Flying Saucers Have Landed!

His alleged encounter with a Venusian in the California desert in November 1952 electrified esoterically inclined saucer enthusiasts

Adamski, George (1891–1965) Although largely forgotten today, George Adamski was once an international occult celebrity, perhaps the most famous of all UFO contactees. His alleged encounter with a Venusian in the California desert in November 1952 electrified esoterically inclined saucer enthusiasts. In three books published between 1953 and 1961, he recounted his travels in space, along with extensive encounters with benevolent Venusians, Martians, and Saturnians.

In 1962, he boarded a spaceship and flew to Saturn to attend an interplanetary conference. By 1965, when he died, many of his most devoted followers had cut ties with him, convinced that he was either lying or being misled by evil people in space. Born in Poland, Adamski immigrated with his parents to upstate New York when he was one or two years old. He relocated to California in the early 1920s, where he eventually established himself as the leader of the Royal Order of Tibet, a metaphysical organization founded on the transmission of Tibetan lama teachings. In the late 1940s, when flying saucers attracted widespread interest, Adamski created photographs of the purported spacecraft, some of which were claimed to have been taken with his six-inch telescope.

Published in the popular occult and paranormal digest Fate in 1950 and 1951, the photographs, along with accompanying text, gave Adamski his first wide exposure. On November 20, 1952, Adamski witnessed the landing of a saucer and the appearance of the lovely, blond-haired Orthon, a visitor from Venus, who expressed concern about the warlike ways of the human race, while six other people (including contactee and fringe archaeologist George Hunt Williamson) watched from a distance. (In later years, Adamski told confidants that his first contact with aliens came from childhood, but he never said as much publicly.)

Three weeks later, Orthon returned in his scout craft to Adamsk’s residence in Palomar Gardens and allowed the ship to be photographed. The resulting images would generate enormous controversy and, for many, would virtually define the image of a flying saucer as a bulging disc with a three-ball landing gear. A fifty-four-page account of Adamski’s first contacts was added to an already existing manuscript (on alleged space visits throughout history) by Irish occultist Desmond Leslie and published in 1953 as Flying Saucers Have Landed.

Two years later, in Inside the Space Ships, Adamski expanded his claims to include additional interactions with aliens, both on Earth and aboard the saucers. Adamski claimed that the “Space Brothers,” as he referred to them, had arrived to aid humanity in escaping its violent and primitive ways, which were inevitably resulting in a nuclear war. They adopted a benign occult philosophy similar to that which Adamski had been teaching for many years. Although revered by many, Adamski also had fierce critics, none more so than conservative ufologists, who dismissed his stories as absurd and feared that he was bringing ridicule to all UFO research.

Some ufologists actively investigated his claims and found discrepancies and other evidence of untruth. One found, for example, that the weather on a particular day when Adamski claimed the contact was not as he described it. Most photo analysts concluded that the “spaceship” images were small models. Once, skeptical ufologists proved that a claim by Adamski was unequivocally false. Adamski had reported that while traveling to Iowa to give a lecture, the train suddenly stopped en route. When he went out for a short walk, the spacemen met him and flew him to his destination.

From interviews with the train crew, investigators learned that the train made no such stop. Under these circumstances, Adamski tended to accuse his accusers of being agents of a sinister “Silence Group” seeking to destroy the good works of space humans. But in later years, after his death, several people revealed that Adamski admitted to them that his stories were not true. By 1959, Adamski’s fame was so great that he was able to embark on a world tour, first in New Zealand and Australia, then in Europe. In May of the same year, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands received him, sparking fierce comments in the press and a riot at the University of Zurich when Adamski attempted to lecture in Switzerland.

Adamski charged that the students — and indeed most of his critics — were agents of a sinister silence group that sought to perpetuate the moral reforms and technological advances championed by the spacemen and their Earth allies. Even though Adamski’s meeting with Queen Juliana has never been called into question, other alleged encounters with famous people, such as those with President John F. Kennedy, the Pope, and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, are almost certainly the product of Adamski’s imagination.

In the early 1960s, after Adamski openly embraced the psychic approaches of which he had until then been openly critical, some of his followers began to question his sincerity, especially when he began consulting psychics for profit. His associate C. A. Honey circulated damning evidence that Adamski was recycling the teachings of 1930s-era Tibetan masters and feeding them to people in space.

When Adamski claimed to have flown to Saturn, the story only fueled growing doubt, even among his devoted followers. His career in decline and his credibility never wavering, Adamski left on a final lecture tour of New York and Rhode Island in March 1965. The previous month, with his financial resources exhausted, he had lived with Nelson and Madeleine Rodeffer in Maryland. He died of a heart attack in their home on the evening of April 23.