Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth – The Space People: THE SCOUTCRAFT PHOTOGRAPHS
Most researchers have denounced Adamski’s famous ‘fifties’ scoutcraft photos as fakes. Descriptions of the ‘model’ used cover a wide range of utensils: ‘lampshade’; ‘operating theatre lamp’; ‘saucepan lid with pingpong balls’; ‘tobacco humidor’; ‘chicken feeder’; ‘the top of a 1937 canister-type vacuum cleaner’; and ‘a bottle-cooler made in Wigan, Lancashire’. The problem is that no one has yet produced examples of any of the above items which resemble proportionately the pictured craft. Adamski, incidentally, offered $2,000 to anyone who could prove his photos were fakes. There were no takers.
Desmond Leslie, a former Second World War fighter pilot who wrote the first (and longer) part of Flying Saucers Have Landed, made a strong case for the authenticity of the photographs: Anyone with experience of tele-photography who has obtained an original print made from the original Adamski negatives will at once notice a factor that has to be taken into account by all film directors using models to represent the full-size objects, a factor known sometimes as ‘atmospheric softening’.
This phenomenon is due to moisture and dust in the atmosphere, so that it is impossible to match up a foreground model with a distant background (however sharp your depth of focus) unless certain partial gauzings and screenings are used. The effect through a telephoto lens is to produce a certain greying and flattening which is practically impossible to reproduce artificially.
Tele-photography also slightly alters the perspective, hence the flattening and greying effects clearly noticeable in Adamski’s pictures.
Leslie also points out, based on his experiments using Adamski’s actual telescope at the site where the photographs were taken, that it is evident that atmospheric distortion was, in one of the photos, responsible for making one of the three balls under the craft appear to be larger than the others. This would not have happened if a model had been used. Leslie further adduces the fact that Adamski’s old German Ihagee-Graphles plate-camera could only be used in conjunction with the six-inch telescopic lens: no other lenses were supplied with
it and to fake a photo using a model, a much lower focal length would have been used.
Leslie gave the Adamski enlargements to one of Hollywood’s most revered directors, John Ford, who stated his opinion that the saucer was a large object shot through a telephoto lens of about six inches focal length. These findings were confirmed by Joseph Mansour, whose job it was to make photos of model aircraft appear to be the real thing.
And Pev Marley, Cecil B. de Mille’s leading special-effects cameraman, who had served as a photographer with Enemy Intercept Command in the Second World War, reportedly testified at a meeting of US Air Force Reserve officers in 1953 that Adamski’s pictures, if faked, were the cleverest he had ever seen. Later, he denied having made such a statement.
In Beyond Top Secret, I discussed the extraordinary 8mm colour movie film of a scoutcraft, identical to the one photographed at Palomar Gardens, taken by Adamski in the presence of Madeleine Rodeffer and three other witnesses at Silver Spring, Maryland, on 26 February 1965 (a frame from which is reproduced in the colour plates). According to William Sherwood, an optical physicist and former senior project development engineer at Eastman Kodak, the film is authentic.
My own investigations into the film began in 1966: I can state unequivocally, based on those investigations and a friendship with Madeleine which spans three decades, that the film is genuine. (Interestingly, as might have been the case with Jerrold Baker, Adamski asked Madeleine to take credit for the film.)
Also in Beyond Top Secret, I cited the photographs taken by Stephen Darbishire, in the presence of his cousin Adrian Myers, at Coniston, Lancashire, in February 1954. The best of these two photographs shows a ‘glass-like’ craft which is identical in proportion to Adamski’s scoutcraft.
I am not hesitant to say that this photograph also is authentic. Darbishire insisted that the craft had what appeared to be a series of portholes arranged in sets of four, whereas the published photos of Adamski showed what appeared to be a set of only three. Adamski’s slightly blurred fourth photo of the scoutcraft, unpublished in 1954, shows a fourth porthole. Darbishire was unaware of this until Desmond Leslie showed him the photo. Another photograph of an identical craft, taken in 1973 in Peru, shows a fourth porthole (see plates).