George Adamski
George Adamski was a Polish-American author who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he displayed numerous photographs in the 1940s and 1950s that he said were of alien spacecraft, claimed to have met with friendly Nordic alien or "Space Brothers", and claimed to have taken flights with them to the Moon and other planets.
Adamski was the first, and most famous, of several so-called UFO contactees who came to prominence during the 1950s. Adamski called himself a "philosopher, teacher, student and saucer researcher", although most UFO researchers and investigators regarded him as a charlatan and a con artist and concluded that his many claims were an elaborate hoax.
Adamski authored three books describing his meetings with Nordic aliens and his travels with them aboard their spaceships: Flying Saucers Have Landed in 1953, Inside the Space Ships in 1955, and Flying Saucers Farewell in 1961. The first two books were both bestsellers; by 1960 they had sold a combined 200,000 copies. In addition to his contributions to ufology in the United States, Adamski's work became popular in other countries, especially Japan and helped inspire many depictions of aliens and UFOs in postwar Japanese culture and media.
Early years
Adamski was born in Bromberg in the Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire. He was one of five siblings born to ethnic Polish parents, Józef Adamski and Franciszka Adamska.When Adamski was two years old his family emigrated to the United States and settled in New York City. From 1913 to 1916, beginning at the age of 22, he was a soldier in the 13th U.S. Cavalry Regiment fighting at the Mexican border during the Pancho Villa Expedition.
In 1917, Adamski married Mary Shimbersky. She died in 1954, they had no children. Following his marriage Adamski moved west, doing maintenance work in Yellowstone National Park and working in an Oregon flour mill and a California concrete factory. In the 1920s, Adamski became interested in the esoteric occultist religion Theosophy, and a variant called Neo-Theosophy. By 1930, "Adamski was a minor figure on the California occult scene", teaching his personal mixture of Christianity and Eastern religions, which he called "Universal Progressive Christianity" and "Universal Law."
In the early 1930s, while living in Southern California, Adamski founded the "Royal Order of Tibet" in Laguna Beach, which held its meetings in the "Temple of Scientific Philosophy". Adamski served as a "philosopher" and teacher at the temple. The "Royal Order of Tibet" was given a government license to make wine for "religious purposes" during Prohibition; Adamski was quoted as saying "I made enough wine for all of Southern California... I was making a fortune!" However, the end of Prohibition in December 1933 also marked the decline of his profitable wine-making business, and Adamski later told two friends that's when he "had to get into this saucer crap."
In 1940, Adamski, his wife, and some close friends moved to a ranch near California's Palomar Mountain, where they dedicated their time to studying religion, philosophy, and farming. In 1944, with funding from Alice K. Wells, a student of Adamski, they purchased of land at the base of Palomar Mountain, along highway S6, where they built a new home, a campground called Palomar Gardens, and a small diner called Palomar Gardens Cafe.
At the campground and diner, Adamski "often gave lectures on Eastern philosophy and religion, sometimes late into the night" to students, admirers, and tourists. He also built a wooden observatory at the campground to house his six-inch telescope, and visitors and tourists to Palomar Mountain often received the false impression that Adamski was an astronomer connected to the famed Palomar Observatory at the top of the mountain. Adamski usually did nothing to correct this inaccurate impression; he would tell visitors the truth "only when pressed to do so." Though he was usually referred to as "Professor" Adamski by his admirers and followers and he often implied or claimed to possess various academic degrees, Adamski held no graduate or undergraduate degree from any accredited college or university and in fact had only a third grade education.
Ufology
On 9 October 1946, during a meteor shower, Adamski and some friends claimed that while they were at the Palomar Gardens campground, they witnessed a large cigar-shaped "mother ship." In early 1947, Adamski took a photograph of what he claimed was the 1946 cigar-shaped "mother ship" crossing in front of the Moon over Palomar Gardens. In the summer of 1947, following the first widely publicized UFO sightings in the US, Adamski claimed he had seen 184 UFOs pass over Palomar Gardens one evening.In 1949, Adamski began giving his first UFO lectures to civic groups and other organizations in Southern California; he requested, and received, fees for the lectures. In these lectures he made "fantastic" claims, such as "that government and science had established the existence of UFOs two years earlier, via radar tracking of 700-foot-long spacecraft on the other side of the Moon." In his lectures, Adamski further claimed that "science now knows that all planets are inhabited" and "photos of Mars taken from the Mount Palomar observatory have proven the canals on Mars are man-made, built by an intelligence far greater than any man's on earth."
However, as one UFO historian has noted, "even in the early 1950s assertions about surface conditions on, and the habitability of, Venus, Mars, and the other planets of the solar system flew in the face of massive scientific evidence...'mainstream' ufologists were almost uniformly hostile to Adamski, holding not only that his and similar contact stories were fraudulent, but that the contactees were making serious UFO investigators look ridiculous."
On 29 May 1950, Adamski took a photograph of what he alleged to be six unidentified objects in the sky, which appeared to be flying in formation. This same UFO photograph was depicted in an August 1978 commemorative stamp issued by the island nation of Grenada in order to mark the "Year of UFOs."
Orthon and the Contactees
On 20 November 1952, Adamski and several friends were in the California Desert near the town of Desert Center, California, when they purportedly saw a large submarine-shaped object hovering in the sky. Believing that the ship was looking for him, Adamski is said to have left his friends and to have headed away from the main road. Shortly afterwards, according to Adamski's accounts, a scout ship made of a type of translucent metal landed close to him, and its pilot, a Venusian called Orthon, disembarked and sought him out. Adamski claimed the people with him also saw the Venusian ship, and several of them later stated they could see Adamski meeting someone in the desert, although from a considerable distance.Adamski described Orthon as being a medium-height humanoid with long blond hair and tanned skin wearing reddish-brown shoes, though, as Adamski added, "his trousers were not like mine." Adamski said Orthon communicated with him via telepathy and through hand signals.
During the conversation, Orthon purportedly warned of the dangers of nuclear war, and Adamski later wrote that "the presence of this inhabitant of Venus was like the warm embrace of great love and understanding wisdom." Adamski claimed Orthon had refused to allow himself to be photographed, and instead, had asked Adamski to provide him with a blank photographic plate, which Adamski claimed he had given Orthon. George Hunt Williamson also claimed that after Orthon left, he was able to take plaster casts of Orthon's shoe imprints. The imprints contained mysterious symbols, which Adamski said was a message from Orthon.
Orthon is said to have returned the photographic plate to Adamski on 13 December 1952; when developed it was found to contain strange new symbols. It was during this meeting that Adamski is said to have taken a now famous photograph of Orthon's Venusian scout ship using his telescope. At the time, skeptics said it looked suspiciously like the top of a "chicken brooder", for warming newly hatched poultry.
Anglo-Irish eccentric Desmond Leslie struck up a correspondence with Adamski. In the mid-1950s, Leslie had created a low-budget UFO film entitled Them In The Thing at his home, Castle Leslie. The flying saucer in the film had been created by shining mirrors on to a Spanish Renaissance shield suspended from a fishing line. The film was rediscovered in 2010.
In need of money and keen to create a bestseller, Leslie had written a manuscript about the visitation of Earth by aliens. Its genesis had been Leslie chancing upon a copy of the 1896 book The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria by William Scott-Elliot in a friend's library.
Adamski sent Leslie a written account of his supposed contact with Orthon, and photos. Leslie combined the two works into the 1953 co-authored book Flying Saucers Have Landed. The book became a bestseller, brought both Adamski and Leslie news media attention, and eventually became "a key text of the New Age movement."
The following year, Leslie visited Adamski in California and claimed to witness several UFOs with him. Leslie described one of them in a letter he sent to his wife while he was in San Diego:
Flying Saucers Have Landed claimed Nordic aliens from Venus and other planets in Earth's solar system routinely visited the Earth. According to the book, Orthon and other aliens were worried that nuclear bomb tests in the Earth's atmosphere would kill all life on Earth, spread radiation into space, and contaminate other planets. Adamski claimed that Nordic aliens worshiped a "Creator of All", but that "we on Earth know very little about this Creator... our understanding is shallow."
In his 1955 book Inside the Space Ships, Adamski claimed that Orthon arranged for him to be taken on a trip to see the Solar System, including the planet Venus, the location where Orthon said the late Mrs. Adamski had been reincarnated. He claimed that in another voyage he met the 1,000-year-old "elder philosopher of the space people", who was called "the Master". Adamski said he and the Master discussed philosophy, religion, and the "Earth's place in the universe". Adamski said he learned that he had been selected by Nordic aliens to bring their message of peace to Earth people, and that other humans throughout history had also served as their messengers, including Jesus Christ. Adamski further claimed that aliens were peacefully living on Earth, and that he had met with them in bars and restaurants in Southern California.
Adamski's stories led other people to come forward with their own claims of contact and interplanetary travels with friendly "Space Brothers", including such figures as Howard Menger, Daniel Fry, George Van Tassel, and Truman Bethurum. The message of Adamski and his fellow contactees was one in which the other planets of Earth's solar system were all "inhabited by physically handsome, spiritually evolved beings who have moved beyond the problems of Earth people... the reader of Inside the Space Ships enters a perfect world, the kind we can create here on Earth if we behave ourselves." Through books, lectures, and conventions, particularly the annual Giant Rock UFO convention near Landers, California, the contactee movement would grow throughout the 1950s. However, Adamski would remain the most prominent, and most influential, of the contactees.
Adamski's claims of traveling aboard a UFO inspired an elaborate hoax perpetrated by British astronomer Patrick Moore and his friend Peter Davies using the false identity Cedric Allingham.