FT269


UFO contactees fall, very broadly, into three groups: those who claim (or claimed) to have met and conversed with spacepeople in person, and to have taken trips on their craft; those who channel communications from extra­terrestrials; and those who have been inspired by their contacts to go on to found quasi-religious sects. There is some overlap among these groups, perhaps inevitably, as a key element of contacteeism is the commentary and advice about life on Earth that the extra­terrestrials freely provided. Except for a few sidetracks, this entry focuses on reportedly physical contacts with people from outer space.

The most famous contactee of the 1950s remains George Adamski (see FT160:49). On 20 November 1952, about 18km from Desert Center, Cali­fornia, Adamski saw (he said) a man whose “beauty of… form surpassed anything I had ever seen”, he later stated, and whose shoulder-length, sandy-coloured wavy hair glistened “more beautifully than any woman’s I have ever seen”. His skin was the colour of a sun-tanned Caucasian’s. He seemed to be beardless. The alien – who had apparently come from a disc-shaped craft sighted earlier – was wearing a single-piece, finely-woven suit with no visible fast­eners or pockets. Adamski thought the outfit was a uniform of some kind. Through a mixture of hand signals and telepathy, the man (whom Adamski was later to learn was named Orthon) told Adamski that he was from Venus. The Venusians were there, he said, because they were concerned about radiation from atomic explos­ions on Earth: too many would destroy the planet. His craft was powered by ‘magnetism’.

Adamski published his story as part of Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953, co-authored with Desmond Leslie; see FT154:26; 225:40–47). The 1955 sequel, Inside The Spaceships, recounts how in the months after his meeting in the desert he met other Venusians who were living in Los Angeles. The aliens also took him on a trip to view the far side of the Moon, where he saw snowy mountains with timbered slopes, lakes and rivers, and a bustling city where vehicles floated through the streets. After feasting on vegetarian food, Adamski was shown similar scenes beamed from Venus. The natives, he was told, had a normal lifespan of 1,000 Earth years, thanks to their healthy diet and the protection that their planet’s cloud cover gave them from the Sun’s rays.


IN THE MASTER'S FOOTSTEPS
Most of the contactees who followed Adamski followed his template. Daniel Fry enjoyed a saucer-borne 30-minute round trip from New Mexico to New York courtesy of alien A-lan and his crew. They were descended from an Earthly super-race who had survived a nuclear conflagration 30,000 years before, settled on Mars, then taken to living in space. Their startlingly original message for mankind: “Understanding is the key to peace and happiness.”

Orfeo Angelucci met ‘Space Brothers’ who warned him that ‘material advancement’ was threatening humanity’s evolution and unless we changed our ways and learned to co-operate, a major catastrophe would strike the Earth in 1986. They also vouchsafed that “The speed of light is the speed of truth.” In the course of many encounters and saucer rides, Angelucci visited the aliens’ (unnamed) planet and met Jesus of Nazareth.

Howard Menger’s contacts began in 1932 when he was eight, and involved a curvaceous blonde, whom he met in a wood. Menger’s ‘Space People’ were from Venus, Mars and Saturn. They gave him a model of a ‘free energy motor’, although no one ever saw it working. Menger (shown on facing page) returned from a visit to the Moon with specimens of the local potatoes, which boasted five times more protein than terrestrial varieties. Menger handed his lunar tubers for testing to the US Government; perhaps predictably, he never saw them again. He was much pre­occupied with nutrition, and zealously devoted 63 pages of his book about his contacts to soil care and dietary matters.

Worth mentioning too, and at slightly greater length, is the generally overlooked Buck Nelson, a one-time cowpoke turned dirt-farmer from Mountain View, in the Missouri Ozarks. In July 1954, a UFO visited his farm and zapped him with a ray that left him cured of chronic lumbago and neuritis. In March 1955, the craft returned; this time Nelson had a long conversation with its occupants – an unnamed trainee pilot, an alien named Bob Solomon, and Bucky, a young Earthman who’d decided to live with the aliens. Also in the party was a 175kg dog named Bo. (This prodigious pooch later came to live with Nelson, but was “too shy” to meet visitors – and was eventually buried on the farm. Nelson sold small packets of Bo’s hair to those attending the flying saucer picnic-cum-conventions he held over the next decade.)

In late April 1955, Bucky, Bob and Bo returned to take Nelson – and his own dog, Teddy – on a journey into space. They first visited Mars, where Nelson observed the canal system, and horses and cows grazing. They stopped at “a ruler’s house” for a good meal (Teddy had fish; the human diet included meat), and Nelson was told “that there are other races and colours of people there, but… I was taken to where the people were just like the ones I was used to.” Next stop was “the light side of the moon”. There were houses and quarries, but nothing grew. After another meal, they set off for Venus, where day and night are divided into 17 hours each. Cars here “skim along 3 to 5 feet off the ground”, which “eliminates the need for roads. No roads, no police force, no jails, no government buildings, no wars. It isn’t hard to understand why their taxes compare to ours like a nickel compares to a hundred dollars. When I started connecting this saving to the fact that the things they use are built to last for ever so much longer than ours and that sickness is almost unknown then it wasn’t so hard to understand why they work only about an hour a day and never more than three. Even housework, the spacemen told me, requires no more than one to three hours… They really do live by the laws of God.”


BEYOND THE SUN
Not all the 1950s contactees made the mistake of claiming their alien mentors came from planets in our local Solar System – planets that scientists already knew or strongly suspected were incap­able of supporting life. Truman Bethurum was informed by Aura Rhanes, a luscious spaceship captain who spoke perfect, rhyming English, that she and her crew came from Clarion, a planet hidden from terrestrial sight behind the Moon. (Bethurum at least had the wherewithal to ask if perhaps she meant the Sun.) Clarion too was free of disease, crime, and politicians, and its natives – organised in a matriarchal society – enjoyed, or endured, lifespans of 1,000 years. Bethurum published accounts of these meetings in a California newspaper in 1953, and in book form in 1954. Bethurum’s tales may have come to the attention of Chicago housewife Dorothy Martin, who through automatic writing received messages from Clarion warning that a great flood would destroy the Earth on 21 December 1954. The cult that grew up around her became the subject of a classic of social psychology, When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter (University of Minnesota, 1956).

Interestingly enough, Clarion is the subject of a science-fiction novel by William Greenleaf (Tor 1988), but lives on more vigorously in the form of Lady Clarion, “from the Planet Clarion, a High Expression of The Love Principle, here to aid Earth during its Changeover”, who is an entity channelled by The Brotherhood of Light. Other ETs known to the Brother­hood include the ubiquitous Comte St Germain, “Champion of America, Dispenser of The Violet Transmuting Flame, Eolia (Elihu in the Celestial Realms) Of the Great Karmic Board” and one called, for better or worse, Master Hilarion of the Fifth Ray.

Another notable ‘extra-solar’ contactee was South African Elizabeth Klarer (obit. FT83:46). On 7 April 1956 (then aged 46), she came upon a handsome humanoid, dressed in a cream-coloured suit, beside his UFO. His name was Akon and his home the planet Meton, near Alpha Centauri. Klarer took a trip with him in his craft, which was powered by ‘natural forces’, and discussed life on his planet and music in particular. Despite her age, Klarer became pregnant as a result of later meetings with Akon; he took her to Meton, where their son Ayling was born. Metonites were vegetarian, and the planet was par for the contactee course – free from war, disease, politics and money. Klarer stayed there only four months: she had difficulty breathing the atmo­sphere. Her last contact with Akon was in 1963, when he visited her in South Africa with their son.


NOT SO CREDIBLE WITNESSES
Even from these condensed accounts, we can see that contactee claims were marked by characteristics that might be generalised as follows:

• The ETs are uniformly human in appearance, often of notable pulchritude, and frequently mix undetected with humans on Earth
• Their home planets are often cast as ideal societies, free of war, crime, disease, hunger, taxes and, in some disheartening cases, the eating of meat; the inhabitants have extremely long lifespans
• These societies often belong to a wider ‘galactic federation’ of space-faring civilisations; their intentions toward Earthlings are always benign
• The ETs bring ‘messages for mankind’, often warning of the dangers of nuclear catastrophe, sometimes of ecological collapse
• Despite this benevolent concern, the ‘Space Brothers’ do not approach governments directly, but contact obscure people in humble positions
• The home planets are places unknown to astronomers, sometimes defying celestial mechanics; or, if known, are known to be uninhabitable

On the face of it, then, the 1950s contactees’ stories are intrinsic­ally far-fetched. Adding to their implausibility, the contactees contradicted one another in detail at least as much as they agreed. Some seemed to be vying for the title of Earliest Contactee, pushing the dates of their first meetings with ‘Space People’ back into the 1940s – implying that they had one over the official grandaddy of the tribe, the amazing George Adamski, who was the first to publish such a tale.

For all these reasons, the 1950s contactees infuriated the largely ET-nuts-and-bolts-oriented ufological establishment – ‘serious’ ufologists – who, relates historian David M Jacobs, considered that “contactees and their publicity posed a serious threat to legitimate UFO investigation and research groups. These groups thought the contactees were confusing the public about whose activities were legitimate and whose were not…” Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York in its newsletter bemoaned the fact that contactees received so much publicity in the news media. The mass­ive publicity, the article stated, “conspires to help the audacious ‘contactee’ on his path to fame and fortune – and in the process to help wreck the reputation of flying saucers, which are more and more indissolubly linked, in the public mind, with the fantasies of these well-tale-spinners.’” [The UFO Controversy in America, Indiana UP 1975, pp124–6] According to Jacobs, this “succeeded in entrenching even deeper the ridicule factor in the public imagination”. [loc. cit.]

We observe that the ‘ridicule factor’ has been no bar at all over the decades to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people who have reported UFO-related experiences, whether mundane or exotic. Nonetheless, Jacobs records a genuine exasperation, even anger, with the contactees, which continues to this day. As a result, the 1950s contactees and the small band of their successors have been written out of ‘serious’ ufological history, except as aberrant curiosities. This seems to us a misreading of the history, for it is based on the presumption that ‘real’ ufology is a vocation in pursuit of definitive answers to a mystery, of identifying the ‘facts’ behind a phenomenon. Whereas we would regard ufology as a broad church with a big tent, which in its time has witnessed everything from scientific experiments and historical scholarship to byzantine conspiracy theories and ‘evidence’ for Earth being a focus of wars between sundry alien species. From that point of view, the contactees have an integral, not marginal, place in ufological history. And they tell us something else about the nature of ufology.

It is something of a commonplace to relate the post-World War II fascination with UFOs, and the contactees in particular, to Cold War paranoia. For almost simultaneously with the emergence of nuclear fusion weapons, the saucers disgorged celestial beings deeply troubled for humanity’s future. The USA tested its first H-bomb on 1 November 1952; on 20 November, George Adamski met Orthon in the desert in California. Too many nuclear tests, the spacefarer said, would “destroy the Earth”. Similar concerns were aired by most of the aliens who lectured other contactees of the Fifties. When such portents of doom weren’t explicit, Earthlings’ fecklessness was plainly implied by the utopian societies in which the Space Brothers lived.

The Space Brothers were at least on our side. By the end of the 1980s, those industrial-scale abductors the Grays had shown themselves to be anything but. Yet the abduction scenario had come to feature three motifs that strikingly echoed those of the Space Brothers. Scenes of future devastation were played to the aliens’ captives; they repeatedly insisted on their concern for the Earthly environment; and (in a kind of lateral inversion) the notion spread that the Grays themselves were a dying race. Besides revealing an unmistakable link between the 1950s contactees and later abductees, the themes raised by both sets of interactors with aliens suggest that neither the quasi-angelic Space Brothers nor the heartless Grays of abduction lore are objective entities, but project­ions of humanity’s own nature. Small wonder, then, that ‘serious’ ufologists, who took abduction tales remarkably literally, wanted to keep the contactees out of the big picture.