The Meetings and the Books
Adamski’s first contact with extraterrestrials occurred at Mount Palomar on November 20, 1952, when he met Orthon, a Venusian—a creature Adamski described as “a human being from another world.” (This momentous meeting was purportedly witnessed by George Hunt Williamson, a second-rate anti- Semitic Fascist and self-described channeler of extraterrestrial messages. So taken was Williamson with the implications of Adamski’s Mount Palomar encounter that he published a book in 1954, The Saucers Speak. Some sources suggest that Adamski absorbed and promoted Williamson’s political views, though little or nothing exists to prove the claim, unless one wishes to focus on the “Aryanized” appearance of Adamski’s ETs.) Adamski established the International Get Acquainted Club in 1957. He embarked on a “world tour” two years later and established a formal publishing arm, Science Publications, in 1962. The George Adamski Foundation International followed in 1965.
The famous 1953 book, Flying Saucers Have Landed (published not by Adamski but by a “legitimate” house, New York-based British Book Centre), is a pastiche, with Irish Theosophist nobleman Desmond Leslie writing the book’s first (and greater) portion and Adamski the second, which amounts to just 55 of the first edition’s 232 pages. Leslie’s approach is pseudo-scholarly and seemingly well researched. Adamski’s take, however, is personal—a picaresque journey. Leslie documents many UFO sightings, creating a reasonable-sounding prelude to Adamski’s more theatrical accounts. Much of Leslie’s section derives from newspaper accounts, in the manner of Charles Fort’s research for The Book of the Damned, a celebrated 1919 compendium of the unexplained. (For more on Fort, see chapter one.) Editor Clara Johns formatted Leslie’s notes so that they appear to reflect the work of Adamski as well as Leslie—a subtle deception that gives Adamski’s section of the book a greater scholarly heft than it deserves.
Adamski historian Colin Bennett feels that the greatest value of Flying Saucers Have Landed is Leslie’s bibliography, which lists a wealth of obscure and intriguing books about ancient Egypt, Noah’s Ark, human oddities, Atlantis, religious mysticism, and other topics that may or may not have true relationships to UFOs, helpful aliens, and the origins of the human race. Leslie and Adamski did not meet until 1954, a year after the book’s publication.
Adamski shortly found himself at the center of the contactee phenomenon. Nineteen fifty-three brought the first Spacecraft Convention, an amiably informal gathering mounted at Giant Rock, California. The convention became an annual event, drawing its biggest crowds, and the most media attention, during the 1950s, partly because Adamski was a regular attendee. The convention ran through 1977.
Inside the Space Ships (handsomely published by New York’s Abelard- Schuman) continues Adamski’s adventures with Venusians, and with a new, late-arriving extraterrestrial group, too, Saturnians. Adamski’s privileged rides on scout ships and a mother ship—intriguing machines that seem equal parts rivets and unimaginable high-tech—give the accounts a special, and frankly irresistible, luster. Inside the Space Ships was ghosted by Charlotte Blodget, sometimes identified (like Alice Wells) as Adamski’s secretary—and even identified as a victim of CIA and INTERPOL harassment. Although some sources claim that Blodgett passed away in the 1960s, she is likely to have lived beyond those years—and is probably Charlotte Blob (rhymes with “globe”), an Adamski follower and the founder of UFO Education Center (UFOEC). Over the years, some former members of UFOEC complained that Blob turned the organization into a quasi-religious cult, from which escape was difficult. In that, Blob contrasts sharply with her mentor.
A late Adamski work, a thirty-page booklet titled Answers to Questions Most Frequently Asked About Our Space Visitors and Other Planets, appeared under Adamski’s own imprint in 1965, the year Adamski died.