Big Bo and Little Buck Missouri farmer and contactee Buck Nelson was slender and rough-hewn, with an angular face and a strong jaw. Invariably dressed in coveralls, he owned and operated eighty acres in the Ozarks. Fifty-nine when he gained notoriety in 1954, Nelson had experienced a hardworking, peripatetic life: railroad worker, cowboy, security guard, … Read more
The Truman Show Mormon Mesa, Nevada, July 1952. After relocating to Nevada from Redondo Beach, California, fifty-five-year-old Truman Bethurum spent his nights performing truck maintenance at an asphalt plant. He had free access to the trucks, so after wrapping up a shift he drove to the dry seabed at Mormon Mesa (about sixty miles north … Read more
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, … Read more
Coming to Grips with George Why do I discuss George Adamski in this chapter, rather than in the chapter devoted to hoaxers? Nostalgia and affection play parts. Inside the Space Ships is the first UFO book I acquired. That happened in 1963, eight years after the book’s publication, when Adamski was still living, and still … Read more
Another Adamski Adamski’s claims encouraged others to share their own tales of interaction with friendly aliens. One of these, Daniel Fry, enjoyed particular notoriety after coming forward in 1954 to reveal his 1949 meeting with ETs, and subsequent ride on a spaceship. Fry worked as an explosives expert and rocket instruments technician, and eventually co-founded … Read more
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 … Read more
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. … Read more
Beautiful, Ageless Visitors Who Share the Wisdom of the Universe As saucer sightings became more common in the late 1940s, alien visitors grew bolder—or human eyewitnesses became more imaginative. Soon, some people did not simply see flying saucers, but received friendly greetings from the crafts’ occupants and were sometimes invited inside. A lucky few enjoyed … Read more
Dead Mountain Some human tragedies are so unusual, so dramatic, that they persist for years despite perfectly reasonable explanations, and end up folded into UFO lore without proper oversight. A modern Russian conspiracy theory holds that early in 1959, nine experienced young Russian hikers camping on the Urals’ Holatchahl Mountain were killed by UFOs. Some … Read more
Fifteen UFO Conspiracy Theories That Won’t Go Away Whatever their preoccupations (JFK! Trilateral Commission! Faked Moon landing! Weather control!), conspiracy theories based in a belief in complex secrecy (to the detriment of society at large) are never easy to prove. Unsympathetic observers can be quick to insist that claimants are paranoid, but to glibly classify … Read more
