George Adamski's Desert Center Contact

George Adamski ran a café at Palomar Gardens in California and was an amateur astronomer. In the 1930s he had founded an occult group, the Royal Order of Tibet. On November 20, 1952, he headed into the Colorado Desert with six companions: Alice K. Wells, Lucy McGinnis, George Hunt Williamson and his wife Betty, and Al and Betty Bailey of Winslow, Arizona. They brought a six-inch telescope, cameras and binoculars.

They stopped beside the road from Desert Center toward Parker, Arizona, about 10 miles out, near the Coxcomb Mountains. It was shortly after lunch. Then, the party said, it came. A gigantic, cigar-shaped, silvery ship, orange on top, approaching over the distant mountain ridge. Silent. It moved directly over them. Fast-moving government planes, they said, chased it off.

Adamski asked to be taken down the road and went on alone with his camera. A bright flash. A saucer, tiny beside the great ship, drifted slowly down between two mountains and landed about half a mile away. The first newspaper report called it about 20 feet in diameter, translucent but not transparent, with a shining silver finish and portholes.

Then he saw a figure. "As I approached him a strange feeling came upon me," Adamski wrote. "He took four steps toward me, bringing us within arm's length of each other." The visitor was somewhat smaller than Adamski and considerably younger. His sandy hair hung in beautiful waves to his shoulders. He wore a one-piece chocolate-brown garment with a broad belt and reddish-brown shoes. "I felt like a little child in the presence of one with great wisdom and much love."

They spoke through telepathy and hand signs, and touched palms. The man said he came from Venus and was worried about "radiation going out from earth" from atomic tests. He acted out the explosions. "Boom! Boom!" He declined to be photographed. Then he floated into his craft. It flashed brightly, lifted off and shot out of sight.

About an hour later Adamski walked back into view. The group found footprints marked with symbols, and Williamson made plaster casts. Four days later the Phoenix Gazette ran the story. In March 1953 all six companions signed notarized affidavits, reprinted in Flying Saucers Have Landed. Adamski later named the visitor Orthon. By 1960 his first two books had sold a combined 200,000 copies.

Captain Edward J. Ruppelt of Project Blue Book attended a 1953 lecture in civilian clothes and judged Adamski a "talented con artist." Jim Moseley interviewed the witnesses for a 1955 article. Al Bailey denied seeing either a UFO or the being. Jerrold Baker, who worked at Palomar Gardens, said he had overheard a tape-recorded account of the trip several days before it happened. He called it a "planned operation."

Rocket engineer Walther J. Riedel said the "landing gear" balls in Adamski's scout ship photos were 100-watt General Electric light bulbs. The famous picture of December 13, 1952 has also been compared to a chicken brooder. In 2012 Joel Carpenter matched its hull to the shade of a 1930s gas lantern sold by Sears. Venus cannot support humanoid life, and Orthon looks like Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Supporters still point to the affidavits and to reprocessed photographs. Critics point to Moseley's verdict that the narrative "contains enough flaws to place in very serious doubt both his veracity and his sincerity." Either way, his books became key New Age texts.