George Adamski: The First Contactee, the Venusians and the Desert Center Meeting of 1952

Adamski was a teacher of the occult before he was a witness. Born in Poland in 1891 and raised in Dunkirk, New York, he served in the Army in the First World War, drifted west, and in the 1930s founded a study group in Laguna Beach, California, called the Royal Order of Tibet, which taught a blend of Theosophy and Eastern religion that he called Universal Law and which, during Prohibition, held a permit to make sacramental wine. By 1940 he had moved his followers to a plot on the slopes of Palomar Mountain, where he ran a café and a small observatory of his own a few miles from the great telescope; the address let journalists call him Professor Adamski of Mount Palomar, and he did not correct them. He photographed lights in the sky from the café from 1947 on, and had sold pictures to newspapers before he had a story to go with them.

The story arrived in the autumn of 1952, a year when saucers were on every front page and the Air Force had just been embarrassed by the Washington flap. Adamski was 61, a short, weathered man with a lecturer's manner and a following that already believed the universe was populated by wise beings. He had also, by his own account, been telling his study group for a decade that the planets were inhabited, which is the context in which the Desert Center meeting should be read.

Seven people drove into the desert east of Los Angeles that Thursday to look for saucers, and one of them found one. Adamski's companions were George Hunt Williamson and his wife, Alfred Bailey and his wife, and two women from the Palomar group, Lucy McGinnis and Alice Wells; they parked on the highway near Desert Center, saw, they all later said, a large cigar-shaped object high overhead, and Adamski asked to be driven a mile away to be alone with his camera. What followed, in his telling, was a bell-shaped craft settling behind a ridge and a man walking toward him: about five and a half feet tall, with long sandy hair to the shoulders, a face of great beauty and no beard, dressed in a one-piece brown garment like a ski suit. They spoke by gesture and, Adamski said, telepathy. The man was from Venus; his people were worried about the radiation from atomic tests; they came in peace and had been visiting for a long time. He declined to be photographed, took a plate from Adamski's camera, and walked back to his craft, leaving footprints whose soles bore symbols that the party cast in plaster.

The six companions, watching from the road through binoculars, signed a notarized affidavit that they had seen the craft and a figure. None of them had heard the conversation. Williamson, who went on to write his own contactee books, later said that he had seen Adamski talking with someone; Bailey and the others saw a man and a craft at a distance. The affidavit is the case's whole evidence apart from Adamski's word, and it is more than most contactees ever produced.

The photographs made him famous. On December 13, 1952 Adamski said the scout craft returned to Palomar Gardens and hovered while he photographed it through his telescope, and the picture, a bell-shaped hull with three spheres under a flared skirt, became the most reproduced UFO image of the decade. Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), co-written with the Irish aristocrat Desmond Leslie, who supplied a history of ancient visitations, sold in the hundreds of thousands and was translated across Europe; Adamski toured, lectured, was received by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands in 1959, an audience that caused a small crisis in her government, and claimed a private meeting with Pope John XXIII in 1963 that the Vatican has never confirmed.

Inside the Space Ships (1955) took him off the ground. Adamski described being collected in Los Angeles by two men from Mars and Saturn, driven to the desert, flown to a Venusian mother ship in orbit and, on later trips, to Venus itself, where he saw cities, forests and lakes and was instructed by a Master; he described the far side of the Moon as forested and inhabited. The claims were testable, and the tests came in. Mariner 2 passed Venus in December 1962 and measured a surface temperature of more than 400 degrees Celsius under clouds of sulphuric acid; Soviet and American probes photographed the Moon's far side and found craters. Adamski said the instruments had been fooled, and died on April 23, 1965, in Maryland, still lecturing. The photographs were examined by the skeptics of the following decades and matched to a lamp shade, a chicken brooder and a model built from one, and the famous hoaxes article places them beside the Billy Meier pictures they inspired.

He invented a genre and a species. Within two years of Desert Center a dozen Americans had met their own Venusians and Saturnians: Truman Bethurum's captain Aura Rhanes from the planet Clarion, Daniel Fry's A-lan, Orfeo Angelucci's visitors, Howard Menger's blonde Venusian who turned out to be his future wife. All described the same being, tall, fair, beautiful, gentle and worried about the bomb, and the being took a name in the literature that has outlasted the contactees: the Nordic, later the Pleiadian, the Space Brother. George Van Tassel's Giant Rock Spacecraft Conventions, held in the Mojave from 1954 to 1977, drew thousands to hear the contactees and are the ancestor of every UFO conference since; the channelers who receive the Space Brothers' messages without the drive to the desert are Adamski's heirs with the travel removed, and the CE-5 movement's invitation to benevolent visitors is his Universal Law with a meditation.

The history of UFOs treats the contactee decade as the moment the subject split: the investigators of the Air Force and the civilian groups, who wanted radar tracks and Air Force files, disowned Adamski as an embarrassment, and the abduction narratives of the 1960s onward replaced his friendly Venusian with the Grey and its table. Yet the figure he described walks through this Knowledge Base still, in the Vulcans and Kryptonians of fiction and in every account of a tall, calm visitor with a message about our weapons. Whether he met anyone at Desert Center, he gave the twentieth century its picture of what a good alien looks like.