieged, the apartment overflowed with reporters and
photographers, and the event looked as if it was going to be a total success. However it had been noticed by some members of the Group that a
certain number of reporters were not sympathetic at all. Fears were justified when the event got hardly any press coverage.
While Bryant Reeve was organizing a conferencia for Adamski, he
experienced the comedy of being mistaken for the great man himself.
Helen Reeve had her own comic episode when she observed a group of
influential Mexicans trying to get into a lift. They were anxious to meet
Adamski, but the social and professional pecking order of entrance into
  133
the lift had to be carefuily organized. While this was being sorted out, the
lift, of course, kept going up and down. The group of rather provincial
Mexicans could not understand this motion, and they would be there to
this day had not Helen ushered them all inside regardless.
Similar Mexican practices prevailed at the conferencia.
Apparently in Mexico, no speaker was ever allowed to continue for
more than a few minutes. The result was a haze of quite impromptu
comments and questions in both Mexican and English. Some of these
interruptions were instantly translated into one or the other language,
often by several over-enthusiastic members of the audience at once.
Any apparent inaccuracies of translation becamne immediately points
of loud multi-lingual contention.
Adamski himself virtually disappeared in what became a mass of
internecine controversy, but he had better luck a short time later when he
appeared at the Insurgenta Theatre. A world-famous mosaic mural created
by the artist Diego Rivera adorned the front of the theatre, and astonishingly, Rivera himself actually turned up for the event, which shows the
kind of people Adamski managed to attract at this time. The pair had a
conversation, and Adamski expressed his admiration of the mural.
In the foyer was hung a long banner: “Conferencia Los Platillos
Voladores Por George Adamski,  and despite a lack of press coverage
again, the Group filled the large theatre by word of mouth. They charged
five pesos (then 40 cents in American money) for entrance to defray
expenses, an action which would cause them much trouble later. Again,
Adamskis lecture was interrupted when a television crew turned up and
tried to film the event. They caused so much noise and disruption they
were asked to leave, which by Mexican standards, must have been some
noise and disruption.
Next came a grand reception at the American Club. Bryant Reeve
describes the scene, and again demonstrates Adamskis pulling power “all
in the interest of saucers : “Lights, photographers, caviar, cocktails, reception lines, introductions, nusic  Distinguished men in fine attire and beautiful ladies in colorful dress. A sprinkling of diplomats and military personnel. And waiters really doing their stuff. 
But all was not well. A member of the Group reported that an uninvited guest was inquiring about how much Adaimski charged for his lectures.

Though he was told that no one had been charged, subsequently another
man appeared who served a subpoena on Adamski. This concerned the
paltry fee charged for entrance to the Insurgentes Theatre, which apparently violated Mexican law since Adamski did not have a work permit. It was
obvious that though he talked only of flying saucers, he had by this time
quite a powerful apparatus following him and trying to discredit and
restrict his activities. Such quite tangible action was the source of much
early conspiracy theory regarding Adamski and many other contactees. If
Authority thoroughly despised and dismissed the phenomenon, it nevertheless paid it a great deal of secret and-semi-secret attention.
Worrying about whether he was going to be deported or even jailed,
Adamski found yet another writ waiting for him when he arrived back at
his hotel that night. This one summoned him to a Court Hearing the next
morning. At the hearing, his papers were taken away, which made him
persona non grata in Mexico. The Reeves tried to get the American
Embassy to help, but such machinery moves slowly, and the next few days
were spent trying to keep Adamski out of jail, a move that would have had
serious consequences with regard to any future passport application.
Because of this business, Adamski received adverse publicity that
resulted in the cancellation of some television programs. Cancelled also
was an important lecture to La Asociacion Nacional de Tecnicos
Mexicanos (the National Association of Mexican Technical Men).
The whole drama headed towards a whirlwind finish. A few days after
the Hearing, a Senor Hero (sic) called on the Reeves. He was obviously a
powerful and influential man, and he took notes as the Reeves described
what had happened to Adamski. He assured the Reeves that all would be
straightened out the next morning, and took his leave. In Mexican fashion,
at midnight, he rang again and invited the Reeves and Adamski to a midnight feast at his house.
They collected Adamski and a Mexican friend, who had a powerful car. They had hardly started the journey to Sefior Heros house
some miles away in Coyoacan, when they were stopped by two grimlooking traffic policemen on motorcycles. Their Mexican friend had
the wit to mention Senor Heros name to the policemen whereupon
their entire attitude changed. The baffled party were then escorted with
screaming sirens, and the pale-faced Reeves noticed that at times the

speedometer read 100 miles per hour.
They arrived finally at a beautiful mansion and were greeted by Sefior
Hero and his wife. Hero said that all the wrongs of the Adamski affair
would be put right, and indeed they were, the very next day. Hero also
managed to re-schedule Adamskis lecture to the Mexican Technical Men.
Before Adamski left Mexico the beaver-like Reeves arranged a meeting between himself and the “Mexican Adamski,  one Salvador
Villanueva Medina, a chauffeur by profession. Helen and Bryant Reeves
were present, together with an interpreter and a friend, Sefior Gebes, in
whose house the meeting took place. The session took the form of
Adamski asking questions about saucers that no-one could have answered
without having being inside one. Medina passed the test, and the Reeves
found the experience a fittingly awe-inspiring end to their days in Mexico,
a place as hot, dramatic, and as full of vibrant hues as Adamskis stories
themselves.
The splendid Reeves now leave the George Adamski story, as on
April 10th, 1955, they cross the border at El Paso passing through country
where the young Adamski might well have hunted bandits, illegal immigrants, and smugglers when he served with the US Cavalry. We leave
them as they head for the next part of their magical Californian journey.
They will meet George Hunt Williamson one of the original members of
the Adamski desert contact group, go to Van Tassels Giant Rock UFO
Airport, and many other points of enchanted America.
Adamski was to return to Mexico in late 1956, where he spent some
months on vacation in Chalapa, Jalisco, Mexico. There he shot a 16-mm
color motion film of a huge, domed spacecraft hovering over a highway.
He also made a short film about an incident that had occurred in
Guadalajara some three years before. Apparently a huge spaceship had
landed near a banana plantation. Two “men  from this ship were invited by
the farmer of the plantation into his home where they stayed for two
hours, during which the farmer gave them fruits, flowers, and seeds apparently at their request. They took off, but returned four days later and took
the farmer for a ride in their ship. After four more days, the farmer
returned and went straight to the Mexican government with his story.
The government formed an investigation committee that studied the

case for three years. Two hundred witnesses were interviewed and soil
samples taken. In his film (shown later in Europe in 1959), Adamski
shows the farm and its surroundings, and also many of the people directly
involved, such as officials and policemen. The affair ended on a disturbing
note with the disappearance of the farmer and his family.
Adamski returned to Palomar Terraces in early 1957 at the urgent
request of Lucy McGinnis, his dreadfully overworked secretary.
McGinnis, one of the witnesses of the original desert contact, feared
financial problems might cause the collapse of Adamskis fragile organization. ;
During the latter part of the following year, in order to raise funds,
Adamski traveled with Carol Honey on a 4,000-mile lecture tour reaching as far north as Bellingham, Washington State. In 1960, Honey, writ-
ing in the Introduction to Adamskis last book, Behind the Flying
Saucer Mystery, gives an example ofthe kind of informal contact many
serving American officers made with Adamski. Then, as now, the UFO
is made of countless such whispers. During the intermission of a lecture given at Everett, Washington, a public information officer from
Paine Air Force Base complimented Adamski on his “scientific down to earth and physical approach to the subject.  He said that: “when the
psychics were kicked out of the UFO situation the Air Force would be
able to release its information. 
But then, as now, there was a lot of confusion about what is meant by
“psychic.  The confusion stems from the admission that we do not know
what electricity or magnetism are exactly, and therefore the whole structure of physics is an act of faith. Being acts of faith, magnetism and elec-
tricity both are as much “psychic  structures as anything else. The concept
of “lines of force  is an element of the metaphorical structure by means of
which we manage such things rather than “know  of their inner nature.
Again, we have our concept of “wonder management  as distinct from -
fact versus fiction. Those things we tend not to call “psychic  are those
things that have been best advertised and sold most avidly within the culture. In a “factual  world the metaphors are tuned and coherent, ready to
build any number of subsequent consequential worlds whose appearance
is equally convincingly “real.  Of course, this structure is never ever completely stable. Perhaps as many “paranormal  events occur as micrometeorites striking the earth in an hour. “Unreality  begins with increasing disorder within this structure, almost as if the metaphors are fighting one
another rather than agreeing.
With Adamski the metaphors were certainly fighting one another.
Though he insisted always that he did not like “psychics  or “mysticism 
at all, such were certainly present in his simple-minded Christian evangelism, his early “Gaia  view, and also in his ideas of telepathy.
There were certainly many instances when Adamski demonstrated
beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had psychic ability. On the morning
of the 16th of August, 1958, he was traveling towards Grants Pass,
Oregon, on a speaking tour. Carol Honey, the man who had replaced
Lucy McGinnis, was traveling with him. Adamski said he had a “telepathic hunch  and asked Honey to drive back to a small cafe they had
just passed.
“As we entered the door,’ Honey would later write in Flying Saucer
Review,'13 “a very small blond girl approached, and George acted as if
someone had hit him on the head with a hammer. In fact he acted so
strange about her that it caused me to get suspicious. After she showed me
that she was reading my every thought, it finally dawned on me that she
was probably a space person. She looked from a distance as if she was
about 12 years old. Close up, however, she looked much older and I
remarked to Adamski that I thought she was about 45 years old, she did
n’t identify herself in any way and, we left and continued on our trip. 
We are left to wonder what the previously quoted Air Force officer
would have had to say to such a down-to-earth and “scientific  approach
to the UFO phenomenon. But the clincher took place the following day,
when Adamski took a call at the motel in Seattle where he and Honey
were staying. According to Honey, a man said: “I called to tell you that
you and the young man were both wrong. The girl you met in the cafe was
not 45 years old and she wasn’t the one you thought. She is her sister. 
Adamski told Honey that the girl looked identical to “Kalna,  as described
in Inside the Space Ships. Honey concluded by saying: “This was absolute
proof to me, no-one knew we were at this motel. No-one knew the route
we had come over and no-one could possibly have known my thoughts as
to the girls age. 

Perhaps, as it were, Adamski and Honey glimpsed the equivalent of a
four-master pass by their island at a great distance. As islanders, little did
they know that they will have to wait five hundred years perhaps for
another sail. But by that time Kalnas sister will have changed, and the sail
will take the form of a smoking funnel.
We are left as Nicholas Urfe is left with a feel of Proustian infinity at
the end of Zhe Magus: “She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive,
never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspend the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A
blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season*from the willows by the lake. A
flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves. 







CHAPTER 13,
America Mystica: 1958.
Alhough an immigrant Pole with an accent, Adamski had America
Afees and old written all over him. He had one of those tub-thumping
semi-educated minds one meets in Twain or Melville, Hemingway, or
Whitman. Certainly he was mentally hyperactive. He quotes Emerson and
John Ruskin in the same breath as Air Force UFO investigator Captain
Edward Ruppelt and the Gospels. In his last book, Behind the Flying
Saucer Mystery, he gives the names, characteristics and functions of the
launched satellites of his day almost at the same time as he talks of telepathy and travelling on Venusian spaceships. This constant cross-referencing
of fantasy, imagination, and substance is, of course, often the hallmark of
genius; but though he had the mental courage to take a thorny path, he
lacked disciplined reading and study. His channel-surfing soap-box mind
never stopped its endless bough-chatter; but nevertheless with this ability,
he certainly drew some of the great mythological cartoons of his time.
When we look at Adamski, we look at a part of the very inside of the
American mind, pregnant with experimental structures, machines and
ideas, all interwoven with the mysteries of Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn
Monroe, and the assassinations. No other mind on the planet is like this. If
we laugh at that, we might bear in mind that Star Trek, Uncle Sams
national flagship, would not have been possible without taking on something of Adamskis original vision. This alone puts him on the level of
Fritz Lang and the creators of the Flash Gordon films, with the supercharged bonus of a reality-claim. In Adamskis mind is the source of
American triumph and dread: designs slot into other designs, and the gimmickry works, but is all this a cargo-like deception buried deep like a
charge of dynamite with the heart of the mystery of machines?
America is a device culture. Its cities look like circuit boards; its two
computer programs control the entire planet. There is no alternative to


being American, no more than there is an alternative to watching television, even lacking a set. At times Adamskis doll-folk in flying saucers act
as if they were the attendant spirits of both Americas genius and tragedy.
Though he was of a very different generation than Jack Keruouac,
Adamski was similarly an American figure standing at the dawn of a new
world when Europe was waiting to be reborn. Perhaps such figures disturb
Authority because, as advanced prototypes, such folk represent disturbing
changes to come. Before 1945, in Britain and Europe, almost all such figures had been murdered by socialism, both national and international.
Odd folk trouble Authority if only’ because it doesn’t understand
them. Weird views are not directly criminal, yet they subvert society in a
much more subtle way. Since it is not possible to prosecute, shots are put
across personal bows in hidden ways, and covert pressures applied. The
odd person is made to feel that no matter how small they may be, no matter how mad or ridiculous, they have nevertheless been noticed.
Conformists are left alone; they are effectively dead matter to systems of
Authority, and actual criminals are finite, their actions and motives fully
comprehensible.

But that living cauldron of experiments with shapes and colors, surreal directions, and outright denials of received truth is the outsider. In
imagining and communicating, the outsider is vital to the process of
changing metaphor. Change of metaphor is in turn vital to that physical
change which the majority of humanity equate to “reality ’ Knowing that
vital new images can change society just as can “fact,  Authority therefore
watches image-makers (such as John Lennon, Timothy Leary, and 
Wilhelm Reich, for example) just as it watches the more obvious banks
and property of the so-called “real  world. Authority knows that imagination can change the cultural bedrock in subtle ways. It is usually not the
apparently nonsensical substance of the act of imagination that is the center of interest as much as the act of imagining itself. Adamski certainly
made seemingly nonsensical statements, such as saying that Venus is
inhabited by human-like forms. Though this might indeed appear to be
nonsense, it certainly brings the picture of such an absurdity into a mind,
though momentarily. Though the mind may reject immediately such rubbish, nevertheless, for a fleeting instant, it has created a picture of an
inhabited Venus, if only to reject the image immediately. This fleeting act


of imagination is the very first minute building block of a possible universe in which Venus might indeed be populated in the manner described
by Adamski.

Authority, of course, must never be underestimated. It knows that the
deviant thought, once reinforced by some powerful means of suggestion,
may start to mutate. The end of this process could well be the manufacture
(or part manufacture) of a universe containing such a possibility as an
inhabited Venus. The introduction of this thin sliver of a suggestion into
the half-formed programmatic “real  is the practice and object of classical
occultism. Reinforcement follows by whatever means. Boil a cauldron full
of advertising, suggestion, propaganda, and collective will to believe and
Adamakis Orthon appears on cue, rather like Fausts Satan, promising our
hearts desire. We thought these old cultural umbilicals had gone from us,
but they are indestructible. They still serve to make up the kind of half forgotten dialogue with Nature that conjures up the half-forms glimpsed
in John Keels The Mothman Prophecies, or Patrick Huyghes,The Field
Guide to Extraterrestrials.


Of course, deviant thoughts require outsiders, and if ever there was an
outsider, it was George Adamski. He almost certainly didn’t know it, but
he was a prototype media-head. If he was chosen for some alien experiment, then this was the most likely reason. Mentally hyperactive, he
moved in many dimensions simultaneously. He was also one of those
inspired people who have no problem with Wonder. When faced with
utterly fantastic claims, many are inspired, while others feel angry and
insulted, guilty and ashamed; still others feel intellectually violated and/or
morally outraged. Fantastic claims can arouse just as much hatred as can
“real  murderous actions. Perhaps domains of thoughts defend themselves
and go to war just as do nations.
But there are those who have no problem with fairies or UFOs. They
see such things as natural elements within an order of nature; these are
obscure or distant mysteries just as are the better-managed mysteries of
electricity and magnetism. Somewhere within the vast interiors of the outsider, there has been a failure of the sort of cultural colonization that is
supposed to convince that one thing is “unreal  while another thing is
“real.  Leslies chapters in Flying Saucers Have Landed are Adamskis



unconscious: there the deep past is still ticking away, subverting the future
and ridiculing the transient present. Behind all frenetic energies such as
his, there is this higher disturbance of History. Hearing such a voice is to
hear sounds from old mine workings long since thought abandoned. With
this energy and the growing range of accusations against him, Adamski
was bound sooner or later to hit trouble.
And when he did, many bells began to ring.

In May 1952 the Special Agent of the San Diego Office of the FBI
wrote a memo to J. Edgar Hoover. It was-about Adamski. In conversations
and letters Adamski had made some mildly pro-Russian and anti American remarks. But it wasn’t this so much as he had accumulated a
large following through broadcasts and public appearances. Even before
the “desert contact  of late 1952, Adamski was a veritable living website
of his day. He had always complained about American nuclear tests; he
gathered information, he spread fantastic rumors concerning conspiracies,
secret technologies, government cover-ups, and environmental policy; he
libeled, he accused, and he played tricks, if only in self-defense. Though
common now, such multi-faceted raw energy feeding on horizons just
born was new for his time. Many were attracted to him also because he
integrated vision and technology with a New Age Christianity. In the early
1950s, the body of Christian belief had hardly got past the Industrial
Revolution. Christian theology was still looking askance at the changes
wrought by the railway engine; at that rate, rockets and space were going
to take a long time to enter its horizon, if ever. No matter how mad
Adamskis rumors were, to make Christianity to any degree sexy, technological, and mysterious at the same was an achievement of genius, no less.
Adamskis defense against official surveillance was no less brilliant.
He got in touch with police, military, defense, and intelligence organs at
the drop ofa hat. He was never one for a fixed defense. Like a good tank
commander, like indeed the flying saucer itself, he was always mobile,
unpredictable, and fought close up, showering almost-libels and asking
many leading questions in one sentence. These methods were the shock
tactics of a deep-penetration panzer attack that often threw the vast, slower thinking intelligence organizations into chaos.
Adamski often quoted one agency to another, and often cross-corresponded, thus causing referential confusion in what were essentially
bureaucratic organizations. He played the role of a concerned American
citizen approaching Authority with whole armfuls of gifts. By doing this,
he disarmed those who would make predictable accusations of disloyalty
or subversion. To say that his gifts were unwanted was to stand on the slippery slope of the argument.
On the 13th of March 1953, a Riverside, California newspaper, the
Enterprise, reported that Adamski had claimed that all his material had
been cleared with the FBI and USAF Intelligence. This followed a speech
Adamski made to the Lions Club of Corona, California the previous
evening. As a result of this newspaper story, investigating officers from
both the FBI and USAF visited him. They forced him to mail a letter to
the Enterprise correcting this report. They also got a written statement
from him that he would not make such a claim again. But the agents made
the mistake of putting their own signatures to this document as witnesses
On the 10th of December 1953, an investigator for the Los Angeles
Better Business Bureau  wrote a report and submitted it to the FBI.  
He said that his organization was considering prosecuting Adamski for
fraud with regard to his claimed “real  encounters published in Flying
Saucers Have Landed (which had by then just been put on sale in Los
Angeles bookshops, hence the interest). This investigator revealed during an interview that “Adamski produced a document having a blue seal
in the lower left corner, at the top of which appeared three names of
Government agents. 

As a result of this report, on the 17th of December, an FBI and an OSI
agent went back to “Palomar Gardens Cafe  again and threatened
Adamski with arrest on the grounds of having forged an official document. The text of this FBI report of the 17th reveals that he was “temphatically admonished to cease and desist in referring to the FBI or the OSI as
having given him approval to speak on Flying Saucers. 

Adamski, with yet more promises of good behavior, backed down,
but then turned the tables by spreading rumors that he had been
“silenced  by the FBI. Some of his tactics of clogging the machine in
this way were certainly echoed much later in the two-stapled hippie
manuals of people such as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman during the
Vietnam protest era. Anyone who knows anything at all about government departments will know that such procedures are a surprisingly
effective way of ensuring internal confusion. When such confusion
starts to feed back upon itself, there results a kind of microphonic howlround frequently encountered in UFO investigations. When this happens, we see the edifying spectacle of the bee-dance of incorrigibly
skeptical enquirers and their manic-depressive conclusion that there is
nothing left mysterious beneath the visiting moon.

So instead of a liar, a fraudster, or con-man, the much-misunderstood
Adamski can be seen as essentially a shaman-like prankster, an early
equivalent to Britains Ken Campbell or irelands Doc. Shiels. To those of
‘a mechanical and industrial age (whose only alternatives are the yes/no
and false/true paradigms), such an ancient cultural figure is difficult to get
into focus. For skeptics in particular the activity and function of such
clown-figures is even more difficult to understand. It is rather like trying
to imagine some modern version of King Lears fool.

Like the shaman and the fool, Adamski could be, on occasion, a magnificent performer. He effectively produced a blinding stream of images,
symbols, metaphors, strange juxtapositions, weird connections, a whole
living theatre which annoyed, baffled, outraged, yet inspired. Like Charles
Fort, another deeply disturbed anarchist American, Adamski used this
kind of rolling barrage to turn Authority round to question its own
innards, and not George Adamski. He loved also to goad Authority into
unsubtle, awkward, and rather brutish actions against him, so that all
resistance looked cloddish and childish. When we look upon all this as
truth by performance-theater, then we avoid the depressing skeptical
merry-go-round of tiny little skeptical minds (of which the British are the
worst), trying to decide whether his experiences were “real  or “false.  For
the shaman, that concept which we call the Objective Real is a box of
tricks and illusions in any case. Far superior cultures to our own have had
little commerce with Fact. Even for Shakespeare, the Objective Real
would have been a meaningless concept.



All modern problems with the UFO stem from this single consideration alone. Our culture lacks an effective language to describe something
that exists outside the old industrial colonization of yes and no.
The outsider, living in this intermediate state, is an amusing yet
frightening figure, and serves to remind folk that the rules of the realitygame are never ever fully settled. This is the oldest fear in the world. The
“threat  to Authority is that the outsider (perhaps despite himself or herself), may walk through the walls just once. In the case of all the major
American assassinations, once was enough.
Like Andy Warhol, Adamski, if he did anything at ali, made junk culture live in an unforgettable and even a profound way. He also had other
qualities of the American Hero. He.was a true soldier, he took the heat and
came through. He had flair, he had style, but above all the old cavalryman
had magic. By stopping the world from taking all this away from him, he
showed that he was a piece of the Right Stuff, as much as Chuck Yeager or
anyone else.

chapter 14, 

 George Adamskis
1959 World Tour.


they could. If only some of these radiating metaphors were to have more
than a half-life, it is possibly by a hairs breadth that these men avoided the
fate of Jack Parsons and Wilhelm Reich, and many more to come after,
such as Timothy Leary and John Lennon. Ideological systems as emerging
moral geometries ring the deepest alarms.
The great physicist James Jeans once said that Nature does not like
being observed too closely, and those few thinkers who have a concentration far in excess of the average are often dealt with by a process that has
absolutely nothing to do with normal mechanics of conscious social-democratic justice. This process of detection appears to have two elements, an
explicit and an implicit. The first is purely conventional police interest,
which explains itself. The second is much more interesting. It seems that
in their unusual seeing, such people as Adamski come near to those forces
that are running the show. Authority rarely has any problem with physical
attack; it is prepared for it, and usually knows the directions from which it
will come. There is no mystery about grenades.
Subversion by changing metaphor is more difficult to counter.
Metaphor, unlike a bullet, gets everywhere. Whether he or she prospers or
dies unpublished in a gutter depends on what stories the prevailing paradigm intends to run, and no hard feelings. The storyteller, with his age-old
technology, is still political dynamite. Stories as complex expanded
metaphor enter and mutate the very interstices of matter/symbol/spirit formulation. Like radiation again, they pass through brains as fertilizing signals whether we like it or not. Mere bullets cannot do that. Just like TV,
stories have no OFF switch. Stories are present, root and branch, both in
equations and literature. In the development of Newtons calculus, we can
read the history of the emerging social need for a grasp of flow and acceleration, and the idea of radiation is one of the 20th centurys great binding
metaphors; most things moral and political are transmitted and broadcast.
In this sense, Adamski was received by many in Europe like some
magician from a dream-future. He was the first powerful shot of 1960s
vibes. He was delightfully anarcho-eccentric, like L. Ron Hubbard, and
indeed Howard Hughes. There was also the perceptible smell of sulfur
about him that made him stand out from other visiting American gurus,
such as the rather plastic Billy Graham. Adamski was a likeable rogue,
suggesting that neither Truth nor Reality were necessarily about good



1940, the RAF got rid of Dowding, preferring the (mistaken, as it turned
out) “big wing” theories of Leigh-Mallory and Sholto Douglas. Compared
with that decision, Adamskis strange views could be judged as sane by
comparison. Dowding, indeed, saved the nation, but that he had more
brains than Douglas and Leigh-Mallory combined, and was undoubtedly a
warrior of genius (though he didn’t look like one), condemned him in
British eyes. Just as were cursed T.E. Lawrence, Alan Turing, and Barnes Wallace. That Dowding was also a dedicated spiritualist helped finally to
seal his fate.
What does Adamski do before this Lion of British history? He refuses
to lecture because a work-permit had not been arranged. He was paranoid
about this matter, because he was convinced that he had enemies out to
exploit every opportunity to damage him. In a very short time Adamski
has an agitated Lord Dowding running round like an harassed store-manager, something that Goerings mighty Luftwaffe had not been able to do.
As Dowding phones a lawyer for advice, we have a scene from a Marx
Brothers film as Adamski describes it: ‘All tickets had been sold, and Lord
Dowding was very perturbed. He called his attorney, who told him it was
quite all right to proceed with the lecture. Another friend talked with the
attorney, and was told the same. Then I was asked to speak with the attorney. When he said everything was in order, I asked him if he would put
that in writing. When he said, “No, it is not necessary,” I stood my
ground,”!55
After an intense donnish discussion, which would have done a 1940
Fighter Command Control Room credit, a plan was formed. Lord
Dowding would preside on the platform with Adamski, who however,
would only answer questions from the floor. To have heard “Stuffy”
Dowding carefully explaining all this to a well-heeled audience, and to
hear him say also, like a disappointed local cinema manager, that arrangements for refunds had been made, if so required, must have been to experience the essence of a superb English moment. To follow this with a two hour discussion about good-looking men from the planet Venus must have
made it a night to remember in the annals of Tunbridge-Wells.
As if this were not achievement enough, Adamski produces next what
might be called an interlude before his next big change of scene. Yes, he
meets a “spaceman” on a British train. It could only happen on the way to
168 
Weston-super-Mare, a center of that ritual scourging the British call holidays. On April 23rd, Desmond Leslie sees him off on the train, which in
those days still had compartments with no connecting corridor. Despite
this being a reserved compartment, there is another passenger, a man, who
starts immediately a conversation with Adamski, who comments: “To my
amazement, he was a spaceman working as a scientist on projects for the
British government! He, and countless others like him, are working in various scientific projects for every government in the world. In his way
space people can help us reach out into space, with our own science and
our own ships, bringing us nearer to the understanding that abundant life
exists throughout the Cosmos. This is the only way the people of Earth
can be awakened from the state of lethargy and apathy, into the realization
that a far greater destiny than they ever imagined awaits them.?!5¢
Having not allowed the spaceman to speak for himself, and having
past off what could have been the greatest event in history in a few bland
sentences, Adamski continues immediately with a description of
Western-super-Mare as a “pretty coastal town” etc. Since modern science has wasted land, sea, air, and earth and every day tortures to death
billions of live animals, we look askance at the idea of aliens “helping
out.” But perhaps again Adamski is not “wrong” or “right,” it is just that
his mental processes act like a custard-pie slapstick clown and the pratfalls of Chaplin. If this is the “fuzzy” view of human mentality, then
researchers in Artificial Intelligence are going to have a hell of a job imitating its sense of a “reality,” which nearly always turns out to be a bit of
a cultural paste-up in any case.
Like the psychic spoonbender Uri Geller in studios and laboratories a
decade later, Adamski ducks and weaves, shifting the scene, the reference
base, the focus all the time, never getting cornered, charming experienced
interviewers, turning their brains to ice-cream, at least momentarily. As
with Oswald.and Mike Tyson again, with Adamski, no one ever knew
what was going to happen next. In Britain, he overcome almost all opposition, and became an overnight hit.
Such a view of such a process may well include the option of
Adamski having us on for a while, if only to reinforce what was a significant experience in the first place. If he was, it really doesn’t matter nearly
as much as some of his detractors think it does. Deception and invention
 169
mixed with more convincing elements are part of the UFO syndrome in
any case. Considering Behind the Flying Saucer Mystery as a text, the
conjunctions and levels of many different atmospheres, tones, and fabrics,
work very well in giving us an idea of the UFO phenomenon as a partly
objective manifestation. Being such, the phenomenon works on the “real”
and “unreal” levels simultaneously, eliminating them altogether as categories of experience and knowledge. When we talk so blithely about
“alien technology,” one thing is certain: it is not going to consist of
improved juice-blenders.
Taking a tip from the Melanesian experience, if we see alien “mechanism” it is more than likely that we are being fooled.
In this respect, even though nearly a half-century old now, Adamskis
books are still superior to a thousand or more works that have appeared
since that time and that have taken a linear approach, arguing “factually”
from case to case in a strictly logical fashion. Though this approach is
effective in demonstrating the case, it gets nowhere in analytical terms.
Throughout Adamskis three books, personal and textual dimensions
stretch quite beyond the page, to make up examples of the very first popart “faction” genre, accomplished when Andy Warhol was still at college,
and the creators of such “faction” classics as Alternative 3'57 were not
even twinkles in the eye. The style is the equivalent to what was called in
those early days of the 1960s “action painting” or “coilage” rather than
“literary,” for Adamski (unlike the accomplished Desmond Leslie) didn’t
pretend to be a writer proper in any sense. In this respect he was successful in that by breaking all the rules he got to the target area of this particu-
lar subject, which of all subjects demands that the rules be broken.
These early books on flying saucers represent a new genre, which
quite defeats the old ideas of assessing literature in terms of the polished
styles of no doubt very clever and accomplished folk. Like Howard
Mengers From Outer Space to You (1959), Adamskis books are examples
of “bad” art that is of very high value by inverse virtue of gross default
rather than by practiced professional application. This untutored expression leads to some delightful cliff-hanging moments: a much more convincing passage comes immediately after the spaceman encounter, with
the short brochure description of Western-super-Mare sandwiched in
between. Such a style as this there never was. But it worked well enough
170 
to get an invitation to Scotland, where he was quite well received by some
very non-metaphysical folk.
On the 29th of April 1959, Adamski lectured at the Midlands Institute
in Birmingham. Writer Christopher Allan was present!58, and in a letter to
this author, he described how the Institute was packed and the audience
overflowed to another hall to hear the lecture on the sound system. “I do
not consider that Adamski gave a good performance,” writes Allan, “and
his films were very poor.”
In an interview with Adamski the day after, the Air Correspondent of
the Birmingham Post was a bit more positive. He described Adamskis
photos as showing up “against the blue sky as moving specks of light.” A
report in the Birmingham Mail of the 30th of April described heated discussions breaking out in the audience, and said sniggers were heard
throughout the hall when Adamski talked about his contact with
Venusians. This same report contained typical examples of the facetious
attitudes of the time towards this subject. The Birmingham Mail reporter
describes the behavior of a woman in front of him whom he thought for a
moment was ill. However: “She was merely being racked by great gusts of
helpless, silent, and irrepressible laughter.”
We can understand her feeling. On January 21, 1955 Desmond Leslie,
on his return from staying with Adamski in California, gave a talk in
Tunbridge Wells to the local Flying Saucer Club. Introduced by the indefatigable Lord Dowding, he said in his talk that Adamski had also communicated in Polish as well as English to the space folk. He added that they
had learned the languages of Earth “by picking up our radio signals for
the past 60 years.” Surely our sympathies must go out to those particular
aliens who monitored Polish radio for sixty years. They must have been in
the state of Melvilles character, Bartleby, who had spent all his life sorting through mail sent to addresses that could not be found. No wonder that
a week after this event the Zunbridge Wells Advertiser commented that “A
Venusian would make a profitable return for Bertram Mills’ Circus.”
From astonishments in Tunbridge Wells, and meeting strange friendly
space men on trains, we find Adamski on the Sth of May in Scotland at the
Central Halls Tollcross, with tickets at three shillings each.
He then met with Leonard G. Cramp, a most brilliant British nuts.


the guest of writer Lou Zinsstag, whose sanity and kindness and her sincere belief at that time helped Adamski to live through what was not a par-
ticularly happy period for him. Like Lucy McGinnis, Adamskis secretary
for many years, she would later modify her views somewhat.
As a good organizer, Zinsstag also advised on Adamskis presentational difficulties. As Desmond Leslie has pointed out, Adamski was not a
practical man at all, adding that he was “just about able to drive a nail in
straight,’ and the late 1950s wasa time before Public Relations and
Personal Presentation Management had been invented. While privately
Adamskis well-mannered charm carried all before him, on a public stage,
strangely, he was a disaster. He was one of those people who are tailormade for television, but who on stage cannot help looking and sounding
like an awkward amateur.
Lecturing in a non-English speaking country presented Adamski with
some other problems he had not encountered before. He had never been
the most well organized of men, and in the past he had experienced some
difficulty with the inconvenience of carrying around some hundred slides
or more, a number of which had been broken and even stolen. He had prepared therefore a single reel of film that expressed the core of his work
and beliefs, interspersed with still and motion footage of flying saucers
shot by him. Since in those pre-video days of 1959, it wasn’t easy for not
very mechanical folk such as Adamski to stop and start film footage without horrendous complications, his comments between running frames
were far too fast for the translators. While this situation was improved
somewhat by Zinsstags German introduction, Adamskis actual lectures
were another problem.
He had never been a good public lecturer under the best of circumstances. Desmond Leslie said that when on the lecture platform “his mind
seemed to tangle in knots, and many who queued avidly to hear him came
away disillusioned and disappointed.” He stumbled over words, and did
not speak evenly. In Europe, he had been worried constantly about
whether the translator was able to follow what he was saying. According
to Zinsstags account, he had tried to remedy this by making a crude “onesentence, over-simplified version, which sometimes sounded like a dictation exercise in a sixth-grade class.” To be fair to Adamski, we must
remember that he had no formal education or professional journalistic
178 
training, no teaching or lecturing experience, and spoke his Native
American with quite a strong Polish accent. Unfortunately, the first lecture
he gave in Switzerland was translated by what Zinsstag describes as an
elderly gentleman who, though he spoke English well, failed to understand Adamskis American pronunciation and Polish accent.”
Bearing these practical problems in mind, matters were not improved
by deliberate and determined attempts by organized groups to sabotage
his somewhat fumbling public presentations. The first lecture, by Adamski
standards, went quite well, apart from a single troublesome interruption. A
man jumped onto the stage and accused. him of being an impostor, but the
man was soon ejected.
Adamski says that on the morning (Zinsstag says it was the afternoon) of his second lecture in Zurich on May 29th, he was interviewed for
“more than two hours” (Zinsstag says it was three hours), by two reporters
from the main German weekly newsmagazine, Der Speigal. As an example of how Adamski masks things in his own mind, in Behind the Flying
Saucer Mystery, he describes his reaction to the article when eventually he
claims he saw it in print: “They did leave out some rather important links,
and thus impart an ever so slight ‘leg pulling’ slant to it”’ Since Der
Speigal didn’t have an English language edition at that time, this appears
to be the height of optimism when we compare Zinsstags (a German
speaker, of course, as distinct from Adamsk1), description of the magazine
article in her own book: “...the title of the ensuing article ran ‘Auf der
Venus gibt es Kvhe’ (On Venus there are Cows). The content of the lengthy
article was correspondingly shattering, and ridiculed him from A to Z. I
never sent it to Adamski, and neither did anyone else.’
And here is Adamski making the best of all possible worlds:
“Considering everything, the magazine displayed a high amount of
courage and independence.”
A hint.of yet more impending difficulties came when the Chief of
Police in Zurich called on Adamski and asked to be given a personal
showing of the film. The policeman appeared astonished by sequences of
the film, which showed a large metallic spaceship and not just lights in the
sky. The atmosphere was pleasant enough, and the policeman was friendly, but Adamski was disturbed somewhat when he added that he would be
present at the second Zurich lecture with “some of his officers.”
here was page 179.
His intuition served him well. A photograph taken at the start of the
meeting on May 29th in the vast Congress Hall, shows him on stage sitting next to Lou Zinsstag, and for once, he looks anything but happy. The
police did indeed attend, but they were all in civilian clothes, and could
not be distinguished from some 300 rowdy students amidst the 700 people
present. Screaming and clapping, shouting, stamping, and singing, this
student group, mostly from the Technische Hochschule, reduced the event
to ruins, throwing on to the stage whatever they could lay their hands on.
The plain-clothes police present took no action apart from one of them
mounting the stage and asking for calm in a weak voice, which could
hardly be heard. According to a Daily Express report of the 31st of May,
the students threw hundreds of cardboard saucers at the stage. One student
waved a banner with a quote in German from Schiller: “With stupidity the
gods themselves struggle in vain,” though it is doubtful if this got to
Adamski as he was pulled away from the microphone by brawling students.
The whole event was quite obviously a set-up, but it quieted down for
a while and Lou Zinsstag was able to talk about the contents of the film,
which was about to be shown. As soon as the hall was darkened, however,
the students set off firecrackers, blew trumpets, and threw fruit and beerbottles. Strong beams of light ruined the film show, evidence that the
whole thing had been prepared. These lights came from car headlamps
fixed to the balcony and powered by the halls main electrical supply.
Finally the police acted and closed the hall, but Adamski, whose
cough was now worse, decided to end his European tour on this sad note
of conspiracy and paranoia. He said to the Daily Express that he would not
lecture in Switzerland again.
There were more pleasant moments than this. One evening Lou
Zinstagg accompanied Adamski to a very forma! dinner party given by
Mr. Vorster, an immensely rich man who lived in a great manor house
above Basle. Vorster was a member of Lou Zinstaggs Get Acquainted
group. Adamski, like the man he was, astonished the Vorsters by displaying immaculate table manners. Without hesitation, he handled the complicated (and uniquely Swiss) cutlery layout in a princely fashion. The
Vorsters and their guests were equally impressed when shown Adamskis
film and heard his accounts of fantastic events.
180 
A German woman, Mrs. Wissler, sent her notes of this occasion to
Lou Zinstagg. Mrs. Wissler recalls a particularly fascinating story told by
Adamski, which is related by Zinstagg in George Adamski: The Untold
Story. Adamski claimed that that a USAF pilot (unnamed) came to
Palomar to see him and told him that his plane was once stopped in midair
by an “enormous cigar-shaped spaceship.” A hangar door opened, and the
plane was “sucked in.” The men in the craft—who spoke “perfect”
English,!©? said they were from Venus, showed the pilot around and were
very friendly. They gave the pilot a message written in strange hieroglyphics, and asked him to deliver a message to a certain person in the Pentagon
(whose name Adamski withheld). The pilot (released together with his
plane) eventually delivered this message. He was given four copies by the
aliens. One he kept for himself, one he sent to President Eisenhower, one
he sent to the Pope (Pius XII), and the other he delivered to Adamski personally, having he said, read his books.
The guests at the dinner party sat astonished as they passed around a
copy of this message. The message was indecipherable, but before we
scoff, we should appreciate that according to Zinstagg, the artwork in its
construction was frighteningly complex.!7° Zinstagg does not reproduce
this particular message in her book, and warns us not to confuse it with
the message illustrated elsewhere in George Adamski: The Untold Story.
This is another message allegedly written by one of Adamskis extraterrestrial contacts. If the letter handed round at the dinner party was anything
like this one, then its complexity rivals that of the Voynich!7! coded manuscript, which quite defeated William Friedman,!'7? the great American
cryptological genius who cracked the Japanese Purple Code used in World
War 2.
If Adamski was a con-man, then as well as being one of the worlds
best trick photographers, he was also a cryptographer who could challenge and beat William Friedman, as well as being a graphic calligrapher
of unsurpassed genius. It could certainly be said of Adamski that none of
his tricks were cheap.
Adamskis tour of Europe ended in the spring of 1959, for which he
was thankful, since he was both sick and exhausted. Just like a character
from Thomas Manns novel, Zhe Magic Mountain, he sits on hotel balcony in Locarno. He could feel perhaps the first rays of 1960s sunshine
falling on a still war-weary Europe where the last bits of Heinkels and
Lancasters were still being dug out from the acres of new building sites.
He has what for were for him were unusually dangerous thoughts. His
paranoia becomes intense. Like many before him, he is now fully convinced that Switzerland, “where the worlds gold is buried,” is the central
headquarters of a world conspiracy which includes the “Silence Group”
he fears: “The invisible reins of financial influence extend from Zurich
to puppet organizations in every nation! Has it ever occurred to the reader that every nation is financially linked to the Bank of Switzerland, in
the country which has enjoyed complete neutrality during every world
conflict.
In this, though Adamski does not have the courage to be openly racist,
he gets as near as he can to it without naming names.!74 Just as with Herr
Castorp in Manns novel, the place oppresses him deeply; he is just as
exhausted as is the sick Castorp, and we can imagine Adamski craving
Californian sunshine, away from a Europe still digging countless war-graves, and re-arming rapidly for possibly another even more horrendous
conflict. He is drained, and an uncharacteristic and ill-concealed spleen is
active: “Geneva is a gigantic chessboard where the nations of the world
are played against one another, according to the dictates of what the Swiss
themselves term “The Colossal Financiers.” All of this is accomplished
under the cloak of neutrality, in Switzerland, where wars are not permitted
to happen.”!75
Adamskis mental level has collapsed. Momentarily, old Europe has
reclaimed him. We sense the onset of those titanic confusions, which were
eventually to destroy him: “I sat on the balcony and thought again of the
widespread mysticism that has been falsely applied to the visitors from
other planets. The fraudulent mystic groups, professing to be in ‘psychic’
contact with the space people, have aided the silence Group’ immensely.
They have caused confusion and kept the entire space program in a state
of ridicule.”
Something has happened to Adamski. Perhaps at the hotel bar, an old
soldier, on hearing his thick Polish accent, asked him about the War, then
only fifteen years gone. Certainly something has dimmed the American
sunlight inside his head. For a moment he is a Californian no longer. His



Josef Konrad Korzeniowski). Adamski on this balcony in Locarno has
come near evil. The most remote contact with evil changes a man. He can
pass through twenty of the toughest of jails, have the most painful of experiences, yet not necessarily contact evil. Evil has nothing to do necessarily
with the dramas of violence or temper, or cliff-face differences in character, opinion, or background. Evil may have nothing to do with hatred or
dislike. Evil is Conrads Heart of Darkness, and Adamski in Zurich is right
in the middle of it, for a moment’a figure sculptured by the ghosts of
Mann and Conrad.
It is rare that vital symbolic change can be located and defined in such
a man. Like Polanski, Adamski was one of the first virtual citizens who
would have seen the “X Files” TV series as one long documentary. This
alone makes him a study in how the 20th century has created and controlled Time and Imagination, against a background of evolving
Technology and media, with not a little archetypal terror along the way.
The young Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in a world in which the
word fiction was beginning to mean something quite different to what it
had meant to Dr. Samuel Johnson. One hundred and fifty years later,
George Adamski was to live his last few years in a world in which the idea
offiction was to change once more. Like Coleridge again, Adamski had
little time left as his mental visions had reached a peak.
But his old Romany psyche was great at sensing change of all kinds.
The new power in the land was going to be Media. Later, of course,
Roman Polanski was to learn this the hard way. Within a decade of
Adamskis death, this new Estate would quite overwhelm almost all other
systems of reference. Two decades on again, Media would have succeeded
in transforming the world into one big cartoon in which cultural advertising was to be the new measure of truth and reality. This was the perfect
environment for Adamskis personality, his books ,and photographic and
film portfolio as performance art, if nothing else. Like the haunted
Polanski again, everything about him was prototypal.
It is highly probable that this moment on the hotel balcony in Locarno
was the very time when he decided to create his own cartoons. He would
watch the system absorb them as later it would absorb countless other programmatic radiations, from the first James Bond films to the “X Files” telstaff. His two books Flying, Saucers Have Landed and Inside the
Spaceships have sold something in the order of 200,000 copies and have
been translated into nearly every language except Russian.
“Only a few months ago, while on one of his numerous nationwide
lecture tours, a saucer unexpectedly picked Adamski up in Kansa City and
took him on a galactic cruise before depositing at Ft. Madison, lowa,
where he had a lecture date. He ‘wowed’ the packed auditorium with his
‘proof’—an unused Kansas City to Ft. Madison train ticket.
“Last week in the Netherlands he repeated his exploits to Queen
Juliana. But at Buckingham Palace, Mr. Barnum, all he saw was the
changing of the guard.”
Despite such sneers from those who should have known better,
Adamski had certainly seen something from another world, but in the traditional fairy manner; like Coleridge after the composition of Kubla
Khan, his visit to this domain had left him broken. His enchanted kingdom was collapsing in suspicion and fear, in mistrust and accusation.
Further evidence of sad decline was the deteriorating quality of the
newsletters to Adamskis Get Acquainted groups. It was obvious that he
was now making it all up as he went along. One example from a newsletter issued by Adamski in 1962 will suffice to show the state of his mind at
this time. In June 1962, Lou Zinstagg received Admskis “Report on my
Trip to the Twelve Counsellors’ Meeting of our Solar System that took
place on March 27th through 30th.” Zinstagg was not surprisingly taken
aback by the first paragraph:
“On March 26th, I left on a spacecraft for the journey. The ship had
come in on the 24th to one of our (U.S.) Air Bases where a high official of
the U.S. Government had a conference with the crew. After the conference, the craft was returning to its home planet Saturn. The trip took nine
hours, at a speed greater than 200 million m.p.h2?!77
The situation with Adamski recalls what the writer Laurens van der
Post said of his friend, the writer Roy Campbell, in the London Evening
Standard on Sept. 24, 2001: “People accused him of lying about himself. I
do not think it could be called lying. I think he was so deeply absorbed in
the images that kept pouring into him from his own dreaming unconscious,
his own need of a personal mythology so kept him on the path of poetic
meaning which was a constant hunger in him, that he could not help it.”
188 
These observations describe the state of mind of many who have a
stroke of genius. Such deep confusions often break up social and personal
relations. But out of his shattered life, Adamski could still exercise what
Charles Fort called a “wild talent.” A few fragments of the enchanted
domain still clung to him. Lou Zinstagg, the very epitome of bourgeois
sanity, was quite astonished when on May 31, 1963, she, together with coworker May Morlet, saw Adamski enter a sidedoor of the Vatican building
while the group were on a visit to Rome. He was let in by a man dressed
in black, although seemingly not a priest. This man wore a kind of breastplate, and Adamski himself carried a small package that he said was a gift
to the Pope. Adamski said that this package had been given to him by a
spaceman in Copenhagen, two weeks previous, when he was lecturing m
Copenhagen and was the guest of Hans Peterson, an organizer of the “Get
Acquainted” group. Pope John XXIII had but two days to live, and
Adamski later said to Lou Zinstagg that the Pope thanked him personally
and said that he knew that such a package was coming to him.
Of course, we shall never know what the mysterious package contained, but whatever it was, someone in the Vatican was grateful. A short
while later, Adamski showed Zinstagg an Ecumenical Council medallion
of between 18-22 carat gold, worth 300-400 Swiss francs at that time.
Though Zinstagg does not say that Adamski said that the Pope himself had
given this to him, he proudly pointed out the date of the coin: May 31,
1963. This coin was not available at the time; the Ecumenical Council,
which was to issue it, had been suspended because of the Popes illness.
After the Pope died, Adamski said that though space people were
present at his bedside, sadly, they were unabie to do anything to prevent
his death.
Nearing his mid-seventies, Adamskis magic was becoming fickle. All
he seemed able to manage was a kind of blown-up circus that compromised his personal worth and dignity. He told Lou Zinstagg that he had
been entrusted by the space folk to give a message to President Kennedy.
This was an invitation to visit one of the huge mother ships at an air base
in Hot Springs, California. Again, a spaceman allowed Adamski into the
White House, and allegedly Kennedy made the visit to the ship.
With such stories, many thought that the magus had become a con
 189
man, fallen from magic to trickery. Carol Honey, Lucy McGinnis, Rey
d’Aquila, Lou Zinstagg, and most of the rest of the sorcerers apprentices
were to leave him, abandon him on his mountain where the gods no longer
spoke to him. Or if they did speak, they told him stories that would put a
tomcat into stitches.
Though, like Carol Honey, Lucy McGinnis remained forever convinced of the truth of Adamskis first.desert contact, she decided finally to
desert him. For her there had been too many indications that not only was
Adamski now writing space-episodes himself, he was at the same time
practicing a form of self-hypnotism. He was also immersing himself in
occultism, a practice which previously he always said he abhorred. In particular, it appeared to both Lucy and Carol Honey that the meetings with
the space folk, which Adamski talked about so freely, were now taking
place inside his head. Since Lucy was the great organizing hub of his
world, without her the organization began to fall apart.
With Lucy gone, Adamski announced that he would now concentrate
on theosophical teaching and hand over practical control of his affairs and
organization to Carol Honey, his close associate for many years.
Unfortunately, Honey now found himself in direct conflict with the kind
of things Adamski was saying in the Newsletter.!78 As editor, he claimed
that some of Adamskis articles now concerned full-fledged accusations of
witchcraft and he refused to publish them.
Also disturbing was the manner in which Adamski now referred to
what he termed the Cosmic Brothers in localized terms, talking about
them in a completely familiar way, as if they were close neighbors who
lived nearby. In direct contrast to this folksy simplicity, he would describe
the agendas and intrigues of such beings. These were not only Byzantine
plots involving world leaders and organizations; they were intrigues
between groups of space-beings themselves. Adamski said that the group
of Cosmic Brothers with whom he was in contact were here to teach us all
how to live a better life, both physically and spiritually. But in a 1963
meeting with Orthon, he was told that there were enemy aliens who were
out to confuse people “either through impressions or direct contact.”
These were not Cosmic Brothers, but were very different space folk out to
exploit humanity.
190 
This latter group had been responsible for many of his difficulties in
the past, and he claimed that it was these folk who had taken Lucy
McGinnis away from him. Finally, he accused Honey of being in league
with the opposing groups of space beings, adding: “The way to know the
true space people whose purpose is to help us is: they do not create trouble
between peoples or friends. Nor do they find fault with any of our religions. They are not here to expose our ignorance. Any that do contrary to
this as Mr. Honeys group is doing are not here for a good purpose. And
all space people are not benevolent. Many have weaknesses like we have
and especially the majority of the Martians.”!79
We are left to wonder what Cosmic Brother Firkon thought of this last
remark since he was a Martian.
Predictably, this kind of talk alarmed those who received the
Newsletter, and support for Adamski dwindled. Honey tried to right the
situation by inferring that Adamski was temporarily out of his mind. But
any hope that the sane Honey would put the situation right were dashed
when he in turn advertised his own work on telepathy. His treatment just
happened to be a mirror-reflection of Adamskis views, developed by him
over some forty years.
Thus the great adventure ended with accusation and counter-accusation from all quarters of the sun and moon. Of course, when two telepathic
metaphysicians throw vitriol at one another, it takes the form of the complete spectrum of conscious manifestations. The accusations and counter-
accusations within the Adamski-Honey debate concerned what was “psychic” and what was not, and all this was pursued to a “scientific” fault, if
you please.'89 One party claimed a near-substance, the other party an
almost-shadow materiality; into this they mixed in mutual charges of mysticism and gangsterism. Thus they raged at one another as in a Vincent
Price movie, with metaphysics becoming physics and vice versa, all in one
wink of a quantum-ravens eye.
Nearing his mid-seventies, Adamskis magic mountain was preparing
for winter. The season was on the wane in Prosperos cell, and sets of
“new boys” were in town who were not kind sprites like Orthon and
Kalna. By 1965, all Adamski could manage was a kind of blown-up circus
that compromised his personal worth and dignity. He told Lou Zinstagg



that he had been entrusted by the space folk to give a message to President
Kennedy. This was an invitation to visit one of the huge mother ships at an
air base in Hot Springs, California. Again, a spaceman allowed Adamski
into the White House, and, allegedly, Kennedy made the visit to the ship.
With such stories, many people thought that the magus had become a
con man, fallen from magic to trickery, and even his much-hated “psychic” activity. Carol Honey, Lucy McGinnis, Rey d’ Aquila, Lou Zinstagg,
and most of the rest of the sorcerers apprentices were to leave him, abandon him on his mountain where the gods no longer spoke to him. Or if
they did speak, they told him stories that would put a tomcat in stitches.
Though Adamski continued to lecture and broadcast up to the end of
his days, his worldwide support collapsed after 1963. Doubt had triumphed. From claims of “teleportation” at “200 million m.p.h.” it was an
easy victory. But these were days before mass media culture questioned
the advertisements of Rationalism. The idea of both truth and the physical
world as “solid” things was still very much in vogue. The Star had not yet
taken over from the Scientist, who was still a class act at the top of the bill.
Our own full-fledged Entertainment State had not yet arrived. In those
pre-assassination, pre-Vietnam days, there was still a little cultural time
left in which to think that fact could be readily separated from fiction, and
that science and democracy both would save humanity.
Adamski mixed Christ and technology, myth and the concrete, cool
and pleasant sanity and the utterly fantastic claim, and he lived in the battleground between all these mixed metaphors. In doing so, he fell into the
ruthlessly selective machinery of the Western mind and was crushed.
But some like Alice K. Wells, kept faith, and in his early seventies,
George Adamski was to meet a guardian angel who would protect and
sustain him in his last days. With the young Madeleine Rodeffer as his
companion, the 74-year-old cavalryman was to make his last charge and
astonish the world before he left it for good.
Or almost for good.

CHA Pen bo
Miracles Must Be
Small, and Not
Happen Very Often.
ur psychology defines itself not so much by what it includes, so
Ge as by what it leaves out. Long ago, Charles Fort provided a
theory of fuzzy perceptions, which applies not only to the Adamski story
but to Roswell and other UFO stories. Fort illustrated this theory by relating the uproarious example in Lo! of what happened at the Swanton
Novers Rectory in 1919. He shows many metaphors coming from different directions and getting into a kind oftraffic jam.
In August, 1919, a housemaid, Mabel Louisa Philippo, worked in this
Rectory, in which paraffin, petrol, methylated spirits, and even sandalwood oil poured from various points in the house, some fifty gallons of
the stuff being caught in drums! The Rector, in response to a request from
the Daily Express, reported as follows: “Expert engineer arriving Monday.
Drippings ascribed to exudations, on August 8th, of petrol, methylated
spirits, and paraffin. House evacuated; vapor dangerous; every room
affected; downpour rather than dripping.”!82
The London Daily News gave reports from an architect, a geologist,
and a chemist, who told of the enormous quantities of liquids flowing. A
Norwich newspaper gave an account from the foreman of an oil company,
who had caught more than two gallons of oil, which had dripped in four
hours froma particular appearing-point. Conditions had become so bad
that the Rector, the Reverend Hugh Guy, had been driven out and had
moved his furniture to another house.
Ceilings were bored through, indeed even taken apart; photographs
were taken, but still the flow continued. At this point, a pair of profession
al stage illusionists, Mr. and Mrs. Williams, were brought in to watch the
girl (in conditions which remind us of todays skeptical magician, The
Amazing Randi). They placed a glass of salted water (thus being
detectable) in the kitchen, and stated they saw the girl throw this glass of
water at the ceiling. They also said that the girl “admitted she had done it,
and finally she broke down, and made a clean breast of it.”!83 A few days
later, however, in an interview with a local newspaper, the 15-year-old girl
denied that she had “confessed,” adding that she had been beaten by Mr.
and Mrs. Williams! Yet another stage-magician, a Mr. N. Maskelyne, then
appeared, presumably to watch both the girl and the Williams. He found
no evidence of trickery, reporting to the Daily Mail of September 10th,
that “barrels” of oil had appeared during the time of his observations. As
concerns the “confession,” the London Daily News reported, also on
September 10th: “According to the little girls statement, she was at no
time alone in the kitchen...she insists that she was the victim of a trick,
and that great pressure was put upon her to admit that she had thrown salted water to the ceiling. ‘I was told’ she said, ‘that I would be given one
minute to say I had done it, or go to prison. I said that I didn’t do it’ ”
There then occurred another bewildering double take: The Rev. Guy
himself made a kind of “confession.” He wrote to the Times saying that
although he thought the girl had thrown the water, she had, in his opinion,
confessed to nothing. Therefore the Williams were suspect. As for the
quantities, the Rev. Guy shrinks those, just as he shrank the pseudo-confession of the girl. He says in this same letter: “It would have taken only a
small quantity to create the mess.” Fort comments: “The meaning of this
statement is that, whereas gallons, or barrels, of oils, at a cost of hundreds
of dollars, could not be attributed to a mischievous girl, ‘only a small
quantity’ could be.
Thus small miracles are allowed to peep over the knife-edge of
acceptance, but even when they do appear, because they are small, they
are not accepted. This attitude is summed by novelist Anatole Frances
remark, upon seeing the cast-away walking sticks and crutches hung up at
Lourdes: this sage asked: “but where are the wooden legs?” These “small”
miracles have also another restriction placed upon them: They must not
happen very often. Thus “fact” is really a matter of size and frequency
rather than being absolute in itself. And so we have miracle-management

rather than any simple-minded idea of “concrete objective reality.”
This truly marvelous mess of double-takes, both human, ideological,
spiritual, and mechanical, plus many different levels of dumb-fake-fakery,
is not only the ideal model of a Fortean world, it is the world of George
Adamski. It serves also as an entrance into the bewildering tangle of the
crop-circle controversy. 
Just as we might ask Adamski about the madcap chase to interpret the
marks on the soles of an aliens boots, we might ask what on earth has
salted water to do with the various kinds of “oil” detected by impeccable
witnesses? And what about the quantities? Was Mabel Louisa Philippo
upstairs, pouring all this stuff down through the ceiling? Seventy-five
years later, was Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso crazy when he talked
about alien autopsies at Walter Reed and Bethesda hospitals as casually as
if he were talking about admission for a broken ankle?!8¢
Whether poltergeists in 1919, or aliens in 1953, it all smacks of those
marvelous Victorian intellectual comedies of “seances” reported by the
Society for Psychical Research in this period, where international philosophers tied down a mediums hands, eminent professors held her feet, and
accomplished academicians tied her blindfold. Louis Pauwels tells of a
report in the minutes of the Paris Academy of Sciences, concerning the
examination of the first phonograph. Apparently, as soon as a voice was
heard from the machine, the permanent secretary threw himself upon the
man who was demonstrating it, and seized him by the throat, thinking he
was some kind of ventriloquist. But to the stupefaction of everyone there,
the machine continued to “speak.”
It seems there is an element in all these cases of the vast confusions
within both the present-day Cold Fusion controversy. When an “era” does
not want something for whatever reason, or when there are investigations
which affect vital definitions which might effect major scientific assumptions, experimenters are faced with plots which lead right to the center of
the main operational ideas of their Age. These ideas, acting in every way
as concrete personae, put the human players in a kind of whirling Swanton
Novers cum Adamski drama. It is as if many kinds of cultural advertising
(in the sense of persuasion) are trying to get through a narrow bottleneck
of “acceptance” at the same time. The object of these different systems
(and that includes systems of rational explanation) is to enter that prime
 
time which is usually taken as “reality.”
There are created situations where a simple line between truth and
falsehood cannot be drawn. The whole game-play exists in what we might
term an “intermediate state,”!88 where there is nothing “real” in the proper
sense: people and ideas, situations and metaphors, all are in various states
of complex Fortean transition. Some situations crystallize out, their
“objectivity” almost achieved, such as the splitting of the atom, or the
finding of the DNA structure. But* others, whose “objectivity” is less
securely achieved, are stillborn. They suffer various degrees of part
acceptance, to finish up in a kind of museum of twilight forms of semimaterialized matter and ideology. Examples are Ron Hubbards auditing
meter, and other almost-theres such as the (“no molecules at all”) Jacques
Benveniste experiments on homeopathy.'89 We might include also the
many “fuel-less” engines whose inventors tend to disappear in mysterious
circumstances.


CRAPTER 17.
Things that Haunt
the Outer Edge.
in February, 1965, a few months before his death, Adamski was staying
with his friends Madeleine Rodeffer, and her husband Nelson, in Silver
Spring, Maryland. On the afternoon of the 26th, with Nelson away at work
at Walter Reed Hospital, Madeleine and Adamski shot some film of UFOs
seen near the house. In the second part of George Adamski: The Untold
Story, Timothy Good gives a detailed account of the content of this film,
the peculiar circumstances in which it was made, and the even more
bizarre things that happened to it before he saw its final version in
Brussels in December, 1965.
The 12-still photo sequence Good himself chose to publish in George
Adamski: The Untold Story, is of quite decent quality. Included also are no
less than five enlargements of which show that the UFO itself is a typical
Adamski “bottle cooler” type, complete with a dome above a base which
has the shape of an upturned saucer. The object is itself in motion, the
right-hand side only is becoming hump-backed, and the three-sphere
undercarriage is shown retracting and lowering. The motion takes place
against a background of trees, and the UFO is seen coming in from a distance, until it is near enough to the camera for details of the structure to be
seen. The shape changing alone is frighteningly convincing, and both
Leonard Cramp and optical physicist William Sherwood testified to the
authenticity ofthis film.!%
But as*with many pieces of UFO “evidence,” the film that Good saw
in Brussels in 1965 had a somewhat checkered history. After shooting the
original film earlier in the year, Adamski and Madeleine were astonished
to find that it had been grossly interfered with after they had given the raw
footage to a firm to be processed. Good comments: “...the original film



aliens also have their vastly different cultural and social levels. One level
may indeed be in awe of another, higher level, who being doubtless fallible in turn, will make mistakes, and have prejudices, and be again in awe
of a yet higher level. When these cross-references are summed to infinity,
any “experience” becomes, no matter how brief, no matter how mysterious or otherwise, an ancient wall-painting weathered by sun and storm,
penetrated by ivy and lichen, and alive with the forms of peculiar life
experienced before breakfast by Adamski and Madeleine.
One of the things that the UFO phenomenon may be teaching us is
that we may well have to replace the “real” versus the “unreal” or the
“paranormal” versus the “normal” by an array of warring informationsystems, any one of which may command the high historical frontier at
any one time. In order to come to terms with the veritable mass of everincreasing UFO evidence and reports, we may have to take apart every
single assumption of the connection between mind and nature as inherited
and as currently perceived.
A child might remind us that in such a welter of grown-up thoughts,
we must not forget that at times it sounds very much as if more than something is having us on. If we can do it to the Melanesians, it sure as hell can
be done to us. Perhaps that assumption is the only thing that can really
“explain” both the Swanton Novers Rectory debacle and the Silver Spring
film.
All human groups have their own myths. They use these to mentally
navigate and form metaphors, without which no “thinking” would be possible in any meaningful sense. All myths, rational or utterly fantastic, are
rain dances before sun and moon. UFO contactees live with aliens as
many still live with Princess Diana, Elvis Presley and John Lennon, all of
whom, like Christ, have been “seen” on Earth after their deaths, and all of
whom now have a fledgling spiritual and social function. Skeptics and
rationalists too live with their own myths of fact, objectivity, and experimental evaluation as equally mythological measures of experience. The
difference between Adamskis claims and the almost-belief of men and
women that they are almost-like James Bond or Marilyn Monroe, is that
the crews of the flying saucers seen by Adamski have jumped out of the
culture-dish. They have jumped out unrestrained by arts, religious, or
media conventions, and have appeared on film emulsion, radar screens
206 
and in the skies of the world.
A function of the UFO phenomenon may be to teach us that given
certain conditions, this baffling process works. Out of doubt, uncertainty,
absent-mindedness, lack of concentration, Adamski and Madeleine teased
out a unicorn-event: a quite clear sequence showing a UFO moving over
nearby trees and changing its shape as it does so. It is a wonderful
moment equivalent to when Geller bends a spoon, or Ted Serios got a picture of a London bus on closed virgin film while surrounded by a round
dozen doubting scientists who have used every methodological trick
(including fraud!) to prevent fraud. .
The anomalous event is an alchemical thing, the deepest action of
cultural defiance, whose politics are born out of every conscious and
unconscious desire to tip the apple cart over, if only to smash its mechanical impostures, the claustrophobic oppression of its too-triumphant
rationalism. Adamskis refusal to disbelieve, with all its confusions and
double takes, has triumphed. In this, like Charles Fort, he is as much an
American Hero as Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, who did it
the easier way.
For a brief moment, Adamski silenced the voices declaiming Thou
Shalt Not. Through that willing suspension of belief, that gap in cultural
time and space, pour Charles Forts “damned” events; what better picture
of the political prisoners of the 20th century and what better epitaph for
Adamski and his kind than this: “Battalions of the accursed, captained by
pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. Some of them livid and some
of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have
been damned alive. There are giants that walk by, though sound asleep.
There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they’ll go by
like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit
little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability.
Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions. and
mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and
the pedantic amid the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the
insincere, the profound and the puerile.”!%
It has to be said that Adamskis deep confusions, sexual and otherwise, were always marvelously creative. He used them to entertain and
frighten, to amuse and disturb, to mystify and annoy. Science raged at
Adamski, yet Power listened, and the popular press were as baffled as ever
by the unusual and bizarre nature of his beliefs and experiences. All
expressed a common fear: that truth and reality may not be worthy or profound, or even purposeful, and that what is termed “reality” may turn out
eventually to be scandalous beyond all conception.
Adamski moved through mid-20th century psychic dimensions as an
action painter throwing onto canvas colors no one had ever seen before.
Always living between page and fable, experience and text, technological
vision and religious faith, it must be admitted that he had some genius. If
he asked unwittingly for laughter, we must remember that he had also that
level of Faustian nerve and cheek to outface the worlds grin and take the
consequences.
Those who criticize George Adamski might well compare their own
achievement with his. Our world would have been a much more comfortable place had Adamski been proved to be an imposter. But perhaps, as
Charles Fort suggested, there is no such thing as a complete imposter. To
call a Fool an imposter is to misjudge the rich and complex relationship
between Fools and Kings, with ordinary mortals living, or partially living,
on the battleground between them.
Perhaps Nature does not experiment socially, choosing instead to concentrate upon certain individuais, such as Adamski. The rest, like the ani-
mals, go on happily flapping and hooting, snorting and grunting, to infinity. Perhaps that is why certain people lead shattered lives. To be “chosen”
is to be the subject of some illimitable cosmic experiment. Just as we are
about to award the Reeves, Frank Stranges, Howard Menger, and Adamski
very low marks out of ten, we must remember that soon after their pandimensional texts were published, flower power hit California, Adamskis
home territory. After that, the world was never the same again, and blond
space folk were seen everywhere. Adamskis life-long obsession with
Theosophy, which in some way links almost every single one of these
early saucer visionaries, had reached social meltdown. If we do not think
that is at all important, it should be borne in mind that partly because of
this development, America later suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam.
Because of this, we may not only have to revise completely all our
208 
ideas about the nature of Mind, but also our concept of just exactly what
we mean by the word weapon.
If people such as George Adamski have anything to teach us, it is not
that the gods are good, bad, or indifferent, but that they can manifest at all,
that they can run riot like a cellular virus, sow their images in minds that
become Malls, and vice versa. They show us also that we ourselves have
power to create that sacred and utterly scandalous tomfoolery which is
always at the heart of time, change, and product.



Afterword.
he spring of 1965 had been hectic for Adamski. Although his reputation in Europe was on the wane, in America at least, he was still very
much in demand for public appearances and lectures right up to the time
of his death. On the 17th of March, 1965, he lectured at the First Unitarian
Church in America. On the 18th of March WROC-TV recorded an interview for the Tom Decker Sunday Night Show. While in Rochester,
Adamski was the guest of no less than the vice president of the Eastman
Kodak Company, who had taken a great interest in the Silver Spring film
shot on the 26th of February.
After yet more lectures and talks in Syracuse, Buffalo, Worcester,
Lowell, and Rhode Island, an exhausted Adamski returned to the Rodeffer
house in Rochester. He told Madeleine that he was having difficulty
breathing.
It is 7:30 in the morning on Thursday the 22nd of April 1965 in Silver
Spring, Maryland. An ambulance carrying Madeleine Rodeffer and the
dying George Adamski leaves the Rodeffer home on its way to the
Washington Sanatorium, in nearby Takoma Park, Maryland. With
Madeleine Rodeffers husband Nelson following behind in his car, the
ambulance approaches a corner near the Rodeffer home where a car is
parked. The car flashes its headlights on and off several times. Madeleine
has a strange feeling about this vehicle. “I don’t know if it was a space
person,” she said later, according to Timothy Good, “but it was like a
sign.”
The result of an electrocardiogram test at the Washington Sanatorium
was not good. At midday the next day, Adamski complained about pains in
his chest. After further tests, the doctors urged him to stay in hospital but
he refused. Back in the Rodeffer house again, his breathing became even
more difficult. By 7 pm his condition had become so bad that drastic treatment was necessary, and Madeleine took him on what was to be his last
journey.

Adamski died sometime between 9:30 and 10 pm on the 23rd of April
1965. Dr. Beldon Reap, the deputy medical examiner for Montgomery
County, confirmed the death as a heart attack. In a private service conducted by Chaplain Captain David F. Tate, and attended by Alice Wells,
Adamskis ashes were interred at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia.
It wasn’t exactly the end he wished for. He told Madeleine that he
would never admit himself to a hospital if he could help it, because at the
very end of his life he was mortally afraid of being at the mercy of conspirators. Alice Wells said he wanted his ashes cast to the wind, but that
was illegal. 
We can rest assured, however, that he would have been proud that his
last resting place was the great military shrine of his nation.
But in death, as in life, nothing about Adamski was certain. As a final
act of defiance against the rules, he had the cheek to come back from the
dead. To come back from the dead is the final ultimate achievement of the
true Hero. Adamski died on 23rd April 1965. The day after that, Arthur
Bryant, a groundsman at an old peoples home in Britain claimed that he
had seen a saucer land. One of the three humanoid occupants had “told”
him that his name was “Yamski,” adding that “With George—anything
could happen and usually does!” The
occupant then “spoke” to Bryant of a
“Des onkes:.
Eileen Buckle in her 1967 book
The Scoriton Mystery,'9’ includes a
clear full-plate photograph of Arthur
Bryant. It is strange indeed that she
does not comment (and neither do
other investigators), on the craggy
features of Devonshire countryman,
Arthur Bryant. Its enough to raise
the hairs on the back of your neck.
It looks like none other than
George Adamski.
index at the end not included here.
the end.