Sometimes the truth is out there in banner type and still there are those researchers who fail in responding adequately to it; perhaps through ignorance, lack of resources, or even investigating skills. A few choose for whatever motives, to ignore any blatant truths and are therefore guilty instead of helping to perpetuate deception. Consequently a plethora of paranormal literature contains within its bulk repeated inaccuracies, fuelled by writers who failed to rely on original sources or their own independent verification. Countless photographs of psychic manifestations and UFOs continue to be published in the media with little regard for the facts, while every day our electronic highways accelerate towards gridlock as misguided computer nerds spin their tales of fraudulent sightings and abduction experiences around the world.
In recent years, celebrated picture evidence supporting the existence of water monsters (the enduring 1934 Loch Ness 'surgeon' photograph), man apes such as Bigfoot (the Patterson movie taken at Bluff Creek in 1967), plus many more images of spectral entities, alien creatures and UFOs, have disolved frame by transparent frame. Far from a picture equalling a thousand words, the reality is that often such 'evidence' is not even worth the paper stock it is printed on. However, combine a hoaxed photograph with a distinctly graphical account of an alleged event and it's a scenario destined to sprout legs and run on for decades.
George Adamski's flying saucer photographs are among the most famous images of UFOs ever published. In spite of the fact that these are now almost universally regarded as a fraud, they and the late (he died in 1965) Adamski's fanciful books nonetheless experience periodic revivals among generations of succeeding UFO theorists. The perverse idea being that Adamski's contactee experiences were genuine but that he had been deliberately lied to by the aliens, or even government agencies bent on perpetrating some elaborate hoax. The latter a scheme designed to unite all nations of the world, fresh from a recent global war, against a common threat. The equally late science fiction/fantasy editor and publisher Ray Palmer, who more than anyone helped to publicise the concept of "flying saucers from outer space" in the late 1940s, revealed that Adamski's books were rewrites of a bad science fiction manuscript Adamski had unsuccessfully submitted. One of these was entitled Pioneers of Space, about an imaginary trip to the Moon, Venus and Mars. In fact UFO researcher Ray Stanford subsequently claimed that Adamski admitted to him in a moment of candor that the whole Venusian contact affair was financially motivated to replace the income he had brought in as a rum-runner during America's Prohibition. Even the famous bell-shaped flying saucer picture (used as wallpaper on this page) was most likely nothing more than the top off a canister-type vacuum cleaner made around 1937, according to author Frank Edwards. It has also variously been described as representing a then well-known type of chicken brooder, a lampshade similar to one spotted in a London restaurant and ingeniously even a tobacco humidor top surmounted by a baby nipple, with three ping-pong balls glued to the base.
Adamski, a former handyman at a hamburger stand on the southern slope of Mount Palomar, had obviously acquired the subtle art of feeding a public appetite that was daily growing ever more voracious. The story of his initial encounters were quickly released in a co-authored book with Desmond Leslie entitled, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), followed two years later by Inside the Spaceships and the finale to his trilogy, Flying Saucers Farewell in 1961. No doubt this former Polish immigrant had discovered a great deal about human nature when, as a self-styled professor of oriental mystical philosophy in California during the 1930s, he formed a cult called the Royal Order of Tibet. Prior to World War Two Adamski became acquainted with one William Pelley, leader of an American fascist organization calling itself the Silver Shirts. In the early fifties Pelley went on to establish Soulcraft, an occult group which attracted not only Adamski but anthropologist George Hunt Williamson, Ray Stanford and others. You will recall that it was Hunt Williamson (real name Michel d'Obrenovic) and his wife Betty, who accompanied Adamski into the desert for his first alleged encounter with a Venusian, on November 20, 1952. A prolific author, Hunt Williamson later churned out UFO/Ancient Astronaut books such as The Saucers Speak, Other Tongues -- Other Flesh and Road in the Sky. Stanford went on to claim telepathic communication with space people in 1954 and publish contact books with his brother Rex, before founding Project Starlight International (PSI). His book, Socorro Saucer (1978) suffered an inexplicably delayed release in Britain of some two years at the hands of publishers Fontana.
The likes of Palmer (busy actively promoting the idea of extraterrestrial visitation as early as July 1946 in his Amazing Stories magazine), Adamski, Hunt Williamson and Stanford all shared with their contemporaries in shaping American postwar hopes and aspirations, something that could sweep away the terrors of a new era dominated by the Atomic bomb. Images of flying saucers were swiftly accompanied in the early 1950s by stories of benevolent space brother occupants who were now here visiting Earth in order to guide us away from a fate of almost certain global calamity. As the Cold War developed the thoughts of many people turned to the awful prospect of a nuclear holocaust. These Saviours from the skies represented a most unlikely turn of events but by offering hope, peace and love the entire concept of human-like creatures from other worlds transcended from the realms of science fiction and adopted a form of reality that hundreds of persons each day helped to shape, as newspapers, radio and television related their stories of sightings and occasional meetings. The future somehow seemed brighter -- contactees were almost unanimous that mankind only had to reach out and grasp it.
At the time of his death Adamski, then in his seventies, was still hustling and offering to teach people how to use self-hypnosis in order to visit Venus and Mars -- for a fee of fifty dollars.
Ufology's Hoaxers And Hoaxes
They represent an enduring aspect of paranormal phenomena which tests the adequacy of investigations and measures the powerful "will to believe" of many an investigator. Hoaxes have dogged research since the 19th century at least. UFO and other supernatural "classics" often include those cases that once originated at a great distance in time and space, thereby becoming almost immune from investigation of any consequence. If they are outright hoaxes it is next to impossible to prove. Inevitably a percentage of accounts accepted as genuine at the time are really works of exaggerated fantasy and falsification waiting to be unmasked. In almost every case the reports contain remarkably rich elements that are traditionally supposed to underwrite the value of a genuine sighting or encounter. It is these very components that increase the difficulty factor in solving a well-constructed hoax.
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