George Adamski

Adamski was born in Bromberg in the Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire. He was one of five siblings born to ethnic Polish parents, Józef Adamski (1867–1937) and Franciszka Adamska (1862–1946). When Adamski was two years old his family emigrated to the United States and settled in New York City. he was a soldier in the 13th U.S. Cavalry Regiment (K Troop) fighting at the Mexican border during the Pancho Villa Expedition. Following his marriage Adamski moved west, doing maintenance work in Yellowstone National Park and working in an Oregon flour mill and a California concrete factory. By 1930, "Adamski was a minor figure on the California occult scene", teaching his personal mixture of Christianity and Eastern religions, which he called "Universal Progressive Christianity" and "Universal Law." The "Royal Order of Tibet" was given a government license to make wine for "religious purposes" during Prohibition; Adamski was quoted as saying "I made enough wine for all of Southern California ... I was making a fortune!" However, the end of Prohibition in December 1933 also marked the decline of his profitable wine-making business, and Adamski later told two friends that's when he "had to get into this [flying] saucer crap." He also built a wooden observatory at the campground to house his six-inch telescope, and visitors and tourists to Palomar Mountain often received the false impression that Adamski was an astronomer connected to the famed Palomar Observatory at the top of the mountain. Adamski usually did nothing to correct this inaccurate impression; he would tell visitors the truth "only when pressed to do so." Though he was usually referred to as "Professor" Adamski by his admirers and followers and he often implied or claimed to possess various academic degrees, Adamski held no graduate or undergraduate degree from any accredited college or university and in fact had only a third grade education. ==Ufology==

On 9 October 1946, during a meteor shower, Adamski and some friends claimed that while they were at the Palomar Gardens campground, they witnessed a large cigar-shaped "mother ship." In 1949, Adamski began giving his first UFO lectures to civic groups and other organizations in Southern California; he requested, and received, fees for the lectures. In these lectures he made "fantastic" claims, such as "that government and science had established the existence of UFOs two years earlier, via radar tracking of 700-foot-long spacecraft on the other side of the Moon." On 29 May 1950, Adamski took a photograph of what he alleged to be six unidentified objects in the sky, which appeared to be flying in formation. This same UFO photograph was depicted in an August 1978 commemorative stamp issued by the island nation of Grenada in order to mark the "Year of UFOs." Orthon and the Contactees On 20 November 1952, Adamski and several friends were in the California Desert near the town of Desert Center, California, when they purportedly saw a large submarine-shaped object hovering in the sky. Believing that the ship was looking for him, Adamski is said to have left his friends and to have headed away from the main road. Shortly afterwards, according to Adamski's accounts, a scout ship made of a type of translucent metal landed close to him, and its pilot, a Venusian called Orthon, disembarked and sought him out. Adamski claimed the people with him also saw the Venusian ship, and several of them later stated they could see Adamski meeting someone in the desert, although from a considerable distance. During the conversation, Orthon purportedly warned of the dangers of nuclear war, and Adamski later wrote that "the presence of this inhabitant of Venus was like the warm embrace of great love and understanding wisdom." Adamski claimed Orthon had refused to allow himself to be photographed, and instead, had asked Adamski to provide him with a blank photographic plate, which Adamski claimed he had given Orthon. Orthon is said to have returned the photographic plate to Adamski on 13 December 1952; when developed it was found to contain strange new symbols. It was during this meeting that Adamski is said to have taken a now famous photograph of Orthon's Venusian scout ship using his telescope. At the time, skeptics said it looked suspiciously like the top of a "chicken brooder", for warming newly hatched poultry. In need of money and keen to create a bestseller, Leslie had written a manuscript about the visitation of Earth by aliens. Its genesis had been Leslie chancing upon a copy of the 1896 book The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria by William Scott-Elliot in a friend's library. Adamski sent Leslie a written account of his supposed contact with Orthon, and photos. Leslie combined the two works into the 1953 co-authored book Flying Saucers Have Landed. The book became a bestseller, brought both Adamski and Leslie news media attention, and eventually became "a key text of the New Age movement." The following year, Leslie visited Adamski in California and claimed to witness several UFOs with him. Leslie described one of them in a letter he sent to his wife while he was in San Diego: Flying Saucers Have Landed claimed Nordic aliens from Venus and other planets in Earth's solar system routinely visited the Earth. According to the book, Orthon and other aliens were worried that nuclear bomb tests in the Earth's atmosphere would kill all life on Earth, spread radiation into space, and contaminate other planets. Adamski claimed that Nordic aliens worshiped a "Creator of All", but that "we on Earth know very little about this Creator ... our understanding is shallow." Adamski said he learned that he had been selected by Nordic aliens to bring their message of peace to Earth people, and that other humans throughout history had also served as their messengers, including Jesus Christ. Adamski further claimed that aliens were peacefully living on Earth, and that he had met with them in bars and restaurants in Southern California. However, Adamski would remain the most prominent, and most influential, of the contactees. Straith Letter Hoax In 1957, Adamski received a letter signed "R.E. Straith," alleged representative of the "Cultural Exchange Committee" of the U.S. State Department. The letter said the U.S. Government knew that Adamski had spoken to extraterrestrials in a California desert in 1952, and that a group of highly placed government officials planned on public corroboration of Adamski's story. Adamski was proud of this endorsement and exhibited it to support his claims. However, in 1985, ufologist James W. Moseley revealed that the letter was a hoax. This was not the first time Adamski had claimed government support for his UFO stories. In 1953, he told a meeting of the Corona, California Lions Club that his "material has all been cleared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Air Force Intelligence." When the FBI learned of Adamski's claims, three agents were sent to talk to Adamski. He denied having stated that the FBI or USAF intelligence supported his claims (even though his remarks were reported in a local newspaper, the Riverside Enterprise), and he agreed to sign a letter stating that "he understood the implications of making false claims" and that the FBI "did not endorse [the claims] of individuals." The three FBI agents also signed the letter, and a copy was given to Adamski. Adamski later said the FBI had "warned [him] to keep quiet." Meeting with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands In May 1959, the head of the Dutch Unidentified Flying Objects Society told Adamski she had been contacted by officials at the palace of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands who advised "that the Queen would like to receive you." Wire services such as United Press International and Reuters circulated reports of the meeting to newspapers around the world. ==Later life==

in 1963 In 1962, Adamski announced that he would be attending an interplanetary conference held on the planet Saturn. However, skeptics noted that the medal was actually a common tourist souvenir made by a company in Milan, Italy, and that Adamski displayed it to his friends in a cheap plastic box - which is how it was sold in tourist shops in Rome. Adamski said he met with the Pope at the request of the extraterrestrials he was allegedly in contact with, in order to request a "final agreement" from the Pope because of his decision not to communicate directly with any extraterrestrials, and also to offer him a liquid substance in order to save him from the gastric enteritis that he suffered from, which would later become acute peritonitis. ==Death==

On 23 April 1965, aged 74, Adamski died of a heart attack at a friend's home in Silver Spring, Maryland, shortly after giving a UFO lecture in Washington, D.C.. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. ==Investigations and criticism==

Since the 1950s, numerous critics and skeptics have investigated Adamski's claims. The aliens Adamski claimed to have met at various times were described by him as "human beings from another world", usually light-skinned, light-haired humanoids that would later be called Nordic aliens. However, all scientific evidence, as well as later lunar trips by American astronauts, clearly showed that the entire surface of the Moon is barren of life and has no atmosphere. In his writings, Adamski claimed he travelled to Venus, Mars, and other planets in Earth's solar system, and clearly stated that they were all capable of supporting humanoid life. to be a "remake" of his 1949 science fiction novel, ghostwritten for Adamski by Lucy McGinnis, and entitled Pioneers of Space. It described a fictional voyage through the solar system that, critics noted, sounded very similar to the space travels described by Adamski in Inside the Space Ships. Adamski claimed that movie director Cecil B. DeMille's top trick photographer, J. Peverell Marley, had examined his UFO photos and found a "spaceman" in them, and Marley himself declared that if Adamski's pictures were fakes, they were the best he had ever seen. In the United Kingdom, 14 experts from the J. Arthur Rank company concluded that the object photographed was either real or a full-scale model. However, in his 1955 investigation into Adamski's claims, James W. Moseley interviewed Marley, who stated that he had never enlarged the photos for analysis nor found a "spaceman" in them, and did not know of anyone who had. Moseley also interviewed German rocket scientist Walther Johannes Riedel, who told him that he had analyzed Adamski's UFO photos and found them to be fakes. Riedel told Moseley that the UFO's "landing struts" were actually 100-watt General Electric light bulbs, and that he had seen the round "GE" logo printed on them. Moseley found other flaws during his investigation of Adamski's story. He interviewed several of the people that Adamski claimed had been with him in his initial meeting with Orthon on 20 November 1952 and found that all of these witnesses contradicted Adamski's claims. One, Al Bailey, denied to Moseley that he had seen a UFO in the desert or the alien Adamski had described. Jerrold Baker, who had worked at Palomar Gardens with Adamski, told Moseley that he had overheard "a tape-recorded account of what was to transpire on the desert, who was to go, etc." several days before Adamski's claimed 20 November meeting with Orthon, and Baker stated that Adamski's meeting with Orthon was a "planned operation." Air Force investigation During the early 1950s, USAF Captain Edward J. Ruppelt was the head of Project Blue Book, the Air Force group assigned to investigate UFO reports. In 1953, Captain Ruppelt decided to investigate Adamski's UFO claims. He traveled to California's Palomar Mountain, dressed in civilian attire to avoid attracting attention and attended one of Adamski's lectures before a large crowd at his Palomar Gardens Cafe. Ruppelt concluded that Adamski was a talented con artist whose UFO stories were designed to make money from his gullible followers and listeners, and he compared Adamski to the famed hoaxer, carnival, and circus showman P. T. Barnum. In describing Adamski's speaking style, Ruppelt wrote "to look at the man and listen to his story you had an immediate urge to believe him ... he was dressed in well-worn, but neat, overalls. He had slightly graying hair and the most honest pair of eyes I've ever seen. He spoke softly and naively, almost pathetically, giving the impression that 'most people think I'm crazy, but honestly, I'm really not.'" According to Ruppelt, Adamski had a persuasive effect on his audience, "you could actually have heard the proverbial pin drop" in the cafe as Adamski told of his initial 1952 meeting with Orthon. Following Adamski's lecture, Ruppelt noted that many of his listeners purchased copies of Adamski's UFO photos that were on sale in the cafe. At another lecture led by Adamski and other well-known contactees, Ruppelt wrote that "people shelled out hard cash to hear Adamski's story." Ruppelt believed "the common undertone to many of these [contactee] stories ... is Utopia. On these other worlds there is no illness, they've learned how to cure all diseases. There are no wars, they've learned how to live peaceably. There is no poverty, everyone has everything he wants. There is no old age, they have learned the secret of eternal life ... Too many times this subtle pitch can be boiled down to, "Step right up folks and put a donation in the pot. I'm just on the verge of learning the spaceman's secrets and with a little money to carry out my work I'll give you the secret." By 1960, according to Ruppelt, Adamski's UFO lectures and his first two books had brought him financial security: "[His] hamburger stand is boarded up and he now lives in a big ranch house. He vacations in Mexico and has his own clerical staff. His two books Flying Saucers Have Landed and Inside the Space Ships have sold ... 200,000 copies and have been translated into every language except Russian." Ruppelt humorously noted that by 1960, two "beautiful spacewomen" who claimed to be Nordic aliens were dating Adamski, a blonde from Saturn called "Kalna" and another woman named "Ilmuth". == Literary works ==

Books • • • • • • • • • • • Other publications • • • • • • • ==Notes==