Orfeo Angelucci's Burbank Contacts

Orfeo Matthew Angelucci was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1912. Poor health and extreme nervousness followed him all his life. In 1948 he moved to Los Angeles because he feared thunderstorms. In April 1952 he joined the assembly line at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, later making radomes for F-94B/C Starfire jets. He believed it had begun years earlier, in 1946, with a "mould balloon" experiment in Trenton. By his account, a circular craft was seen.

Friday, 23 May 1952. Around midnight. Angelucci was driving home from his swing shift. First came a pricking in his hands and arms. Palpitations. His eyesight glazed and the traffic sounds went muffled. Then he saw it. A red, faintly glowing oval over Forest Lawn Drive, growing in brilliance, "appearing brighter but not closer." He followed it.

Two smaller green objects came out of it, three feet in diameter. They hung silently a few feet away, their light fluctuating rhythmically. The red object shot away. Between the discs, a masculine voice spoke in perfect English. "Don't be afraid, Orfeo. We are friends!" A crystal goblet appeared on his fender, holding a bubbling golden drink. He drank and felt refreshed. A luminous, three-dimensional screen showed the heads and shoulders of a man and a woman. They promised to return. Then they were gone. He stayed in bed for two days.

23 July 1952. In the dry bed of the Los Angeles River waited a translucent, igloo-shaped craft, 30 feet high. Inside, a windowless dome and a form-fitting chair. He felt the pressure change as it rose. A round window opened onto Earth, more than 1,000 miles below. A cigar-shaped mother ship drifted into view, 1,000 feet long. Then the voice. "Weep, Orfeo. Let tears unblind your eyes. For this moment we weep with you for Earth and her Children." He wept.

On 2 August 1952, near the Hyperion Avenue bridge, a being appeared in person. "Greetings, Orfeo!" Angelucci called him Neptune, noble and handsome. The visitors said they had watched him since 1946. They warned of the harm humans were doing to themselves, and asked him to spread their message. Later came missing time. He said he spent a week living in Neptune's body on "the largest asteroid" left from a destroyed planet, while his own body wandered the plant in a daze.

He gave weekly talks at the Hollywood Hotel and shared a flying saucer convention there with Frank Scully, George Van Tassel and George Adamski. In January 1954 the Daily Breeze reported a hall jammed for his lecture. The Secret of the Saucers followed in 1955, edited by Ray Palmer. The FBI kept a short file on him.

Asked for proof, Angelucci replied that "ideas preponderantly spiritual cannot now and have never been capable of proof by material methods." One version describes the first object as a blue ball of light the size of a beach ball. Palmer edited the book heavily, and some question how much of its voice is Angelucci's own. Long John Nebel said of contactees in general, "I don't buy any of it."

Carl Jung gave the story about ten pages of Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies in 1959. He read it as a psychological and mythic experience, setting aside whether it physically happened. Jung's analysis and ridicule in the press left the story "largely disregarded." Others still call it one of the most moving and sincere of the contactee stories.