Happy Life on Meton
Once the kindly Venusians contacted Adamski, similar aliens began to contact many other people. In the mid-1950s, Elizabeth Klarer (1910–94) revealed that she had witnessed UFOs as early as 1917, and had continued to see them ever since. She observed the landing of a tremendously large saucer in Natal in 1954, gaining a glimpse of the “handsomest” man she had ever seen. The man returned on April 6, 1956, a particularly interesting day because Klarer traveled with the gentleman and other friendly extraterrestrials to the planet Meton, where she lived happily for nine years (a mere four months in Earth time). So friendly were the aliens, in fact, that Klarer became pregnant by the handsome standout, Akon.
In 1958, she bore a human-alien son called Ayling.
Much later, Akon admitted to Klarer that he was a Venusian by birth—as well as Klarer’s reincarnated soulmate. Although Klarer’s descriptions of Akon’s joyous demeanor, exotic gifts, and “electric” kisses have the naiveté of a romance novel (she wrote of their bodies “merging in magnetic union as the divine essence of our spirits became one”), Klarer never modified her tone or her enthusiasm.
Klarer likened the love given by aliens to the love offered by Christ—an affection that promised not simply an afterlife based in pure energy, but reincarnation on other planets. She wrote and spoke of the aliens’ “sophisticated” technology which was based in “the electromagnetic wavelength of the universe.” She described space as “out there,” and said it existed in the fifth dimension.
Meton, Klarer said, was continually bathed in the light of three stars, and was thus a place untroubled by night. Health concerns on Meton were addressed by a fabulous “silver herb” that grew not just on that planet but on Earth as well, at the landing point of the Meton starship decades earlier.
Klarer was a native South African educated, purportedly, at Cambridge. In middle age, she was a handsome, elegant woman with a self-described meteorological background, a posh accent, and an interest in the military- political ramifications of human contact with aliens. (Like many people interested in UFOs, she linked the craft with secret Nazi files discovered in Berlin at the end of World War II.) She claimed to have worked at high levels of the RAF during the war and afterward, investigating foo fighters (see chapter five) and decoding intercepted German military communications. Starship technology, she said, was in the hands of various world governments, which suppressed it. She feared for her safety in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union keenly desired her insights into starship technology.
Elizabeth Klarer published an autobiography, Beyond the Light Barrier. (A second book, The Gravity Files, was unfinished at the time of her death.) A representative portion of her lectures is preserved on audio tape. She was a calm, steady speaker who showed patience with polite questioners. If there is a sour note to all this, it is that she did not come forward until after reading George Adamski’s accounts in the mid-1950s. Skeptics label Klarer a copycat; her advocates explain that Adamski created a level of public acceptance that encouraged Klarer to finally reveal herself.
Klarer’s pleasing public manner did not prevent her from contentiously engaging another contactee—and another South African—Ann Grevler, who claimed to have begun an intimate relationship with an extraterrestrial called Ashtar sometime in the 1950s (Grevler declined to be more specific), after her car died on a remote road in the Transvaal. For reasons that Grevler never explained, Ashtar turned her disabled car invisible—a good parlor trick with the unintended consequence of Grevler walking into the invisible license plate and slashing her leg. Apparently the forgiving sort, Grevler accepted the alien’s friendly greeting and was taken aboard Ashtar’s scout ship.
Following an in- space rendezvous with a mother ship, Ashtar and Grevler traveled to Venus, where Grevler met university students who studied ESP and Venus’s form-and color-based “cosmic language.” Ann Grevler’s 1958 booklet Transvaal Episode details friendly encounters such as the one described above; she did note, however, that Men in Black— whom she identified as malevolent aliens—wished to disrupt friendly contact between humans and extraterrestrials. Perhaps wishing to conceal her identity from unsympathetic persons and organizations, Grevler published her booklet under a pseudonym, “Anchor.” Like Klarer, Grevler drifted into religious reverie, identifying the Venusians as honoring “the Creator” and living by a broadly accepted moral code. Also like Klarer, Grevler was enthusiastic but vague about alien energy technology, especially the spaceships’ motive power; Grevler attributed the latter to a system that drew from “cosmic power” and “powdered quartz” to create the “ionized air” that sent the craft aloft.
Another woman encouraged to speak out after absorbing George Adamski’s stories was Cynthia Appleton, a British woman who claimed to have met—and been seduced by—one of Adamski’s blond alien friends. She identified the son that resulted as a human-alien hybrid.
Klarer and Appleton fall in line with certain devotees of Christianity, Theosophy, and other belief systems, as contactees that come to be regarded—or regard themselves—as prophets. They are among the familiar “chosen few.” Sometimes, this distinction is made and then elaborated on minimally or not at all. The “prophet” is a benign presence who demands little from her followers besides their attention. But inevitably, prophet status can inflate egos and encourage “class distinctions” within groups. Soon, the leader has chosen favorites, and those who fail to make the cut are regarded as lesser creatures, who are insufficiently devoted to the prophet and the prophet’s message.
Sometimes, these lesser acolytes are surprised to find themselves on the outs not just with the prophet but also with the entire group. In extreme cases, the lesser members are abused psychologically or physically. (For much more on UFO prophets and cults, see chapter fifteen.)
Orfeo
Southern California amateur physicist and onetime Lockheed employee Orfeo Angelucci, who witnessed a circular flying object approach his test balloons in 1946, had an even more dramatic encounter on May 24, 1952: while he drove near Burbank, hovering green objects dropped onto the road and halted his car.
A disembodied voice explained that the green craft were extraterrestrial, and that the operators had been monitoring Angelucci since that first encounter six years earlier. The voice went on to reassure Angelucci that the ETs loved human beings. He found that comforting, but one wonders how he felt two months later, on July 23, 1952, when he fell into a coma and awoke as a passenger on a spaceship. In time, he regarded the aliens as angelic, even mystical creatures that helped him journey to an awareness of his higher self. (Angelucci’s description of a tiny dancer in a champagne flute is particularly intriguing). “As I listened to their gentle voices,” he recalled, “I began to feel a warm, glowing wave of love. . . . For a wonderful moment, I felt infinitely greater, finer, and stronger than I knew myself to be.” Angelucci wondered if he had “transcended reality.”
By the mid-1950s, Angelucci held a spiritual view of UFOs, and was a contributor to F. E. Rogers’s Talk of the Times, a semi-professional, proto-New Age magazine that described itself as a “scientific-religious publication”; Angelucci contributed “California Soul Rush Days” to the magazine’s July 1958 issue. He recounted his experiences in more detail in two books, The Secret of the Saucers (1955) and Son of the Sun (1959).