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UFO caught on camera near Kanab,
Utah on 21st March, 1968.
This UFO is very similar to the craft that George
Adamski claims to have seen.
Proof that Adamski was truthful or perhaps evidence
that some hoaxers have no sense of imagination! |
The
following article is a response to the initial article
on this site relating to George Adamski (see above) from
Bill Hamilton.
George
Adamski, Contactee or Charlatan?
By
William Hamilton III
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Some
say it is the California sun or the Santa Ana winds
that created the weird culture of the west coast. The
inhabitants think differently. Westerners
are open to new ideas. Visitors from another
planet are welcome in California.
I
was enthralled as a teenager to read the story
of George Adamski who rode out to Desert Center,
California on November 20, 1952 to meet a visitor
from the planet Venus, an event attested to by
six witnesses who signed a notarized statement. In
the 1950s there was still much speculation about
intelligent life on our neighboring rocky planets,
Mars and Venus. |
Biologists
believe that human life is a product of the long
evolutionary processes that are unique to Earth.
They consider it extremely unlikely that we would
someday encounter human forms from another planet.
This popular view has prevailed to the degree that
most scientists reject the stories of the contactees.
They also point out that other planets in our own
solar system do not have atmospheres conducive to
human life as we know it. Venus has a hothouse
atmosphere and it bears down on the Venusian surface
at a pressure 90 times greater than earth's atmosphere
at sea level.
As
a teenager I was excited by the prospect of making
contact with the visitors or, at the very least,
catching a glimpse of their ships over these remote
desert regions. This was not a formal investigation
of contactees. I had very few doubts then. I
felt that the contactees were not concocting stories.
Little did I know that an era was passing, that a
future day would come when UFO researchers and investigators
would dismiss and debunk contactees as frauds who
possessed motives of greed and a need for attention
and adulation. Little did I know that the contactee
of the future would report a different kind of experience,
that of menacing abductions and examinations conducted
by humanoid, but non-human entities. Little
did I know that the future would bring greater mystification
rather than enlightenment. |
All
these human visitors were described by various contactees,
those who had written books, and many who had not. Their
descriptions were remarkably similar.
I
drove my first car, a 1953 Mercury on the Palms to Pines
highway in 1959 when I drove twins Ray and Rex Stanford
from Giant Rock in the Mojave Desert to Mount Palomar in
San Diego County California. We stayed an entire
weekend talking to Adamski and examining his photos, plaster-of-paris
casts of Orthon’s footprints, and his workshop experiments
with radioactive materials and magnets for the purpose
of exploring levitation. Later Ray Stanford wrote
a scathing report denouncing Adamski as a fraud even though
he himself had published stories about his own contacts
with human-like space visitors and the facility he had
of using telepathy to establish such contacts.
Many
years later, in the 1970s after Adamski’s death,
I had the opportunity of interviewing Alice Wells for a
period of 4 hours and subsequently going to the site of
Adamski’s first meeting on November 20, 1952 at a
location 10.2 miles north of Desert Center, California
on the highway to Parker, Arizona where he met up with
George Hunt Williamson and his wife, Betty. I was
impressed with Alice’s eyewitness account of the
large cigar-shaped
“mothership” they had observed on that momentous
occasion as well as her description of the man Adamski called
“Orthon” as seen clearly by her from a distance
with binoculars. She was emphatic that her drawing
of him in Adamski’s recounting in the book Flying
Saucers Have Landed was accurate and that she was close
enough to see the details of his face and manner of dress. She
also said that a similar visitor dressed in our style of
clothing had visited her Palomar Gardens restaurant in the
1950s. I had no reason to doubt her and the attention
to detail in her testimony was excellent.
Most
criticism of Adamski revolves around two factors. One
is his association with metaphysics and the other
is his claim that these visitors came from planetary
bodies in our own solar system when the advancement
of technology revealed that these bodies had no
signs of human life or civilization and indeed
had atmospheric conditions unfriendly to any plant
or animal form of life as we know it on earth.
Overlooked is the fact that these meetings with extraterrestrials
may have taken place as Adamski said they did and as
witnesses attested to even under oath, but may have
either deceived Adamski themselves by telling him they
were from uninhabitable planets or told him the truth
and made him swear to keep it to himself while giving
out a public story. |
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George
Adamski had described his meeting with a man at Desert
Center and remarking that the flesh of his hand was as
smooth as a baby's, but firm and warm. His hands
were slender with long tapering fingers. He was only
five feet six inches in height and looked like he weighed
about 135 pounds. Adamski estimated his age at 28. He
had a round face 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;
a finely chiseled nose...an average size mouth with beautiful
white teeth that shone...skin coloring that is an even,
medium-colored suntan...and it did not look like he ever
had to shave for there was no more hair on his face than
a child's. His hair was sandy in color and hung in
beautiful waves to his shoulders. His clothing was
a one-piece garment...it's color was chocolate brown...a
band about eight inches in width circled his waste...it
was definitely a woven material...there was a sheen about
the whole garment...saw no zippers, buttons, buckles,
fasteners, or pockets of any kind...nor seams as our garments
show. He wore no ring or ornament of any kind.
Contrast
Adamski's description with that given by Travis Walton
when he was abducted in 1975. Travis saw a human
being, a man about six feet two inches tall. He was
muscular and was evenly proportioned. He wore a tight-fitting
bright blue suit of material that looked like soft velour. He
had course, sandy-blond hair of medium length. He
had a dark complexion, like a deep, even tan. He
had no beard or mustache. In fact, stubble or
dark shadows of whiskers were not even visible.
Contactee
Orfeo Angelluci saw a beautiful man with extremely large,
dark and expressive eyes and noble features. He was
wearing a kind of uniform, bluish in color, perfectly
tailored and tightly fitted to the outline of his body. But
it was apparently without seams, buttons, pockets, trimmings,
or design of any sort.
Howard
Menger describes a beautiful woman he met sitting on a
rock. She had on a uniform which had a shimmering,
shiny texture...the clothing had no buttons, fasteners,
or seams that he could discern.
Human
extraterrestrials have been reported in Mexico, South America,
and Europe as well. All of them have demonstrated
extraordinary telepathic abilities. The uniforms
they wear, first described by the contactees, and are similar
to those described by abductees in a later era. Some
of these visitors reportedly blend in with us and could
not be readily identified if they wore our clothing and
make-up. This implies that they have a genetic kinship
with earth humans and have evolved under similar biochemical
and biophysical conditions to those found on earth. Their
actual origin is unknown, but if they are from other planets
or dimensions, then their existence is a challenge to our
scientific dogma.
The
controversy concerning Adamski continues to this day.
A few ardent supporters believe Adamski reported true experiences,
and that his photographs of mother ships and scout ships
are among the best UFO photos in the world.
However, the majority of UFO researchers believe Adamski
wove tall tales, that his earlier work of fiction, Pioneers
of Space, foreshadowed his non-fiction tale, Inside
the Spaceships; that he photographed small models through
his telescope, models that he had constructed in his workshop. At
one time it was thought that the scout ship had been identified
as a chicken brooder, a lamp, or the top of a water cooler,
which had been made to look like a flying saucer. However,
none of these explanations were ever convincingly proven. The
fact that many other photos of this bell-configuration have
been taken in different parts of the world, and that many
independent witnesses had seen such a shape attests to its
authenticity. Today, we know that photos can be easily
hoaxed, but this does not mean that Adamski's photos were
hoaxed.
The
controversy over Adamski’s photos of motherships
and scouts still rages on and is further complicated by
color film taken by Adamski on various occasions, one of
which was sent to a naval laboratory in San Diego and never
returned. This film was taken in Mexico and I was
one of the few who saw the film before it disappeared and
must say it was very impressive. There was no evidence
that his photographs were hoaxed despite claims by skeptics.
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The
recent claim that Adamski had built models based
on the ones built by Agnew Bahnson in his experiments
with Townsend T. Brown in Bahnson’s electrogravitic
laboratory has really reversed the true story which
is that Bahnson corresponded with Adamski after reading
his book and asked Adamski if he had learned technical
details that he, Bahnson, could experiment with
in his lab.
One
man who is very skeptical, yet fascinated with
the contactee era is Jerome Clark who wrote a
monthly column on UFOs for FATE magazine. He
considers that contactees such as the well-known
George Adamski were charlatans. He considers
that the evidence against the early contactees
was overwhelming and that Adamski and other contactees
were caught telling falsehoods on more than one
occasion. The remarkably clear photos that
Adamski took of Venusian scout ships were fakes.
Some believe that Adamski built models and others
feel that he dressed up some common piece of apparatus
such as a chicken brooder to look like a flying
saucer, this despite eyewitness claims that craft resembling
the Venusian scout ship were seen in different
parts of the world. Tales of the so-called
Space Brothers were no more than contrived fantasies
to put one over on the unsuspecting public. |
Isabel
Davis who, in 1957, was an officer of Civilian Saucer Intelligence
of New York, once wrote a scathing critique of the contactee's
claims entitled, "Meet the Extraterrestrials." One
criticism that she levels at the spacemen in the contactee's
stories is that they never provide unequivocal proof. And,
of course, they claim to originate from planets that scientists
know harbor conditions hostile to any kind of life, much
less humanoid life. The main criticism of Adamski's claims
is that his visitors claimed to have come from Venus, Mars,
and Saturn.
The
early contactees described meeting human extraterrestrials
wherever their point of origin. These human visitors
had very symmetrical features; their skin was clear and
translucent; their fingers were more flexible than ours;
and their irises had different hues and colors than those
seen on earth. They are never reported to be fat,
thin, or ugly. Their hair, teeth, nails, and eyes
were all without defect. It's as if they perfected
control over their genetic breeding and produced healthier
and longer living specimens than terrestrial humans.
Once
in 1960, a young contactee named Paul took a photo out
of his wallet allegedly showing a picture of a woman from
another planet. She appeared to fit the description
given by many contactees. Her eyes were the most
electric blue I had ever seen.
Another,
little-known California contactee of the fifties was Calvin
Girvin. Calvin reported many contacts with a human
saucer pilot named Cryxtan. Calvin also reported
going aboard one of the scout ships. Calvin was also
in the Air Force and was interrogated by the AF Office
of Special Investigation. Last heard from, he was
living somewhere in Hollywood.
From
time to time present-day abductees report an encounter
with Nordic-looking alien beings that bear a resemblance
to the ones described by the contactees of the fifties. Recently,
a coffee shop friend found out that I was a field investigator
and was eager to tell me of the odd events that had entered
his life when he was a pre-teen. Like the old-timers,
he claimed that a man from Mars came to visit him, and,
one day, took him for a ride to the planet Mars where they
entered an opening in the ground. A shaft descended
five miles toward the planet's interior where he encountered
the inhabitants of an ancient underground Martian civilization.
The
contactee experience has its own characteristics. Some
of these characteristics are shared with the abductee experience,
but most are unique to a contactee scenario. Most
Ufologists of the nineties have been led to believe that
the contactees were charlatans out to spread religious
philosophies, and this has proven a stumbling block to
any proposed scientific investigation of the contactee's
claims.
A
typical contactee scenario usually proceeds in this
fashion:
1) The
contactee has an urge or impulse that he or she perceives
to be coming from an outside source and this urge seems
to direct them to some remote location.
There is an air of expectancy.
2) The
contactee is usually approached by a human being wearing
a one-piece uniform that has disembarked from a flying
saucer. The human can access the contactee's mind
with telepathy. The visitors do not display any difficulty
with English or any other spoken language.
3) Either
the meeting terminates or the contactee is taken on a tour
of the ship or a ride to a mothership.
4) The
contactee does not experience a loss of time or lapse of
memory.
5) The
contactee is usually given a message or project to accomplish. One
of the common themes of the messages given to the early
contactees is that we are upsetting the balance of
nature.
Many
Ufologists who study abductee (or, using the newer term
-- experiencer) cases generally accept that there were
no legitimate contactees and that there is no precedence
for the abductee scenario.
Objections
to the case for the contactees are:
1) The
contactee doesn't have any first-hand eyewitnesses. Although
true of the vast proportion of abductees as well, it was
felt that the contactee should have someone else that would
attest to the reality of the experience. As we have
related here, George Adamski, for one, had six eyewitnesses
to his first contact.
2) The
early contactees claimed that the visitors came from planets
in our local solar system such as Mars and Venus. Space
probes have proven that other planets in our system could
not sustain life as we know it. It might be possible
that humans with advanced technology could build protected
habitats on or under the surface of neighboring planets,
but they would not have originated there. Other possibilities
include coming from a different frequency/density/dimension
of the other planet in our system, but the visitors did
not always explicitly state this as their origin. Perhaps
they were deceiving the contactees or the contactees colluded
with the visitors to protect their identity and origin
from enemies also contacting earth humans. Otherwise,
we are left with the conclusion that the contactees fabricated
this part of their story or their whole story. This
last conclusion is, of course, the one that wins the most
votes among researchers.
3)
One of the primary objections to the contactee was the
apparent zeal with which they spread quasi-religious messages. This
was disturbingly cult-like. The feedback of adulation
and attention given the contactee may distort whatever
legitimate experience he/she may have had.
4) The
contactees were not very cooperative with researchers;
extensively ridiculed, they were not interested in providing
proof of their experiences to still another skeptical inquirer.
5) One
of the biggest objections to the contactee experience is
that the visitors were reported looking human and able
to pass undetected amongst us if dressed in our clothing. Humans
were a product of earth's evolutionary development and
could not possibly arise on other worlds. Yet, reports
of human entities from UFOs will not go away. We
still hear of encounters with them from the new experiencers.
The existence of humans originating from an extraterrestrial
or extra dimensional civilization is a comforting thought
to our aloneness in the universe.
This
article recounts just some of my experiences with the early
California contactees. I was convinced that the flying
saucer mystery had a simple solution and that the mystery
would be unveiled before the next decade of the sixties
had passed. Little did I know that we were facing
complex phenomena that would continue to baffle us all
to the present day.
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