King of the “Contactees”: The bizarre UFO saga of George Adamski.

In November 1952, a man named George Adamski, a Polish-born, California-bred ranch owner and operator of a burger stand, claimed that he and several friends were walking in the desert near Desert Center, California when a flying saucer swooped down and landed near them. Adamski claimed he went off alone and encountered a second ship, out of which clambered a golden-haired alien named Orthon. Supposedly from the planet Venus, Orthon came with a message of peace, warning Adamski of the dangers of nuclear war. After he got back in his ship and flew away Adamski and his friends said they took plaster casts of Orthon’s footprints, ostensibly to prove he’d really been there. The footprints had mysterious symbols in them which were supposedly a secret code from Orthon.

According to Adamski, he returned to the landing site a few weeks later, on December 13, 1952. As the Venusians’ ship descended to meet him, he took a photograph of it—the first clear picture ever of a flying saucer, which would eventually become easily the most famous photo of a UFO. It became so famous that has influenced depictions of flying saucers ever since; the header image of this article, from the stock image site Pixabay, is based on it.

The following year Adamski began publishing books about his experiences with the “space brothers.” In Flying Saucers Have Landed, published in 1953, and Inside the Space Ships, published in 1955, Adamski waxed eloquent about the fabulous civilization of the Venusians, who wanted to bring peace to Earth. Jesus Christ, according to Orthon, was one of these emissaries. When they wanted to, the Venusians could pass as humans, and Adamski said he met some of them in various Southern California bars. Later investigation proved that Adamski had not even written these books. They were ghost-written for him from his minimal dictation. Indeed, most of Flying Saucers Have Landed wasn’t even original material, but a crib of some mumbo-jumbo by British writer Desmond Leslie expounding the ideas of Theosophy, an occult religion with which, as we’ll see, Adamski had considerable previous involvement.

As pop culture material, flying saucers were big in the early 1950s. Sightings of “unidentified flying objects” went viral in the years after World War II, and with grandiose claims being made by government and private industry about technological progress, they did not seem so far-fetched. There was also a great deal of anxiety about nuclear warfare and nuclear weapons. The bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, the badly-botched Bikini Atoll tests the next year, and the USSR’s acquisition of the bomb in 1949 deeply affected the psyche of Americans. The mix of these two elements—fascination and fear—made Adamski’s message of peace, demanded by extraterrestrial visitors, essentially go viral. Adamski’s books were best-sellers and suddenly people all over America, and some in Britain, were coming forward claiming that they too had been “contacted” by Venusians and other races of aliens.

There were a number of problems with Adamski’s claims. For one thing, Venus, where he said was the home planet of the “space brothers,” in reality is totally inhospitable to any life, much less life that resembled Earthlings closely enough pass as normal in bars in Southern California. The temperature on Venus is hot enough to melt lead and its carbon-dioxide atmosphere is full of sulfuric acid rain. This was not unknown to scientists in 1954 even though it would be several more years before space probes reached the planet to give us firsthand observatio of it. Furthermore, Adamski’s “proof” was pretty shaky. A photographic expert examined the famous December 1952 photo and said it wasn’t a flying saucer at all. It was the top of a machine used in the poultry industry to keep baby chicks warm. The saucer’s exposed “landing gears” were actually light bulbs. Even Adamski’s own witnesses—the people who had been with him for various sightings—told contradictory stories. In short, Adamski made up the whole thing.

That Adamski was a fraud was evident just by looking a bit into his background. A drifter who supported himself in the early years mostly by manual labor—though he was in the Army during World War I—Adamski got into the occult in California in the 1920s, forming something called the Royal Order of Tibet. This was a Theosophist organization, or at least an offshoot of Theosophy. That was an occult movement begun in Europe in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, a notorious faker of paranormal powers. Blavatsky’s bizarre philosophy encompassed subjects like Atlantis and Lemuria, lost ancient civilizations and beings that could, in the 1940s and ‘50s American flying saucer culture, be easily refashioned into Adamski’s “space brothers.” Adamski does not appear to have been a particularly sophisticated acolyte of Theosophy, or of anything, really. Looking at his life and career before he met Orthon, he seems to be have been a rather common grifter.

The chief benefit of the Royal Order of Tibet was that, as a religious organization, it afforded Adamski an opportunity to make wine. This was during Prohibition, and one of the few exemptions was for religious orders that used wine for sacramental purposes. The Royal Order of Tibet was very small, but it wound up making a lot of wine—enough, conveniently, to provide Adamski a profitable business. This business ended when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. At that point, according to one witness, Adamski said that he had to get into “the flying saucer crap.” Also, it turned out his accounts of journeys through the solar system with the Venusians were extremely similar to a science fiction novel that was ghost-written for him in 1949, three years before he made the flying saucer claims that brought him the notoriety he enjoyed in the last 15 years of his life. According to some of his associates, Adamski even downplayed the importance of his alien contact claims, stating that they were merely a vehicle through which to communicate the Theosophist, or Neo-Theosophist, message. The sudden pop culture prominence of UFOs and flying saucers in the late 1940s and early ‘50s provided a convenient Trojan horse for messages Adamski had already been trying to disseminate for years.

Whether or not he originally intended for “the flying saucer crap” to be the key part of his legacy, Adamski found that, at the very least, it paid very well. In addition to selling hundreds of thousands of copies of his books and prints of the flying saucer photos at his burger stand, Adamski charged money to give lectures on his adventures with the Venusians and their philosophy. Eventually he had a paid staff and took vacations in Mexico. In 1959 Adamski was punk’d by two UFO skeptics who wrote a fake letter to him on FBI letterhead suggesting that the U.S. government knew all about the Venusians and supported his claims. It was a prank of course, but for the rest of his life Adamski claimed the letter “proved” the government was behind him. He also claimed he received a special medal from the Pope—which turned out to be a cheap souvenir available for sale in gift shops in the Vatican—and at one point that he was dating an attractive female alien. He died in 1965.

Adamski was obviously a fraud, but tell that to the legions of fans who did—and some who still do—support him and believe his claims are literally true. Adamski almost single-handedly began the “contactee” movement, people who claim personal involvement with aliens who have come to Earth in UFOs, usually communicating spiritual, personal-transformation or political messages. The eagerness to believe with which many people approach these claims is evident in the number of people who still believe nearly every UFO hoax that has come along in recent decades. Silly though his claims were, George Adamski remains a prophet of the bizarre UFO subculture, even now 60 years after his death.

I first covered George Adamski on my original WordPress blog more than 10 years ago. My original take was somewhat humorous, poking fun at the obvious crudity of Adamski’s claims, and amazement that so many people in the 1950s believed them. What amazed me at that time—yes, I was a little naïve then—was that I began to receive emails and messages, often hostile, from people who insisted, in the year of our lord 2014, that the stories of George Adamski were absolutely true and I was being unfair by daring to impugn them with the worst of all evils, critical thinking. Invariably these people turned out to have links to Theosophy, which is still alive and well now into the second quarter of the 21st century. Theosophy is a movement that laid the groundwork for a lot of the New Age nonsense that’s popular today. In its time Theosophy has done plenty of damage. Helena Blavatsky’s fulsome theories of race and eugenics influenced early thinkers (if you can call them that) of Nazi Germany. It’s kind of hard to call Adamski a leading light of the Theosophist movement; he seems to be more like an exploiter and hanger-on to it. But the strange persistence of his claims goes to show that, in today’s post-truth, magical-thinking society, there is very little tomfoolery out there that isn’t somehow a right-wing grift.

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