George Adamski
The most famous contactee of all was George Adamski, a Polish American whose adventures with the
'space people' were chronicled in several books beginning with 'Flying Saucers Have Landed'. This
self-made man, who had an interest in astronomy and oriental philosophies, was out with some friends
on 20th November 1952. They were picnicking in the Mohave Desert in California when they noticed
a cigar-shaped object which was chased away by military jets - but not before it had ejected a
silver disc which landed some distance away.
Adamski drove out near to where the saucer lay and was approached by a 'man' dressed in a one-peice
suit. They communicated using telepathy, and Adamski learned that the being was from Venus. He said
his race was concerned about the radiation from Atomic Bombs reaching into space and harming other
worlds. The alien also informed Adamski that Earth was being visited by races from other planets
in the solar system and beyond.
The witnesses to this encounter, observed through binoculars, signed affidavits. Meetings with
other humanoids ensued, who took him on flights into space and around the dark side of the moon. But
his description of wooded valleys was not borne out by subsequent space missions from Earth.
Adamski's photographs of cigar-shaped 'mother-ships' and close-ups of the smaller disc-shaped
'scout craft' caused a lot of controversy. Critics compared the latter variously to part of a vacuum
cleaner, a chicken feeder and a bottle cooling machine made in Wigan, Lancashire. This turned out to
have been designed after the photographs were released, and purposely engineered by a fan of Adamski's
to look like the scout craft. However, none of these items exactly matched the image captured on film.
In his defence, even sceptics were impressed with Adamski's apparent sincerity. Science journalist
Robert Chapman wrote in 'UFO - Flying Saucers Over Britain': "Adamski was so damnably normal and
this was the overall impression I carried away. He believed he had made contact with a man from Venus,
and he did not see why anyone should disbelieve him. I told myself that if he was deluded he was
the most lucid and intelligent man I had met'.
Others around the world who had never heard of Adamski had sighted identical objects to the scout
craft. One of them was a schoolboy named Stephen Darbishire, who with his cousin took two
photographs in Coniston one day in February 1954. Leonard Cramp, an aeronautical engineer used a
system called orthographic projection to prove that the object depicted in Darbishire's and Adamski's
photographs were proportionally identical.
On his first trip into space Adamski observed "manifestations taking place all around us, as
though billions upon billions of fireflies were flickering everywhere". This is not something that would
readily emerge from the imagination to be included in a space yarn. When astronaut John Glenn orbited
Earth on 20th February 1962, he commented that
"...a lot of the little things I thought were
stars were actually a bright yellowish green about the size and intensity as looking at a firefly
on a real dark night...there were literally thousands of them"
Russian cosmonauts reported the same phenomenon, which turned out to be caused by billions of
reflective dust particles. How could George Adamski have guessed that ?
This son of a Polish immigrant generated a world-wide following. By the mid-sixties, however, his
popularity was on the wane as his claims became more and more outlandish. Just months before he
died, on 26th February 1965, he was staying with a couple at their house in Silver Spring,
Maryland. That afternoon Adamski and Madeleine Rodeffer saw something hovering through some trees.
A car drew up and three men told Adamski: "Get your cameras - they're here', before driving off.
Adamski grabbed the Rodeffers' cine camera and produced some 8mm colour footage of a scout ship
which appeared to be suffering a distortion effect down one side. Was this meant to revive public
interest in Adamski, or was it evidence that the contacts, on some level at least, were real ?