A LOOK AT COLIN BENNETT'S BOOK ON GEORGE ADAMSKI
By Harold Egeln
February 10, 2006 -- The above is the text by George Adamski. typewritten by himself, on a two cents post card mailed to me on April 24, 1958 from "George Adamski, Palomar Terrace, Star South, Valley Center, California."
MY CORRESPONDENCE WITH ADAMSKI
It was the third communication in my short-lived childhood correspondence with the most famous of all "contactees," this time in reply to a lengthy letter I hand-wrote about my then recent UFO sightings in Irvington, New Jersey and about my support for him against the then skeptical charges being leveled against him, encouraging him to persist.
Adamsko's post card was, also, a welcomed boost for me, after the April 1957 incident when I was suspended for two months from public school for reporting two UFO sightings to my classmates. This official muzzling of my basic interest in not only ufology but astronomy and space science was a traumatic event, putting me into virtual exile in my hometown and being labelled "the Martian."
In mid-1957 I had received a typewritten letter from Adamski, which I still have, about my own sightings and experiences, and somewhere in between I also received material from Adamski's secretary. [When I find the letter, I will add it to the end of this review.]
Although a boy, while classified as gifted by my school when I was in fifth grade, I had read the Adamski book "Inside the Spaceships" in 1955 (when I had my first multiple-witnessed UFO sighting at a camp in Stanhope, NJ) and later I would hear Adamski when he was a guest on "The Long John Nebel Show" on late night radio in New York City, spinning his ear-grabbing yarns.
To me as a boy, Adamski was admired for speaking out about his alleged contacts with "space people." As an astronomy-savvy child, reading space science books, I did not "buy" his tales of an inhabited solar system but felt that he did, indeed, have some kind of interaction with a hyper-intelligence which masked itself as ETs named Orthon, Firkon and Rami, a mixture of frolic, fraud, farce, folly and fractured fact.
As a boy and later as a teen, I accummulated a huge collection of hundreds of UFO newspaper and magazine articles (which only a smidgen survives), including a front page story on Adamski's visit to Queen Juliana of Holland in his famous world tour of 1959, and I reported my UFO sightings to NICAP in forms they provided.
I provide this personal Adamski connection background as my own recollection of those exciting early Flying Saucer era for a review of an excellent, in-depth study of Adamski by researcher Colin Bennett, "Looking for Orthon: The story of George Adamski, the First Flying Saucer Contactee and How He Changed the World" (Paraview Press, NY, 2001 - ISBN 1-931044-32-5).
Perhaps Adamski had one verifiable genuine close encounter: the multiple witnessed desert incident on November 20, 1952, which led to his first book "Flying Saucers Have Landed" with Desmond Leslie. His other accounts were certifiably questionable, a mythology of alien and human deception mixed with possible or improbable authenic contact on some level of reality.
Bennett, a feature writer for the "Fortean Times," calls that "techno fairy tales" with Adamski acting as a contacted native in a developing cargo cult society in relation to Contact, which he spells out in a chapter.
ADAMSKI: TRICKSTER? HUCKSTER?
Was Adamski, spokesman for "Space Brotherism," a con artist, a hoaxer, an outright fraud? Was he stretching "the truth" a wee bit too far, embellishing some very real experiences? These questions have bothered researchers in the 41 years since his death, some of whom dismiss the gentleman completely as a deluded fraud not worthy of mention nor notice.
The chapter 7 title, "The Ufonauts are the Liars, Not the Contactees," is a concept shared by several UFO researchers (subsitute "contactees" with "abductees" and "witnesses"), such as Budd Hopkins, who wrote an perceptive paper on "alien deception." This is a complex subject in itself, with falsehood the salt put in place of sugar in an otherwise good cup of coffee.
Of Orthon and Indrid Cold (from "Mothman") and such other Ufonaut--types who "appear to come from paper-thin almost-worlds...Western thinking in general has great difficulty with these intermedate forms and partial states of being," writes Bennett (pages 74-75).
Adamski was like, writes Bennett, an "outsider" He writes, "The outsider, living in (an) intermediate state, is an amusing yet frightening figure, and serves to remind folk that the rules of reality-game are never fully settled." (pages 145-146)
Thanks to Colin Bennett's astute study, critical thinking evaluation and insightful cross-disciplined correlations of The Adamski Phenomenon, Bennett has emerged with the definately final and ultimate look of the Palomar Gardens Cafe cook who cooked up wonderful tales with a mixture of natural and artificial ingredients, serving up the contadictory, negating workings of the UFO enigma itself. It is, Bennett writes "a mystery to enter rather than solve."( page 91)
"A PROTO-TYPE 'PAN-DIMENSIONAL' REALITY" OF "INSIDE THE SPACESHIPS"
What emerges from Bennett's brilliantly entertaining foray into the initimately researched details of Adamski's life and associates are certain acutely sharp observations about the Nature of the Contact Experience in its many forms of expression, as reported by countless "contactees," using that term for all sorts of experiencers.
Here are a few excellent examples that should be stated, citing Bennett's formidable and sharp insightfulness.
"Perhaps," writes Bennett, "...that which we now call the UFO stayed with us because we like reminding ourselves that the world is never quite completely real. To many who feel that they live under the claustrophobic oppression of a 'factual' culture that is practically destroying all land, sea and air, that is a comforting thought."
"We bind such things to our hearts like pressed leaves whose personal code tells us that both Matter and Experience are conspiracies," Bennett continues with his skillful, beautiful poetic prose which makes his book a delight to read. "As such their plots can be subverted, and the good news is that there are rumors of guerrillas in the hills, tales of lights in the forest at midnight, and if we believe George Adamski for even a second, we may even see a WHITE RABBIT or two, if we keep our eyes open." [page 13]
Yes, there is the White Rabbit and Alice In Wonderland factor to Adamski, as Bennett describes Adamski as "one of the most celebrated White Rabbits of the 20th Century." (page 65). Adamsk, Bennett writes, is "...instead of a liar, a fraudster, a con-man, the much-misunderstood Aamski can be seen as essentially a shaman-like prankster," Bennett writes. "Like the shaman and the fool, Adamski... effectively produced a blinding stream of images, symbols, metaphors, strange juxtapositions, weird connections, a whole living theatre which annoyed, baffled, outraged, yet inspired."
Bennett compares Adamski to the early 20th researcher Charles Fort, author of "Lo!" and "The Book of the Damned" (the latter, an essential UFO primer, I first read as a child of nine or ten). "For the shaman, that concept which we call Objective Reality is a box of tricks and illusions." [In 2002, a year after his Adamski book was published, Bennett's "Politics of The Imagination - The Life of Charles Fort" was published by Paraview Press.]
"Contact may indeed be contact with a highly developed information field that has the power to change metaphor," writes Bennett (page 103). And, "There are those scientists who think that a really advanced 'intelligence' may well exist in a semi-disembodied game world in which that old industrial analogue we called 'objective reality' may be replaced eventual virtual stimulation" (page 80).
"This contact may not be in either 'greys' or the spindly 'War of the Worlds' machines spouting laser death-rays, but in the cool form of that powerful suggestion-virus called the advertisement," Benneth writes, suited to the world's "Entertainment State." "'Advanced' life might be indeed as vaporous as a mere power metaphor that dines onbelief batteries as inevitably as catte chew the chud."
These cultural observations are peppered throughout Bennett's book, which gives an intimate look "Inside the Adamski" and his life as the first and foremost contactee.
ADAMSKI LIVES AGAIN!
"Looking for Orthon" brings Adamski to life again, successfully resurrecting him, re-animating those years from 1952 when he met Orthon in his pre-arranged contact on November 20, 1952 to his death at age 74 on April 23, 1965.
The relationships Adamski had with his friends and colleagues come alive because of Bennett's meticulous research and writing style putting the reader in the midst of Adamski's life and into his mind. What a great movie it would make!
One key player is "Flying Saucers Have Landed" co-author, then-young Irish aristocrat Desmond Leslie, a novelist and playwrite who died a few years ago.
[-- I did not notice Bennett mention Leslie being the screen writer for a really good but largely forgotten British scence fiction movie called "Stranger From Venus" and the alternate title "Immediate Disaster" from 1958. In it, a young man from Venus lands near an English countryside inn and hotel, as part of a planned peaceful worldwide contact with Earth. However, Bristish government officials try to foil the contact in a failed attempt to capture a second scout ship sent to make that contact. This Orthon-like Venusian befriends a woman, played by Patricia Neal, who also co-starred in the earlier 1951 movie classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still." --]
It is Colin Bennett who suggests, writes John Michell in the book's Foreword, "that the defining moment of the 20th century will prove to be 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 20, 1952, when George Adamski met Orthon, a long-haired youth from Venus... in the presence of witnesses." (And with military jets flying overhead!)
In Bennett's book, rightly called "a literary tour-de-force" by Michell, (author of "Who Wrote Shakespeare?") we have a linear progression - and a linear regression of credibility - centered around Adamski's contact books "Flying Saucers Have Landed" (1953), "Inside the Spaceships" (1955) and "Flying Saucers Farewell" (1961).
Rather than tell those rather juicy stories here, where Adamski alternately soars and stumbles, I recommend that they be read in the book itself. I can assure you that it is the stuff of a Hollywood movie with a cast of fascinating characters, playing their roles in Adamski life, later to walk off the screen, with only one person waiting at the studio lot gates... author Colin Bennett.
"Adamski moved through mid-20th Century psychic dimensions as an action painter throwing onto canvas colors one has never seen before," writes Bennett. "Always living between page and fable, experience and text, tecnological vision and religious faith, it must be admitted that he had some genius. If he asked unwittingly for laughter, we must remember that he also had that Faustian nerve and cheek to outface the world's grin and take the consequences."
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New York City, February 2, 2006 -- UFO abductions are the prime focus of Budd Hopkins longtime research, which is well-known. As a now established and popular annual event, his Intruders Foundation presents its yearly Abductee Panel Discussion here in New York City as part of IF's Public Seminar Series.
"An interactive team is forming. There will be no more ways for the truth to be suppressed or for the future of peaceful contact, universal peace and technological conversion to be kept under a black shroud." -- Jeffrey Morgan Foss, Feb. 10, 2006
"Dear Mr. Egeln: Thank you for the encouraging things you said in your recent letter about the work for mankind that I am attempting to do. As of this time, I do not know what special infomation of forgotten civilizations the space people have - - but am inclined to think they 'know' all of past truths. Congratulations on your continued sightings! Wiih every good wish, G.A."
