FROM OUTER SPACE TO YOUR WALLET
Consider the case of George Adamski. Born in Poland in 1891, Adamski came to America in his infancy. He received a spotty education and developed an early interest in occultism. By the 1930s Adamski had established a niche as a low- rent guru in Southern California’s mystical scene. He founded the Royal Order of Tibet, whose teachings drew on his psychic channelings from “Tibetan masters.” In the late 1940s “Professor” Adamski produced pictures of what he said were spaceships he had photographed through his telescope.
The pictures attracted wide attention. But the events that began on November 20, 1952, would make Adamski a saucer immortal. Responding to channeled directions from extraterrestrials (who had replaced the Tibetan masters, though their messages were identical), Adamski and six fellow occult seekers headed out for the desert. Near Desert Center, California, he separated from the others and met a landed spaceship. Its pilot was a friendly fellow named Orthon, a handsome, blond-haired Venusian. Serious UFO investigators scoffed, but other people all over the world believed, even as Adamski’s tales grew ever more outrageous.
Adamski’s 1955 book Inside the Space Ships recounted his adventures with Venusians, Martians, and Saturnians, who had come to Earth out of concern for humanity’s self destructive ways. These “Space Brothers,” as Adamski and his disciples called them, proved a long-winded lot, fond of platitudes and full of tedious metaphysical blather.
In Adamski’s wake other “contactees” emerged to spread the interplanetary gospel and to count the take at gatherings of the faithful.
The principal gathering was held every summer at Giant Rock, near Twentynine Palms, California. The driving force behind the Giant Rock gatherings was George Van Tassel, who had established psychic contact with extraterrestrial starships (“ventlas”) in early 1952. A few months later he rushed into print the first modern contactee book, the misleadingly titled / Rode a Flying Saucer! The following year, Van Tassel would get to do just that when his pal Solganda invited him inside a spaceship for a quick spin.
At the space people’s direction, Van Tassel established the College of Universal Wisdom and solicited donations for the construction of the “Integratron,” a rejuvenation machine.When completed, Van Tassel told his support¬ ers, it would handle as many as 10,000 persons a day. People would emerge looking no younger, but their cells would be recharged. Untold tens of thousands of dollars later, the Integratron languished unfinished in February 1978 when Van Tassel died—from the ravages of old age.
Reincarnated Saturnian and space communicant Howard Menger held forth from his farm in New Jersey, where followers would come to witness—well, something. Followers would see lights and even figures but always in the dark and never up close. Once, when Menger led a follower into a dark building to speak with a spacewoman, a sliver of light happened to fall on the face of the “extraterrestrial.” It was, the follower could not help noticing, identical to the face of a young blond woman who happened to be one of Menger’s closest associates.
After releasing a book, From Outer Space to You (1959), and a record album, Music from Another Planet, Menger would virtually recant his story, vaguely muttering about a CIA experiment. In the late 1980s he withrew his recantation and marketed a new book detailing his latest cosmic adventures.
Most contactees have managed to stay out of legal trouble, though law-enforcement and other official agencies look into their activities from time to time. Reinhold Schmidt was not so lucky. In the course of contacts with German¬ speaking Saturnians, Schmidt’s space friends showed him secret stores of quartz crystals in the mountains of California. Armed with this information and a gift for (so the prosecutor charged) “loving talk,” he persuaded several elderly women to invest their money in a crystal-mining venture. The money went, however, into his own pocket. He went on trial for grand theft and from there to jail.
MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE
As galactic heavyweights go, few tip the scales as impressively as Ashtar, the commander of the 24,000,000 extraterrestrials involved in the Earth project. According to one of his Earth friends, Ashtar is sponsored by “Lord Michael and the Great Central Sun government of this galaxy. . . . Second only to the Beloved Commander Jesus-Sananda in responsibility for the airborne division of the Brotherhood of Light,” Ashtar beams his channeled messages from a colossal starship, or space station, that entered the solar system on July 18, 1952.
The first to hear from him was California contactee George Van Tassel, but since then dozens, and possibly hundreds, all over the world have heard from him and communicated his sermons. Asked what he looks like, Ashtar replied modestly, “I am seven feet tall in height, with blue eyes and a nearly white complexion. I am fast of movement and considered to be an understanding and compassionate teacher.” profiteers than prophets. The psychic contactees, on the other hand, tend to be quiet, unflamboyant, and almost painfully sincere.
They can best be described as Space Age religious visionaries. In another century their messages would have been from gods or angels or spirits. These messages, generally inane and rarely profound, are manifestly not from true extraterrestrials. Psychologists who have studied contactees believe these individuals are not crazy, just unusually imaginative; their communicators come from inner, not outer, space, via a nonpathological form of multiple-personality disorder.
Though only a few professional contactees of the 1950s are still alive or active today, the contactee movement is as big and vibrant as ever. This is due in part to the efforts of a Laramie, Wyoming, psychologist, R. Leo Sprinkle, who sponsors an annual summer conference on the University of Wyoming campus. 1 hose attending are mostly individuals convinced that the Galactic Federation—a sort of extraterrestrial United Nations—has placed them on Earth to spread the cosmic gospel. In a sense these conferences function as revival meetings in which the faith is renewed even as the larger world continues to scoff.
NAKED SPACE PEOPLE?
Two outlandish yet similar tales told half a century apart seem to indicate that extraterrestrial beings may at times appear nude. On April 19, 1897, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed a letter from one W. H. Hopkins. Three days earlier, near Springfield, Missouri, Hopkins encountered a beautiful nude woman standing outside a landed “airship.” As he approached, a similarly clad man stepped up to protect her.
Though neither being spoke English, Hopkins convinced them of his peaceful intentions. Asked where they came from, they “pointed upwards, pronouncing a word which sounded like Mars.” On March 28, 1950, Samuel Eaton Thompson reportedly met up with nude Venusian men, women, and children in a forest outside Mineral, Washington. Friendly but childlike, they spoke “uneducated” English.
Whereas Hopkins’ Martians were sweating in the spring temperatures, Thompson’s Venusians were cold because of the respective distances of the two planets from the sun. Still, not all contactees are con artists, by any means. In 1962 Gloria Lee, who chronicled her psychic contacts with “J.W.” of Jupiter in Why We Are Here (1959), starved to death in a Washington motel room after a two-month fast for peace ordered by her space friends. In 1954, in the face of massive press ridicule, followers of Dorothy Martin, who communicated with extraterrestrials through automatic writing, quit jobs and cut all other ties as they awaited a prophesied landing of a flying saucer that would pick them up just before geological upheavals caused massive destruction.
The charlatan contactees typically claim phys¬ ical encounters, nearly always have photographs and other artifacts (in one especially brazen instance, packets of hair from a Venusian dog) to “prove” it, and in general behave more like
ARE YOE A STAR PERSON?
Contactee chronicler Brad Steiger says you may be a Star Person if you are physically attractive, have a magnetic personality, require little sleep, hear unusually well, work in the healing or teaching profession, and harbor the suspicion that this world is not your home. Steiger discovered this while working on a book on space channeling. When he announced his discovery in the May 1, 1979, issue of the National Enquirer, he was inundated with letters from people who recognized themselves.
According to Steiger, there are four kinds of Star People—Refugees, Utopians, Energy Essences, and reincarnated E.T.’s—all of whom have been placed on Earth to prepare it for the great changes that will come in the wake of worldwide disasters that will precede mass landings by the Star People’s off-world relatives. In his 1981 book, The Star People, Steiger predicted a pole shift and worldwide famine in 1982, World War III in the mid-1980s, and Armageddon in 1989.