Over the last 20 years, as a journalist and an academic, I’ve read every file in these UFO archives. In my new book I have collected the best drawings and photographs.

GEORGE ADAMSKI - His photos GEORGE ADAMSKI - His photos

Others, like J. Allen Hynek, took a somewhat dimmer view, accusing Adamski and others like him, of discrediting the entire field of UFO research. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. Originally set up after a request from Winston Churchill, the Ministry of Defence’s UFO Desk ran for over 60 years, collecting mysterious sightings and records of strange objects in the sky from observant – and sometimes imaginative – members of the public. In the 1955 book, Adamski claimed that his new friends took him aboard one of their scout ships, flew him to an immense mother ship hovering over the earth, gave him a ride around the moon and treated him to a colorful travelogue about life on Venus.Fourteen experts of the J. Arthur Rank film distribution company (UK) “concluded that the object photographed was either real, or a full scale model”. ( Source: Leonard Cramp, aeronautical designer and engineer, in his book Space, Gravity, and the Flying Saucer, 1954.)

George Adamski - Wikipedia George Adamski - Wikipedia

In 1952, one George Adamski ran into Orthon, a five-feet-six-inch humanoid in a brown jumpsuit who hailed from Venus. In 1953, the spiritualist writer George Adamski caught the imagination with his book Flying Saucers Have Landed, in which he claimed that he had communicated with creatures from Venus and Mars who had come to Earth to avert nuclear war. Preposterous as his stories seemed, Adamski became an international celebrity and lectured widely. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands raised a public stir after inviting him to her palace in 1959 to discuss extraterrestrial doings. Adamski supposedly claimed a secret 1963 meeting with the pope, as well. While often ignored by his critics, Adamski’s other works show that his teaching and philosophy were not only consistent throughout his life, but also far ahead of their time, as they are now finding confirmation in the latest insights from systems science.Ultimately, UFOs are something that people project onto their perception of the world. In 1957, the psychologist Carl Jung was asked for his views on UFOs. He said, ‘There is an overwhelming amount of material pointing to their legendary or mythological aspect. As a matter of fact the psychological aspect is so impressive, that one almost must regret that the UFOs seem to be real after all.’ By the end of 1952, the skies over his California home had become a sort of UFO shooting gallery. Adamski estimated he took another 500 flying saucer photos, from which he got a dozen good ones. He claimed to have provided prints to the Air Force, but he kept the negatives. George Adamski stands in front of a painting by Gay Betts depicting the Venusian space pilot he met in the Mojave Desert, California.

George Adamski and the Space Brothers | HowStuffWorks George Adamski and the Space Brothers | HowStuffWorks

Adamski chronicled his alleged adventures in several books. The first, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), coauthored with Desmond Leslie, recounted his chat with the Venusian. Widely read at the time, it later gained a new generation of fans in the trippy 1960s. This is a typical example of what’s in these files. It’s not a huge cover-up. It's people seeing things that are unexplained, which are then filed away and forgotten. There are two reasons for this change – popular culture and technology. In 1977 the opening scene of Star Wars featured a triangular spacecraft. At the same time, the newspapers were full of stories about the new US bomber planes, which were also triangular. This photo was taken by a retired RAF serviceman while on holiday in Sri Lanka in 2004. He said he thought it was an atomic bomb going off.I showed this picture to a meteorologist and they said it was an iridescent ice cloud. About 10% of the reports in the UFO archives can be explained by showing rare natural phenomena like this. While we were busy imagining aliens, scientists discovered faint signals of phosphine gas in the clouds of the famously harsh, seemingly uninhabitable planet Venus—a signature that could indicate the presence of life. Even if they won’t find Orthon or his peaceful brethren, one thing is clear: We have barely begun to scratch the surface of what aliens might actually be. It was in November 1952, in a remote patch of California desert, that Adamski came face to face with his supposed visitor from Venus. “The beauty of his form surpassed anything I had ever seen,” Adamski wrote. “And the pleasantness of his face freed me of all thought of my personal self. I felt like a little child in the presence of one with great wisdom and much love…”