The Unidentified by Colin Dickey

Author:Colin Dickey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

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The desert is contactee country, where mystics and occultists (along with ordinary people like Bethurum) claimed to have made communions with visitors from other planets throughout the early 1950s. “The whole thing about deserts,” Ken Layne tells me, “is that deserts are where religions come from. It’s with people on the edges of a city, or on a trade route or something, that you get Christianity and Islam.” Layne runs Desert Oracle, a magazine and accompanying radio show out of his home in Joshua Tree, California, chronicling the natural and cultural landscape on the edge of civilization. It’s not just religion that is born in the desert, he suggests, “but also that mysticism that comes with being out in the desert in a place that is inhospitable.” The Christian mystics who holed up in caves in the Syrian deserts or lived on abandoned columns in Roman ruins—these people found in the desert an existence just on the edge of being, on the far reaches of the human.

It was out here in the Southern California desert that George Adamski began the contactee era. In April 1952, Life magazine ran a feature with the bold headline: HAVE WE VISITORS FROM OUTER SPACE? It took only a few short months for Adamski to offer a definitive answer to the question. Adamski was born in Poland in 1891, and came to the United States during the First World War. He spent his first few years in America working various odd blue-collar jobs, but soon switched to preaching a brand of mystical philosophy, which he called the Royal Order of Tibet. The main tenet of his religion seemed to be the imbibing of wine, which is to say the entire thing seems to have been a scam to allow Adamski to skirt Prohibition laws. During World War II and afterward, he and his wife operated a hamburger joint near the Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, which may have fueled his interest in astronomy and watching the skies. On November 20, he claimed, he was traveling in the deserts east of Mount Palomar with a few friends, when they saw a “gigantic, cigar-shaped silvery ship.” Adamski went off to investigate alone, and there encountered a spaceman from Venus. A tanned man with long, sandy hair wearing a brown ski suit, in Adamski’s description he seems straight out of a fashion shoot for some Nordic skiwear. Communicating telepathically, the Venusian explained to Adamski that he and his fellow extraterrestrials were worried about mankind’s sudden development of atomic weapons.

Adamski’s account of his encounter first appeared in a book coauthored with UFO investigator Desmond Leslie, Flying Saucers Have Landed. The first half of the book is a long, sober-enough treatise by Leslie, recounting evidence and the likelihood of extraterrestrials, before giving way to Adamski’s short account. Taken as a complete text, Flying Saucers Have Landed walks a curious line between earnest scientific inquiry and junk mysticism—and exhibits the degree to which the latter would continue to rely on the former for legitimacy.

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