Pioneers of Space

Some say it is the California sun or the Santa Ana winds that created the weird culture of the west coast. The inhabitants think differently. Westerners are open to new ideas. Visitors from another planet are welcome in California.

I was enthralled as a teenager to read the story of George Adamski who rode out to Desert Center, California on November 20, 1952 to meet a visitor from the planet Venus, an event attested to by six witnesses who signed a notarized statement. In the 1950s there was still much speculation about intelligent life on our neighboring rocky planets, Mars and Venus.

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Biologists believe that human life is a product of the long evolutionary processes that are unique to Earth. They consider it extremely unlikely that we would someday encounter human forms from another planet. This popular view has prevailed to the degree that most scientists reject the stories of the contactees. They also point out that other planets in our own solar system do not have atmospheres conducive to human life as we know it. Venus has a hothouse atmosphere and it bears down on the Venusian surface at a pressure 90 times greater than earth's atmosphere at sea level.

As a teenager I was excited by the prospect of making contact with the visitors or, at the very least, catching a glimpse of their ships over these remote desert regions. This was not a formal investigation of contactees. I had very few doubts then. I felt that the contactees were not concocting stories. Little did I know that an era was passing, that a future day would come when UFO researchers and investigators would dismiss and debunk contactees as frauds who possessed motives of greed and a need for attention and adulation. Little did I know that the contactee of the future would report a different kind of experience, that of menacing abductions and examinations conducted by humanoid, but non-human entities. Little did I know that the future would bring greater mystification rather than enlightenment.

All these human visitors were described by various contactees, those who had written books, and many who had not. Their descriptions were remarkably similar. I drove my first car, a 1953 Mercury on the Palms to Pines highway in 1959 when I drove twins Ray and Rex Stanford from Giant Rock in the Mojave Desert to Mount Palomar in San Diego County California. We stayed an entire weekend talking to Adamski and examining his photos, plaster-of-paris casts of Orthon's footprints, and his workshop experiments with radioactive materials and magnets for the purpose of exploring levitation. Later Ray Stanford wrote a scathing report denouncing Adamski as a fraud even though he himself had published stories about his own contacts with human-like space visitors and the facility he had of using telepathy to establish such contacts.

Many years later, in the 1970s after Adamski's death, I had the opportunity of interviewing Alice Wells for a period of 4 hours and subsequently going to the site of Adamski's first meeting on November 20, 1952 at a location 10.2 miles north of Desert Center, California on the highway to Parker, Arizona where he met up with George Hunt Williamson and his wife, Betty.

I was impressed with Alice's eyewitness account of the large cigar-shaped "mothership" they had observed on that momentous occasion as well as her description of the man Adamski called "Orthon" as seen clearly by her from a distance with binoculars. She was emphatic that her drawing of him in Adamski's recounting in the book Flying Saucers Have Landed was accurate and that she was close enough to see the details of his face and manner of dress. She also said that a similar visitor dressed in our style of clothing had visited her Palomar Gardens restaurant in the 1950s. I had no reason to doubt her and the attention to detail in her testimony was excellent.