CHAPTER NINETEEN
Off They Go into the Wild Blue Yonder
At 12:30P.M. on Thursday, November 20, 1952, history was made.
At least, so says George Adamski, lecturer on philosophy and student of technical matters and astronomy.
At 12:30P.M. on Thursday, November 20, 1952, George Adamski was the first man on earth to talk to a Venusian.
At least, so says George Adamski.
I was chief of Project Blue Book at the time and the name "Professor Adamski"—he had a title then—wasn't new to me. He, or some of his followers had been showering the Air Force with photos of flying saucers. Letters by the gross were coming in demanding recognition of the great professor and an analysis of his photos.
We obliged and the photos were examined by the experts at Wright- Patterson Photo Reconnaissance Labs. The verdict came back: "They could be genuine, of course, but they also could have been easily faked by a ten year old with a Brownie camera."
For a few weeks we forgot George Adamski. But then the press began to clamor at our gates. The news was leaking out of Southern California. George Adamski had talked to a Venusian! We held out for a long time but the pressure mounted and I headed for California to find out what it was all about.
As far as George Adamski was concerned I was just another thirsty sight-seer from the famous observatory on Mt. Palomar when I walked into the little restaurant at the foot of this famous mountain one day in 1953.
The four stool restaurant, with a few tables, where Adamski worked as a handyman, was crowded when I arrived and he was circulating around serving beer and picking up empty bottles. There was no doubt as to who he was because his fame had spread. To the dozen almost reverently spoken queries, "Are you Adamski?" he modestly nodded his head.
Small questions about the flying saucer photos for sale from convenient racks led to more questions and before long the good "professor" had taken a position in the middle of the room and was off and running.
In his slightly broken English he told how he was the son of poor,
Polish immigrants with hardly any formal education.
To look at the man and to listen to his story you had an immediate urge to believe him. Maybe it was his appearance. He was dressed in well worn, but neat, overalls. He had slightly graying hair and the most honest pair of eyes I've ever seen.
Or maybe it was the way he told his story. He spoke softly and naively, almost pathetically, giving the impression that "most people think I'm crazy, but honestly, I'm really not."
Adamski started his story by telling how he had spent many long and cold nights at his telescope "at the request of the government" trying to photograph one of the flying saucers everyone had been talking about. He'd been successful, as the full photograph racks on the wall showed, and he thought the next step would be to actually try to contact a saucer.
For some reason, Adamski didn't know exactly why, on November 19th he'd decided to go out into the Mojave Desert. He'd called some friends and told them to meet him there.
By noon the next day the party, which consisted of Adamski and six others, had met and were eating lunch near the town of Desert Center on the California-Arizona border.
They looked for saucers, but except for an occasional airplane, the cloudless blue sky was empty. They were about ready to give it up as a bad day when another airplane came over. Again they looked up, but this time, in addition to seeing the airplane, they saw a silvery, cigar-shaped "flying saucer."
For some reason, again he didn't know why, the group of people moved down the road where Adamski left them and took off into the desert alone.
By this time the "space ship" had disappeared and once again Adamski was about to give up.
Then, a flash of light caught his eye and a smaller saucer (he later learned it was a "scout ship") came drifting down and landed about a half mile from him. He swung his camera into action and started to take pictures. Unfortunately, the one picture Adamski had to show was so out of focus the scout ship looked like a desert rock.
He took a few more pictures, he told his audience, and had stopped to admire the little scout ship when he suddenly noticed a man standing nearby.
Now, even those in the crowded restaurant who had been smirking when he started his story had put down their beers and were listening. This is what they had come to hear.
You could actually have heard the proverbial pin drop.
Adamski told what went through his mind when he first saw the man— maybe a prospector. But he noticed the man's long, shoulder-length, sandy-colored hair, his dark skin, his Oriental features and his ski- pant type trousers. He was puzzled.
Then it came into his mind like a flash, he was looking at a person from some other world!
Through mental pictures, sign language, and a few words of English, Adamski found out the man was from Venus, he was friendly, and that they (the Venusians) were worried about radiation from our atomic bombs.
They talked. George pointed to his camera but the man from Venus politely refused to be photographed. Adamski pleaded to go into the "ship" to see how it operated but the Venusian refused this, too.
They talked some more—of spaceships and of solar systems—before
Adamski walked with his new found friend to the saucer and saw the
Venusian off into space.
At this point Adamski recalled how he had glanced up in the sky to see the air full of military aircraft.
Needless to say, the rest of Adamski's party, who had supposedly seen the "contact" from a mile away, were excited. They rushed up to him and it was then that they noticed the footprints.
Plainly imprinted in the desert sand were curious markings made by ridges on the soles of the Venusian's shoes.
At the urging of the crowd in the restaurant Adamski took an old shoe box out from under the counter. One of his party, that day, had just happened to have some plaster of paris and the shoe box contained plaster casts of shoe prints with strange, hieroglyphic- like symbols on the soles. No one in the restaurant asked how the weight of a mere man could make such sharp imprints in the dry, coarse desert sand.
Next he showed the sworn statements of the witnesses and the crowd moved in around him for a better look.
As I left he was graciously filling people in on more details and the cash register was merrily ringing up saucer picture sales.
I didn't write the trip off as a complete loss, the weather in
California was beautiful.
Adamski held the UFO spotlight for some time.
The Venusians paid him another visit, this time at the restaurant, and he photographed their "ship." This, whether by Venusian fate or design, increased the flow of traffic to the restaurant at the base of Mt. Palomar.
It also had its side effects.
An astronomer from the observatory that houses the world famous 200- inch telescope on top of Mt. Palomar told me: "I hate to admit it but the number of week end visitors has picked up here. People drive down to hear George and decide that since they're down here they might as well come up and see our establishment."
But George Adamski didn't hold the front center of the stage for long. In rapid succession others stepped forward and hesitantly admitted that they too had been contacted.
Truman Bethurum, a journeyman mechanic of Redondo Beach, California, was next up.
Actually, he admitted, he had been the first earthman to talk to a person from another world. Back on the night of July 26, 1952, four months before Adamski, a group of eight or ten, short, olive-skinned men with black wavy hair, had awakened him while he was asleep in a truck in the desert near Mormon Flats, Nevada.
These little men, unlike Adamski's, spoke any language.
"You name it," they'd quipped to Bethurum, "we speak it."
In a newspaper article that was voted "Best Read of 1953," Bethurum told how the little men he met had been more cooperative and had actually taken him into their saucer, a huge job 300 feet in diameter and 16 feet high.
Once inside, Bethurum had met the captain of the "scow"—a true leader of men. Aura Rhanes was her name and she was a Venus de Milo with arms and warm blood. "When she spoke her words rhymed." They chatted and Bethurum learned that he was on the "Admiral's scow" the command ship of Clarion's fleet of saucers.
All in all, Bethurum made eleven visits to Aura's scow. Each time they'd sit and talk. Bethurum told her about the earth and she told of the idyllic, Shangri-La type planet of Clarion—a yet undiscovered planet which is always opposite the moon.
But before too long, both Truman Bethurum and George Adamski had to move over. Daniel Fry, an engineer, stepped in.
At a press conference to kick off the International Saucer Convention in Los Angeles, Fry told how he had not only contacted the spacemen two years before Adamski and Bethurum, he had actually ridden in a flying saucer.
It had all started on the night of July 4, 1950, when engineer Fry was temporarily employed at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico.
It was a hot night, and with nothing else to do, Fry decided to take a walk across the desert. He hadn't traveled far when he saw a bluish light hovering over the mountains which rim this famous proving ground. He paid no attention. He'd heard flying saucer stories before and just plain didn't believe them.
But as he watched, the light came closer and closer and closer, until a weird craft came silently to rest on the desert floor not seventy feet away.
For seconds, Fry, who had seen missile age developments at White
Sands that would have dumfounded most laymen, merely stood and stared.
The object, Fry told newsmen, was an "ovate spheroid about thirty feet at the equator." (Fry has a habit of drifting off into the technical). Its outside surface was a highly polished silver with a slight violet iridescent glow.
At first Fry wanted to run but his rigid technical training overrode his common, natural urges. He decided to go over to the object and see what made it tick.
He circled it several times and nothing broke the desert silence.
Then he touched it.
"Better not touch that hull, pal, it's hot," boomed a voice in a
Hollywoodian tone.
Fry recoiled.
The voice softened and added, "Take it easy, pal, you're among friends."
After politely reading off the spaceman, or whoever he was, for scaring him, pal Fry and the voice settled down for a friendly moonlight chat. Fry learned that the voice was indeed that of a spaceman and they were down to pick up a new supply of air. After about four years of earth air transfusions, according to the spaceman, they would become adapted to our atmosphere, and our gravity, and become "immunized to your bi-otics." The craft, Fry was told, was a "cargo carrier," unmanned and built to zoom down and scoop up earth air.
The conversation went on, waxing technical at times, and ended with an invitation to look into the ship. Then the spaceman, possibly carried away by all the interest Fry was showing, offered a ride.
Fry accepted and they antidemagnetized off for New York City. Thirty minutes later they were back at White Sands.
Over New York City they came down from 35 to 20 miles and Fry could read the marquee of the Fulton Theater. "The Seven Year Itch" was playing.
He hadn't told the Air Force about his ride before because he was afraid he'd lose his job. But, at the press conference, he did plug his new book, The White Sands Incident.
By this time Adamski had already published his book Flying Saucers Have Landed and it looked as if Fry was going to cut him out. But Fry took a lie detector test on a widely viewed West Coast television show and flunked it flat.
His stock dropped as fast as it had risen but the decline was somewhat checked when a well known Southern California medium wrote to "her old friend" J. Edgar Hoover about the situation. Hoover, the story goes, shot back an answer—lie detectors are no good.
But the damage had been done. The "rigged" lie detector test had unfortunately relegated Daniel Fry, "engineer," "missile expert," "part owner of an engineering plant," and interplanetary hitchhiker to the bush league.
With Adamski and Bethurum on the stage and Fry peeking out of the wings all hell broke loose.
One could say that everyone tried to get into the act, but I'd rather think that each colony of space people tried to promote their own candidate.
In England, one Cedric Allingham met a Martian on the moors. In France, Germany, the United States, Portugal, Brazil, Spain— everywhere—people "too uneducated to pull a hoax" met green men, dark men, white men, big men with little heads, little men with big heads and men with pointed heads. They wore motorcycle belts, baggy pants, diver suits, and were naked.
One lady proudly announced that a Venusian had tried to seduce her and within days another snorted in disgust. A Martian had seduced her.
Then Adamski took a hop through outer space and back.
Saucers poured forth words of wisdom via radio, light beams and mental telepathy. All of these messages were duly recorded on tape and sales were hot at $4.50 per 10-minute tape.
Not to be outdone by any other lousy planet, the Venusians picked up a young man from Los Angeles and actually took him to Venus. Not once, but three times.
He packed in audiences by telling how he had been contacted one night and asked by a "strange man" if he would go on an important mission. Afraid, but not one to shirk his patriotic duties, he met the stranger at a prearranged spot and was whisked off to Venus. During a high level conference up there he was given the word: Tell the earthlings to lay off their atomic weapons, or else. They're killing all our doves and we make our flying saucers out of the feathers our live doves shed.
The Venusians, this space traveler warned his audiences, were already infiltrating the earth and he intimated that they were ready to move in case we didn't cease atomic testing.
His next two trips to Venus were purely social.
The highlight of his lecture, when he awes his audience, is when he whips out his proof: (1) a blood smear on a slide—genuine Venusian blood, (2) an affidavit from his landlady stating he wasn't home on three occasions, and (3) a photo of a Venusian walking in Los Angeles' McArthur Park. The mere fact that the Venusian looks like any Joe Doakes walking down the street is a picayunish point. Venusians look just like us.
And it hasn't stopped. During the big UFO flap of 1957 a man stumbled onto a landed saucer and chatted awhile with its occupants. A few months later, soon after the atomic powered U.S.S. Nautilus made its historic trip under the polar ice cap, this same man snorted in disgust. He packed his suitcase and started on a lecture tour. Months before he'd been there in a flying saucer.
Once again people shelled out hard cash to hear his story.
Wherever you are, Mr. P. T. Barnum, you are undoubtedly grinning from ear to ear.
But there is a sober side to this apparently comical picture. The common undertone to many of these stories "hot from the lips of a spaceman" is Utopia. On these other worlds there is no illness, they've learned how to cure all diseases. There are no wars, they've learned how to live peaceably. There is no poverty, everyone has everything he wants. There is no old age, they've learned the secret of eternal life.
Too many times this subtle pitch can be boiled down to, "Step right up folks and put a donation in the pot. I'm just on the verge of learning the spaceman's secrets and with a little money to carry out my work I'll give you the secret."
I've seen a man, crippled by arthritis, hobbling out into the desert in hopes that his "friend who talks to the Martians" could get them to cure him on their next trip. I've seen pensioners, who needed every buck they had, shell out money to "help buy radio equipment" to contact some planet to find out how they'd solved their economic problems. I saw a little old lady in a many times mended dress put down a ten dollar bill to help promote a "peace campaign" backed by the Venusians. She'd lost two sons in the war but had four grandsons she wanted to keep alive. A couple died and left $15,000 to a man to build a "longevity machine" so others could live. The Martians had given him the plans.
A woman died of thirst and exposure in the Mojave Desert trying to reach the spot where a man told her he was going to "make a contact."
Some of it isn't comical.
Even though the field is becoming crowded, through thick and thin, Martian and Venusian, the old Maestro, George Adamski, is still head and shoulders above the rest. The hamburger stand is boarded up and he lives in a big ranch house. He vacations in Mexico and has his own clerical staff. His two books Flying Saucers Have Landed and Inside the Space Ships have sold something in the order of 200,000 copies and have been translated into nearly every language except Russian. To date, he's had eleven visits from people from Mars, Venus and Saturn. Evidently Truman Bethurum's Aura Rhanes put out the word about earthmen because two beautiful spacewomen have now entered Adamski's life: an "incredibly lovely" blonde named Kalna, and the equally beautiful Illmuth.
Only a few months ago, while on one of his numerous nationwide lecture tours, a saucer unexpectedly picked Adamski up in Kansas City and took him on a galactic cruise before depositing him at Ft. Madison, Iowa, where he had a lecture date. He "wowed" the packed auditorium with his "proof"—an unused Kansas City to Ft. Madison train ticket.
Last week, in the Netherlands (Adamski's nationwide tours have expanded to world-wide tours), he repeated his exploits to Queen Juliana.
But at Buckingham Palace, Mr. Barnum, all he saw was the changing of the guard.