Was UFO Contactee George Adamski Really a Hoaxer?

This might interest some of the peeps here who are into ufology and the question of whether aliens really are visiting the Earth. I’m a member of ASSAP, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomenon. It’s an amateur psychical research group, which was set up in the 1980s to investigate spontaneous cases of ghosts poltergeists, UFOs and so on in the field, as opposed to the laboratory work of the Society for Psychical Research. It differs from other psychical research and ghost hunting groups by using scientific protocols in its investigations as well as mediums. It’s membership comprises wide variety of people, from those with backgrounds in science and medicine, professional investigators like the police, and ordinary people fascinated with and keen to explore these bizarre phenomena for themselves. It has two magazines, Seriously Strange, which is the more popular of the two and similar in tone to the Fortean Times, and Anomaly: the Journal of Research into the Paranormal, which is rather more academic with articles properly referenced. The most recent edition of Anomaly, for May this year, carries an article by Dr John Tate, ‘George Adamski: The Luxury of Disbelief’ (pp. 172-181). And it’s truly perplexing as it questions whether Adamski was the fraud everyone, or nearly everyone, thinks he was.

Adamski was a Polish-America restauranteur, owning a hot-dog establishment on Mount Palomar. He was the first of the UFO contactees, men and women who believed they’d met aliens, who had given them special knowledge and messages for humanity. They emerged in the 1950s, and many of these messages were naturally warnings from the ufonauts about the threat of nuclear weapons. Adamski was deeply interested in eastern mysticism, and claimed to have met a Venusian out in the Californian desert and observed and photographed his spacecraft. The alien, Orthon, also left a footprint from his boots in the sand, of which Adamski and his fellows took a plaster cast. He seems to have been a dubious figure, at least. There’s a suggestion that he made have been bootlegging and smuggling hooch during Prohibition. He’s supposed to have told his cronies one evening that the end of Prohibition had been bad for him, as he had made money selling wine and telling the authorities it was for religious purposes. Presumably this was as part of the sacrament in Christian holy communion. His photographs have been analysed professionally. One of the alien ships was really his chicken hutch, while there have been claims since that the photograph of the classic UFO he made, which appears on the poster in Mulder’s wall in the X-Files with the slogan ‘I want to believe’, was really the top part of a kerosene or similar lantern. It’s so much taken for granted that Adamski hoaxed his encounter that the late British UFO Magazine, which wasn’t particularly sceptical, titled an article about him ‘The Great Pretender’. There was a little spat a few years ago between the Fortean Times and Colin Bennet, who at that time was the webmaster of a site claiming to be the ‘real Fortean Times‘. Bennet was an enthusiast of Postmodernism and had just then published a book about Adamski, Looking for Orthon. Bennet frequently denounced on his website what he called ‘the cult of the real’ and seems to taken the view of the extreme Greek sceptics and contemporary Postmodern philosophers that there was no objective reality. He had appeared on a panel at the Fortean Times Unconvention that year, where he got annoyed with the Fortean Times crew who tried to get him to say if he really thought Adamski was genuine. Hence there was a lot of ranting and personal attacks on his blog against Lance Sieveking and the rest of the Gang of Fort.

I’d always assumed that Adamski was making it all up, though one of the great commenters on this blog has strongly argued that he was instead the victim of a hoax by the US military or intelligence services. I don’t know about that, but Adamski certainly was suspected by them of being a Communist. In the above article, Dr Tate suggests that there are good reasons for thinking Adamski may have been genuine. Firstly, unlike the popular myth, he didn’t own a hamburger stall on Palomar. It was actually quite large, and more like a restaurant. His account of his journey into space aboard the Venusian craft contains details that were only confirmed later during the manned spaceflight missions of later decades. He mentioned ‘fairylights’ surrounding the Venusian UFO, which was unknown at the time but later observed by astronauts. He also said that in space he saw no stars, which again is what the astronauts observed, contrary to expectations. Other experts have analysed his UFO photograph, to reveal details showing it definitely wasn’t part of a lantern and appears to have been a real object.

Furthermore, Adamski wasn’t alone when he met Orthon. He was accompanied by six other people, who also observed the Venusian and his craft. One of these other witnesses was George Hunt Williamson, a professional anthropologist, who carried out pioneering work excavating the remains of the pre-Columbian Amerindian civilisations in South America. Williamson was also into spiritualism and became an advocate of the ancient astronaut theory that claims humanity was visited in the past by aliens. These were responsible for the creation of the world’s ancient monuments like Stonehenge, the pyramids, Easter Island and so on. Later on Williamson changed his name to d’Obrenovic. I think he may also have become involved in far right politics. But at the time of the Adamski sighting he was a respected academic.

Tate says he has no idea what was going on, which I think is a fair description of ufology full stop. Some UFO sightings are hoaxes, misidentifications of ordinary objects seen under extraordinary conditions, hallucinations or confabulations produced by unusual psychological states, sightings of top secret military aircraft. Others, to me, seem genuinely paranormal in the sense they are more like a ghost sighting or similar supernatural event than nuts and bolts alien spacecraft. But who knows? Maybe a few UFOs have been of visiting spacecraft, or beings from the future or parallel worlds. And may be there isn’t a single explanation at all for the UFO phenomenon.

Tate’s article raises some interesting questions about Adamski, and certainly made me wonder if there was a kernel of truth in what he said. If anyone’s interested, I’ll post a longer piece about the article and some of the points it makes.