There are few tales in the world of UFOlogy that don't have a lot of supporters. The flimsiest stories have dozens of web sites and blogs beating the drum for their veracity. The paranoid nature of a certain segment of that community insures that any story is too implausible or unsupported by facts is the target of a misinformation campaign (or worse). In the case of George Adamski, even some of the hard-core conpiracy-theorists admit that he was a charlatan or long overdue for a trip to the rubber room. Adamski (1891 – 1965) was a Polish-born American who said he saw and photographed ships from other planets. He also claims to have met and chatted with people from other planets, and even gone on space flights with them.
He wrote several books about his adventures with the aliens, including the 1953 best seller
Flying Saucers Have Landed.
He was the most prominent contactee yet known. However his fame was as fleeting as the veracity of his story, and his followers fell away as his claims became more and more questionable amnd improbable. By the time he died, he was pretty much universally considered a hopeless nutjob. And yet, he still has plenty of supporters out there. The web site
http://www.gafintl-adamski.com/html/AboutGA.htm says the following:
"In the last years of the 1940's, George Adamski was one of the very first people to publicly reveal his encounters and experiences relating to the UFO phenomena. Through his devotion and courage to speak, he personally became responsible for pioneering the movement towards establishing greater public awareness and education regarding the existence of extraterrestrial life. "
Both George, and his parents, claimed they were contacted by extra terrestrials when Adamski was very young. Eventually he would lecture on the "cosmic philosophy" of the aliens. Adamski's science fiction book was titled
Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus. A His idea in this book was to kind of soften up the public on the idea of aliens and space travel. He then prsented a lot of that material as fact in a later (cough cough) nonfiction book,
Flying Saucers Have Landed.
In the late 1940s, Adamski and his disciples began showing photos of what they claimed were ships from other planes. According to some folks, they looked very similar to the lids from the water coolers he sold for a living.
His best known and most widespread claim (in UFOlogy circles) was that on November 20, 1952 he and friends were in the Mojave Desert where they saw a large submarine-shaped object hovering in the sky. Adamski said he believed that the ship was looking for him so he went away from the main road. A shuttle or transporter from the main UFO landed. Adamski claimed he and aan alien communicated telepathically and through hand signals. The alien, named Orthon, was Venutian, and expressed concern over nuclear weapons on earth. Later in life, Adamski claimed he met other people from Venus, Mars, and Saturn) and said he was taken on flights by them, including one around the moon where he observed valleys and bases.
He had considerable support from UFO proponents around the world. But just about every assertion and "fact" about aliens and UFOs has legions of believers and skeptics. If you believe the stories, you are a few bricks shy of a full load, and if you doubt them, you've been brainwashed by government disinformation agents
TIME magazine predictably called him "a crackpot from California". The scientific discovery that Venus and other planets in the solar system were unable to sustain any form of life (at least that's the current story), severely damaged his claims of talking to friendly aliens from those planets. If you talk about aliens, they need to be from Draco or Zeta Reticulon, or somewhere else we know little about.
Adamski denounced the photos from the first Russian lunar probe in 1959 as fakes. He later announced he would attend a conference on the planet Saturn. Following this revelation, most of his followers abandoned ship. George Adamski died on the east coast in 1965, but I could steer you to at least a dozen or so web sites and blogs that worship him as a prophet
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