One man who supposedly was privileged to make contact with visitors from space was Daniel Fry who, while strolling in the New Mexico desert on the evening of July 4, 1950, noticed a flying saucer that had apparently just landed. When he approached and started to touch the ship, he suddenly heard a voice speaking in friendly caution: “Better not touch the hull, pal, it’s still hot.” The voice, he discovered, belonged to an extraterrestrial being in a mother ship that was hovering some 900 miles above the earth. The craft on the ground needed no crew, for it was a “remote-controlled cargo carrier,” sent down to collect samples of the earth’s atmosphere. Communicating by mental telepathy, the spaceman revealed that, although he came from a remote planet, his ancestors had been earthmen who had migrated from the island of Lemuria in ancient times (see [Chapter II]). Strangely enough, although the visitor’s first remark had shown a remarkable command of contemporary English, he did not know what a roller coaster was! He took such a fancy to Fry that he invited him to enter the cargo craft and treated him to a quick flight to New York and back, a round trip of 4000 miles completed in half an hour![[X-3]]

A contactee whose experience offered variations on the basic theme was Truman Bethurum, a construction worker. According to his story, he happened to be looking for sea shells in the Nevada desert sometime before dawn one morning in July 1952 when he encountered a flying saucer and its friendly crew. The captain was a female, a “queen among women,” whose attractive costume included a bright-red skirt, a black-velvet short-sleeved blouse, and a black beret with red trim[[X-4]]. Though the grandmother of two, she was so beautiful that at their first meeting Bethurum was speechless. Obviously trying to put him at his ease, she smiled and said encouragingly, “Speak up, my friend, you’re not hexed.” During the following months, he says, they had several meetings and eventually, at her invitation, he accompanied her on an enjoyable visit to the saucer’s home base, the planet “Clarion.” Being placed directly behind the moon and apparently moving in a parallel orbit, this heavenly body has entirely escaped the notice of earthly astronomers[[X-5]].

George W. Van Tassel, operator of a commercial airport, resort, and guest ranch in California (for some reason most of the better-known contactees seem to be Californians), allegedly made contact with space beings of a more ethereal type. Their saucers traveled on power produced by the “transmutation of hard light particles into soft light particles,” and a typical vehicle was 1500 feet in diameter, 300 feet thick, and carried a crew of 7200. Why they needed so much room—more than 70,000 cubic feet per spaceman—remains a mystery, for both the ship and its occupants were made of pure light. The mother ships remained thousands of miles above the earth at substations from which they sent out their “ventlos,” or flying saucers, to patrol the earth and try to improve conditions here. Speaking through Van Tassel, the visitors sent many messages such as that of June 28, 1952:

“Salutations. My identity is Qel, 72nd projection, 15th wave, realms of Schare

Several times the spacemen threatened, if opposed, to launch thousands of saucers per second against the earth. In January 1953 they warned that they had three substations in space ready to release 500,000 saucers each; two months later, in March, they informed Van Tassel that they now had 3½ million saucers in operation around the earth. Somehow or other, this armada of UFOs seems to have remained invisible to both the United States Air Force and the public[[X-6]].

Whether such tales are delusions, fantasies, or hoaxes may be impossible to determine. Some contact cases, however, undoubtedly contain elements of fraud. At worst, the witness may be deliberately inventing the whole story from start to finish; at best, he may feel so certain of the reality of his experience that he feels justified in manufacturing evidence to convince possible skeptics. No matter what his motives, when he tries to add verisimilitude to his narrative by fabricating proofs, he joins the company of hoaxers[[X-7]].

In the Maury Island case (see [Chapter II]), the witnesses offered alleged fragments of a disabled spaceship, which turned out to be chunks of slag. The scoutmaster in Florida exhibited singed hair on his arm and a scorched cap to prove that he had suffered from the heat rays of a landed flying saucer (see [Chapter VII]), and the grain salesman in Nebraska bolstered his tale of the Saturnian ship by pointing to shallow cracks in a dry river bed and oil smudges on the grass (see [Chapter IX]).

A contactee who provided “proof” of his story was Howard Menger, who specialized in describing visits to the moon. In the moon cities, he said, he met many earth scientists who enjoyed a delightful, relaxed existence. The lunar natives use no money, are born without appendixes, and for entertainment play a game very much like baseball. In science they are way ahead of us: using saucers equipped with “self-contained gravity” and propelled by “processed free energy,” they transported him from earth to moon in only two hours[[X-8]]. As a trophy of his visit, Menger brought back a lunar potato. This remarkable vegetable was supposed to have five times the protein content of an ordinary American potato, but unfortunately it was not available for analysis. As soon as he returned, he said, he had turned it over to the United States Government, and the government was keeping it top secret[[X-9]].

Adamski’s Travels

Perhaps the best known of the contactees is George Adamski, who on the night of November 20, 1952, in the desert of Southern California, supposedly met and talked with the pilot of a vehicle that had just arrived from Venus. Conversation was no problem; both men simply used telepathy and sign language when words failed[[X-10]]. In the years since then Adamski has reported many other pleasant chats with visitors from Mars and Saturn as well as Venus, and has allegedly made several journeys in their spacecraft, including an aerial tour of the moon. On this trip he observed with surprise that the moon’s hidden side contained fertile country abounding in lakes, rivers, vegetation, and prosperous cities with people strolling along the sidewalks[[X-11]]. He was not at all disconcerted when the Russian photographs of the moon’s far side showed no trace of these delightful features. Obviously, said Adamski, the Russians had simply retouched the pictures before releasing them to the world, in order to deceive the United States and to conceal the vegetation, trees, and buildings of the space people who had their bases there[[X-12]].