Getting Into the Mind of the Most Infamous Contactee: George Adamski

Having mentioned George Adamski in my previous article (on the subject of huge UFOs), I thought I would give you more insight into the guy. There’s no doubt that George Adamski was at the height of his fame from the early-to-mid 1950s, with the absolute peak year being 1953. That was when his book, Flying Saucers Have Landed, was published. It sold more than 100,000 copies in the process. The book was curious not just because of its content – controversial encounters with human-like aliens – but also because of how it was written. And who by. It was credited to Adamski and an Irish writer named Desmond Leslie. That’s not entirely wrong; but, it’s important to note that it’s not precisely correct, either. It so happens that in the same time-fame that Adamski was toiling on his book, Leslie was working on a publication on strange phenomena in the skies: UFOs. Leslie got his hands on sixty pages of a manuscript on Adamski’s claimed encounters that he, Adamski, had cobbled together in somewhat chaotic fashion. An agreement was made to combine the two works-in-progress and fuse them into one, which is exactly what happened. The reality, though, is that those sixty pages were not written by Adamski, at all. They were actually ghost-written by Adamski’s secretary, Lucy McGinnis. Adamski dictated the story to McGinnis, who made the whole thing readable, if not particularly believable.  

On this issue of believability, or of a significant lack of it, we need to return to the words of the Adam Gorightly- Greg Bishop team: “Flying Saucers Have Landed wasn’t Adamski’s first stab at literary immortality. In the 1940s, he submitted a science-fiction yarn called ‘Pioneers of Space’ to Amazing Stories that featured an extraterrestrial messianic figure who comes to Earth bearing a message of peace and love. Adamski later self-published a book version of Pioneers of Space that fell by the wayside until debunkers rediscovered the work and pointed to it as an early fictional account of his Orthon encounter.” To fully understand the mindset of George Adamski, his motivations, and how he ultimately became a figure of concern and controversy to the FBI, we have to turn our attentions to Colin Bennett. He was the author of an excellent, illuminating biography on Adamski, Looking for Orthon, and who I interviewed extensively on Adamski, his motivations, and his claims of alien encounters. Bennett shared the following thoughts and observations with me. They collectively suggest Adamski may actually have had some genuine alien encounters, but chose to combine the nature of those encounters with his personal admiration for communism and the Russians. Not a good idea.

Bennett said: “Many Orthons have appeared throughout history. The equivalents to Adamski’s Venusian ‘space brother’ have appeared on mountain tops, in deserts, and have appeared to walk on water, or fly in the sky. Their sole function is to sow seeds in the head; just as a farmer grows a particular crop. These seeds act on the imagination, which replicates and amplifies whatever story-technology is around at the time. People such as Adamski and the rest of the contactees were, and still are, like psychic lightning-rods for certain brands of information. Undoubtedly, rich or poor, clever or dumb, they are possessed by a kind of higher cerebral disturbance, and like Moses, they are as prepared for the ‘visitation’ as they anxiously await for a new product brand. Contactees are host-nutrients for whatever cultural sales lines are on offer from visions conjured up by clouds, sea or sand. The message is ‘consumed’ and thoroughly processed exactly as a viral product is absorbed. The incomprehensibility of the received stories is irrelevant. They represent a heavily codified branch of postmodern intellectual consumerism. In receiving ‘messages’ at all, Contactees are bar coded as it were, and elements of the induced story-technology are ready to crystallize out into that final alchemical stage called the mechanical real. But we must be careful here. As the alchemist said to his apprentice, ‘The game may be rigged, but it’s the only game in town.’”

“Deception and all its ramifications is the key to this whole business. This does not burst the bubble of the mystery however, for manipulative levels of faction may well be our first clue as to how a possible alien mind might work. If the levels of deception of all kinds in human culture are anything to go by, the range of such within an alien culture must be both multiple and profound. “The ‘space-folk’ are sculptured by wars between rival viral memes competing for prime-time belief. It may be that, as an independent form of non-organic life, memes as active viral information can display an Orthon entity at a drop of a hat. They come complete with sets of cultural agendas. After they have rung the doorbell as it were, and the goods are sold, these metaphysical salesmen disappear like the traditional Men in Black, no doubt traveling on to seed other dreams in other towns and other heads. The goods we have unwittingly bought are half-formed memories of having met someone from another world.

“Over a half-century later, we can no more erase the legendary Contactees from our heads than we can erase Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe. Once induced by mere transient suggestion, these powerful images become permanent fast-breeders, turning out scripts and performances in all our heads – for no-one can escape – even as we sleep. It might come as a disappointment to extraterrestrial nut-and-bolters, but as [Jacques] Vallee says in Passport to Magonia, Orthon and his brood may be a form of ‘alien’ life that has been with us for a long time. Such ethereal beings are part of the structure of that much-despised and rather unfashionable idea described by the phrase mystical experience. “A man says he has seen a fairy being. Another man says that is impossible, because fairy beings do not exist. When we subtract the two beliefs we do not get zero as an answer. We have the thinnest of belief-tissue remaining, but perhaps mechanical quantity is irrelevant. The smallest part of an HTML address contains the whole address, rather like a fractal. These creatures, though seen and photographed, leave no trace of fights, no food swath, no blood, no sweat. They appear as partially formed displays rather than flesh and blood as we know it. As soon as we are into display we are into Media. It is somewhat chilling to think that if an Orthon or even perhaps a Jesus can appear in this manner, then so can many things else, including objects and even situations. In this it is possible that we are host-receptors of skunk-smoke from life forms not yet known to us.

“There is no doubt that Contactee claims allow access to a refreshing world which includes humor, and inspired absurdity. They allow humanity to breathe and access a Matrix world in which anything that can be imagined can happen. It might be denied by social-scientific left, but the truth is that dreams, fantasies, and mystical experiences of all kinds play an absolutely essential part in all human mental operations. George Adamski played a significant part in establishing New Age thinking. It might be well to remember that the entire body of our moral philosophy and spiritual life is formed by visions and inspirations. It does not come from science or technology. Those who thoughtlessly dismiss mystical experience cut themselves off from all art, literature, and no small part of all thought and philosophy. As mystics and prophets know, when desert light strikes the retina, anything that can be imagined can happen. The greatest tribute that can be paid to Adamski is that through both foul means and fair, he helped to create one of the very few routes to the unconscious that we have.”

Now, we have the words of the late Jim Moseley, who was a long-time observer of the UFO phenomenon. He was also someone who had the opportunity to chat, in person, with Adamski in 1953 about his claimed encounters: “When I met him,” Moseley told me, “Adamski was in his guru mode. You could go to him at Palomar without an appointment and he would be sitting there, holding court, and talking to all the people that came in. He seemed like a pleasant sort. He couldn’t prove anything; you had the choice of believing him or not. Now, whether he was genuine or not, he did have a background with the Royal Order of Tibet. Then, he wrote his science-fiction story, Pioneers from Space, which turned out to be very similar to his later UFO book. I don’t think he literally believed everything he said. But, I think what he said was in-line with a personal philosophy that he may very well have taken seriously [italics mine]. I think with Adamski it was like this: if I say ‘I’m Jim Moseley, and I believe in world peace, love, and saving the environment,’ people won’t care. But, if I say that a spaceman called Orthon told me that we should love each other, well, that certainly gives it more meaning. “I think this is one of the big things behind the Contactee movement: they believed in what they were saying, but they needed a higher authority to get it across. Like in religion, you need God. Adamski needed Orthon. Adamski and the Contactees represented an early hippie philosophy of the time – a 1950s version of what came later in the Sixties with flower-power protests. A lot of what they were saying merged into the mainstream of liberal thinking at that time. So, in that way, it was a very significant movement.”   

Having studied how George Adamski was elevated to astonishing levels of fame, infamy and notoriety, it’s now time to address the matter of why, exactly, the FBI came to suspect that Adamski was not only a closet communist, but possibly even someone who was being used by the Russians in a strange psychological warfare-based operation. Just maybe, Adamski was an unwitting player in this strange and sinister game. In a worst-case scenario, though, Adamski was a knowing and entirely complicit figure. Certainly, the FBI wanted answers and, as a result, they dug very deeply into the man’s life. As evidence of this, close to 400-pages of FBI documentation on Adamski have now been declassified. An FBI document of May 28, 1952 reveals that Bureau agents had a credible source who, back in 1950 – no less than three years before Flying Saucers Have Landed was published – had shared with them certain disturbing data on Adamski. The FBI took – and to this day continues to take – careful steps to ensure that its source’s name would not be compromised.

What we do know, is that the FBI’s informant claimed to have seen Adamski in the presence of a group of Russians in downtown Los Angeles, California, on several occasions in 1950. Discussing politics, no less. Unfortunately, the available, censored papers don’t specify where exactly in L.A. the meetings occurred, or under what particular circumstances. Nor do we know who was responsible for the source of the story. Also, we have to wonder how the source was so absolutely certain that the group were Russians. Was he or she conversant in Russian? Did the source recognize the accent? Were they themselves Russian, too? If so, what were they doing in Los Angeles? On this specific part of the story, a lot of questions remain frustratingly and tantalizingly unanswered. I have to wonder if the Bureau’s source may have slightly embellished this part of the story, as a means to try and justify further, deeper surveillance of Adamski. I should stress, though, that there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the source exaggerated the story in the slightest; it’s just a theory on my part. Also, lying to the FBI would have been a very stupid and reckless thing to do. We only have to take a look at certain events surrounding the undeniable Russian meddling of the past few years to see how lying to the Feds will get a person into deep, deep trouble. And, even, a significant number of years in the slammer. George Adamski: a bizarre, controversial guy. And totally over the top when it came to Flying Saucers.