"Some day when the cover-up has ended and all the bulldust has settled,
November 1952, may be marked by historians for something more than the
month in which 20 years of Democratic Party grip on the White House
came to an end.
To be sure, Dwight Eisenhower’s victory of 4 November deserves its
place in the sun: a hero of World War II climbing the final pinnacle
of public service at age 62, the reluctant Republican candidate
drafted into the race by popular demand.
But as Ike – as he was popularly known – celebrated his victory with
friends in a New York ballroom that night, neither he nor the millions
of other voters could have known that two weeks later, across the
country in the desert of Southern California, another American of
almost the same age, would realize a soaring ambition of an altogether
different kind, an achievement more remarkable in its own way than
that of the newly elected president.
On 20 November, under the distant gaze of six eye-witnesses, a few of
whom were watching through binoculars in the clear desert air, George
Adamski apparently met a man from another planet and communicated with
him for about 45 minutes.
Adamski’s friends, all of whom later swore supportive affidavits about
the remarkable events of that day, had accompanied their pied piper in
a cat-and-mouse car journey on the roads around the dusty stop-over
called Desert Center. It was cat-and-mouse with a difference: the
quarry in this case was a large cigar-shaped UFO floating serenely in
the blue sky, and the stalkers were Adamski and his friends shadowing
the craft in their two cars, waiting to pounce should the visitors
make a touchdown. The seven had been many hours on the road that day
on a UFO-hunting expedition prompted by one of Adamski’s hunches. When
they finally struck gold they were eating lunch on an isolated back
road 11 miles from Desert Center. After the silvery ship had floated
into view their excited leader had headed off into the hills on his
own, hoping for a face-to-face contact. He positioned himself with his
tripod-mounted telescope about half a mile from his friends and told
them not to approach until he signaled.
After some minutes they saw Adamski leave his position and head for a
ravine between two low hills. He approached another distant figure and
seemingly began to talk to him. Through the binoculars that were
passed from person to person his friends saw Adamski and the man
gesticulating to each other as they conversed. Alice Wells studied the
stranger closely and later drew a sketch of a man with long hair,
dressed in a one-piece suit that had a broad band at the waist and was
pulled tight at the wrists and ankles. One of the other observers,
Lucy McGinnis, had seen a small craft come down near where the unknown
visitor had appeared. “They stood talking to each other and we saw
them turn and go back up to the ship,” she said later. The witnesses’
view of the scout ship, as Adamski dubbed it, was not a good one. It
was seen as a bright and sparkling object rising and falling behind
some boulders. They told Irish investigator, Desmond Leslie, in 1954,
that when the ship had left the scene it shot up into the sky in a
brilliant flash. Twenty seven years later McGinnis described it in
more detail to another British researcher, Timothy Good: “…when it
left, it was just like a bubble or kind of like a bright light that
lifted up.
(rø-comment: then seemingly
increasing the vibration-freq.of the whole ship, making it capable
to enter the astral/4d level which is where the planetary jumps
/'travels' happen.)
Then George went out on to the highway and he motioned for
us to come out.” When they reached their leader he was babbling almost
incoherently. “If he was an actor,” said George Hunt Williamson, “then
he was the best actor I’ve ever known. He was out of his mind with
excitement.” Desmond Leslie interviewed the witnesses closely on what
happened next. They described how they had back-tracked with the
breathless Adamski to the scene of the contact, all the while
peppering him with questions. “I seemed to be in another world,”
Adamski later wrote. “My answer to the questions, were given in a daze.”
If his answers lacked clarity, his footprints did not. They were
imprinted clearly in the soft dirt. The group came upon smaller ones
with distinctive markings that the ‘spaceman’ had left. Williamson and
his wife Betty took plaster casts of the best examples. The small
prints led back to the site of the touchdown then stopped abruptly.
Adamski’s detailed account of his meeting with this handsome, human
looking visitor with the shoulder-length hair of a seventies hippie,
is described in detail in the book, Flying Saucers Have Landed, which
he co-authored in 1953 with Desmond Leslie.(link) The key point to be made
about this event and subsequent face-to-face encounters that he and
other credible witnesses reported in the 1950s was that the alien
interaction was taking place on these occasions with human looking
visitors, not Grey-type aliens. Not only were the encounters with
distinctly human types but these ‘space people’ generally communicated
in a benevolent and helpful way. They were concerned with the trends
on Earth, they said, often in plain English. Atomic bomb testing was
their number one concern. The witnesses who came forward to report
these more inspirational contacts were generally rubbished by the
mainstream press. These brave people were flippantly debunked as
wishful fantasists and grouped together under the derisory term ‘contactees’.
The word said it all without the need for enlargement; it had about it
the feel of other “ee” words – devotee, divorcee, debauchee. Their
detractors were not only the news media but ‘mainstream’ UFO research
groups who craved respectability and were terrified that reports of
commonsense, repeat meetings with human-like aliens, who sometimes
talked about the spiritual life, would bring the whole serious subject
into disrepute. If only the NICAPs, APROs and MUFONs – the biggest
research groups – had known that there was no chance that they could
insinuate their way into the good books of the myopic scientific
community, or get a fair hearing from the US government, no matter how
much they behaved themselves. That same government, operating in a
vastly resourced conspiracy, would stop at nothing to suppress and
discredit any attempt to elevate the subject to the level of the
respectable. No amount of hobnobbing in Washington or sneering at the
‘lunatic fringe’ was ever going to get ufology’s unctuous
conservatives on to the right side of the railway tracks.
The
contactees were like coarse gatecrashers at a refined dinner party,
blowhards who wedged thei r seats among the dignified social climbers
and ruined the artful agenda. But the hosts weren’t going to buy the
pitch anyway. No amount of decorous table talk or dexterity with the
cutlery was ever going to give the Donald Keyhoes, the Richard Halls,
Allen Hyneks and Walt Andruses the gravitas that they sought. Like
thousands of other sincere researchers and advocates who devoted
countless hours of hard and thankless work to the campaign for
official recognition, these people were doomed in their noble quest
even before they started. The apparatus that had been erected to lie
and obfuscate the issue could not tolerate a single chink in the
armour of deceit. No compromise, no partial admission was possible
without the integrity of the whole edifice of deception being
threatened.
In the early, romantic era of the flying saucers, the age of Elvis,
McCarthy, I Love Lucy, and delta-winged Dodges, a fascinating duality
of encounter emerged. The most secretive of the visitors – the greys –
who were not much engaged in encounter activity (at that time), were
crashing all round the place. They were furtive and shy but their
flawed technology kept blowing their cover. Their fatal mishaps
virtually monopolised official attention – the crash site clean-ups,
the cover stories, the corpse collections, the alien autopsies, the
reverse engineering of intact craft.
By contrast, the talkative and
likeable visitors described by the contactees never crashed their
craft. Their machines were far more reliable. The first group was a
disturbing enigma who left their calling card in a trail of debris and
lifeless bodies. The second were an open book but left no trace, apart
from the stories of those they had met.
The greys were far more credible as aliens. They looked liked aliens
should look – they looked different. They were ‘picture book’ ET’s.
They had wonky eyes and spindly limbs. Encounters with human visitors,
no matter how strong the collateral witnesses or photographic evidence,
were simply never going to cut it. If the right wing of ‘ufology’ was
ever going to move on from ‘sightings in the sky’ and let
flesh-and-blood aliens into the pantheon of dignified debate it was
only ever going to be the greys, especially once abduction activities
by these taciturn visitors stepped up after the 1960s.
And then there was the problem – which must be admitted – that the
most prominent of the contactees seemed to overegg the recipe from
time to time. The guileless millions who thought, in all their
delightful ingenuousness, that one day the truth about UFOs simply
must out, did not count on the quagmire that lay between the rock and
the hard place: on one side a seamlessly organised, taxpayer-funded
cover-up with all the manpower, surveillance tools and disinformation
techniques that the State could muster; on the other side witnesses
‘of the third kind’ with yarns that sometimes fell apart after a good
poke.
The Saintly S camp
The Janus face of the UFO ‘problem’ expressed itself most vividly in
the person of
George Adamski. He seemed to be half holy man, half huckster, a
fascinating blend of the sublime and the slippery. Adamski was two of
a kind. Where one George left off and the other started is hard to say.
But there is a tightly coiled stature here that needs to be released
to its full, awesome measure, and then we need to consider the
banalities of human nature that diminished the man’s standing and
legacy.
Posterity has allowed George Adamski to control his own biography. No
discerning writer sought to pin him down before he died in 1965 and
produce a vigorous and probing picture, especially of the explosive
last 13 years when his fame was world-wide and his photo instantly
recognisable. The scores of acquaintances, friends and family from his
first 60 years – the pre-flying saucer days – have gone. The
biographical sketch in his second book on UFOs, Inside the Space Ships,
published in 1956,
(link)
was penned by ghost writer Charlotte Blodget, a dab
hand at journalistic cosmetics. No doubt under George’s guidance, this
admirer from the Bahamas crafted a hagiographic four pages that
portrayed his life as a patiently compiled spiritual odyssey, from
small town poverty on the shores of Lake Erie to veneration as the
savant of Laguna Beach; Huckleberry Finn with a Polish accent punting
his way across the American Century in a leaky boat, gathering in a
trove of transcendental insights.
None of those who spent years in his presence in the forties and
fifties – which amounted to three or four admirers and his wife –
wrote anything that resembled a reminiscence. He married Mary
Shimbersky in 1917 but she died of cancer in 1954 without leaving
anything for annalists. For some reason a veil of silence descended.
Blodget failed to mention Mary’s death in her biographical sketch
written in 1955.
George’s own airbrushed account of his domestic
arrangements in the 1953-55 period leave her out as well. It was a
shrewd move that helped forestall gossip: indicating the marriage’s
beginning but not its ending served the useful purpose of fudging
Adamski’s unconventional domestic milieu after that time. Mary had
been around for the hard work during her husband’s back-to-the-land
projects in Valley Center-Palomar in the 1940s.
She was apparently a
devout Catholic, which, with George’s reincarnationist views, would
have made for interesting table talk. His move from the esoteric to
the extraterrestrial was a step too far for his wife. Once, she fell
on her knees begging him to stay away from meetings with his space
friends and discontinue his writings on the subject, he later told his
Swiss co-worker Lou Zinsstag.
But George could not stop anymore, he
told Zinsstag, not even for his wife. His hour had, indeed, arrived;
this is what it had all been leading to. Mary’s passing soon after,
had about it the quality of deus ex machina, a providential release
from marital attachments that freed Adamski for more than a decade of
relentless service to his mission. We do know that during his world
tour of 1959 George would flop out his wallet and show Mary’s photo
fondly to friends. Those who saw the snapshot remember her as a pretty
woman. One can imagine that life with George was not a bed of roses
from the word go. The union was childless and George was a rolling
stone. He served with the Army on the Mexican border for six months in
1918-19 (inflated to five years in the Blodget sketch) then drifted
from job to job with Mary in tow.
When finally they came to rest in
California and George had established himself as a full-time New Age
philosopher and teacher, Mary had to put up with two of his female
acolytes living on the premises. Lucy McGinnis signed on as voluntary
secretary to ‘Professor Adamski’, as he called himself, in the
mid-1940s. She worked for him loyally until the early 1960s when,
along with many of his other supporters, she deserted the work as his
tales seemed to get out of hand. Lucy was only ever known to have
given one interview with a writer reflecting deeply on those years
with George.
Alice Wells also took up residence in the 1940s. She was reportedly
part American Indian and one of the small inner circle who helped
clear a plot of stony land in rural California on the isolated hill
road to Mount Palomar. Here, George and his followers established a
small commune, called Palomar Gardens, with subsistence agriculture
and income from a road-side café to provide the necessities of life.
Alice was touted as the owner of the café but diners often got the
impression it belonged to George. She was prominently mentioned in
Adamski’s books as “Mrs Alice K.Wells” but no visitors ever came
across a Mister Wells. George was nothing if not a ladies’ man.
Declassified FBI files indicate there were “four or five” women
working in the café in 1950, which the bureau’s informant felt was not
justified by the level of business.
Late in 1953 George cracked the whip again. The café was sold and the
group resited further up the road and took to their picks and shovels
once more. “We work hard but we are happy,” he wrote with Maoist
simplicity. It sounded like the hippie ideal of spiritual renewal
through fresh air and bracing outdoor activity among the furrows, the
advance guard of the counter-culture. Indeed George’s romantic
collectivist views had been the cause of the FBI’s early interest in
his activities. He and his waitresses at the Palomar Gardens Café
liked to regale diners not only with tales of flying saucers but with
the virtues of the communist way of life. Adamski told the FBI snitch
that “Russia will dominate the world and we will then have an era of
peace for 1000 years.” He honed his powers of prophecy even further,
predicting a flare-up in the Cold War: “Within the next twelve months
San Diego will be bombed.”
Until 1955 there was no electricity at the new “ashram” (visitor
Desmond Leslie’s word) that followed the move from the café. Lighting
was by candle and kerosene lamp. Fresh water came from a stream. Alice
Wells stuck with George through all of this, after fame had turned to
notoriety, and inherited his share in their joint home in Vista,
California. Leslie said that Wells had an “oriental calm”, which seems
to imply she was a woman of few words; certainly she left precious few
for historians.
A young radio technician from Boise, Idaho, called Carol A.Honey
wandered in and out of George’s life and left a frustratingly
incomplete picture. His writing style suggests a rather humourless
man: he once complained to a magazine that people thought his
published letters were penned by a woman. “How they arrived at this
crazy idea I’ll never know,” he railed. Honey came calling at Palomar
in 1957 on a tour of Californian contactees. He was so impressed with
George that he settled in California and served for several years as
Adamski’s right hand man, especially in the outreach programme which
by now spanned the world, and in his bosses’ hectic lecture schedule.
He too broke with Adamski in 1963 over an alleged ‘trip to Saturn’.
(again- George himself did not
understand those trips happend on a vibration raised level, acc.to
the contacts of "Edw.James" as they seemed fully real to him,
which is the case when the 'day-consciousness is focused on to the
astral body' - but for most people brings no memory back from -
but in some cases though as 'clear dreams'- as really are, acc. to
theosofy/+Martinus, memory-parts of what really happens. rø-rem.)
After departing, Honey went on to work in a technical role for Hughes
Aircraft Corporation for many years, and left relatively small
pickings for researchers. His big chance came in 2002 when he emerged
from obscurity to publish a book on UFOs. Followers of crypto-history
held their breath: juicy gossip from an insider seemed in the offing.
Sadly, the large format, soft cover tome was a disappointment. It
dealt only obliquely with Honey’s former mentor.
The most acute observations we have about Adamski from a long-time
friend are those of Leslie, a dashing free spirit who was worth a book
himself. Leslie was the son of Irish baronet, Sir Shane Leslie, and
spent much of his childhood at Castle Leslie, in County Monaghan. Born
in 1921, he was drawn early to the paranormal by the open mind of his
father, who wrote several books on the subject, and by a sighting of a
green fireball in the sky while at boarding school in England. After
university in Dublin, Leslie became a war-time fighter pilot and
survived to celebrate VE Day drinking Pol Roget at 10 Downing St with
his cousin Winston Churchill and his new wife, a Jewish cabaret singer
from Berlin. Leslie had a roguish sense of humour and often joked that
he destroyed many fighter planes during the war, most of which he was
piloting.
The onset of the flying saucer age in 1947 tantalised the handsome
aristocrat and he began researching ancient texts and the writings of
anomalist Charles Fort, fossicking out startling references to
antediluvian flying machines and early UFO sightings. The year 1952
found Leslie hawking a manuscript around London publishers that pulled
together the results of his antiquarian endeavours. Hearing of
Adamski’s desert encounter, he fired off a letter asking if he could
see, and possibly buy, the Californian’s photos.
“He replied by sending me the whole remarkable set of pictures with
permission to use them without fee,” recalled Leslie in 1965. “What an
extradordinary man, I thought. He takes the most priceless pictures of
all time and wants no money for them. Later he sent me his manuscript
humbly suggesting I might be able to find a publisher for it.”
By this
time Leslie had scored a contract with Waveney Girvan, at Werner
Laurie. “After much soul searching Waveney suggested a joint
publication. We wrote to George who cabled the following day before
receiving our letter, ‘Agree to joint publication.’ Here indeed was
telepathy at work. And so the amazing relationship developed!” Adamski
had spoken a lot on the subject of telepathy during his years at
Laguna Beach and said he used a combination of gestures and telepathy
to communicate with the ufonaut at Desert Center.
Desmond Leslie Visits
In June, 1954, Leslie kissed his wife and three children goodbye and
headed off to California to meet the mystery man who had helped make
his book a runaway best seller. He was 33 and Adamski was 63. Despite
the age difference the two hit it off straight away. Leslie’s visit
was “a great joy,” Adamski wrote a year later. “Endowed with a very
interesting mind and a delightful sense of humour, he added much to
our little group here, not only in that he shared our common interests
but also entered into the nonsense which often overtook us when
relaxation from serious subjects was indicated.” To accommodate their
distinguished guest, Adamski and his group rejigged the cramped
sleeping arrangements, easing one of the regulars into a pup tent.
Leslie came intending to visit for a month but stayed on for nearly
three. The air at Palomar Terraces, as the property was now called,
was crackling with excitement. If there was one place on the planet
that a UFO buff would want to be in 1954 it was Palomar Terraces –
electricity or no electricity.
Adamski, who had spent years peering at
the night sky through telescopes snapping impressive pictures of UFOs
when he could get a rare shot at one, was now at the epicentre of
staggering events. He was no longer the patient hunter; the elusive
prey were now coming to him. Leslie arrived to find that Adamski was
involved in an ongoing set of covert contacts with the ‘space people’,
as he called them. Young men, dressed and living as ordinary Americans,
would meet him in Los Angeles and drive him out to isolated spots.
Here, a craft would be waiting and he would be taken up for flights
and meetings; discussions ranged over current events, philosophy,
religion and science. The people said they came from planets in the
solar system, including Venus, Mars and Saturn.
(...as they in fact did- but
they did not say it was not of/on this 'coarse physical dimension', as
they foresaw that the common people could not understand this +
that would be a filter to make this info un-scientific; naive - to
the scientific thinking people who are trapped in the physcal
thinking. But that was also the meaning, as this info will not be
for common people before they have reached a level of
understanding the multi-dimensionality of life. This will probably
not occur before after ca year 2050-2100 for most people. rø-rem.)
The conundrum of their
true planet of origin would remain unresolved long after Adamski’s
passing.
While Leslie whiled away the summer months on the side of Mount
Palomar, Adamski was often ensconced in his makeshift office, which
also doubled as a bedroom, cobbling a diary of these remarkable
experiences into the raw material for Inside The Space Ships. The
British visitor begged to come on one of the contacts.
George would
feel a rising intuitive or telepathic tension and know it was time to
head off on the 100-mile trip to Los Angeles, where the rendezvous
always took place at the same hotel. Leslie hung around for weeks
hoping to get the green light. Finally George brought back depressing
news from one of his clandestine meetings: the aliens had vetoed the
request. “I complained about this rather bitterly at the time,” Leslie
recalled.
Many years later George told Zinsstag: “You know they once
planned to take aboard a young friend of mine whom I very much wanted
to be favoured. But they tested this man in secrecy and found out that
he was still too young…to keep a secret in his heart.” Adamski further
explained that there were many things to be seen in the saucers that
needed to remain a secret. Leslie might have been given the
thumbs-down but there were compensations – the flying saucers would
come to him instead.
In a letter to his wife, Leslie described seeing “a beautiful golden
ship in the sunset, but brighter than the sunset…It slowly faded out,
the way they do.” Another night he got a glimpse of a small, remotely
controlled observation disk, about 2-3 feet in diameter. George had
watched these sensing devices being launched and retrieved while on
one of his space excursions and would go on to describe them in detail
in his book. Leslie was walking up the road returning to Palomar
Terraces after a visit to Rincon Springs five miles away.
“I noticed a
very bright ball of light rising rapidly from Adamski’s roof, about a
quarter of a mile away. It rose rapidly, rather like a silvery-gold
Verey Light, and continued to rise until it disappeared from sight. It
gave the impression of accelerating as it rose. But the following
evening I was to see it at very close range. We were sitting on the
patio in the twilight, George, Alice Wells, Lucy McGinnis, and I with
my back turned facing the doorway. A curious cold feeling came over me
as of being watched, as if someone or something was standing directly
behind me. I swung round in time to see a small golden disk between us
and the Live Oaks fifty feet away. Almost instantly it shot up in the
air with an imperceptible swish leaving a faint trail behind it, then
vanished.
George grinned solemnly. ‘I was wondering when you were
going to notice that!’ I was amazed. ‘One of those remote control
things?’ I believe I asked. He nodded. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘thank God our
conversation’s been reasonably clean for the last half hour,’ and we
all laughed. For George enjoyed a good story and was quite unshockable.
I felt rather smug, like a schoolboy who for once has been behaving
himself when the Headmaster appears silently in the dormitory.”
Michigan resident Laura Mundo reported a similar sighting in Dearborn
at about the same time in the summer of 1954, several months after she
had guided Adamski on a round of lectures and meetings in the Detroit
area. “A small electronic disk came down across the street from my
house one night when I was sitting on the porch.” But Palomar was
still the place to be.
by about this time, other crafts
were "downed" in other parts of USA - and the military were soon on
the place, securing it - before taking the crafts to secret bases-
as picture her is to illustrate. they moved those downed crafts at
night - but under cover this picture only made to show the idea
McGinnis was lying down in her room one afternoon when for some reason
she decided to get up and go outside. “As I got out the door I looked
up,” she told Timothy Good, “… and here was this great big saucer-like
thing. I was amazed! As I looked up I could see through it )*. It was two
stories: you could see the steps where they would go up and down.”
Good recorded McGinnis’ recollections after tracking her down in
retirement in California in 1979. He found her to be an “intelligent
and highly-perceptive lady.” In her Palomar sighting McGinnis saw
people inside the saucer. “I don’t remember how many people I saw but
they were moving around. It seems to me they had kind of ski-suits,
fastened around the ankle…Then suddenly it started just drifting away.”
)*
("I could see through it..."- yes not fully physical; materialized
or partly now/still on "next level"- rø-rem.)
Lucy McGinnis, Alice and George earned Desmond Leslie’s affection. “I
came to love and respect them as I found, by the quality of their
lives, their actions and reactions, their simplicity and their mental
and spiritual values, they were what one would call ‘good’ people; if
anything, rather better than the average,” he wrote.
“A strange summer. Three months on the side of Mount Palomar with the
enigmatic fascinating, at times infuriating, Mr Adamski. Lovable,
provocative, evasive at times; and at other times overshadowed by a
profundity that was quite awesome. You had to get him alone and
relaxed to discover this deep inner Adamski….one often had the
impression there were two people in that fine leonine body, the little
Adamski, the burbler which always shoved its way to the foreground
when the crowds gathered, talking non-stop…Then there was the big
Adamski, the man we came to know and love, who appeared only to his
intimates, and once having appeared, left them in no doubt they had
known a great soul. The Big Adamski spoke softly with a deep beautiful
voice, incredibly old, wise and patient. Looking into those huge
burning black eyes one realised that this Adamski had experienced far
more than he was able or willing to relate.”
In this Big Adamski,
Leslie wrote another time, “I several times glimpsed the presence of a
Master, and I was always sorry when the curtain came down again and
the worldly mask obscured him.”
Worldly Mask & Otherworldly Visitations
The worldly mask included a moderate appetite for drinking and
smoking. Adamski’s tastes in alcohol were catholic but he preferred
Screwdrivers before his lectures because vodka could not be smelled on
the breath. But, still, there was nothing excessive about his drinking;
it lay within the bell curve. He had an endless store of ribald jokes
and stories, which he didn’t mind telling in mixed company, perhaps as
relief from the stifling expectations that others had of him. Society
hostesses gave their famous guest extra latitude. “Oh George,” said
one through a forced smile over the dinner plates in Auckland, “that
one went a bit too far!” Adamski also used knock-about humour as a
leveler in masculine company, the macho combination of exaggeration
and self-deprecation.
In 1958 he told two visitors to Palomar Terraces
that the Royal Order of Tibet, the name he gave to his theosophical
movement at Laguna Beach in the thirties, had been a racket to get
around Prohibition (which had stretched from 1920 to 1933).
“It was a
front,” he bragged. “Listen, I was able to make the wine. You know,
we’re supposed to have the religious ceremonies; we make the wine for
them, and the authorities can’t interfere with our religion. Hell, I
made enough wine for half of Southern California. In fact, boys, I was
the biggest bootlegger around.”
The worldly mask also included a propensity to invent and fabricate
under the fuel of a viral ego. Quiescent for the most part, this
bacillus flared up from time to time and helped bring Adamski to the
brink of self-immolation. When called to account on these falsities he
often responded angrily like a man betrayed, digging himself deeper
with further evasions and false accusations.
Therein lies the supreme
tragedy of George Adamski. His truthful tales were incredible enough
as it was. They couldn’t bear the further burden of embroidery. They
demanded an unbending integrity of the teller if they were to have
even the faintest hope of a wide currency and regard. All that destiny
demanded of the man was that he stuck to the truth. It was that easy.
No one begrudged him a quick slug before a lecture, a smoke, a
masculine expletive or an off-colour joke. No one cared if he had an
eye for a pretty face, an interest in the occult, or fudged his CV to
hide an embarrassing episode. That was all part of being human. But he
did have to stick to the facts. That was the irreducible minimum: a
no-risk investment in personal integrity. It carried no known costs,
emotionally, spiritually, physically or financially. It was a
no-brainer. But it was not to be.
Within months of the Desert Center contact, Adamski was claiming in
lectures that his speeches had been cleared by the FBI and Air Force
intelligence. This canard was an act of poetic licence arising from a
meeting he had had with representatives of both organisations on 12
January 1953. At that meeting, which had been held at his request,
Adamski spoke about a number of UFO-related items, including his
recent desert encounter. Files released by the FBI to researcher
Nicholas Redfern show that Adamski had then magnified this cosy
relationship with officialdom into an indication of endorsement in a
speech to a California Lions Club on 12 March. Agents of the FBI and
Air Force Office of Special Investigations visited him at the Palomar
Gardens Café and “severely admonished” him for this false claim. They
insisted he sign an official document in which he declared his speech
material did not have official endorsement. One copy was left with
Adamski and other copies were circulated to FBI director, J.Edgar
Hoover, and three branch offices.
In December, Adamski was at it again.
He had doctored the letter the men had left behind and shown it to the
Los Angeles-based Better Business Bureau to make it seem that the FBI
and Air Force signatories had backed his claims. Special Agent Willis,
of the San Diego FBI, was told to take a team back to Palomar to well
and truly extract this thorn from their side. Willis was instructed by
HQ to retrieve the offending document and “read the riot act in no
uncertain terms pointing out that he has used this document in a
fraudulent, improper manner, that this bureau has not endorsed,
approved, or cleared his speeches or book, that he knows it, and the
Bureau will simply not tolerate any further foolishness,
misrepresentations and falsity on his part.”
George had a cheek
alright – fancy playing MJ-12 at their own shifty game – but his
future hung in the balance. A court appearance for fraud or forgery
could have ruined his promising career as a controversialist. But
head-strong Hoover was not taking guidance from any other shadowy
spooks operating on his patch: he decided not to prosecute.
We don’t have an FBI account of the roasting that Special Agent Willis
and his companions gave George, but we do have the latter’s
self-serving version written several years later as part of an article
valiantly titled “My Fight with the Silence Group”. In this account,
George creates an innocent-truthseeker-does-battle-with-men-in-black
scenario. “…I was visited by three men, two of which I had met
previously,” George wrote, “but the third was a stranger. It was he
who took the role of authority and directly threatened me demanding
certain papers I had, for one thing. Some of these I gave him and was
promised their return, but this promise was never kept. Since I did
not exactly understand to what he had reference, I did not give him
some of my more important papers. There is no need denying that I was
frightened. Before they left I was told to stop talking or they would
come after me, lock me up and throw the key away.”
(This was seemingly at a time
'they' had already decided on the ufo-coverup, and the MIBs came
into action worldwide - but most of them in the USA? Acc.to talk
of BILL COOPER - the MJ12people were in the beginning very
confused what to do with the saucer-problem. Here
talk on that in mp3- same also
on youtube. rø-rem.)
Wily behaviour notwithstanding, the space people stuck with their man.
Wherever George went the flying saucers followed. Those who spent any
time with Adamski had amazing experiences. When he circled the world
in 1959 playing to packed houses and showing impressive movie footage
that he had shot, his escorts were frequently treated to lavish aerial
displays. The four weeks he spent in New Zealand were a case in point.
One day traveling by car between two engagements, Adamski and his two
kiwi companions were accompanied on part of their rural journey by
five pinpoints of light high in the sky which left vapour trails. The
five trails “seemed to keep pace with us,” Ken Pearson wrote later,
“connecting the various clouds on the way.” The driver of the car,
Henk Hinfelaar, said that Adamski accepted the aerial ‘escort’ as a
natural thing; he looked at the trails and said casually, “Oh yeah,
dat’ll be de boys.” A check later with air traffic control indicated
no known air traffic in the vicinity at that time.
Two nights later
after an Adamski lecture in a small town, the wife of one of the men
who had been in the car watched a disc manoeuvre above the lecture
hall. This was small potatoes compared with a sighting a few days
later that two other Adamski escorts had in the town of Taupo. After
passing George on to a new set of hosts taking him further on his tour,
Bill and Isobel Miller lay on their backs in a lake-side park watching
“dozens” of saucers zipping around high in the sky. Bill Miller
qualified his bold claim to a local newspaper – “We could have seen
the same ones twice.”
Being around Adamski was a passport to the
paranormal, right until the time of his death. Ingrid Steckling, who
together with her husband, Fred, spent considerable time with him in
the last two years of his life, reflected on that amazing period: “I
can’t even tell you how many scout craft or spacecraft we have seen…because
I don’t think anybody would believe it.”
‘The Boys’
Yet, ironically, it was not so much the sightings in the sky or
Adamski’s space trips that most tantalised his supporters: it was his
assertion that he met the space people regularly and furtively in
everyday society, and especially when he was on the lecture circuit.
It was to place himself in the best possible position to exploit these
private encounters that Adamski insisted on staying in hotels rather
than private homes. This was a strict injunction that all his lecture
organisers and hosts had to observe; when they broke this rule – as
happened occasionally – he made his annoyance clear.
The most amusing
example of an accommodation foul-up occurred in Australia in February
1959. “At the airport, behind a barricade of people waiting to meet
him, in the front row was a social woman, and as I remember, wearing a
large flowery hat,” wrote Roy Russell later. “George was to emerge
from a room, walk across the front of the barricade and into a private
room where we would meet him. None of us had met Adamski. What should
we expect?….We were released from our apprehensions when George
Adamski finally came through the door formally dressed in a grey
business suit, who took one look at the barricade, and on sighting the
woman in the large flowery hat quickly made his way into the private
room and said, ‘Get me away from that bloody woman!’ They were his
first words to us on Australian soil. They sounded wonderful. We were
dealing with a bloke that an Aussie could understand…This woman we
later learned had visited Adamski in America and he’d not taken kindly
to her persistent visits…We then had to tell him that that woman’s
home was to be his accommodation while here. Sydney had broken the
main rule…”
The “main rule” existed because Adamski had come to live for his
meetings with the visitors. These extraordinary exchanges sent him
into a state of near euphoria. His most deeply observant host, Lou
Zinsstag, of Basle, implied in her reminiscences that Adamski had
elevated his relationship with the space people to a level that
relegated his earthly associations to second class status.
One is left
to ponder whether he over-romanticised his alien interlocutors. Was
his ardent evangelism the price that he knew had to be paid to earn
the prized meetings? Zinsstag spent a total of six weeks with Adamski
during his European trips of 1959 and 1963, and has left us a treasure
trove of acute and multi-layered observations about the enigmatic
companion she guided through three countries.
“I confess that
sometimes I was hurt by his impersonal casuality with which he treated
not only passing guests but also Dora Bauer and myself,” she observed
after his death. “He never was much interested in people – not in
those of this planet, at any rate. And although he wanted me to be
around every hour of the day I felt that this was not out of
friendship, he simply needed me.”
On his first morning in Basle, in
1959, Adamski had been in a “splendid mood,” according to Zinsstag.
“‘Do you notice how happy I am?’ he said, beaming.
‘Yes’ I said, ‘but
why?
Did you have such a good rest?’ ‘Yes indeed I had a good rest but
in the morning I had the visit of two of the boys, they came to my
room at nine o’clock.’ I was quite flabbergasted because I knew what
he meant by this. It was his way to call his extraterrestrial friends
‘boys’ when he was pleased. It was hard even for me to believe him at
that moment but he insisted that there were quite a few in Basle at
the moment. On several mornings of the same week he told me the same
story and so I decided to check on it. I asked the hotel manager as
well as the portier whom I knew well, if Adamski did indeed have
visitors in the morning. ‘Yes’ both men said, ‘there are several men
coming around 9 o’clock, but never more than two at a time.’ I felt
that they were wondering about it. Of course, I could not enlighten
them.”
One afternoon she got a good look at one of the mystery men. Zinsstag
had left Adamski in his hotel room for a two-hour nap and retreated to
a sidewalk café downstairs. “All tables but one were empty. There, a
young man was sitting with a Coca Cola bottle and a glass in front of
him. He looked very distinguished, well dressed, with his dark-blond
hair neatly cut and brushed down over his forehead… His skin had a
strong sun-tan and his eyes were hidden behind large sunglasses…he
looked very intellectual.” Zinsstag tried to guess his nationality.
“I hesitated between American, Swede, Swiss, while I took a seat at a
table at some distance.” As she started on her drink, Adamski appeared,
smiling and light-hearted. “Not so fast, Lou, not so fast!” “I was
much astonished to see him at this moment ….When, twenty minutes
earlier, he had left me he had looked very tired. Now, he stood in
front of me, fresh and wide awake, his eyes sparkling with pleasure.
However it was easy to see that his smile was no longer directed at me
but at the man sitting behind me….Adamski also ordered a Screwdriver
and kept on smiling. After a while the stranger got up, leaving the
open café and crossing the almost empty street, very slowly, while
greeting George and me with a most friendly and prolonged smile. No
word was spoken. When he had disappeared from view I turned to George,
urging him to tell me if he was one of the ‘boys’ who used to come to
his room in the morning. ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘now that he has left us
I can tell you that much.’ He looked very pleased.
Of course, I had
guessed that a lively telepathic ‘conversation’ must have been going
on behind my back, but what impressed me most, was the fact that the
stranger seemed to have made George come down to where we sat. Adamski
confirmed that he had already slept but was wakened up. ‘I did not
know who it was or why he did it, but I followed the summons. It was
just one of those hunches, you know.’ Most unfortunately, I did not.”
*
One of the New Zealand tour organisers got a shot at George’s
undercover escorts. She was waiting for him at Auckland airport on his
return from a flight to a southern city. “I noticed two good looking
young men with fair hair disembark from the plane among the passengers
and walk across the tarmac,” she said later. “They could have been
brothers but I didn’t pay too much attention, apart from notice that
they smiled at me as they approached the gate. George was the last
person off the plane and when he got to me he said excitedly, ‘did you
see de boys?’” The woman said she let out an unladylike exclamation as
it dawned on her that she had missed out on a unique opportunity. By
the time they got into the terminal the men had disappeared, to her
great regret.
Adamski’s whole organising committee in Auckland might have spent an
unwitting few hours with one of ‘the boys.’ George advised them that
they had been ‘checked out’ by the space people before his arrival.
Thinking back on the months preceding Adamski’s visit, committee
members came to the conclusion that the stand-out candidate was a fair
complexioned young man of indeterminate race who had joined one of
their afternoon meetings. This young man had arrived out of the blue
at the home of two of the members, shortly before their departure for
the meeting. He claimed to have the same surname as theirs, was
passing through Auckland from overseas, and believed they were related.
The couple had been pleasantly surprised by his arrival and asked if
he would like to accompany them to the meeting. He was enthusiastic
and came along. The visitor was quietly watchful at the gathering,
apart from making one or two enigmatic comments. After that day his
impromptu hosts never heard from him again.
The concept of a clandestine ring of visitors from off the planet
living quietly and watchfully in terrestrial society holds a sublime
fascination: the ‘secret agent’ genre taken to its orbital extreme.
The mind conjures with the problems – the ever-present danger of
detection and exposure, the difficulty of obtaining fake papers, the
mundane chore of getting your hands on cash. Epigrams abound – Goodbye
socialist utopia; welcome to Struggle Street!
Those Coca Colas don’t
grow on trees. In fact, welcome to the real world, buddy! Lou Zinsstag
gave Adamski pocket money, but never saw him spend it. She finally
understood from a remark he made that he had given it to ‘the boys.’
Perhaps there was a humorous downside to the inspiring meetings: “…that
just about wraps up our treatise on telepathy, George. Oh, by the way,
you haven’t got a dollar you can spare?” Zinsstag didn’t begrudge the
money that she and George had forked over: the young man in the café
had been a charmer. “He looked so very nice,” she told a British
audience in 1967, “that I was quite happy to think that it was he who
had got my money.” Bob Geldof, your new mission should you wish to
accept it….
Adamski told Roy Russell in Brisbane that the space people had once
been involved in the British shipping industry in order to generate
funds for their undercover operations. He seemed to imply that they
had moved on to other money-earning ventures in America. Carol Honey
may have come upon one of their more modest forays into capitalism
when he accompanied Adamski on a lecture tour in the Pacific
north-west in August, 1957. “We had just finished breakfast…and were
driving up the road towards our next stop, Grants Pass, Oregon. I was
driving in my car and chose the route myself,” Honey wrote in 1959.
“We passed a small café and as we went by George had a ‘telepathic
hunch’ to stop. I couldn’t understand this as we had just eaten a
short time before. He insisted so I turned the car around and we went
into the café. As we entered the door a very small blonde girl
approached and George acted as if someone had hit him on the head with
a hammer. In fact, he acted so strange about her that it caused me to
get suspicious.
After she showed me that she was reading my every
thought, it finally dawned on me that she was probably a space person.
She looked from a distance as if she was about 12 years old. Close up,
however, she looked much older and I remarked to Adamski that I
thought she was about 45 years old. I had been looking her over pretty
close and when she let me know she was reading my thoughts I was very
embarrassed. She didn’t identify herself to George in any way and
after his coffee and my pie we left and continued on our journey.
George was silent for quite a ways and appeared deep in thought.
Finally I told him I thought this girl was one of the space people
living and working among us. He agreed but said he wasn’t absolutely
sure…”
The two men continued on to Seattle, Washington, and stopped in
a motel for the night. The next morning the phone rang in their room
and a man told Adamski: “Good morning. I called to tell you that you
and the young man were both wrong. The girl you met in the café was
not 45 years old…” Honey recounted that the caller advised that he had
called to relieve George’s mind about a couple of other things in
relation to the woman, and he “let us know that they had given George
the telepathic impression to stop at that particular café. We found
out that the café was run by space people, as a way of supplying food
and funds for those who came down among us on a mission and might need
spending money to get around. Also other space people were in the café
at the time we were there.”
The highly credible and well-documented “Ummo”(link
to p-point intro on that case) contact case in Spain
in the 1960s and 1970s showcased another example of human-like
visitors who apparently set up shop in order to carry out in-depth
cultural study from within. The visitors disclosed a mine of
information in scores of communications to a restricted network of
correspondents, mainly in Spain and France. They seemed to seal their
authenticity in a pre-announced and much photographed flying saucer
fly-by in the Madrid suburb of San Jose de Valderas on 1 June, 1967.
This sensational incident was headlined the following day on the front
page of the daily newspaper, “Informaciones”.
By comparison with
Adamski’s taciturn network, the Ummo infiltrators were surprisingly up
front about how they had operated. There is some evidence that they
financed their lifestyle by bringing in diamonds from off the planet
and feeding them unobtrusively into the world gem trade. Their numbers
appeared to peak in the late 1960s when they said they had nearly 90
observers in place. While the Ummo visitors’ primary focus was on
Spain and a handful of Spanish-speaking countries in South America,
they mentioned that they also had had people in France (their first
point of infiltration in 1950), Denmark, West Berlin and Australia
(Adelaide), among others. In the Middle East crises of 1967 and 1973
when Arab-Israeli conflicts threatened to escalate into a superpower
confrontation, the Ummo visitors took fright from their probability
calculations of nuclear war (38% in the 1967 crisis) and were
temporarily evacuated, in pick-ups that occurred in Spain, Brazil and
Bolivia.
The Ummo visitors maintained that they had tentatively
identified two other groups of human-looking extraterrestrials living
secretly in Earth society. The motives of the other groups, they wrote,
indicated “no negative character”.
Exit The Boys
George Adamski might have lived for his meetings with the boys but he
deserved every minute of whatever it was they gave him. In his old age
he had taken on a global mission, the likes of which no one had ever
conceived let alone initiated. To be sure, it gave him the fame that
he relished but it also brought ridicule and hard work. Not a letter
went unanswered. Speaking invitations were generally accepted. He
stayed on after lectures, talking to the stragglers until late in the
night.
“I sometimes wondered if he ever slept,” said a much younger
host who was run off her feet. At an age when most people were taking
it easy, Adamski had signed on for the toughest job in the world.
Dwight Eisenhower had come to his empyrean with a cast of thousands at
his beck and call. Adamski had a couple of committed volunteers at his
elbow and he was about to lose those.
Some time in 1960 or early 1961, his space contacts came to an end.
George never admitted it. His statements on that matter are
contradictory. Reading between the lines the joyrides in space had
probably petered out in the 1950s, and contact after that had been of
the ‘street corner’ variety. We don’t know why communication was
broken off; there has been much speculation among those with an
interest in this recondite borderland: Adamski had spoken out of turn;
he had breached a confidence; Phase One Contact had come to a natural
end… Whatever it was it hit the 70-year-old dynamo hard. He was left
with the mission but not the pay-off. By now he was living in the
sea-side town of Carlsbad, north of San Diego, with an enlarged
retinue.
Alice Wells was, for the record, his “housekeeper”, Martha
Ulrich, a retired school teacher, was a keen assistant, and Lucy
McGinnis was still in the picture, taking his dictation, massaging his
clumsy syntax into articulate, mistake-free letters on a manual
typewriter, organising his tours, laying down the main rules. Carol
Honey had taken up employment with Hughes but was still in close
liaison from his home up the coast in Anaheim. He took care of
George’s ghost writing, publications and newsletter production. With
‘the boys’ withdrawing from the scene, not only had Adamski lost the
buzz he got from their company, he lost their steadying advice. “Many
of the meetings I have had with our visitors,” he wrote in 1960, “have
dealt mostly with my own problems and possible solutions.” Now he was
on his own with a self-imposed, world-wide mission and a following of
expectant readers and representatives hungry for the next revelation.
It was McGinnis who noticed the change first and then Honey followed.
George began channeling ‘Orthon’, the name Adamski had given to the
Desert Center spaceman. “I was present, along with several others as
witnesses, when Mr Adamski went into a trance state and claimed Orthon
was talking through his vocal chords,” wrote Honey later. “He taught
against this very strongly for many years but then he started doing it
himself. He said it was different in his case, all the others were
fraudulent, but not him, he was genuine.”
Adamski took to using an
occultist’s cliché – a crystal ball – to conjure up the appropriate
visions. Late in 1961, McGinnis quit after 14 years. This was a blow
that George would never fully recover from and he knew the scale of
the disaster. As late as May, 1963, he was begging friends to write to
Lucy and plead with her to return. When she walked out, the quality of
his letters declined and his thoughts on paper were often muddled and
contradictory. There was no one to counsel moderation in the bitter
ructions that were to come, no one to take the sting out of Adamski’s
written broadsides against those who split with him. McGinnis wrote a
gracious and non-committal farewell to the network of co-workers.
“Please understand that this separation is due only to the urge within
me to practice that which I have preached for so long a time. GA’s
experiences through the years I was with him, those reported in
‘Flying Saucers Have Landed’ and ‘Inside the Space Ships’ and our
innumerable letters I will support so long as I live. I was a witness
to his first contact, remember, and I could never denounce that which
I know to be true. Understandably, GA was very upset by my decision.
It hasn’t been easy on any of us. Yet, the urge within me is so strong
that I can no more disregard it than I can stop breathing and continue
to live.”
At the start of 1962, Adamski announced to co-workers that he would
soon make a trip to Saturn to attend an interplanetary conference. At
the end of March he declared that the journey had been successfully
carried out over a 5-day period. On some of the days he was alleged to
have been away Honey knew for a fact that Adamski had been sitting on
his recliner in Carlsbad rather than hurtling through outer space. (
*)
( *see on this
time-confusion etc. on
http://www.galactic.no/rune/venuscont2c.html)
How
did he know? Simple – “…I was with Adamski part of the time…,” he
wrote later. The puzzled ghost writer nevertheless interviewed George
with a straight face and dutifully wrote up an account of the trip
that won his bosses approval and signature. It was a syrupy concoction
of ‘space brother’ schmaltz. The recipe had not so much been
over-egged as over-sugared. Saturn was a planet of fountains and
flower-strewn highways. The superlatives flowed endlessly in a 16-page
gusher: “…the city and surrounding country was beautiful beyond
description…their architecture is beyond anything of our imagination….it
could be considered as heaven itself….the people live as one big
family….one could feel the perfect harmony….the vast beauty which I
witnessed….music seemed to be coming from the fountains, ceilings and
walls, such as never is heard on earth…”
The cloying romanticism of
the account, which Adamski circulated to his followers under the title
“Report on My Trip to the Twelve Counselors Meeting of Sun System”,
wears thin by the second page and it requires a Phenergan to persist
reading to the end. George had been on a far journey alright. The
account’s patent lack of credibility demonstrates the extent to which
Adamski had descended into a mental, intellectual and ethical fog
during this period. Some observers have suggested that the Saturn trip
was an out-of-the-body experience, or a hypnotically-induced fantasy
perpetrated by disinformation agents who had masqueraded as space
people. Lucy McGinnis’view was more prosaic. She told Timothy Good
that Adamski’s oversized ego was the problem. He was simply lying to
pump up his ego, which had taken a knock by the departure of the space
contacts. When the Saturn report reached the international network,
Adamski’s following began to crumble. The view from the inside was
worse.
Later in 1962 he wanted to get into fortune-telling. “He asked
me to publish in my newsletter that he would give an analysis of
photographs for $5, a recent photo and the person’s date of birth,”
Honey wrote. “I refused to do this. He claimed he was shown how to do
this on his ‘Trip To Saturn.’ I could not go along with his new idea
and told him I couldn’t understand how the ‘brothers’ could propose
such a thing. He replied he couldn’t understand it either but he
trusted them and they wouldn’t let him down.” Other hare-brained
schemes were cooked up.
In September, 1963, Honey cut his ties with
his once revered preceptor. Adamski embarked on a campaign of
vitriolic recrimination, savaging Honey and other departing followers,
including McGinnis, heaping the blame for the blow-out on everyone but
himself. Cosmic brotherhood, his tedious mantra from the rostrum, went
out the window on his home turf.
1963: Sense and Non-Sense
It is a biographer’s duty to gather together disparate strands from
time and space and weave them into a coherence that is both just to
the subject and convincing to the reader. The years 1961-62 can be
slickly portrayed as a period of befuddlement and desperation, an
atavistic reversion by Adamski to expedient lying and posturing.
Whether that would be a fair judgment is uncertain. However, it is
from the start of 1963 that Adamski’s life evades coherent
interpretation. The suavest of analyses fails to come to grips with
what was happening. Different friends saw him in different lights.
There was a bipolarity to his behaviour and the persona he projected.
To add to the confusion the space people returned.
The evidence is
strong that they reopened their contacts in 1963 and, on occasion,
their morale-boosting aerial displays as well, which George copiously
filmed with his ubiquitous 16mm camera. Some of his best movie footage
was shot after this date. There is a savage irony here: his closest
supporters are deserting their man, believing him to have lost his way;
“the boys” who deserted him – the mystery men who are the litmus test
of his legitimacy – are returning. Perhaps historians of the merely
terrestrial kind are doomed to frustration trying to figure out these
cross-currents. After all, we are dealing here with a man who was
privy to the most profound and unfathomable hidden knowledge.
In 1963
he confided wistfully to Zinsstag, “My heart is a graveyard of secrets.”
The iceberg metaphor is unavoidable: nine tenths of the information we
need is below the surface, hidden in the disciplined recesses of a
man’s soul – as well as in the unreachable archives of a distant and
nameless society. More accessible earthly chronicles are available
that might one day shed extra light: a partly finished fourth book and
a daunting cache of 60 reel-to-reel audiotapes of talks, lectures and
interviews that Adamski gave. One day a biographer with qualities of
patience and self-punishment will trawl through this archive,
filtering it for fact and fiction. It won’t be an enviable task.
In 1963 the confused signals that Adamski gave out can be tracked in
the recollections of his two good friends in Europe – Zinsstag and
Leslie. He arrived in Basle on 23 May in the mid-point of a European
speaking tour. When Zinsstag asked if he was still in touch with the
Boys, George gave an opaque and defensive answer. “His voice…sounded
unnatural…as if coming from a defiant child, provocative and stubborn.”
That evening she noticed changes. “I felt that he was playing the part
of a contented lecturer while underneath his countenance was a
lingering precariousness. This did not manifest itself, as I would
have expected, in reluctance and caution, but in an unexpected
somewhat naïve boastfulness. Some friendly newcomers who joined us
received flippant answers to their polite questions, and they soon
left our table.
George seemed to have lost his remarkable faculty to
listen attentively and to answer carefully. I felt truly unhappy on
this first evening.” Things improved and the old George returned over
the next few days. Zinsstag and Belgian co-worker May Morlet took
their VIP to Rome for an appointment with the ailing Pope, John XXIII.
The pontiff was in the advanced stages of cancer but George was
determined to deliver a small package that he carried. This had been
given to him some days before by one of the Boys in Copenhagen and
contained a message from the space people to Pope John. Adamski had
been advised of the time to report – in front of St Peters at 11 a.m.
on 31 May. This astonishing mission was vintage Adamski – preposterous
drivel, with the madcap possibility that it was true. George had
played many walk-on parts in the Theatre of the Absurd and this would
be just another.
Would it end in laughter or ovation? “Slowly we
walked up the broad central stairway, looking around,” Zinsstag
recalled later. “Within a few minutes George cried out: ‘There he is,
I can see the man’….swiftly he descended the steps, turning to the
left. I had looked to the right because I expected him to be admitted
through the well-known gate where the Swiss guards were posted. Yet,
without any hesitation, he walked to the left of the Dome where I now
noticed a high wooden entrance gate…with a small built-in door. This
door was partly opened and a man was standing beside it, gesturing
discreetly to George. He wore a black suit but not a priest’s robe.”
George slipped through the opening and it was closed. When the women
returned in an hour’s time, as per George’s instruction, he was almost
leaping up and down with joy, much as he had done 11 years before
after another outrageously implausible meeting in the desert of
Southern California.
Over the next few days as Adamski gradually
revealed details of his meeting with the bed-ridden pope, and produced
evidence to support its authenticity, it became apparent that the
fakir of flying saucers had pulled one of his biggest rabbits out of
the hat.
Before he said goodbye to Zinsstag they had a last intimate talk.
Adamski spoke with a depth and power that she has never been able to
put into words – referring to it simply as “our last private
conversation.” She came away with an unshakable belief in his
legitimacy and stature, but not so much that it dulled her
discrimination. Eleven months later she resigned from Adamski’s
network in dissatisfaction over his claims and contradictions.
Adamski flew to London for his last days with Leslie. George had
changed, but not in the way that Zinsstag had noticed. “There was a
greater calmness, a heightened spirituality, and the traces of
tiresome egotism that had annoyed me ten years earlier had entirely
disappeared,” Leslie noted later. “He was as one who had experienced
the ultimate mysteries, and no longer cared whether he was believed or
disbelieved. He knew.” Perhaps Adamski “knew” when he was relaxing in
the warmth of admiring friends. Seven months later when he was being
called to account for dishonesty he lost sight of the ultimate
mysteries. On 13 December he wrote a dishonorable letter to a Canadian
correspondent shifting blame to others for a fake mail-based scheme
that he had helped mastermind. Much of his mail in late 1963 and early
1964 involved attempts to extricate himself from tight spots that had
their seeds in 1962; his letters swirled with craft and indignant
self-justification.
The Government Cottons On
Some time during the Adamski years, MJ-12 (or whatever they were
calling themselves at the time) came to realise that he was the real
McCoy, someone who was having genuine repeat ‘contacts.’ The
realisation may even have occurred as early as the 1952 Desert Center
encounter. Throughout much of that event, military aircraft were in
the skies above Adamski and his group, clearly alerted by tell-tale
radar returns from the cigar-shaped ‘mothership’ and possibly the
bell-shaped craft that touched down. It would have been easy for
analysts to put two and two together, to tie in this military alert
with the subsequent newspaper publicity surrounding Adamski’s claim of
a face-to-face meeting.
After his link-up with George in 1957, Carol
Honey began to find that his mail was being intercepted. His most
sensitive papers relating to UFOs and Adamski, which were kept locked
away, were expertly stolen. The burglary left no trace and no
indication of when it had occurred. All the documents “disappeared at
some time unknown to me, since I did not check on them very often,”
Honey wrote later. “No signs of a break-in were found to the residence
or to the cabinet.” Government intelligence operatives would
periodically turn up at his work and interview him about his and
George’s latest activities. “I was always treated courteously and was
never threatened in any way. They always acted as if they knew my
claims were real and not imaginary.” The Steckling family, in
Washington DC, who forged a close friendship with Adamski, were often
visited by intelligence agents. The Rodeffers, in nearby Silver
Spring, where Adamski stayed, had their phone tapped and their mail
opened.
In 1960, Adamski reportedly invited both presidential candidates to
visit him during their primary campaigning in California. Richard
Nixon declined but Senator John F. Kennedy accepted, according to
Glenn Steckling. Steckling, a professional aviator, now has control of
Adamski’s personal papers, tapes and literary estate through the
George Adamski Foundation that Alice Wells set up. Steckling also had
access to the reminiscences of both Wells and Ulrich who his family
helped care for in their old age. The meeting with Kennedy is said to
have been held in secrecy in George’s Carlsbad home. If a link was
forged with the future president, there may have been some substance
to later claims of occasional meetings between the two. Whether useful
information was ever passed across at these confidential tete-a-tetes
will probably never be known.
One would have to question if anything
of value was transmitted at a meeting Adamski had in Washington in
April, 1962, hard on the heels of the ‘Saturn Trip’. He returned from
‘outer space’ imbued with an urgent impulse to pass on a confidential
message to the president. This had been entrusted to him by the space
people. Danish Air Force major, Hans C. Petersen, Adamski’s co-worker
in Denmark, was based in Washington at the time working in the Danish
NATO exchange office. He received a call from Adamski with the hot
news. “He called me right away after he came back,” said Petersen in
1995, “and told me that he had to go to Washington on his arrival
because he had a message to the President, ‘but,’ he said, ‘I cannot
tell you what this message is. But if you follow the political
situation of the Earth you will, for yourself, be able to see what the
message contains. In one year you will see the result.’” Petersen was
one of Adamski’s most devoted followers and formed a rose-tinted view
of the message that was passed on.
He concluded afterwards that it was
a warning about the forthcoming Cuban missile crisis, a warning which
enabled Kennedy to resolve the nuclear-tipped stand-off with complete
mastery and the avoidance of violence. Apart from the fact that the
crisis occurred seven months after Adamski’s ‘warning’ rather than one
year later, there is nothing in any of the voluminous writings on the
missile crisis to suggest that Kennedy and his administration were
caught by anything but surprise by the Russian establishment of
missile launching sites in Cuba. The skillful way the crisis was
resolved by Kennedy was not the result of slick application of inside
information passed on from ETs, but by his acceptance of the best
recommendation that came from a special advisory group he set up that
wrestled for days and nights, in Kennedy’s absence, with an
ever-changing array of possible military and diplomatic responses.
There is no indication in the public record that either Kennedy or his
administration benefited from any type of foreknowledge, apart from
their long established practice of photo reconnaisance flights over
the controversial Caribbean nation. Nor is there any indication from
Adamski’s writings at the time that he was the bearer of a message
about an impending crisis. “My recent trip to Washington was very
successful,” he wrote to his co-workers afterwards. “I fulfilled the
mission I was assigned with good results. It was in reference to the
use of space for peaceful and educational purposes. I am well
satisfied with the response, even though it was costly to me from the
financial angle.”
Glenn Steckling says that apart from the Carlsbad talk, Adamski’s
other secret meetings with Kennedy occurred at the White House and at
Desert Hot Springs, in California, not far from Adamski’s home. (The
President is known to have visited the Hot Springs-Palm Springs area
four times in 1962-63, mainly for romantic dalliances.) Did the
meetings with Kennedy really occur? As Desmond Leslie said in his
Adamski obituary, “With George – anything could happen.” Certainly,
late in his life Adamski was the bearer of official passes that
indicated a close relationship with officialdom. William Sherwood, an
optical physicist and senior engineer with the Eastman-Kodak Company,
was a friend of his who examined the Government Ordnance Bureau card
that Adamski carried and which gave access to military bases.
Sherwood
once had a similar pass himself and felt that Adamski’s was
unquestionably genuine. Fred and Ingrid Steckling were shown a White
House pass by Adamski that appeared to be genuine. He maintained to
confidantes that when it came to passing on information he worked
“both sides of the fence”, as he called it. In other words, he not
only passed on messages from the space people, he passed on messages
to the space people.
The Most Extravagant Demonstration
The evidence for the return of the space people into the very centre
of Adamski’s life is most sensationally illustrated by the Silver
Spring ‘fly-by’ of 26 February, 1965. This display, apparently
conducted to give Adamski and his friend Madeleine Rodeffer the chance
to get unparalleled movie evidence, was the most extravagant
demonstration ever laid on for their man in a public place. Coming, as
it did, two months before his death it can perhaps be seen as a
touching valedictory and, in its own quirky way, some sort of
exoneration, or at least redemption. Hey, I know I screwed up for a
while, George might have said, but at least at the end I was back on
track, I still had the magic touch. How else to explain the
extraordinary events of that day?
Madeleine and Nelson Rodeffer were respected residents in a leafy,
low-density suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland, on the outskirts of
Washington DC. Here, the houses are set amidst large tree-covered
lawns on gentle, rolling contours. Nelson was a maintenance supervisor
at the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital in the Capital. Madeleine, a woman
of 42 at that time, had worked in the Army Finance Office during the
war and later acted as a doctor’s receptionist. She had helped
organise some speaking engagements for George on the East Coast a year
before and, together with her husband, had formed a firm friendship
with the veteran campaigner, so much so that when in their
neighbourhood he preferred to stay with them rather than in a hotel.
All those who met Mrs Rodeffer found her to be an impressive witness,
a woman of humility and gentleness whose account of that remarkable
day did not change at all in the years until her passing in June 2009.
Nelson had gone to work by the time Madeleine got up that morning. She
had recently broken a leg and was limping around in a plaster cast.
When she came downstairs Adamski had some news for her. Chalk up ‘Zany
Moment One’: One of the Boys had come to the door at 8.30 a.m. on his
way to meeting the new Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey. He advised
George that he and Madeleine should get their cameras ready for a
flying saucer visit. During the day they loaded film into Madeleine’s
new movie camera that she had received from her husband as a Christmas
present.
Some time between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. the two looked out of the
dining room window and saw a disc moving in the distance. And then
Zany Moment Two: a grey Oldsmobile screeched to a halt at the bottom
of the Rodeffer driveway, which meets the street 40 metres from their
elegant home. Three men leaped out of the car and ran up the driveway
waving their arms and shouting: “They’re here! Get your cameras!
They’re here!” It was “the Boys”! Well, no, it didn’t happen exactly
like that – but almost. It was a grey Oldsmobile; the three men did
hoof it up the driveway. When George answered their knocking on the
front door they were full of urgency: “They’re here. Get your cameras.
They’re here,” Madeleine heard them say.
The breathless arrival of the
Brothers was the wackiest turn-up in contactee history, a moment that
the humour-starved UFO phenomenon had been crying out for for 20 years.
Madeleine Rodeffer panicked, claiming an inability to operate her new
camera. Sadly, George took the low-quality, Bell & Howell 8mm point ’n
shoot from her and began filming the saucer, leaving his own 16mm
Kodak lying unused. The saucer came floating across the neighbourhood
at a low level, brushing treetops. Rodeffer described it as a gorgeous
dark blue colour with portholes where she got an occasional glimpse of
faces peering out. The scout ship cruised over the house and bobbled
around the property for minutes, as Adamski, Madeleine and the Boys
stood on the front porch taking it all in. At one point the saucer
rolled on its side and gave George a clear shot of the three-ball
undercarriage.
All this time the three visitors are monitoring the
situation. “They had normal American accents. They could have been
your uncle, or your cousin, or you,” she told me in May 2009. “I got
the impression their role was a supportive one, to make sure we both
held up under the excitement of the occasion. They watched George,
especially, as he was older than me.” One satisfying aspect of their
arrival needs to be noted: the three men were, in Rodeffer’s opinion,
middle-aged. One had dark hair, one had brown hair and the third was
tending towards grey. The presentable young men had gone: the
Abercrombie & Fitch brigade had been let go. Finally, the space people
were getting the ‘equal opportunity’ message. After a while the saucer
floated away.
The Boys heaved a sigh of relief. One of them commented,
“Well, that’s all. I hope we never have to do this again because it’s
too dangerous.” Then they headed back to their car.
Zany Moment Three:
Madeleine and George discover they have accidentally locked themselves
out of the house. They head round the side to gain entrance from a
patio when the saucer swoops back again, even closer than before. Then
finally it glides away. Several days later the film was sent away for
processing. When it was returned it was clear the movie had been ‘got
at’. The film looked like a doctored copy of the original. Much of the
footage was missing, including the section where the craft had rolled
on its side. Other parts looked like a reshoot against a white screen
with a man’s hat used in place of the saucer. It still had good parts
but it was a mess. Adamski and Fred Steckling re-edited the
disappointing footage into a shape where it could avoid instant
ridicule.
The Final Days
Adamski made a poignant comment after the dramatic filming at the
Rodeffers. “Don’t tell anyone that I helped you,” he advised his
hostess, “because they will pick on you. Don’t even tell people that I
was here.” He knew only too well the controversial figure that he had
become. Just a few months shy of his 74th birthday, Adamski was calm
and philosophical about the notoriety that attached to his name.
Probably he realised that much of the opprobrium was justified.
Adamski had admitted to Carol Honey that for a while there he had been
“off the beam.” George was a tarnished hero but a hero nonetheless to
thousands who had recognised his courage to speak out. “He believed
that others, greater in the world’s esteem, had also been contacted
and given the same mission,” Desmond Leslie wrote, “but that for
various personal reasons had refused or failed.
He saw himself as the
‘lame and the halt and the blind’ who were called to the king’s feast
after the chosen guests had made excuses not to come. He felt he was a
broken reed, but alas the only reed willing to try and play their
tune.” Lucy McGinnis drew a similar conclusion. “I really think he was
picked out because he had the courage to go out and speak,” she said
in 1979. “There have been many others who have been picked out. But
they’ve been afraid…”
Adamski had not been afraid when destiny came
calling that important day in 1952. He stepped forward from the rank
and file and, with all his faults, took on his appalling burden. He
had cracked under the strain, but in the end he seemed to be whole.
Adamski was a new type of hero. He had redefined the borders of
iconography; his role reached out beyond the earthly celebrity of
achievement in war or politics, science or social endeavour to
encompass the extraterrestrial. A new corridor in the pantheon had
opened up. Adamski voyaged into uncharted waters where none had gone
before, and where shoals of derision and excoriation lay waiting in
plain view. And he served until he dropped.
After some days at the Rodeffers the gutsy pensioner headed off on
another round of lectures and interviews: Rochester, Syracuse,
Buffalo, Worcester, Lowell, Rhode Island, New York, Boston. The
weather was cold but people still turned out in good numbers to get a
glimpse of the legendary figure. “I am willing to work as I do, that
we may leave something good for the generations to follow, that they
may not blunder as we have done,” he told people. His posture was
still erect and he moved well, but his handwriting was starting to go.
He wrote a letter, dated 24 March, 1965, to Bill Sherwood from a hotel
in Buffalo, penned in a shaky hand: “Thanks for all you and yours have
done for me. We had a full house – 800 on the 22nd, and tonight – we
shall see.” Numbers still mattered to the old trouper; a professional
to the end.
He returned to the Rodeffers in mid-April looking exhausted and badly
in need of rest. No one with the exception of the Stecklings was to
know that he was in town. On 17 April Adamski celebrated his 74th
birthday with Fred and Ingrid and their son Glenn. During the quiet
gathering he advised the parents that his time was drawing near and
handed Fred his briefcase that contained the precious movies. Fred had
to continue the mission, George said. Steckling was shocked and tried
to hand it back, but the birthday guest insisted. His mission was
over. Five days later on the 22nd, Adamski awoke complaining to
Madeleine Rodeffer of a painful neck and shoulders as well as of
difficulty in breathing.
Over the next 24 hours he was in and out of
the Washington Sanatorium receiving tests and treatment but refusing
to stay. His heart was giving out, the doctors reported, but Adamski
was deeply suspicious of what could be administered to him in a
hospital. In the early evening of the 23rd, home-based treatment had
clearly failed: his breath was coming in gasps. He was ordered to
hospital in an ambulance. Madeleine traveled in the vehicle with her
dying guest; Nelson was behind in a car. As the ambulance reached a
corner near the Rodeffers a car parked at the kerb flicked its lights
several times at the convoy. “I don’t know if it was a space person,”
Mrs Rodeffer said later, “but it was like a sign. I had a strange
feeling about that car…”
Let’s take it as a given that this was a ‘farewell’ or a sign of
solidarity from the “Boys.” Why didn’t they turn the car around and
follow George to the hospital; stand vigil in the waiting room or
beside his bed? They knew he was dying. Their mental percipience was
that good. Their technology was certainly that good: their sensors
could read the mind of a gnat at a hundred miles. Why didn’t they
throw the rulebook away like they’d done on the day of the filming?
Their man was dying; he had given them his heart and soul; it was time
to discard the operations manual. It was a time for duty, not a time
for policy. The Boys wouldn’t have been arrested at the hospital. Nor
were their identities in danger – there were no closed-circuit TVs in
those days recording the image of visitors.
Flicking the car lights
was worse than pathetic – it was dysfunctional. Joe Earthling would
have known what to do – and did. God had sent George an angel in his
greatest hour of need and her name was Madeleine Rodeffer. She held
his hand in the emergency room while medical staff fussed about
administering oxygen. When she returned after a spell outside, George
said, “Where’ve you been, Madeleine?” She said, “George, they don’t
want me to stay here with you – they say I’m in the way.” George spoke
to the others in the room, “She’s not in the way.” Adamski added, “I
know that I’m going.” Madeleine Rodeffer held his hand firmly. She had
no children; she had plenty of love to give. Adamski had no children;
a recent friend would do just fine. “…I kept thinking that some
miracle was going to occur – that he’s not going to die,” she told
Timothy Good. “I was just holding on to the thought that he wasn’t
going to leave yet.” George’s laboured breathing was the only sound in
the room, then a last, long exhalation. A hesitation, then they said,
“He’s gone.”
-----
REFERENCES
20 Nov. 1952 Desert Center UFO meeting: “Flying Saucers Have Landed,”
Desmond Leslie & George Adamski, Werner Laurie, London, 1953; also
extra witness comments and detail per same book 1970 edition, Neville
Spearman, London, ‘Commentary on George Adamski’ pp. 239-278, by
Leslie; “Inside the Space Ships,” Adamski, Arco & Neville Spearman,
London, 1956, foreword by Leslie, pp. 21-24; “Alien Base: Earth’s
Encounters with Extraterrestrials,” Timothy Good, Century, London,
1998, p.108.
The Saintly Scamp
Biographical sketch by Blodget: op cit. Inside the Space Ships,
pp.228-232.
Adamski’s account of domestic arrangements 1953-55: ibid, ‘Days at
Palomar Terraces,’ pp. 192-198.
Mary Adamski as devout Catholic etc per “UFO…George Adamski: Their Man
on Earth,” Lou Zinsstag, publ. by UFO Photo Archives, Tucson AZ, 1990,
p.18.
GA showing Mary’s photo in wallet etc, per former Adamski co-worker,
personal discussion with writer 2009.
Declassified FBI files on Adamski per “The FBI Files: The FBI’s UFO
Top Secrets Exposed,” Nicholas Redfern, Pocket Books, London, 1998,
‘The Adamski Connection,’ pp. 289-317.
“Ashram” description, op cit. “Flying Saucers Have Landed” 1970
edition, p.154.
C.A.Honey complains to magazine, Flying Saucer Review, London,
July-Aug. 1960, vol.6, no. 4, ‘More News on Adamski, Honey, p.14.
Carol Honey’s book on UFOs and Adamski, “Flying Saucers 50 Years
Later,” by C.A.Honey, Trafford, Victoria, Canada, 2002.
Desmond Leslie’s biographical details per several sources including
his 2001 obituary on www.telegraph.co.uk.
Leslie and Girvan contact Adamski re photos etc: per George Adamski
obituary by Leslie, “Flying Saucer Review,” vol. II, no. 4, July-Aug.
1965, pp. 18-19.
Desmond Leslie Visits
Details of visit derived from several sources including op. cit
“Inside the Flying Saucers,” pp. 192-198; Leslie op cit. “Flying
Saucers Have Landed,” 1970, ‘Commentary on George Adamski’; op. cit.
www.telegraph co.uk.; op cit. “UFO, GA: Their Man on Earth”, Zinsstag,
p. 68; op. cit “Alien Base,” Good, p. 151.
Worldly Mask & Otherwordly Visitations
GA habits and tastes per writer discussions with former co-workers.
GA Prohibition era comment, per op. cit. Good p.148, quoting Jerome
Clark article.
FBI dealings with GA per op. cit. “The FBI Files,” Redfern.
GA article ‘My Fight with the Silence Group,’ quoted op.cit. Zinsstag,
p.98.
Pearson/Hinfelaar UFO sightings with GA, personal correspondence or
comments to writer.
Miller UFO sighting at Taupo, per “Flying Saucers Farewell,” George
Adamski, Abelard Schuman, New York, 1961, pp. 129-130.
Ingrid Steckling comment, per video documentary, “The UFO Contacts”,
written & directed by Michael Heseman, 2000 Film Productions,
Dusseldorf, Germany, 1996.
The Boys
GA Australian arrival per 3-page reminiscence, ‘Some Memories of
George Adamski,’ by Roy Russell, Brisbane, Nov. 1998.
Zinsstag on GA impersonal behaviour, per ‘On George Adamski,’ lecture
at BUFORA meeting, London, June, 1967.
GA in Basle and café incident, op cit. “GA: Their Man on Earth,”
Zinsstag, pp.40-41.
Airport experience with ‘the boys’ and committee meeting comment,
advice to writer by former co-worker, Dec. 2001.
British shipping industry ref. op. cit, Russell.
Carol Honey experiences on lecture tour, per ‘Flying Saucer Review,’
vol. 5, no. 2, Mar-Apr., 1959, Honey letter to editor, p. 32.
Ummo contact case per “UFO Contact from Planet Ummo,” Antonio Ribera,
publ. UFO Photo Archives, Tucson AZ, 1985.
Exit The Boys
GA channelling Orthon & use of crystalball, op. cit. “Flying Saucers
50 Years Later,” Honey, p. 206, 314.
McGinnis farewell message, per op. cit. “GA: Their Man on Earth,”
Zinsstag, p.67.
GA ‘trip to Saturn’ mainly per op. cit. Honey pp.211-227; also op cit.
Zinsstag, p.75-101.
GA fortune-telling suggestion, op. cit. Honey, p. 202.
GA embarks on campaign of recrimination, per op.cit. Honey, Zinsstag
and personal discussion with former co-workers.
1963: Sense and Non-Sense
GA audio tape archives and 4th book, held by George Adamski
Foundation, advice to writer by Glenn Steckling, June, 2009.
GA visits with Zinsstag in Basle, 1963, per op.cit. Zinsstag,
pp.67-74.
Last intimate talk with Zinsstag, per BUFORA talk, op. cit. p.5.
Last days with Desmond Leslie, per “Flying Saucers Have Landed,” 1970,
‘Commentary on George Adamski’, p. 259.
GA letter to Canadian correspondent, per op. cit. Honey, p.203.
GA mail in late 1963 & early 1964, per op.cit. Honey pp. 300-317, op.
cit. Zinsstag pp.80-94, and personal discussion with former
co-workers.
The Government Cottons On
Honey’s mail intercepted, files stolen etc, per op. cit. Honey,
pp.88-90.
Steckling family visited by intelligence agents, advice to writer by
Glenn Steckling, June 2009.
Rodeffer’s phone tapped and mail opened, per “George Adamski: The
Untold Story,” Zinsstag and Timothy Good, Ceti Publications,
Beckenham, England, 1983, p.185.
GA meetings with Kennedy, advice to writer by Glenn Steckling, June
2009.
Major Hans Petersen’s testimony on Adamski message, per op. cit. video
documentary, “The UFO Contacts”.
GA message on trip to Washington, per op.cit. Zinsstag, p.76.
Sherwood testimony on Ordnance pass, per op. cit. video documentary,
“The UFO Contacts”.
White House pass shown to Stecklings, advice to writer by Glenn
Steckling, June 2009.
The Most Extravagant Demonstration
Material in this section comes per “George Adamski: The Untold Story,”
Zinsstag & Good, pp. 160-170; personal interview (telephone) with
Madeleine Rodeffer by writer, 23 May, 2009; Rodeffer comments on op.
cit. video documentary, “The UFO Contacts”.
The Final Days
Material in this section comes per op. cit. Zinsstag & Good, pp.
179-185; personal interview (telephone) with Madeleine Rodeffer by
writer, 23 May, 2009; also advice re GA birthday at Stecklings per
Glenn Steckling to writer, June 2009; Adamski comment and letter to
Sherwood, quoted by Sherwood in ‘UFO Understanding: An American
Perspective, 17 July, 1983, quoted in op.cit. Zinsstag, p. 169.
this was copied from online text
as a partly backup-copy from
http://www.ufocusnz.org.nz/content/Secret-History-Part-2/62.aspx
and another online book of same author as this - is titled "Secret
History - And Why Barack Obama Must End It" and copy of that
here