A UFO-believer looks at “contactees”:
“The first and foremost among them was a fellow named George Adamski. He was a man of meager scholastic attainments, but he made up for that shortcoming by having an excellent imagination, a pleasing personality, and an apparently endless supply of gall.
George established the ground rules for the contactees which they have dutifully followed. He was the first— and he showed that there was considerable loot to be made by peddling tales of talking with space people. George instinctively realized that everything had to be pretty nebulous; he knew that details would be disastrous.
Prior to becoming associated with a hamburger stand on the road to Mt. Palomar, George had worked in a hamburger stand as a grill cook. With this scientific background he wrote, in his spare time, a document which he called An Imaginary Trip to the Moon, Venus and Mars. He voluntarily listed it with the Library of Congress for copyright purposes as a work of fiction.
That was in 1949.
His effort did not attract many customers but it did attract the attention of a lady writer who saw gold in them there space ships. She made a deal with George to rewrite his epic; she was to furnish the skilled writing and he was to furnish the photographs of the space ships.
This lady brought the finished manuscript to me for appraisal and she brought with it a clutch of the crudest UFO photographs I had seen in years. I declined to have anything to do with the mess and she left my office in a bit of a huff.
In its revised form it told a yarn of how George had ventured into the desert of southern California, where he met a "scout ship" from which stepped a gorgeous doll in golden coveralls. She spoke to him with a bell-like voice in a language which he did not understand, so they had to resort to telepathy, or something similar, to carry on their conversation. And then, as she prepared to leave him, she tapped out a message in the sand with her little boot. George realized that she wanted him to preserve this message (it was terribly important) and, having a pocket full of wet plaster of Paris (which he seemingly always carried with him on desert trips), George quickly made a plaster cast of the footprint with the message, which he eventually reproduced for the educational advancement of his readers, who were legion.

Of the numerous photographs which embellished the book let it be said that some of them could not have been taken as claimed. The others were crudely "simulated," as the Air Force put it charitably.
But for me the payoff was the alleged photograph of Adamski's "scout ship" in which he allegedly took a trip to Venus and returned. The picture as shown in his book was taken either on a day when three suns were shining or else it was a small object taken with three floodlights for illumination. After eight years of patient search I finally came to the conclusion that his space ship was in reality the top of a cannister-type vacuum cleaner, made in 1937. I doubt that many persons are traveling through space in vacuum cleaner tops.
Adamski communicated with me frequently. When he was questioned about the title of "professor" which he used, he explained that it was just an honorary title given to him by his "students," and that he never used it himself. George was evidently forgetful, for the letters he sent to me were always signed "Professor George Adamski."
But this congenial con man sold a jillion books to those who were eager to believe that somebody from space was crossing millions of miles of the trackless void for the dubious privilege of conversing telepathically with former hamburger cooks. Adamski
toured this country on the lecture circuit; then he branched out into Europe, where he even arranged a private confab with the Queen of The Netherlands, a maneuver which stirred up quite a bit of comment for the Queen, very little of which was favorable.
The bogus professor followed his first book with another volume but it did not meet with the ready acceptance which the public had granted his first offering. For one thing, some of his "witnesses" to his alleged meeting with the golden girl from a distant galaxy had changed their minds about both George and his story. And perhaps more importantly, several other contactees had rushed into print with yarns of having ridden in space ships and of having conversed with the operators thereof.
George Adamski died in 1965 of a heart attack. At the time of his death he was offering to teach people how to visit the planets Venus and Mars by self-hypnosis . . .for fifty dollars.”
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Adamski describes the flying saucers and meets with the Saturn Mother Ship.
Adamski
Frank Edwards on George Adamski
