The Triangle

Issue date: 11/11/05 Section: Sci-Tech

Media Credit: www.gafintl-adamski.com Adamski's Web site contains his telescope photographs.

The history of alien abductions has gone through some strange changes over time. In the 1940s, no one had ever heard of alien abduction. In the 1950s, a group of people claimed they were contacted by aliens and given special knowledge, because aliens were afraid that we were going to ruin our planet with nuclear weapons. In the 1970s and 1980s, people began to claim that they were forcefully kidnapped by aliens and had terrible medical procedures performed on them. This is also the period where people claimed that aliens have always been among mankind, kidnapping people.

There's one portion there that the modern UFO enthusiast is quick to gloss over: the role of the "contactees", who claimed to have been contacted by people from space and given advanced technical, medical, or philosophic information with which they were going to save the world. These people were, each and every one of them, lunatics or con-men. That's why the UFO enthusiast is so quick to try and ignore that they existed; because the modern movement of alien "abductees" has its roots in the contactee movement, which was a load of baloney.

The most famous contactee was a man by the name of George Adamski, a Polish immigrant living in California. He claimed, among other things, that while driving with friends, he saw a huge, submarine-shaped flying saucer that he was sure was "looking for him." He got out of his car, went off alone, and met a spaceman named Orthon (a native of Venus) who warned him that humanity was going to really screw itself over if we kept developing atomic weapons.

Adamski eventually produced lots of photographs of UFOs, which looked suspiciously like the lids of water coolers that he delivered for a living; this was because they were, in fact, the lids of water coolers he sold for a living tossed into the air and photographed from afar. He also made plaster casts of footprints he claimed were left by the men from Venus, and believe me: they've got some weird footwear. Instead of treads or cleats or whatever you usually find on the bottom of shoes, they contained elaborate artwork. I guess if you're in a spaceship, style is more important than traction.

Anyway, Adamski claimed that the first photos of other planets brought back by Soviet satellites were fakes; he'd know because his friends from beyond the sky had taken him to most of the planets in our solar system and let him look around. When he eventually claimed that he wouldn't be in town for a few weeks because he was going to a conference on Saturn, most of his disciples became a little annoyed and he soon lost popularity, though there are still piles of websites singing the praises of his "research".

Continued...

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