George Adamski: many of you probably heard this name before. It belongs to one of the most famous contactees in the history of ufology. In the 1930s, Adamski was running a monastery named “The Royal Order of Tibet”, which granted him a special permit to make sacrificial wine during the prohibition law. Curiously, the monastery was disbanded after the prohibition ended. After that, Adamski mounted a burger stand in the vicinity of the Mount Palomar Observatory. He claimed having helped the scientists at Palomar at photographing UFOs, a claim they denied.
This Polish-American, with interests in the fields of astronomy and oriental philosophies, narrated in several books (starting with “Flying Saucers Have Landed”) his experiences with the “space people”. According to Adamski, it all began on the 20th November 1952, in the Mojave Desert (California, USA), when he and some friends noticed a cigar-shaped craft being pursued by military jets. Before it disappeared from sight, it ejected a silver disc, which landed some distance away.
When Adamski arrived at the place where the saucer landed he was greeted by a “man” wearing a one-piece suit. After a little conversation, supposedly through the medium of telepathic transmission, Adamski was told that this being was from planet Venus. Apparently, he was utterly concerned about the possibility of atomic bomb radiation reaching other planets and causing damage. He also told Adamski that Earth was being visited by several other species from the solar system and beyond.
Many other contracts followed this one. Adamski was taken aboard the ships and visited several places around in space and the dark side of the moon. Here, he claimed having seen such things as wooded valleys and cities and water streams, things that were never detected by the space missions from Earth. Adamski also took a great number of photographs from the cigar-shaped mother ships and close-ups of the smaller disc-shaped “scout craft”.
Many of the wonders described by Adamski lack credibility and the whole case can be seen as a hoax. However, even skeptics were impressed with the apparent sincerity of George Adamski. Either he truly believed he contacted a man from Venus, or he was a damned good storyteller.
Furthermore, other people around the world who had never heard about Adamski sighted identical or similar objects to the scout craft. One of these people was a little boy called Stephen Darbishire, who took two photographs in Coniston, one day in February 1954. An aeronautical engineer, Leonard Cramp, used an orthographic projection system to prove that the objects depicted in Adamski’s and Darbishire’s pictures were identical.
On his first trip into space, Adamski observed: “manifestations taking place all around us, as though billions upon billions of fireflies were flickering everywhere”. This is something that would not readily emerge from the imagination to be included in a space yarn. When astronaut John Glenn orbited Earth on 20th February 1962, he commented that “…a lot of the little things I thought were stars were actually a bright yellowish-green about the size and intensity as looking at a firefly on a real dark night…there were literally thousands of them.” Russian cosmonauts reported the same phenomenon, which turned out to be caused by billions of reflective dust particles. How could George Adamski have guessed that?
This son of a Polish immigrant generated a worldwide following. By the mid-sixties, however, his popularity was on the wane, as his claims became more and more outlandish. Just months before he died, on 26th February 1965, he was staying with a couple at their house in Silver Spring, Maryland. That afternoon Adamski and Madeleine Rodeffer saw something hovering through some trees. A car drew up and three men told Adamski: “Get your cameras—they’re here’, before driving off. Adamski grabbed the Rodeffers’ cine camera and produced some 8mm-color footage of a scout ship, which appeared to be suffering a distortion effect down one side. Was this meant to revive public interest in Adamski, or was it evidence that the contacts, on some level at least, were real?
One thing is for sure: Adamski never passed up an opportunity to make money out of his alien encounters. He wrote books, gave paid lectures and sold several copies of his famous photographs of “scout ships” and cigar-shaped “motherships”. He practically made a living out of his fantastic stories.
Of course, this wasn’t known by Adamski then, but Venus has surface temperatures of over 500 ºC (about 900 ºF), with an atmosphere of 96% carbon dioxide, and an extremely elevated atmospheric pressure. All of this for a planet shrouded in thick acid sulfur clouds, which reflect most of the light received back to outer space.
We advise you to read further on this case and be the judge yourself. Remember: facts are facts.