Earth (15 page)

“I then went into George's house and told him what had just happened.
He said he heard all the ‘ruckus' outside, and then just looked at me and smiled….”
31

Adamski wasn't alone in photographing alien craft in this vicinity. According to Harold Wilkins, in December 1951 a U.S. Marine claimed to have overheard an interesting conversation at the Palomar Observatory, which then housed the world's largest telescope. The Marine stated as follows:

“I, and another Marine, were chatting to one of the Palomar professors when a friend of his arrived from Berkeley, California. He, too, is a professor. They began talking, and we listened in to what we were not supposed to hear. The Palomar man said that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation had forbidden the publication of [certain] astrophysical photos taken at Palomar. ‘Why?' asked the other. ‘Well, they show things that the U.S. government thinks it wiser people should not know. They might cause panic. There are pictures of jet planes chasing flying saucers, and disintegrating in mid-air. There are [also] data about strange changes in the atmosphere, and the effect on other planets of radioactive emanations after the explosion of atomic bombs.'”

Wilkins also cites a tongue-in-cheek report by Walter Winchell, the well-known columnist: “June 30, 1952: Scientists at Palomar Observatory, Calif., are supposed to have seen a ‘space ship' land in the Mojave Desert, in May last. Four persons stepped out, took one look, and went off again. The U.S. Army may officially announce it in the fall.”
32
It didn't, of course.

Collateral Evidence

In
Flying Saucers Have Landed
, a best-selling book by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski, the latter's famous series of clear photographs of scoutships and motherships, taken through his telescope, were first published. In the updated edition, Leslie reports that in 1955 his friend Patrick (later Sir Patrick) Moore, the iconic British astronomer who died in 2012, revealed that he too had been shown a set of photos of a “scout-ship,” even better ones than those taken by Adamski and Stephen Darbishire:

“They were taken, I was told, by a world-famous American astronomer who desired to remain anonymous as he feared the ridicule of his colleagues. Patrick Moore has given a pledge of secrecy regarding this eminent man's identity [so] we compromised by referring to him as ‘Dr. X.' At my request,
Moore kindly wrote to Dr. X asking if I might be permitted a sight of his photos (while preserving his anonymity), but this, to my regret, was refused. However, I gathered that Dr. X had taken some of his series through a telescope, as had Adamski, and had once, when out for a walk, practically stumbled upon a UFO rising from the ground and had managed to photograph it close at hand.”
33

“The Noble One”

In an unusual book on the early contactees, author Henry Dohan reveals that the aforementioned Orthon—the name given him by his terrestrial contacts, meaning “the noble one” in Greek—lived “on and off for about three years” in the Vista, California, area, spending much of his time with Adamski. Claiming to be around 360 years old in 1952, but apparently looking like a man in his twenties, Orthon was often pursued by both the FBI and CIA, according to Dohan.
34

During a conversation with Adamski in 1959, Lou Zinsstag asked about the well-known painting of Orthon depicting him as appearing rather effeminate and undistinguished. “Orthon did not look like that at all,” replied Adamski. “He had a very manly, highly intellectual face, but as his features were so distinct and characteristic, it would have been dangerous for him to have had them published.” To Lou's surprise, Adamski then showed her a photo of Orthon's face in profile. Lou revealed to me that his most striking feature was a pronounced chin.
35

“People may wonder what kind of person He [
sic
] was,” writes Dohan. “I was never privileged to meet Him, but those who did say He is a most humble person with the most incredible powers.” On one occasion while with Orthon, Adamski explained that he would need about four or five people to move a large solid oak table from a storage shed into the house. “Orthon told Adamski to go to the street and make sure that no cars were coming,” Dohan continues. “Orthon put His hands on the top of the table and it began to float. He held His hand over the table all the way as He walked alongside it and it floated all the way from the storage shed into the house.”

Yet Orthon was evidently very down to Earth. “On another occasion,” writes Dohan, “Adamski had problems with the plumbing in the house near the foothills of Mount Palomar where he lived. Orthon volunteered
to help since He [was smaller than Adamski] and He fixed the problem. I write this to illustrate the humility of such a great Man who was not too proud to go under a house to help somebody.”

Dohan claims that Orthon left after three years and allowed people from Adamski's house to film the departure of his craft. “I saw this movie,” he affirms. “The spacecraft rose in front of the camera to only a few feet above the ground, then it flew in a circle, returning again to the camera before it finally departed. In the beginning of that same movie was a short segment where [an object] the size of a fly kept jumping up and down in front of the windshield of the car in which Adamski was riding,” Dohan continues. “Adamski asked the driver to stop the car [and] filmed the small saucer and followed it with the camera; and then, as you look into the sky, in the background of the tiny saucer was another one, an exact replica of the first one but many miles [
sic
] in size. The message they wanted to give us is that these [craft] can be built in all sizes.”
36
In the Amicizia case (Chapter 13), very similar small “craft”—given the name “aniae”—were seen by various witnesses, two of whom I interviewed.

Born in Vienna, Henry Dohan was a textile and electrical engineer who achieved fame in 1961 for his invention of ladderless nylon stockings, based on research into “mass and macromolecular structures.” After becoming an Australian citizen, he eventually moved to Southern California. He seems to have been respected, described for example in the Australian Parliament by Senator the Hon. G. Brown as “an inventive genius, with remarkable powers of concentration and unusual tenacity who finally triumphed over colossal difficulties….”
37

Dohan's use of the capital “H” in relation to Orthon seems to imply his belief that the latter had been Jesus in a previous life. An outrageous implication, to be sure. Yet I have often pondered on the possibility myself. In 1976 I asked Alice Wells, Adamski's closest associate for many years, if she thought this to be the case. She replied in the affirmative, without further comment. In Chapter 19, I cite various quotes from the Bible which tend to support the likelihood of Jesus's out-of-this-world provenance.

 

Fred Steckling relates that one of his alien contacts worked for several years
on Earth, in many different environments, with both rich and poor people. “I have not hesitated to do any kind of job, regardless of what kind of work was involved, ‘dirty' or ‘clean,' as you may classify it,” he told Fred. “The work has to be done, and without the dirty work, the clean could not exist.”
38

Which brings me back to Carl Anderson. He recounts how a trusted friend of his, a native American chief who lived in east Los Angeles, was camping one night in 1965 at Salton Sea (a National Wildlife lake recreation area where he owned quite a lot of land) when he and his wife witnessed at close proximity the landing of an alien vehicle. “The people came over and conversed with him in his own tongue—an Indian language. They told him they were coming here to study the ways of our people. They wanted him to find them a place to live, because they wanted to mingle among us and associate with the people of Earth, to try and find out what made us do the things we do; why we have wars, why we kill one another, and why we don't have any brotherly love….

“So he got them a place to stay. But first of all he told them they had to put on different clothes. ‘You're all dressed in white,' he said, ‘and you'll be recognized right away as somebody different.' So they went to the store, after [my friend] had put them up in a motel for the night—a man, a woman, and three children. And their hair, it was so red!
39
‘You're going to have to dye that hair a different color,' he told them, ‘because it'll be obvious that you're not like people of Earth.'

“They're now living in a town in the east Los Angeles area. My son-in-law was driving a bakery cart, and he delivered bakery goods to them. The three children are going to a school in the Los Angeles County School System, and they got coached almost daily by their parents to make boo-boos—to actually make mistakes on purpose so that they won't be recognized as being out of the ordinary, because those children are such geniuses that they're almost incapable of making any mistakes. And as far as I know, they still live in the area. The man works putting vegetables on the counters of a large supermarket….”
40

Since the early days of the space program, we have received assistance from some alien groups—and hindrance from others. Citing the deflection from orbit of NASA's Juno 2 rocket in 1959, Wernher von Braun is reported to have stated: “We find ourselves faced by powers which are far stronger than we had hitherto assumed, and whose base is at present unknown to us. More I cannot say at present. We are now engaged in entering into closer
contact with those powers….”
41

One of five affidavits provided by witnesses to their observations of spacecraft in the California desert in 1954 and 1955.

George Adamski claimed that these strange symbols were inscribed for him by one of his alien contacts in the 1950s. Each symbol apparently represents a sentence. Note the array of planets in our solar system (top right, third line) depicting three alleged planets beyond the orbit of Pluto. Translations welcomed!

Airborne Encounters

O
ver a lengthy period, Britain's Ministry of Defence has released
batches of its voluminous documents relating to unidentified flying objects, mostly comprising correspondence from members of the public and attendant inter-office memos. In August 2010, the sixth such batch (some five thousand pages) included an interesting if apocryphal story contained in a series of letters in 1999 from an astrophysicist in Leicester (name and address redacted).

The physicist's grandfather had served with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in World War II, and his duties sometimes involved being part of the personal bodyguard of Winston Churchill. On one occasion—according to his young daughter at the time—he was present when Churchill and General Eisenhower discussed an incident, alleged to have occurred during the latter part of the war, when an RAF photo-reconnaissance aircraft returning from a mission in either France or Germany was intercepted by an object of unknown origin, which “matched course and speed with the aircraft for a time and then underwent an extremely rapid acceleration away from the aircraft.” The report continues:

“The encounter with the unknown object occurred close to or over the English coastline [and] was undetected until it was close to the aircraft. It was suddenly observed by the aircrew appearing at the side of the aircraft
at a very high speed; then it very rapidly matched its speed with that of the aircraft [and] appeared to ‘hover' noiselessly relative to the aircraft for a time. One of the airmen began to take photographs of it. It appeared metallic but its shape was not described. The object very rapidly disappeared, leaving no trace….

“[My grandfather] was not present during the initial discussion when this event was communicated to the U.S., but he was present at the follow-up meeting when the response from the U.S. was received [and he] witnessed the discussion of the event by both Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eisenhower in the United States…. Mr. Churchill declared that the incident should be classified for at least 50 years and its status reviewed by a future Prime Minister. [He also] is reported to have made a declaration to the effect [that] it would create mass panic amongst the general public and destroy one's belief in the Church….”

Said to have been “greatly affected by his experience,” the bodyguard told few people about it.
1

Another document reveals how some UFO reports from members of the public were taken seriously by the Ministry of Defence during the Cold War. Minutes from a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee in May 1959 state that Air Vice-Marshal William MacDonald discussed the matter at the highest level. He reported that UFOs had been observed by official and unofficial sources at a rate of one a week and disclosed that a sample of sixteen reports in early 1957 showed that ten had been identified—but six were not.

Also during the Cold War, and right up to 1991, RAF fighters were scrambled two hundred times a year to intercept unidentified targets penetrating U.K. airspace. Although some were anomalous, most turned out to be Soviet long-range reconnaissance or anti-submarine aircraft.
2

Air Disasters

In the late 1940s and 1950s, unexplained crashes of military and civilian aircraft proliferated dramatically. It needs to be stressed that hundreds of reports of UFOs from all over the world were coming in each
week
from trained observers—pilots in particular. In
Need to Know,
I cited numerous cases involving mysterious disasters worldwide, including many kindly
supplied to me by Jon “Andy” Kissner, former Republican State Representative for Las Cruces, New Mexico,
3
and other cases reported by Harold T. Wilkins and Major Donald E. Keyhoe. The late American researcher Kenny Young also collated records of such cases, including the following sobering examples I have selected from the period June 3–8, 1951:

June
3
:
A C-82 Packet cargo plane “fell apart in the sky” over New Boston, Texas, killing all aboard.

June
4
: A C-119 Flying Boxcar cargo plane exploded in mid-air and crashed, killing four crew. A crew member who parachuted successfully reported that the plane “just seemed to come apart around him and he found himself in mid-air.”

June
5
: An F-51 Mustang, an F-86 Sabre, and an F-82 Twin Mustang were involved in a mid-air collision, killing two pilots.

June 8
:
Eleven or more U.S. military planes crashed, some disintegrating in mid-air, including an AJ-1 Savage and an F-80 Shooting Star (the latter “falling apart”), and several F-84 Thunderjets, near Richmond, Indiana, killing three.
4

Here follows another of Harold Wilkins's summaries, covering mainly the period between January and June 1954:

“RAF Meteor jet explodes and strews wreckage over Poulders Green, Kent. Pilot, gallantly remaining at the controls, is killed; Vampire jet cuts out at 15,800 feet and falls on ploughed field at Old Lackenby, Yorkshire. Pilot killed; Royal Danish Air Force grounds all its Thunderjets and Sabre jets after numerous disasters; British Undersecretary for Air says that 507 RAF jets crashed in 1952–1954 with great loss of life (112). Some crashes caused by engine-disintegration; Six-engined Stratojet, U.S. B-47, crashes at Townsend, Georgia, immediately after take-off. Four men lost; Skilled chief test pilot, Ed Griffiths, crashed in field and was killed at Rugby, England, only a few miles from his starting-point. He was testing a new Royal Navy propeller-jet, torpedo-carrying Wyvern, and had only
time to radio his position before his sudden crash; Canberra jet bomber explodes in air over suburbs of Doncaster, Yorkshire. Crew of two killed. On the same day, a few miles away, at Six Mile Bottom, Newmarket, a second Canberra crashes, the crew of three missing; The bodies of two pilots were found in a Vampire jet wreckage at Lewes, Sussex.”
5

Obviously, not all these disasters should be attributed to alien hostility: many new types of aircraft were in service at this period, thus susceptible to accidents.
6
However, it is revealing to consider official U.S. Defense Department statistics for the period from 1952 to the end of October 1956, which I published in the second (and U.S.) edition of
Need to Know
. Out of 18,662 major accidents of U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy military aircraft—mostly involving fast new jets (such as those scrambled in UFO interceptions)—1,773 were caused by “unknown factors.”
7

Test Pilot Attacked

Lieutenant Colonel Roy Jack Edwards enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) in 1941 and served in World War II. A 1947 graduate and classmate of President Jimmy Carter at the U.S. Naval Academy (a letter from Carter to Edwards is reproduced on p. 130), he also served in Korea and Vietnam.

In 1955, while stationed with the USMC at Edwards Air Force Base, California, test-flying the latest version (F-100C) of the Super Sabre jet, Edwards encountered a large UFO during a test flight in clear sky at about six thousand feet. On alerting ground control, the pilot was ordered to break away immediately and return to base, together with his “chase” plane monitoring the flight.

“His observation plane complied,” reported his son Frank in 2008, when the story first came out. “However, my father told me that his raw intrepid instincts kicked in, thus he ignored ground control because he knew he probably wouldn't ever get another opportunity to confront a UFO—and pursued.”

Edwards headed directly toward the stationary cigar-shaped and orange-glowing object, estimated to be about two football fields in length and slightly more than fifty yards in circumference, without any apparent source of propulsion on its surface area. “As he reached a range of about
three or four miles from the UFO, it emitted a single burst of blue light, immediately rendering my father to instantly lose his ability to see and disabled his plane's communication equipment.”

Although stripped of his vision and communications with ground control, Edwards managed to bank his jet slightly to starboard and to prevent his altitude from dropping. He considered bailing out but, knowing he had enough fuel, opted to “ride out some time,” in the hope that the shock of whatever had happened to him and his plane would be temporary. Luckily, he regained full vision after about fifteen minutes and headed back to base—still minus communications.

During the debriefing by his commanding officer for disobeying orders, Edwards was admonished severely. He learned that the reason he had been ordered to return to base immediately was the fact that the same UFO had previously caused the deaths of three test pilots.

Edwards subsequently lost his status as a test pilot and was reassigned to a U.S. Naval Academy weapons department teaching position at Annapolis, Maryland. Furthermore, he was never again allowed to fly jet aircraft. After a few years at the Pentagon, however, he petitioned and was permitted to fly CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters with the U.S. Marine Corps.

Colonel Edwards did not discuss his experience until two years prior to his death in 2003. Interestingly, his military records list him as having been stationed with the USMC in Gifu, Japan during the period when he was actually at Edwards AFB.
8
Tactics such as these commonly apply to pilots who have close encounters with UFOs—as in the following case.

Pilot Witnesses Flying Saucer Crash

Before becoming a military pilot, Robert B. Willingham served with the U.S. Army during World War II and thereafter, until he was reassigned to Korea in 1950 as an F-51 Mustang pilot. Following a serious injury incurred during an attack on his ground position, he was flown back to the United States. In 1952, doctors having decided he was no longer fit to fly combat missions, he entered the Air Force Reserve, flying many types of aircraft, including F-51s, the F-47 Thunderbolt, the F-84 Thun
derjet, and the F-86 Sabre.

In the early spring of 1955, stationed as an F-86 pilot at Carswell Air Force Base, Texas, one of Major (later Colonel) Willingham's missions involved an exercise escorting B-47 bombers as they flew into Texas from New York, heading for El Paso, from where they would then continue to Washington State, and then via the West Coast, Canada, and Alaska on a pre-designated flight path to the Soviet Union (in the event of a nuclear exchange). Each bomber was assigned four fighters.

The fighter escort squadron received an alert that the Distant Early Warning (DEW) radar system had tracked fast-moving unidentified traffic. Willingham then received a report from the radar operator aboard the B-47 he was escorting that the object appeared to be heading toward them from a northwesterly direction. “By his radar, he could tell it was coming our way,” Willingham told Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte, authors of an important book on the case. “I looked up and saw a big, bright object that looked like a star, but I knew it couldn't be a star.” He estimated that it shot past at over two thousand miles per hour, within thirty-five or forty miles of their position.
9

All four pilots escorting the bomber observed the UFO as it headed south toward the Texas/Mexico border. “At about that time,” said Willingham, “it made a 90-degree turn to the right doing about two thousand miles an hour, and I knew it wasn't an airplane. We didn't have anything that could do that.” The object then headed in the general direction of Del Rio, Texas. “There were a lot of sparks, and it tilted down by about a 45-degree angle.” The object continued listing as it descended, and then no longer could be seen. Willingham learned that the radar controllers claimed it had crashed “somewhere off between Texas and the Mexico border.”

During a debriefing later, two of Willingham's F-86 colleagues admitted to their base commander that they had observed the incident, though Willingham was the only one to speak up about it.
10

Crash/Retrieval

Based also on the radio exchanges he was listening to, Willingham estimated that the object had crashed near Langtry, Texas. Knowing the area well, he requested permission from the flight commander to fly down to
the crash site—about 150 miles away—and attempt to locate the object. Permission was granted. Approaching the crash site at about eight hundred feet, he could see the still-smoldering wreckage of a roughly disc-shaped object on the ground, just south of the Rio Grande river. He then returned to his mission.
11
He has implied that he used the excuse of being low on fuel to obtain permission to return to Carswell ahead of his colleagues, as he already had it in mind to procure a small plane and return to the crash site.

Determined to find out more, a few hours later Willingham asked Lieutenant Colonel James P. Morgan—who had flown with him on the mission—if the latter could fly him to Corsicana Air Field, some fifty miles away, where Willingham planned to pick up a light aircraft to survey the crash site. The two men flew out of Carswell Air Force Base in Morgan's Piper Cub. After arriving in Corsicana, Willingham ran into his friend Jack Perkins, an electrical engineer who had served in Willingham's Civil Air Patrol unit. After relaying the events of the day, Willingham asked if Perkins would accompany him to act as witness.

The two took off from Corsicana at around 14:00 in a very basic two-seat Aeronca Champion. “It was a nice little plane for landing and taking off in tight spaces,” Willingham reflected. “You could land it in a hundred feet if you had to, but I had to make sure I had enough room for take-off, especially if you had a passenger.” Two hours later, they arrived in the vicinity of the Langtry crash site. There they noted that a team of Mexican soldiers had cordoned off the area and were guarding the craft and wreckage. Based on Willingham's testimony, Torres and Uriarte describe the scene as follows: