George Adamski
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George Adamski (April 17, 1891 – February 26, 1965) was a Polish-born American, one of the first people to publicly claim to have seen and photographed UFOs, met aliens and to have gone on flights with them. Adamski and others who made such claims were sometimes called "Contactees". He wrote several books relating to his claims, including the best-selling Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), co-written with Desmond Leslie. His work is now generally considered fictional at best.
History
Adamski emigrated with his family to New York City in 1893. He served with the U.S. Army from 1913-1916 and with the National Guard until 1919. His post-war activities are unclear but he settled in California in the late 1920s and by 1940 was a self-appointed professor of the Royal Order of Tibet, an organisation he founded. He gave lectures on philosophy and "Universal Law" but the organisation had a short existence.
In 1949 Adamski wrote a science fiction book which had a space travel theme. Called Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus and published by Leonard-Freefield Co of Los Angeles, it was to greatly influence his subsequent writings, such as Inside The Space Ships, which echoed the fictional work's descriptions in great detail.
Adamski began claiming sightings of UFOs and taking photographs and film of them, and in the early 1950s he was describing encounters with aliens. His best publicised claimed encounter was on November 20, 1952 when he and friends were in the Mojave Desert. Adamski said they saw a large cigar-shaped object hovering in the sky. Adamski believed that the ship was looking for him and so went into the desert by himself. There he saw a silver disc land and an entirely humanoid alien exit from the disc. Adamski said he approached him and they communicated telepathically and through hand signals. Adamski said the alien, named Orthon, was from Venus and expressed to Adamski his concern over the development of nuclear weapons. Adamski claimed to have met other aliens later (mostly from Venus but also from Mars and Saturn) and said he was taken on flights by them, including one around the moon where he observed valleys and cities. After his meeting with Orthon, Adamski was able to take plaster casts of what he claimed were the Venusian's footprints.
Five years after publishing his first book, Adamski took some of the fictional material from that book and combined it as fact within Flying Saucers Have Landed. He later published Inside The Flying Saucers and Flying Saucer Farewell and travelled the world on lecture tours.
He had considerable support from UFO proponents worldwide, but also attracted much scorn, TIME magazine going so far as to call him "a crackpot from California". The discovery that Venus and other planets in the solar system were unable to sustain any form of life, however, severaly hurt his claims. After denouncing the photographs taken by the first Soviet lunar probe in 1959 as fakes and announcing he was going to Saturn for a conference, many of his supporters became disaffected and his reputation rapidly declined. He died, aged 74, of a heart attack, in Maryland.
Trivia
The Japanese name for the 1985 Transformer Autobot, Cosmos, is "Adams", a tribute to George Adamski.
External link
- Adamski Foundation (http://www.gafintl-adamski.com/)
- George Adamski biography (http://www.ufopsi.com/ufodc/george_adamski.html)
- Skeptical critique of Adamski's claims as untenable (http://www.skepticreport.com/ufo/adamski.htm)da:George Adamski