BRIEF ORIENTATION, from Wikipedia:
George
Adamski (April 17, 1891 – April 23, 1965) was a Polish-born American citizen
who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular
culture, after he claimed to have photographed spaceships from other planets,
met with friendly Nordic alien Space Brothers, and to have taken flights with
them to the Moon and other planets. He was the first, and most famous, of the
so-called contactees of the 1950s. Adamski was called a "philosopher,
teacher, student and saucer researcher," although his claims were
investigated by skeptics, who concluded that they were an elaborate hoax.
Adamski
authored three books describing his meetings with Nordic aliens and his travels
with them aboard their spaceships: Flying Saucers Have Landed
(co-written with Desmond Leslie) in 1953, Inside the Space Ships in 1955, and Flying
Saucers Farewell in 1961. The first two books were both bestsellers; by
1960 they had sold a combined 200,000 copies.
AND NOW TO OUR STORY:
Several
Amazon reviewers of this fine tome appear disappointed because this is not a
scholarly, year-by-year treatment of the facts and details of the life of
ur-Contactee George Adamski. They should
have read the subtitle:
“The Story
of George Adamski, The First Flying Saucer Contactee and How He Changed the
World.”
Well, you
shouldn’t expect Carl Sagan after that!
Bennett is
a writer with a distinctly different outlook and style to my own rather dry and
by-the-numbers composition. That’s
great! Because the “world” of Adamski is
more suitable to Cosmic Trickster treatment than a dry recitation of dates and
places.
Bennett
does a passionate job of depicting our own present-day media-driven world as an
almost direct result of the sort of attention sparked by Adamski’s solution to
the Flying Saucer Frenzy: They’re
piloted by humanoids who look like us, but are vastly superior in spiritual and
intellectual development. Yes, While
there were earlier intimations of the Benevolent Space Brother trope, George
Adamski, this Polish-American who lived a life surrounded by a haze of chaos
and uncertainty -- this guy crystallized the concept into the image familiar
today.
The bare
biographical bones of Adamski’s youth, life, military service, and such are
indeed covered, but usually only in passing, on the way to a comment on the
process of the development of our present-day mode-of-consciousness from the
“simpler” higher-contrast world of the post-World War II West.
I marvel at
Bennett’s philosophical angle, so different from mine. Even though I have a lot to disagree with him
about, I still love his observations. In
his theorizing of the outlook and motivations of “ life from elsewhere,”
Bennett makes a wonderful observation that “they” might not be coming here to
just talk. “Perhaps the terrible truth
is that since humanity at large can act in a way that is ass daft as the
proverbial brush, then we can well expect other conscious life forms to be just
as crazy as we are” (p 72).
The
phenomenon that was George Adamski and the Contactee movement was a social one
more than a scientific one. People were
enchanted by the idea that somebody “out there”
cared enough to send their very best (pace Hallmark Cards). There
were higher, more evolved, kinder folk out there, and they wanted to help
us! What great news!
Another
brilliant book I have recently read,
The
Legend of Spring-heeled Jack by Karl Bell, quotes another researcher’s
comment about Sherlock Holmes.
This
observation is similarly true about the popularity of “Space Brothers,” in my
opinion:
“…
a modern enchantment, a yearning
for the fantastical that has detached itself from traditional supernatural
associations” (Bell, p 8).
On the
other hand, perhaps the percipients are as misguided as the entities they
“perceive.” In Chapter 6, “Cargo
Perspectives,” Bennett comes up with a great analogy. He refers to “the African stick insect” without
explaining which of several possible this might mean. At any rate, Bennett tells us,
The African stick
insect knows how to imitate the rhythmic march of a line of termites in order
to avoid annihilation …. Similarly, the UFO phenomenon, as a species of
information, most likely creates a partial-objectivity to stay in business for
as long as it can. Like the stick
insect, Orthon’s “task” may have been to create and hard sell a certain kind of
wonder as a screen for whatever were his complex intentions. Any downtown salesman would understand.
(p 76)
Instead
of serious creatures of traditional sci-fi, we may encounter something
guessing, laughing, and deceiving, rather than something physically violent.
(p 77)
Again, on
page 79:
We have also to bear
in mind that for hundreds of years a standard procedure to clear hostile
natives off landing beaches was for crew to wear bizarre masks and strange clothing.
The fact
that such a message, both cosmic in implication and childishly simplistic and
naïve in its explication. was bundled up with so-called “facts” that were
scientific hogwash -- this was a concern to the FBI or UFO skeptics, but not to
the yearning souls for which the Gospel of the Space Brother indeed took the
place of religion for many. There were
many gods (advanced races), and this shill of a fast-talking, clumsy,
self-promoting goofball was their prophet!
He became
famous and infamous, attracting followers who shared his near-commune or helped
organize his national and international speaking tours. These were a scattershot affair, as reports
seem to show one talk a success, while the next a dud. Evidently Adamski was an amateur, a
dilettante if you will, at public speaking as well as outer-space contact. While he professed that his “philosophy” was
the ne plus ultra of conscious
achievement, he wasn’t a very good embodiment of these exalted goals. Oftentimes he was caught in petty lies or
small misleading, which properly shed a bad light on the rest of his
pronouncements.
Such
feet-of-clay behavior endears him to Bennett, who repeatedly opines that
Adamski’s childish deceptions put the lie to the skeptics’ opinions of the man
as a shyster and professional con man.
Would an accomplished liar try to get away with so many transparent
deceptions? These fumbles, for Bennett,
reinforce for him that SOMETHING genuinely strange had happened to
Adamski. If his entire tale were a
fabrication, a story conjurer should have come up with something more
internally consistent. As Bennett says
on page 202, “Their very ineptness is a screen against normality.”
Only one
thing makes it plain to Bennett that Adamski should be considered
seriously: At times, independent
witnesses reported the same things! A
plane pilot report, found years later, describes something odd at the same time
as one of the early sightings/contacts;
some not-proven-as-fake photos resemble Adamski’s saucers.
If you do
an internet search on the phrase “George Adamski and the Flying Saucers from
Venus” you will find a whole list of other photos that appear to show
spaceships similar to Adamski’s.
Here is one:
This
paragraph from page 192 sums up the book:
Adamski mixed Christ
and technology, myth and the concrete, cool and pleasant sanity with the
utterly fantastic claim, and he lived in the battleground between all these
mixed metaphors. In doing so, he fell
into the ruthlessly selective machinery of the western mind and was crushed.
Here are a
few more select quotations:
It is as if a great
many kinds of cultural advertising (in the sense of persuasion) are trying to
get through a narrow bottleneck of “acceptance” at the same time. The object of these different systems (and
that includes systems of rational explanation) is to enter that prime time
which is usually taken as ‘reality.’ (pp 195-6)
Being a
member of the Contactee Movement, as with any social or religious association,
is also attractive to people who feel that their lives are empty or not
important. As Bennett says on page 203,
In this, the
phenomenon is certainly a part-function of individual and group
personalities. The inexcusable fumbling
of Adamski and Madeleine [another witness], the drunken rages of the psychic
“thoughtphotographer” Ted Serios, the extremely superficial mind of disco-child
Uri Geller, indicated that such people are playing, rather than
thinking. Thinking, as we know it, was a
very late arrival on the historical scene.
For hundreds of thousands of years we reasoned only as young children
now still reason. Researches into
Artificial Intelligence have now come up against the play barrier. The chief characteristic of play is the waste
of time involved in it as an activity.
Its free associations and mobility thoroughly disturb intellectuals all;
they want the roundabout to stay still, and it will not; it continues to
generate very large numbers of noisy and redundant connections. We cannot help the feeling that, prior to
fetching fire from heaven, as it were, the lives of many of these contactees
were, an any bourgeois sense at least, complete wastes of time in themselves.
All of these wondrous (because I couldn’t have
thought of them!) observations are woven into the context of Adamski’s rise and
fall from handyman to international sensation to often-mocked perceived
charlatan.
And don’t
forget that, even if taken at supposed face value, the Space Folks didn’t treat
Adamski 100% squarely, either. They
flimflammed him, just as he was supposedly doing to his disciples:
These
“space folk” who speak so casually of “magnetic vibrations” and “etheric matter
transfer,” are therefore nice chintz-cushion and flock-wallpaper gods. They are very definitely not the
bleeding-to-death, treacherous, or kick-in-the-backside gods of Shakespeare,
Neitzsche, or Mount Olympus; These “space folk” gods are the nice boy-scout
deities of patio and lawn. They are the
guardian spirits of regularly washed curtains, and neat hedgerows, the gods of
a landscape tamed, and their rare petulant bleats could be from Donald Duck at
extremely low ebb. (p 104)
In CS
Lewis’s terms, these “new gods” are definitely tamed pussy-cats; or, as Ian
Anderson might put it, you would have to wind them up every day and twice on
Sundays!
I am
enchanted with these observations, although I don’t agree with all of Bennett’s
conclusions.
To my mind
this is a wondrous evocation of a certain point of view. This view holds that, as technology develops,
the wonders of living are slowly drained by the assurance that “we know
everything.” It’s wild cards like the
Contactees (or even, Lord help us, Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot) that
help people feel alive.
It’s only
human to look around at the world and wonder, along with Peggy Lee,
"Is
That All There Is?" Or, as
Gandhi said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
People and
movements such as those described in this book are the kinds of thing that keep
the magic of life alive, Bennett feels, thus the book’s subtitle. Without wonder, you might as well be
dead! Generally speaking, I agree with
him.
As Arthur C
Clarke said during the making of
2001: A Space Odyssey, “Magic is
alive, God is afoot!
God is alive, magic
is afoot!”
(rephrasing the title of a
1966 Leonard Cohen
book)
I hope you
enjoy this fun and thoughtful book as much as I did!
