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George Adamski

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George Adamski (April 17, 1891 – April 23, 1965) was a Polish-born American who claimed to have seen and photographed ships from other planets, met [[Space Brothers } people]] from other planets and to have gone on flights with them. He wrote several books relating to his experiences, including the best-selling Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), co-written with Desmond Leslie. He enjoyed some popularity as perhaps the most prominent contactee, but this gradually diminished as his claims became more questionable, and he was generally considered a crackpot when he died.

Biography and early writings

George Adamski emigrated from Poland with his family at the age of two, to Dunkirk, New York state. He and his parents claimed they were contacted by extra terrestrials (ET) when Adamski was very young, which led to his lecturing on "cosmic philosophy" of ETs. In 1913 he joined the 13th US Cavalry Regiment. He was a caretaker and painter at Yellowstone National Park and entered the National Guard in 1918. In 1921 he lectured in California. Adamski founded the monastery of the 'Royal Order of Tibet' at Laguna Beach in 1934, where he taught 'Universal Laws' and 'Universal Progressive Christianity'. His students called him 'Professor' but he was never an academic.

In 1949 Adamski wrote a science fiction book which had a space travel theme. Called Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus and published by Leonard-Freefield Co of Los Angeles, the book has been claimed to be mainly for his students and to test public reaction to the idea of life on other planets. Adamski took some of the fictional material from that book and presented it as fact within "Flying Saucers Have Landed".

Alleged contacts with aliens

In the late 1940s, Adamski and some friends and students began showing photos of what they claimed were ships from other planets. One in particular appeared worldwide and is still published today. The subject of the photo has never been identified but there are claims that it ranges from the underside of a streetlight to an extraterrestrial UFO.

His best publicised claim was that on November 20, 1952 he and friends were in the Colorado Desert near Desert Center, California when they saw a large submarine-shaped object hovering in the sky. Adamski said he believed that the ship was looking for him so he went away from the main road. He claimed that a scout ship made of a type of translucent metal, landed nearby. Adamski claimed he and a human-like figure from another planet communicated telepathically and through hand signals. Several Adamski supporters — Alice Wells, Lucy McGinnis, Alfred & Betty Bailey, George & Betty Hunt Williamson — later signed an affidavit claiming to have witnessed the event.

Adamski said the ET, named Orthon, was from Venus and expressed to Adamski his concern over the development of nuclear weapons and the inability of men on earth to have their spiritual growth keep pace with their technology. Adamski claimed he and George Hunt Williamson were able to take plaster casts of what he claimed were the Venusian's footprints which contained mysterious symbols. UFOlogists claim some of these casts are located today at Castle Leslie in Ireland but no evidence of this has been produced.

Adamski later claimed to meet other people from other planets (mostly from Venus but also from Mars and Saturn) and said he was taken on flights by them, including one around to the back side of the Moon where he saw cities, UFO landing strips, and mountains covered with trees and snow. Observations by Project Apollo and unmanned lunar missions such as Lunar Orbiter and Clementine have not confirmed these claims (Klass 1983:161).

In 1957, James Moseley and Gray Barker wrote a fake letter to Adamski on stolen letterhead from the US State Department. The letter said that some people in the State Department knew that Adamski's claims were true. The letter was signed by "R. E. Straith" of the non-existent Cultural Exchange Committee of the State Department. Adamski used this letter to bolster his claims. Some UFO true believers continue to believe that the letter is genuine, despite Moseley's confession of the hoax in January 1985. The letter was the most successful hoaxed UFO document until the Majestic 12 documents were produced in 1987 (Moseley and Pflock 2002:124-27, 331-32; Peebles 1994:133-34).

Adamski had considerable support from UFO proponents worldwide, but also attracted much scorn, TIME magazine going so far as to call him "a crackpot from California". The discovery that Venus and other planets in the solar system were unable to sustain any form of life also severely damaged his integrity. He said that photographs taken by the Soviet lunar probe Luna 3 in 1959 were fakes, a claim which proved to be unfounded. After he announced he was going to Saturn for a conference, many of his supporters became disaffected and his reputation rapidly declined. He died, aged 74, of a heart attack, in Maryland.

Trivia

  • The Japanese name for the 1985 Transformer Autobot, Cosmos, is "Adams", a reputedly tribute to George Adamski.
  • Adamski claimed that many of his contacts were from Venus. This is not possible, since Venus has an average surface temperature of over 800 degrees and an atmosphere that is 96% carbon dioxide.

References

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