audio clips from book,
LOOKING 
FOR ORTHON. 
THE STORY OF GEORGE ADAMSKI. THE FIRST FLYING SAUCER CONTACTEE AND HOW HE CHANGED THE WORLD. 
of COLIN BENNETT.


Foreword by John Michell.

In a thousand year's time, if there are still people studying history, I someone is sure to ask, what is the most important thing that hap. pened in the twentieth century? What will be the answer to that, I won der? 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 12:30pm 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 witness es. 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 Adamski's world wide best seller, Flying Saucers Have Landed, which he cowrote 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 Jung's 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 people's 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 Adamski's 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 Bennett's quality are attracted to it. 
I really enjoyed this book, the author's 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 extra terrestrial 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 immigrant's 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, published 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 litera ture 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 con siderable 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 An GS 
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 Desmond Leslie & 
facts versus fiction, but of possi facts versus bilities and allowances. In the mil 
lion acres of nonsense published Jacket of hook published in 1953. 
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 pres sure built up in psychic realms that there is seepage of part-worlds through a membrane into 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. 
Adamski's experience was the first modern powerful suggestion, with early technological trimmings, of a prototype "pandimensional” reality, and we had better get used to that situation, because a hybrid 

state of affairs is the microcosm of our Entertainment State2 The thousand-channel consumer society hardly deals with the mechanical objec tive 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 estab lishment 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 April 23, 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 Adamski's 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 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 fly ing saucers, along with the bikini bathing suit, remain with us from the time of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Korean War. 
12  
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 at all 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 vanished, 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 claus trophobic 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 sub verted, 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. 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 sci entists, 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 disturbing 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 Oswald Syndrome, the UFO reveals events and implicit connections, movements of people, materials, and ideas, which bint 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 is most important about George Adamski is that he structured one of the most blatant acts of visionary cheek of the twentieth century. Far cleverer men have done far less. Though toward 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 bed rock. 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 extreme 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 there fore 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 cat's tail, he rattles through our dreams, shaming, embarrassing yet thrilling us still with a perverse intellectual eroticism which is absolutely irre sistible. 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 inay 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 fly ing 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 baf fled, 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 plac es 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 capa ble 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 carth-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 visionar ies 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 Adamski's 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 breath less cheek of the sheer intellectual eroticism of all prophecy and vision. 
  
 15 
If most people are terrified by the unusual, those whose lives are commit ted to thought (as Adamski's 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 the 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, then 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 dif ference between work and play, dream and religious impulse, inspira tion 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 Alain Fournier's novel Le Grand Meaulnes, Adamski was to lose the enchant ed house in the forest that once he saw. Like Ahab, the quest finally consumed him, and like Hemingway's 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 “imagina tion," 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 Adamski's 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. 
Yeorge Adamski was born in Poland on April 17, 1891, of parents 
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 on January 28, 1953, mentions three sisters, but no brother.3 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 froin 1913 to 1916 he served with K troop of the 13th U.S. 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 revo lution 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, UFO contaclee George Adamski 
  
 
serving under General Pershing, whose aide-de-camp was a young sec ond lieutenant by the name of George Patton. His Arlington gravestone mentions his National Guard unit, the 23rd U.S. 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 Florentine than Polish, and in a good light, he could be Tommy Lee Jones doing Aristotle Onassis in a new episode of The Godfather. Adamski's face is a piece of interesting simulation in itself, he looks like a desert man-his sinewy leonine body and his Indian-chief's 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 Capone's bootlegging America, George Adamski might well have been quickly and 
quietly ushered to the best table, 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 honor ably 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 cen tury 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." 
  
This was almost certainly an example of Adamski's rough humor, which according to Lou Zinsstag, the coauthor with Timothy Good of George Adamski: The Untold Story;5 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 wander ing 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 con sider 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 “philoso phy.” The big chief speaks: "In the full conception, all manifestations of 
 
all 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 philoso phizing, it must be bome in mind that there is considerable evidence that Adamski practiced successfully as a healer. There are three examples of this given in Gray Barker's Book of Adamski, showing that he certainly gave great comfort and spiritual uplift to many stricken with often fatal ill nesses. Lou Zinsstag also gives an example of Adamski correctly analyzing a young boy's eye defect in the presence of a doctor, who was impressed. 
In Adamski's own words, his life was dedicated almost entirely to "metaphysics, psychism, and religion.“ In this he was certainly a pro totype of many hippie-style teachers who were to come after him in the 1960s. The "Natural Law” principles that he formulated 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 Carson's 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 characteristics 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 preindustrial 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 naïve, and desperately unconventional, Adamski was never theless one of the very first writers to think about modern space science and ancient theology 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 specula tion that was to launch hundreds of books after his time. He discusses the UFO visions of Ezekiel some ten years before Joseph Blumrich's The Spaceships of Ezekiel and Von Daniken's 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 knowl edge of the nature of the space travelers and assumed that the ships were fire-breathing animals of some sort. They couldn't conceive of mechani cal constructions made to navigate the heavens. I imagine the automo bile 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 real ity” 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 hap pily 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 nei ther right nor wrong: in his terms, they were meaningless. If in William Blake's eyes, John Milton's sin was to make the Bible more glamorous and dramatic, then in modern eyes, George Adamski's sin was to try and update it. And in doing this he certainly convinced many of his follow ers 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 digest ible 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 
 
steam-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 Adamski's 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."10 
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 TV 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, 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 coauthor Desmond Leslie remarks on his more than occasional stubbornness, Lucy McGinnis, his secretary for many years, talks of his ego, and Zinsstag is often suspicious of many things he said and did, but it doesn't amount to much as far as criminal fraud and deception are concerned. 

Adamski's 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 tele scope. 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 "tech nical 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 cooperate 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 neigh boring 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."{2 
The mountain commune cleared rough virgin land and constructed some basic accommodation for the many people who came up the moun tain 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 elec tricity or water, but a freshwater stream, which ran down the side of the mountain, was tapped and piped into a pool 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 

twentieth-century America. Just as today, if you are somewhat swarthy, have a strong foreign accent, and sell hamburgers, you are nobody, wheth er you believe in flying saucers or not. 13 
“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."14 
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 referred 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 estab lishment square with the description by Lucy McGinnis of the café 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 Flying 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 Café," there is evidence that he certainly helped out there quite often if not actually being "employed,” since the com mune he lived in hardly supported such a relationship in any case. He certainly lived on the café 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 Mystery15 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 café in regard to its operation. I often conversed with guests in the café dining room, on astronomy and other topics. When the spacecraft arrived, I was in a posi tion 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 interest 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 inountain, 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 ninteenth-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 cre ated 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 stretching 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 simu lacra 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 world's 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 pandi mensional 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-falsehoods 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 twenty-ton Pyrex mirror, was quite obsolete before it became operational in 1948. It cost six million dollars, took eighteen years to complete, and it stands now in the twenty first century rather like a gorgeous ninteenth-century folly.16 It is a veri table 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 techno logical success. The great observatory represented the unsullied inno cence of the science of seventeenth-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 postmodern thinkers who reason by metaphor and simulacra rather than by linear “factual" propaganda will have noted this conjunc tion 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 tour ists from far-flung domains encountered Adamski's 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 II, 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 Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure are still alive and well. C.P. Snow in The Physicists17 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 reediting of experience that he published as "real" event. Like Hitler again, he is both phenomenon and man, and in his tumultu ous wake there 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 October 9, 1946, Adamski with a group of his followers observed a "gigantic space craft” hovering above the mountain ridge south of Mount Palomar, toward 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 24, 1947 quickened Adamski's interest. A few weeks after this event, accom panied 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 toward 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 Belmonte's count was accurate. Adamski commented, “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' res taurant. 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 Amold 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 cooperate with them in trying to get pho tographs 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 cooperation from the men at the big Observatory."19 
Thus right from the start of the postwar 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 pic tures 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 Keyhoe's earliest books, for example, are full of overscripted purple passages. While Adamski's 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 4pm 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 sup pressed because of fear of a rising panic amongst Mexico's "supersti tious" 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 March 21, 1950, some months after the Bloom visit, Adamski gave a lecture to the Everyman's 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 March 29, 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 cur rently 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 some thing 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 hap pening." 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 overobvious 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, November 20, 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 reali ty of this event before a Public Notary in the Arizona County of Navajo. 
 
CHAPTER 2.
Meeting in the Desert.
The Californian desert on November 20, 1952. Two cars speed out 
1 from Desert Center down the Parker Highway. Lucy McGinnis, Adamski's 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.20 
George Hunt Williamson2! 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 pleas ant picnic lunch prepared no doubt by the industrious Alice Wells, the group sights ** gigantic cigar-shaped silver ship, without wings or appendages of any kind." Their wonder is increased when they see that many very carthlike aircraft surround this ship. With his mind full (even in 1952) of daunting rumors about abductions (which he calls kidnap pings), 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), drives 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 fur ther 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 com panions, although they were some distance away. Alice K. Wells, look ing 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 call Orthon after the name given him later by Charlotte Blodget, one of Adamski's followers and the editor of his second book, Inside the Spaceships22), 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 Adamski's 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 com ing 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 curi ously similar to Adamski's own ideas on “Natural Law.**23 
Fortunately this aspect of the conversation does not last very long, for Adamski does not write well when talking about his favorite sub ject. When he becomes objective however, he does show a talent for deft, clearly factual description, reminiscent of the classic naturalist's style of the nineteenth century. This is most evident when he describes Orthon's clothes and figure, and when he describes the scout-ship. It is "translucent and of exquisite color," and its shape is more like "a 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 sec ond," 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 24 "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 con spicuously 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 meltdown. 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 Adamski's hand: "The flesh of his hand to the touch of mine was like a baby's, 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 painfully 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 Orthon's 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 Venusian's 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 them.26 This was prob ably 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, tum 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 Adamski's 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 Adamski's 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:28 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 the transformation of 
36  
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, December 13, 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 glasslike 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 20. Not exactly a hi-tech ges ture, 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 Adamski's face as he stood by his old fashioned 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 mea sure 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 care 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. Detwiler's 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 our cultural bedrock. A half century has gone by, but even ten-year-olds scream for toys much like Adamski's three-ball-undercarriage "bottle-cooler"* UFO which he photographed on this date, December 13, 1952. Despite all that has hap pened since that time, these black and white images are still hauntingly beautiful, symbols of mysteries beyond mysteries that have entered the universal imagination.29 
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 taken 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 wan nabe, 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 that's 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 mounted 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 Baker's signed statement made on December 13 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 com mon 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 alınost 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 Adamski's pictures. 
  
 39 
Oddly, Baker's account indicates that the pair were very close chums, but in Flying Saucers Have Landed, Adamski's late 1953 account of December 13, 1952, contains no mention of Baker, or his shot. This is strange, since Adamski chose to publish Baker's photo graph in this same book and give Baker credit for it in the text accompa nying the published photograph. 
There then begins one of the first great celebrated Ufological con troversies containing a great 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 brightest commentators on the UFO scene, discusses the rather suspicious Baker's friendship with the very suspicious Frank Scully,32 who wrote the legendary 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers: 33 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 Baker's letters to Scully, and also to Desmond Leslie. He published parts of these letters together with a statement by Irma, Baker's 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 Moseley's great regard for Baker's evidence is concerned, Moseley reprints a para graph from one of Baker's letters 34 to Frank Scully that shows Baker's deep and complex uncertainty about the whole and entire business. 
We might well compare Baker's 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 space ship 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." 
40  
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. 
Moscley of all people should have known that when in the ring with an opponent like Adamski, the last thing to do is hesitate. 
Baker's 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 December 13, 1952. He made matters worse by form ing 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 Adamski's more intelligent correspondents for some time, but he appeared 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 Adamski's 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 realigning, 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 donkey's 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 him self with the rather nasty woman-hating Hunrath, and rejected Adamski lock, stock, and barrel, the multilevel affair blew up in all their faces, made probably worse as far as Adamski was concerned by Baker's 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, claim ing 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 protégé. In any case, the uncer tain mess produced terrible guilt feelings on both sides. Adamski, a somewhat lonely bisexual, was looking for a familiaran 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 at about the same time on December 13. 
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 “real ity" appears to be shot through with holes like a French cheese. It also defeats the strongest of oppositions. For example, the fairy webs cre ated 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 con vinced 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, Moseley's 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 Adamski's account is necessarily untrue."-35 
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 Orthon's ship. But the point is surely that Al Bailey says he DID see the big “mother ship" that appeared minutes before Adamski's contact. If such unbelievable things exist, why spend so much time arguing about the "authentic ity” of Orthon and his ship? If the contact was a hoax, then again we ask Jerrold Baker's 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 December 13, 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 hal cyon 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 Hunrath's gifts to the gods took the form of elec tronic 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 Baker's 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 Adamski's ill-concealed liking 
  

for intense relationships with young men such as Baker, who accord ing to Irma, had rather a weak personality. Irma says6 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 "psy chic” treatment by Adamski, who was supposed to rid him of low spir its. 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 accusa tions involving possible theft of mail and money. According to Irma Baker's account, there were tearful, paranoid, and almost violent scenes. Hunrath, when collecting the mail from Escondito, was almost attacked by Adamski's faithful secretary Lucy McGinnis, and the police were called to the incident. 
In the middle of this divine comedy involving flying saucers, psy chics, 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 found ing fathers would return to do the Professor," Alice Wells, and herself much harm, as well as downing some USAF planes into 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 moun tain to admonish Adamski, who had been boasting in Alice Wells' restau rant 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 consistently with his looks as he poured scorn on Hunrath, Baker, and even George Hunt-Williamson. His accusations against Hunrath were straightforward national sabotage, which no doubt the "govern ment men" (as they were called at the time) fully understood. But they possibly were somewhat baffled by Adamski claiming that in addi tion, 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 Adamski's 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 November 20 and December 13, 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 Adamski's claims. In 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 November 20, 1952, which was the second year of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt's 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 leg ible) 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 langry 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 39 "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 Adamski's 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?40 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, Adamski's coauthor on Flying Saucers Have Landed, was vulnerable, and steps onto the same enchanted ski-run as Fred Steckling. Leslie in his tribute, 41 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 Peterson43 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 ancil lary to ours, structures which fit almost, but not quite. Two worlds or more existing at one and the same time within a single person's con sciousness 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 magi cian 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 Dali's melting clocks than Adamski's 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 com prised 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 mov ing 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 dis seminate the latest information. 
  
 
While many derided him, the photographs and the moving footage 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 photo graphs, did not succeed in rivaling Adamski's 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 sorcerer's 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, 46 of course, and if Adamski had not been of a different gen eration to him and his followers, perhaps lights and amplifiers would have strewn the sides of Mount Palomar. 
But not even Ken Kesey had spacemen dropping in uninvited for dinner. 
Time: an evening in the early 1950s. Place: Mount Palomar. Adamski's 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 dur ing "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 bus-garage 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 
reason 

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 rub bish? 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 tes ticles of a woolly mammoth. 
With a senior staff like this, asking where your baggage has disap peared to in a Saturnian departure lounge would be like the Dormouse asking for the address of the Mad Hatter. 
Equally interesting were the visits of the numerous very human beings who were drawn to Adamski's domain. In 1960 Henk Hinfelaar, a New Zealand coworker 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 coworker in Copenhagen. She says: “A young pilot who had been to the café 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.*247 
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 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 fascinat ing in turn as some of those who made their way to his domain. 
  
 page 51.

CHAPTER 4. 
Enter Desmond Leslie. 
Desmond Leslie was an Irish 
aristocrat who owned a cas tle 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 nov elist 48 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 con tacted Earth many times in the past, and had left definite traces of their presence. But as soon as 
Desmond Leslie he started the research, he became convinced that what he had found was not fiction, but fact. Leslie, in his own account in Gray Barker's 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 U.S. newspaper pub licized Adamski's 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 Adamski's desert contact a week after it happened, and he wrote to him immediately. This letter requested also copies of Adamski's photographs 
 
that Leslie said he would like to use for his book, Adamski sent a selec tion of his photographs (including the controversial Baker photograph), refusing all payment 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 Leslie's 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 book's two narrators--Leslie writing Part 1 and Adamski a brief Part 2-could not have been more different in style, approach, and content. 
Leslie could have written his Book 1 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 book's 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 intel lectually, 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 Adamski's 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 straight forward; Leslie has an extremely high intelligence, Adamski has some thing 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 com ments 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 Adamski's 55 pages of bizarre experiences tacked on the end of it as the somewhat intimidating Part 2, Flying Saucers Have Landed was guaran teed 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 well expresses the atmosphere in which Leslie and Adamski wrote their prophetic book over twenty years previously. 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 synthe size into a marvelous, exciting panorama .All we have learned appears inadequate, as though down through the centuries the truths of our uni verse 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 clas sical 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. 49 
Drake's view might be compared with the following passage by Leslie from Flying Saucers Have Landed which shows us Desmond Leslie's vital inspirations at the time: "It comes as a rather painful shock 

to 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 our 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 promis ing. 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 1 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-boxes 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 Record"? 

For those still unconvinced, there were "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 year's 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 multidimensional 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 per sonality, education, and society. Leslie's Book 1 has many dimensions compared with Adamski's 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 Greene's The Third Man, Norman Mailer's 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 Leslie's unprecedented mix 'n' match style, which at times comes near to a kind of literary vision of a much later multimedia age. We have history, and the closely focused present day in terms of a burst of spleen against Dr. Donald Menzel (the prototype for today's 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 May 5, 1952. He combined successfully his skilful rcediting of the ideas of Charles 
  
Forts, 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 9:10pm on August 25, 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 hori zon, in a few seconds. They gave the impression of about thirty lumi nous 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 a DC3 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 Fort's 1919 Book of the Damned, which had by 1953 become an obscure out-of-print book, Like Fort's book, which has now been rediscov ered, 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 “postmodern" nature, that the ordered Cartesian perspectives of the 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,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 written by different and sometimes unacknowledged hands, the Notes to cach chapter and Bibliograpby 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 acts as a kind of subtextual stabilizer to Lesley's 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 avant-garde 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 acknowl edge his debt to this author. What Leslie did (which Adamski would hardly have been capable of) was to take Fort's occasionally cumber some style and give it a popular update. The result was a reader-friendly 

streamlining in which John Worral Kecly's perpetual motion machine and the mystical power of the Great Pyramid follow breathlessly on the heels of saucer sightings over American atomic weapons establishments.54 
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 Adamski's book is the way it sent book-hunters in droves looking for such titles as Alice Bailey's The Consciousness of the Atom (1922). Other titles for dedicated bib liophiles included Noah's 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 reli gious mysticism, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the obligatory "Tibetan" religious teachings. Many of the books mentioned may have been on Adamski's own shelves, including the Theosophical Publishing Society's The Solar System by A.E. Powell (1930), and The Pyramids and Stonehenge by A.P. Sinnett (1924). 
Throughout many generations the ideas in such books had retreat ed 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 awaited their opportunity for a climate change. When it came, narrow streams of such obscure and almost forgotten books55 moved rapidly toward the delta-mouth of Leslie and Adamski's creation as if they were masses of Charles Fort's 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 Michell's Flying Saucer Vision, and Robert Anton Wilson's lluminatus would have been impossi ble. 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 manqué; 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 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 under growth were almost unknown nineteenth- and early-twentieth-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, Leslie's 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 book 56 by Cedric Allingham that included photographs of an Adamski-type saucer, which he said that he had taken near Lossiemouth, Scotland, on February 18, 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 connec tion of Leslie's material from the past with Adamski's "contact" story. Flying Saucer From Mars is useful because again 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 cliché "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, writ ing 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, thought the photographs were all faked. However, he added: "If flying saucers do turn out to be space ships 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 clas sic Space, Gravity & The Flying Saucers7 had shown that the propor tions 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 October 4, 1953, by Charles Davy was intelligent, well-balanced, and left the question of truth or falsehood open. A letter of October 11 from G.G.). 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 appre ciate 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 Adamski's time belonged to a totally exhausted generation. Given such initial reac tions 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 toward 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 his tory. Many valuable libraries, manuscripts, and much historical material had been destroyed by the two Wars, and the gradual cultural marginal izing of all matters esoteric had been going on since the decline of nine teenth-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 stand ing 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 demythologiz ing 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 his torical 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 prosecution (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 bewil dered 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 ide ology 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 seien tific “objectivity" was a new kind of demonology, although previously Churchill, with his usual far-sighted vision had described Nazi 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-cul ture reaction against Marxism and the puritanical terrors of the begin nings 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 Fort's 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 Leslie's 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 Fort's poorly hidden politi cal anger and bitterness at the nonrecognition of his undoubted genius. Certainly it struck a brilliant light in those depressing pre-Sixties days, which were a kind of "no-man's land" between the end of World War II 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, Leslie's 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 lics, and threw Adamski out of the group he headed, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, 

Leslie's 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. Heard's otherwise intelligent and inter esting 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 reac tion 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 Leslie's Chapter 20, “The First Spaceship on Record,“ the time is ripe for the entry of one of the most celebrated White Rabbits of the twentieth century, one George Adamski. After quoting from the Brahmin Tables, Desmond Leslie gives George a build-up straight out of Ben Hur: “I 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 stand ing 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 frag ments; 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, strug gling ascent toward 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 Leslie's florid descriptions and often quite breathless enthusiasm is Adamski's almost monosyllabic style. Such a contrast had 
  
 
hardly been achieved before in one book, or at least with such aplomb. The cool and calm nature of Adamski's entrance (after such an introduc tion), comes as a pleasant surprise. Expecting some kind of crazy mon ster 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 fundamental ist 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 tem per 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. 
66  
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 multidimensional duplicity involv ing 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. 
Orthon's Shoes and Mr. Silas Newton.
Flying Saucers Have Landed, does not end with Adamski's story,  of the original desert contact on November 20, 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 interpre tation of the marks on the soles of Orthon's 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 spaceship's porthole on December 13, 1952. And he adds without the slightest blush: "I learn that not one of the workers feels within him self 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 him self on occasion as he introduced this game to the world, and sat back and watched 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 postwar 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. Adamski's 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 Orthon's shoes. The following passage from the Postscript, for instance, is naïf 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 markings 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 Orthon's shoes. 
  
page 69, was last read. book has 228 pages.End reading here.