The contactees are that group of disparate individuals who, mainly between the early ’50s and early ’70s, claimed contact with aliens from other planets within our solar system.
Their stories were more amazing than any contemporary science fiction, yet they have become the forgotten people of ufology. Where once their thrilling yarns of saucer rides to the far side of the Moon sold thousands of books and took up acres of newsprint, they have largely been consigned to the ufological shredder. Was it because once their claims of humanoid life on the Moon, Mars and Venus were scientifically trashed, they just looked silly? Or has the post-Hopkins, abduction-obsessed version of ufology tried to sideline them because they don’t make historical sense in the development of the subject? Either way, the contactees are out of fashion and shunned, even by historians of the subject, who should know better.
Nick Redfern, author of UFO books ranging from the serious to the ‘popular’, has taken the bull by the horns and produced the (so far) most detailed book on the subject. Thus, we get a whistlestop tour of the old favourites, the Great Guru Adamski and his ‘look at me’ contactee stories, Truman Bethurum, who fell for leggy space babe Aura Rhanes, and a cast of many more, each seemingly trying to outdo each other in cosmic one-upmanship. And, of course, at the time – in those hazy, halcyon saucer dream days of the ’50s and ’60s – these tales were lapped up by a saucer faithful who wanted cosmic release from the grey, Cold War drudgery. The contactees were so popular that George van Tassel – himself a contactee – was able to hold annual conferences in the Californian desert at the fabulous Giant Rock, fun precursors to the later, dourer UFO conferences.
And, of course, despite the unproven claims of the abductees and their proponents, the intelligence agencies were interested in the contactees. Not because they had a hotline to the stars, but because the ‘messages’ given to them by space folk were essentially antithetical to the consumer boom of the ’50s and ’60s. Messages of equality, love and peace, early ecological concerns and speculation about new ways of living were emphatically not what military-industrialist governments of the US and UK wanted spread around. There was a real belief that Communists could harness the contactees and their organisations for their own subversive ends. Redfern cites UK police files, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, which indicate that the Ætherius Society was watched for that very reason. But within ufology there are always at least two sides to every story, and Redfern suggests it could also have been possible that the FBI were using the contactees to spread disinformation about UFOs and aliens in order to bury genuine UFO cases. Evidence is much more tenuous for this, but it is an intriguing line of research which may pay dividends.
Redfern, besides covering some of the barely known contactees, also examines the methods some of them used which may have accounted for their experiences. Many – such as the Ætherius Society’s George King – used meditation and channelled their alien contacts while in a trance, faked or otherwise. Others, Redfern suggests, using compelling examples, may have accessed states of mind normally only found in psychedelic drug experiences, the chemical basis for which is pre-existing in our bodies.
In the closing chapters, Redfern examines the theories of Mac Tonnies (crypto-terrestrials, who have lived alongside us on Earth for millennia) and Colin Bennett (unintelligible postmodern gobbledygook about control systems). As with all good ufology, the theories and theorists eventually become more bizarre than their subject matter!
The best analysis of the contactees is that they were an unrelated bunch of fantasists, mystics, hucksters and conmen (sometimes all of those at once), with some, possibly, having connections to the intelligence services. Their story is a wild ride – and much more interesting than reading about abductees’ claims of being taken aboard and probed. Ufologists can, if they pay attention, learn much of how ufology got to its present state by looking at the contactees instead of ignoring them.
The definitive academic work on the contactees is yet to be written. While you wait for that, you will find enough stories, theories and speculation about this fascinating group of space-age messiahs in Nick Redfern’s history picnic to keep you in mind food for many months.
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