George Adamski
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| Paranormal Researcher | |
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| Biography | |
| Name: | George Adamski |
| Born: | April 17, 1891 |
| Died: | April 23, 1965 |
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| Field: | |
| Paranormal Area: | Ufologist |
George Adamski (April 17, 1891 – April 23, 1965) was a Polish-born American who claimed to have seen and photographed ships from other planets, met people from other planets (whom he called "Space Brothers"), and to have gone on flights with them.
He wrote several books relating to his experiences, including the best-selling Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953' co-written with Desmond Leslie). Adamski enjoyed some popularity as perhaps the most prominent contactee, but this gradually diminished as his claims became more questionable, and by the time of his death public opinion had turned against him.
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[edit] Biography and early writings
Adamski emigrated from Poland with his family at the age of two to Dunkirk, New York. He and his parents claimed they were contacted by extraterrestrials when Adamski was very young, which led to his lecturing on the "cosmic philosophy" of ETs. In 1913 he joined the 13th US Cavalry Regiment. He was a caretaker and painter at Yellowstone National Park and entered the National Guard in 1918. In 1921 he lectured in California.[citation needed] Adamski founded the monastery of the 'Royal Order of Tibet' at Laguna Beach in 1934, where he taught 'Universal Laws' and 'Universal Progressive Christianity'. His students called him 'Professor', but he was never an academic.
In 1949 Adamski wrote a science fiction book which had a space travel theme. Called Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus and published by Leonard-Freefield Co of Los Angeles, the book has been claimed to have been intended mainly for his students and to test public reaction to the idea of life on other planets. Adamski took some of the fictional material from that book and presented it as fact within "Flying Saucers Have Landed".
[edit] Alleged contacts with aliens
In the late 1940s, Adamski and some friends and students began showing photos of what they claimed were ships from other planets. One photograph in particular appeared worldwide and is still published today. The subject of that photo is a shallow, downward-widening metallic cone broken by a shallow cylinder on top and which holds three spheres underneath. It has never been positively identified: some feel that it depicts an everyday or typical object (such as the underside of a streetlight or the heat source of an incubator) while others believe it to be an actual extraterrestrial UFO. This shape has entered popular culture; the spaceship of the television show The Invaders was based on it, and it appears in the first episodes of the Japanese anime UFO Robot Grendizer and Kimagure Orange Road.
Adamski's best publicised claim was that on November 20, 1952 he and several friends were in the Colorado Desert near Desert Center, California when they saw a large submarine-shaped object hovering in the sky. Adamski said he believed that the ship was looking for him, so he left the group and went away from the main road. He claimed that a scout ship, made of a type of translucent metal, landed nearby. Adamski claimed he and a human-like figure from another planet communicated telepathically and through hand signals. Several Adamski supporters — Alice Wells, Lucy McGinnis, Alfred & Betty Bailey, and George & Betty Hunt Williamson — later signed an affidavit claiming to have witnessed the event.
Adamski said the ET, named Orthon, was from Venus and expressed to Adamski his concern over the development of nuclear weapons and the inability of men on earth to have their spiritual growth keep pace with their technology. Adamski said he and George Hunt Williamson were able to take plaster casts of what he claimed were the Venusian's footprints, which contained mysterious symbols. UFOlogists claim some of these casts are located today at Castle Leslie in Ireland but no evidence of this has been produced.
Adamski later claimed to have met other people from other planets (mostly from Venus but also from Mars and Saturn) and said he was taken on flights by them, including one around to the back side of the Moon where he saw cities, UFO landing strips, and mountains covered with trees and snow. Observations by Project Apollo and unmanned lunar missions such as Lunar Orbiter and Clementine have since refuted these claims (Klass 1983:161).
In 1957, James W. Moseley and Gray Barker wrote a fake letter to Adamski on stolen letterhead from the US State Department. This letter said that some people in the State Department knew that Adamski's claims were true. The letter was signed by "R. E. Straith" of the non-existent Cultural Exchange Committee of the State Department. Adamski used this letter to bolster his claims. Some UFO true believers continue to believe that the letter is genuine, despite Moseley's confession of the hoax in January 1985. The Straith letter was the most successful hoaxed UFO document until the Majestic 12 documents were produced in 1987 (Moseley and Pflock 2002:124-27, 331-32), (Peebles 1994:133-34).
Adamski had considerable support from UFO proponents worldwide, but also attracted much scorn. TIME magazine went so far as to call him "a crackpot from California". The discovery that Venus and the other planets in the solar system are unable to sustain any higher form of life also severely damaged his integrity. Adamski said that photographs taken by the Soviet lunar probe Luna 3 in 1959 were fakes, a claim which proved to be unfounded. After he announced he was going to Saturn for a conference, many of his supporters became disaffected and his reputation rapidly declined. He died at age 74 of a heart attack in Maryland.
[edit] References
- Klass, Philip (1983). UFOs: The Public Deceived. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-87975-322-6.
- James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock (2002). Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-991-3.
- Peebles, Curtis (1994). Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 1-56098-343-4.
- Roth, Christopher F., "Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult." In E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, ed. by Debbora Battaglia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.
[edit] External links
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- Adamski Foundation
- George Adamski biography
- Hallet, Marc, "Why I Can Say That Adamski Was A Liar", 2005
- Overview of the early 1950s "Contactees," including Adamski
- Anonymous, "Profiles in Pseudoscience: George Adamski!(brief outline of Adamski's life and claims; no date)
- Newscaster Frank Edwards on Adamski
- Another Adamski critique
- Straith letter
- Some Adamski-related gossip
- Contactees I Have Known, by Long John Nebel, as told to Lloyd Malian]
