Objections
In 1957, UFOlogist Jim Moseley insisted that Adamski faked the saucer photos in the two books, and plundered easily accessible science-fiction literature for the aliens’ “space messages.” Other critics charged that the saucers in the photos were decorated with glyphs Adamski copied from published sources, and that he reworked his twenty-year-old Royal Order of Tibet material so that it had a “Space Brother” imprimatur. Particularly harsh critics claim that Adamski submitted his “contact” story, as fiction, to Ray Palmer’s Amazing Stories magazine in 1944. The story, apparently rejected, put Jesus inside an alien spaceship.
The single most famous Adamski photograph, of a hat-shaped saucer (published in Flying Saucers Have Landed and Inside the Space Ships) that Adamski identified as a Venusian scout craft, has generated equal parts awe and skepticism. The ship’s portholes and globular, tri-part landing assembly are marvelous; on the other hand, some doubters insist that the ship is a model constructed from (according to discrete accounts) a hat, a hat box, a lamp shade, a mechanical chicken feeder, and vacuum-cleaner parts. But the scout ship has demonstrated popular longevity, and remains available as a carved, Philippine- mahogany desk piece in various sizes, and as plastic model kits, usually in 1/48 and 1/60 scale. The kits are manufactured around the world, and are called George Adamski Flying Saucer or Adamski Type Flying Saucer. (A 1/48-scale kit from South Korea’s Hand Hero company notes the Adamski connection in small type at the bottom of the box art; the main headline reads, “FLYING SAUCERS HAVE COME.”)
Doubts and criticism aside, by 1959, Adamski’s standing in the UFO community was so well established that the March–April 1959 issue of Thy Kingdom Come, the newsletter of the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, ran the following as a news item:
ADAMSKI SAVES TRAIN FARE WITH FREE SAUCER RIDE
After just finishing a lecture in Kansas City, Missouri, last November, George Adamski boarded a train for Davenport, Iowa, where he had another lecture engagement scheduled. About 20 minutes out of Kansas City, the train stopped for some reason. Mr. Adamski got off the train and met a man who took him to a nearby wooded area and they both teleported about 50 up into a Spacecraft, where he spent about 8 hours before being delivered to Davenport in time for his lecture that eve.
During the latter part of Adamski’s life, and concurrent with his international celebrity, Adamski grew faintly paranoid about “conspirators” and others that might wish to silence him. This may have developed because of his incidental association with a man named William Dudley Pelly, a self-educated metaphysician with grotesque Fascist leanings.