Claims, Contradictions and Corroborations: A WELL-CONNECTED GENTLEMAN

Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth: A WELL-CONNECTED GENTLEMAN

That Adamski was well connected is supported by others. Dr Jacques Vallee, for example, learned from a man who hosted Adamski during his tour of Australia in 1959 that he was travelling with a passport bearing special privileges.

Also remarkable were Adamski’s manners. ‘They were, quite simply, those of an English gentleman,’ said Lou Zinsstag, who recounted how a well-to-do couple in Basle once invited her and Adamski to a formal dinner. There was quite a collection of precious silver cutlery beside each plate, indicating a dinner of four to five courses. ‘We were astonished at Adamski’s accomplished table manners,’ the host told Lou afterwards. ‘He made use of his cutlery in the right way, without hesitation, and he ate and drank like a true gentleman. He could have accepted an invitation to Buckingham Palace:

FURTHER ATTEMPTS TO SUBSTANTIATE THE CLAIMS

On several occasions, witnesses have substantiated some of Adamski’s claims. On other occasions, he was less successful in providing evidence. For example, he reported that two scientists accompanied him on one of his trips into space. ‘Both are scientists who hold high positions,’ he wrote to Charlotte Blodget. ‘However, the way things are nowadays with everything classified as security, for the time being they must remain in the shadow. When they believe that they can release the substantiation they have without jeopardizing either the national defense or themselves, they have said that they will do so through the press.’

Regrettably, the two scientists have not come forward, and it is doubtful if they are still living. Researcher Richard Ogden alleged that his friend Dr David Turner was one of the scientists. If so, he was backward in coming forward. In the postscript to Inside the Space Ships, Adamski wrote that on 24 April 1955 he was taken for a ride into space, specifically to fulfil his request to take some photographs inside the space ships. ‘We can guarantee nothing for reasons which will be clear to you later,’ one of his hosts told him, ‘but we shall try to get a picture of our ship with you in it. This would be simple enough if we could use our own method of photography, but that would not serve your purpose. Our cameras and film are entirely magnetic and you have no equipment on Earth that could reproduce such pictures. So we must use yours and see what we can get.’

Adamski had brought along a new Polaroid camera, and explained its workings to his hosts. Orthon and Adamski allegedly stood in the carrier ship, looking through the very thick glass portholes — an estimated six-foot gap lay between the outer and inner windows — while a spaceman took photographs through a porthole of a nearby scoutcraft. ‘From her ball top,’ Adamski reported, ‘she was throwing a beam of bright light upon the larger craft. Sometimes this beam was very intense, and again not so intense.’

As the photographs show, they were experimenting with the amount of light necessary to show the mother ship and at the same time penetrate through the portholes to catch Orthon and myself behind them. While this was going on, radiation from both the mother ship and the Scout had been cut to a minimum. I learned later that the men had been obliged to put some sort of filter over the camera and lens in order to protect the film from the magnetic influences of the craft.

When the scoutcraft returned, Adamski studied the pictures. Although pleased, he cursed himself for not bringing more film along, and his hosts were less than satisfied with the results. While the four pictures (one of which is reproduced in the plate section) purportedly show the hull of the carrier craft (and one the edge of the scoutcraft’s porthole) the faces peering through the portholes are not clear. Nonetheless, I see no evidence of photographic trickery.

The spacemen decided to attempt shots of the interior of a small flight deck with two pilots sitting at the controls. But these two attempts failed, due to the greater magnetic power in the carrier in comparison to that in the Scout,’ Adamski explained. ‘Without some as yet undeveloped filter system for our film, it is impossible to get clear photographs within the space ships. When I asked if a better camera with a finer lens might be more successful, I was told that any appreciable improvement was unlikely because of the type of film used.’

In addition to the metal ‘slag’ given him by Orthon, Adamski claimed to possess another sample of alien alloy, which he had had analysed chemically: When I first telephoned to ask the result, this man sounded very excited. But when I saw him later in his laboratory, he . . . tried to brush the whole thing off lightly. When he said it was nothing that could not be picked up in any old scrapyard, naturally I persisted in demanding an explicit statement of his findings. He then admitted that there were ‘slight differences’ in composition from any usual alloy, but said that could have happened by a variation in heating or some ‘slight accident’ which had gone unnoticed at the time, thereby making duplication of the alloy improbable.

In December 1958 Adamski claimed that a spaceman picked him up by car from his delayed train near Kansas City, Missouri, and drove him a short distance to a grove of trees above which a craft was hovering. The method of boarding was dramatically different from anything hitherto, and is worth recording here because of the similarity to descriptions provided in much later years by some abductees and contactees: I had the experience to be lifted up into the space craft while the ship was hovering.

It feels as if something is surrounding you like a transparent or plastic curtain, yet you can’t touch it and you don’t see it, and like a magnetic force it lifts you just like an elevator into the ship. And they can do this from a thousand miles away if they want, but usually it is only two to three hundred feet. You can take baggage and everything with you, as if you are standing on a platform, even though you can’t see it. This only works in the open and the person being lifted is visible the whole time.

Once aboard, Adamski asked his friends if they would lower the craft and land him during daylight so that hundreds of people could witness the event, but it was explained that although they themselves could escape harm from our military, he would be arrested and held incommunicado. Even if hundreds of people did see him land and walk out of the ship they would quickly be silenced. The landing in Davenport, Iowa, where Adamski’s train was heading, was therefore reportedly delayed until nightfall.

MORE CLAIMS, MOUNTING DOUBTS

In 1960, according to Adamski, the US military exploded a nuclear device in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The Russians had a similar idea, he told Lou Zinsstag, but after the first American test the project was cancelled on both sides, supposedly due to warnings from the space people. (In actuality, the US Navy’s Project Prime Argus exploded three such nuclear devices, in 1958.) Adamski also claimed that the space people were involved in neutralizing harmful radiation from our nuclear tests.

From one of their space laboratories in a mothership, green balls are being sent out (they have been observed all over the world). This is being done in order to counteract or neutralize or even absorb concentrations of radiation created through our bomb experiments. I do not know about the frequency of sightings of ‘green balls’ in 1959, when Adamski made this statement, but I do know that from 1948 to 1950, at least, there was a plethora of reports of ‘green fireballs’ — particularly in the vicinity of nuclear test sites and installations — and that these were the subject of secret studies by military and scientific intelligence personnel, as I have recounted in Beyond Top Secret.

As an Army Intelligence memo from the period reveals:

Agencies.in New Mexico are greatly concerned over these phenomena. They are of the opinion that some foreign power is making ‘sensing shots’ with some super-stratosphere device designed to be self-disintegrating.

Adamski further claimed in 1959 that secret studies were being conducted into various methods of cancelling gravity. ‘They already have models for anti- gravity propelled flying objects in disc form,’ he wrote, ‘but none of these methods for application of a free kind of energy must be revealed to the public, because such a society in possession of these advanced methods would soon escape from economic control.’

From 1960 onwards Adamski began warning his coworkers about a new and ‘foreign’ group of space visitors. Though admitting that it was not easy for him to guess their purpose nor to estimate their numbers, he nonetheless speculated: Who is to say that defense will not be needed? Since we are in the process of evolving, people of other planets throughout the Cosmos are likewise evolving. We are not the lowest in the Cosmos! Beyond our solar system are whole systems whose people have not progressed, socially, as far as we on Earth; yet some of them have advanced beyond us scientifically, and do have space ships. While we were confined to our planet with the thought that space was an empty void, we naturally were of little interest to most outsiders. But now that we are sending rockets and satellites into space we are attracting their attention and natural curiosity, and this would cause them to investigate us.

Since we on Earth are warlike, with a history of wars, why should we not suspect that people of lower evolution socially would not be like us, or even more so? Because they live on another planet and travel space as we are trying to do, this certainly does not make them angels! And while they might not try to attack the world as a whole at this time, our own space ships just might need,one day, the protection which our military-trained personnel could provide

Much to the surprise of the sixties peace groups, Adamski never acted as an apostle for peace and disarmament. ‘He was no dreamer,’ wrote Lou Zinsstag, ‘and knew that the time for disarmament had not yet come, and worse, that world-wide war preparations were the most serious obstacle to the promotion of contacts between space people and senior officials.’

By the early 1960s, Adamski’s claims and philosophical treatises became increasingly esoteric; a departure from his usual, down-to-earth self. ‘I must confess, I became tired of Adamski’s articles on cosmic philosophy,’ said Lou Zinsstag, until then one of his staunchest coworkers. ‘They were moralizing and indulgent, and often singularly pointless I thought