Dabbling with UFOs can be as dangerous as dabbling with black magic. The phenomenon preys upon the neurotic, the gullible and the immature. Paranoid-schizophrenia, demonomania and even suicide can result—and has resulted in a number of cases. A mild curiosity about UFOs can turn into a destructive obsession. For this reason, I strongly recommend that parents forbid their children from becoming involved. Schoolteachers and other adults should not encourage teenagers to take an interest in the subject.
— John Keel (1969)
It started in California’s Colorado Desert, with a telepathic message and a plaster cast. Acolytes would refer to the men there as Professor and Doctor, although neither of them held PhDs. In late 1952, in a wash just out of view of a busy highway, the Professor met a Spaceman. Dr. George Hunt Williamson, avid amateur anthropologist, preserved his footprint.
The Doc had been tipped off by his contacts. In the months leading up to the landing, he’d amassed a wealth of messages coming through different channels. The senders were representatives of a variety of extraterrestrial civilizations.
The messages came first through a pencil, with receivers compelled to transcribe them, relinquishing the control of their hands to unseen forces. They came through ouija boards constructed of wrapping paper, and through short-wave radio transmissions. “When radio was developed on the Earth, things began to happen,” Williamson declared. “Yes, the ‘saucers’ have been here for centuries,” he said, “and the moment we developed our crude radio communication, they utilized that also!”
Most times, the radio messages were embedded in International Morse Code. At certain points, Williamson’s in-house radioman became overwhelmed with the sheer volume of transmissions to decode. He toiled away tirelessly in a backyard shack, sifting through repetitive dots and dashes which often translated to misspelled words in English.
Williamson’s entourage wasn’t the only group interested in radio waves emanating from parts unknown. A few years later, it was leaked that the Central Intelligence Agency’s scientific division had analyzed a “space message” caught on tape. Two Chicago-based sisters had captured a bizarre communication crackling through their set, one that had also been picked up by scattered ham operators. The agency tried their best to wash their hands of the situation. “Nothing more than Morse code from a US radio station,” they had reported, as they vehemently denied any involvement with the whole ordeal.
It became apparent to the Doc that these beings were so advanced, so highly evolved, that they could command the transmission of their words through any medium of their choosing. This included extrasensory perception. With great effort, Williamson trained himself to sort the thoughts seeping out of his own mind from those implanted by the UFOnauts. By honing their telepathic abilities, his team was able to enhance the fidelity of the alien signals they were receiving.
“Many other messages were received by members of our group by direct telepathic contact, which we never would have received had we not become as one mind,” Williamson wrote. “It took weeks of meditation and concentration, holding self down, and allowing ourselves to become attuned to the influx from the Universe.”
The space beings spoke of flights of cigar-shaped craft, of imminent landings of “Crystal Bell” saucers carried in the bellies of these motherships. They told of a grand cosmic battle unfolding using earth as a set-piece, warning of entities from Orion meddling in planetary affairs. “Many there wish to conquer the universe,” one spaceman advised.
They relayed stories of the benevolent saucer-piloting “Harvesters”, who had aided humanity’s spiritual development since time immemorial and stood in opposition to these nefarious intruders. They spoke of great earthly time cycles computed by extraterrestrials and of coming changes to the planet. “The reason they made themselves known generally over the world in 1947, is because this is the time for the Great Harvest,” Williamson later explained.
The doc learned of a group he deemed “Wanderers”, beings who had arrived on earth not aboard spaceships, but through the process of reincarnation. “They have birth certificates, they went to school...,” wrote Williamson. “In brief, they were exactly the same as all the other people on Earth, except for one thing: they didn’t belong here! They occupy physical vehicles and are born to parents of their own choice who they feel will best give them the advantages and training they need to fulfill their missions on Earth.”
He had been clued in on the concept through one particularly cryptic message. “‘To [the] apples we salt, we return.’ You may not understand this strange saying now, but someday you will. It is from one of our old prophecy legends. Rites will save your people.”
The transmission continued with a grave warning against the use of nuclear weapons. “Your bombs will destroy Universal balance. Your Hydrogen Bomb could make an asteroid belt out of you. This happened many years ago to planet of the fifth orbit,” the extraterrestrial said. “We knew what they were doing but we didn’t interfere. We cannot stand by and see another waste.”
Plans were set in motion as 1952 limped toward closing. “Our space friends had told us that we would be contacted by a man when all was ready. This ‘man’ undoubtedly would be an inhabitant of another planet,” he wrote of this electrifying time.
Williamson packed up and headed toward Desert Center, California “in the hope that [he] would see one of those flying saucers.” His wish was granted.
At first they mistook it for an airplane, until they really saw it go. The Spaceman later indicated that this out-of-place cigar-shaped object was, in fact, a mothership.
“We saw the large craft. We saw flashes of light from this craft, from which we later learned the smaller craft had come out of the larger one,” Williamson recalled in a later radio interview. “We did see a great opening in the bigger craft through which the smaller scout ship must have originally left the larger ship.”
The Spaceman didn’t speak to George Adamski. He communicated with the Professor mind-to-mind, conveying his message through hand gestures and body language. It was enough to get his point across. He had come from Venus and was displeased with the Earthlings’ use of atomic weapons. According to the extraterrestrial, he was concerned that this could lead to a great cataclysm.
The Phoenix Gazette ran with it. The story was hand-delivered by Williamson, along with sketches of the extraterrestrial’s footprints, the first of their kind. Williamson maintained that the representations held by the Gazette were not entirely accurate, and later published extensively on the intricate symbolism left on the desert floor. After reportedly observing Adamski speaking to someone through a pair of binoculars, he was the first to arrive on scene. He’d snapped photographs on-site of the soles impressed in the sandy wash, ground zero having been cordoned off with rocks by the Professor. The alien visitor had pointed out the footprints to Adamski several times, implying that they were of the utmost importance. Williamson carefully preserved the prints using plaster-of-Paris, which he always kept on him “to use when he [found] a skull that may need a bit of filling in to make it complete.”
[The preserved footprints of the Venusian Spaceman, complete with a swastika on one the heels. Students of saucer history will undoubtedly be aware of Williamson’s brief association with William Dudley Pelley. Pelley was founder of the Nazi Silver Shirts and did prison time for acts of sedition against the United States government.]
Adamski later claimed that he never intended for the story to get out. He was reluctant to speak on the telepathic nature of his interactions with the peaceful extraterrestrials, and never brought up the photographs taken by Williamson in his lectures nor did he use them in his publications. According to him, the beans had been spilled against his will.
It was too late. Saint Adamski had broken containment.
The gospel according to Professor George Adamski lit up people’s brains across early Cold War America. Scars from brushing up against the atomic age had already been scratched into the collective psyche. Many looked to a strange new phenomenon plaguing the skies for relief. Flying saucer clubs sprouted up around the country, with particularly strong roots taking hold in Detroit. Adamski’s story had bloomed into a bestseller and, before long, he was lecturing to a standing-room-only crowd in Michigan, to thousands of spectators sardined into a Masonic Temple.
The FBI kept a close eye on the Detroit Flying Saucer Club. The McCarthyist commie hunt was in full swing. The Bureau tucked away information on the club in their back drawer, a file under the dramatic heading ESPIONAGE-X. Since the group’s formation, the FBI had been piling up complaints about certain organizational activities from concerned citizens. One informant could not decide whether they were a new religious cult or a subversive operation, but was certain it had to be one of the two.
Professor Adamski’s Space Brothers were radically anti-nuke, at a time when the United States government was making craters of tiny Pacific atolls with thermonuclear weapons. Before his encounter with the Spaceman, the Professor had already been flagged as a “security matter” by the FBI. He’d been spreading word around that the FCC had been intercepting off-planet communications. Moreover, he had information about the system of government deployed by these higher beings. “If you ask me they probably have a Communist form of government and our American government wouldn’t release that kind of thing, naturally.”
“That is a thing of the future—more advanced,” the Professor added.
Doc Williamson soon transplanted himself to Detroit and quickly rose up the ranks of the Michigan saucerite hierarchy. After a series of popular lectures, he took over as editor of the club’s official ‘zine and, behind the backs of the other members, formed a new spinoff with the club’s President. Both men had drawn the suspicious eyes of one ESPIONAGE-X source, as rumors circulated about someone on the Board of Directors being a card-carrying Red. “At times he has wondered about the sympathies, with respect to political views, of the following persons, [President] Harry Maday and George Hunt Williamson,” one Bureau report stated.
Like the FBI, the CIA had also found itself increasingly tangled up in the growing UFO problem at the beginning of the 1950s. The saucers, whatever they were, were becoming a nuisance to the agency, with the country already knee-deep in paranoia over the Soviets and their ballooning nuclear capabilities. In January 1953, its scientific chief pulled together a committee stocked from the top shelf of the national security science establishment to decide the best course to take on the matter.
Participants recommended the rollout of an institutionalized debunking campaign, aimed at cooling down saucer hysteria and keeping anti-authoritarian sentiment at bay. In true Cold War fashion, they also suggested keeping tabs on citizen UFO groups, marking them as potential hotbeds for subversive activities. Most of the panel’s findings were kept out of the public’s reach for thirteen years.
The saucer community fractured over the Professor. Adamski devotees were convinced that the CIA wanted him silenced, and Adamski himself alluded to as much. One supporter sent a lengthy letter to Allen Dulles demanding answers. The CIA’s copy of their response to the man is capped with a handwritten note from [redacted]: “Frank—what should we do if anything about this one?”
A minority of UFO fiends suspected that the CIA was behind the whole ordeal from the beginning.
Years later, visitors to the Adamski residence found themselves taken aback by his casual dismissal of previous claims of extraterrestrial contact. “That was just a means of getting the message out,” the Professor would say plainly. “It’s the message that’s important.”
The Detroit Flying Saucer Club was entering a state of civil war. The fracture was catalyzed in one part by Dr. Williamson’s growing influence, in another by a failed doomsday prophecy made by a grandmotherly channel named Dorothy Martin. One prominent but disgruntled member issued a manifesto from her new splinter group sounding the alarm about the pitfalls of focusing on extrasensory perception over “PHYSICAL” evidence. In her opinion, all of the talk of psychic forces and radio contacts and ouija board manipulations was misdirection away from flesh-and-blood spacemen and their marvelous vehicles.
She cautioned against engaging in the channeling of supposed extraterrestrial beings, as oftentimes these were lowly discarnate spirits playing deceptive games with human bodies at their disposal.
Dorothy Martin was scribbling doodles at the telephone in her Illinois home when the first message from outer space came through. Day after day she diligently transcribed the transmissions from beyond, and soon a small group of followers sprung up around her, calling themselves the Seekers. Things reached a boiling point when a physician named Charles Laughead went to the press with a prediction of doomsday catastrophe and the salvation of a select few via a ride on a flying saucer. The prophecy never came to pass.
Dr. Laughead lost his job in the process. Martin, in lieu of being charged for inciting a riot, opted to check herself into a mental hospital.
Doc Williamson often shared his channeling sessions with the prophet, although he was in disagreement with the apocalyptic messaging Martin was propagating. In a letter sent to his biographer decades later, Williamson wrote, “I did NOT believe in it in 1954, and still don’t!! I want to go on record on that!”
The FBI filed away reports on the Seekers with those on the dissolving Detroit Flying Saucer Club. Scattered ESPIONAGE-X sources whispered about members setting up shop south of the border.
Two of the club’s founding members made a pilgrimage down to Mexico to spread the good word to the Spanish-speaking population. They came with tapes of George Hunt Williamson in tow and played them to eager audiences whenever a chance arose. The couple excitedly reported that they may have met the Mexican version of George Adamski in the process.
Charles Laughead made his way across the border too. Through an act of fate, or perhaps a cosmic joke, a mixup of hotel rooms led him to run into Dr. Andrija Puharich, who had made the journey with one of his psychic subjects. Laughead was delighted to meet the pair.
Laughead offered up tales of a young man, who he regarded as “a very fine voice channel or medium,” who had been receiving messages from a group of spacemen with esoteric knowledge of ancient South American mystery schools. Laughead insisted that Puharich and his psychic were beings from outer space, despite the doctor’s protestations and polite laughter.
The fine young man was none other than George Hunt Williamson. “During our stay there we carefully avoided seeing the Laughheads [sic] again,” Puharich later wrote of this chance encounter. “This space-brothers talk was just too wild for our tastes.”
Not long after, he received a pair of impossible-seeming letters from the disgraced physician.
The most astounding letter read as follows:
M calling: At the moment of our advent, December 31, 1952, your most spectacular phase of work began. We are Nine principles and forces. The nature of our work is to accentuate certain directions as will fulfill the destiny of creation. We used the body or brain of Dr. “V.” We can and are using other bodies also.
In 1952, at a seance circle in Maine, Dr. Puharich had a message delivered to him through a Hindu scholar, a man named Dr. Vinod who was undergoing a spontaneous state of trance. The beings declared themselves to be The Nine Principles and Forces. Puharich would spend decades working to unlock the secrets of The Nine.
Charles Laughead and Dorothy Martin later joined Dr. George Hunt Williamson, along with a handful of true-believing adults and children, on a journey deep into the jungles of Peru. Calling themselves the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, Williamson’s cult sought to unravel the mystery of an elder race exiled to a hidden valley in the Andes.
Williamson’s wife died on the excursion, and he changed his name to Michel D’Obrenovic, all but fading into the background of saucer history.
Williamson’s retinue weren’t the only seekers who’d made their own way after the fracture. One member, Clyde Trepanier, had his name stamped in the FBI files and in the records of a small Detroit-based channeling group. Clyde had been one of the founding members of the Detroit Flying Saucer Club.
In between navigating the UFO bureaucracy, he was sitting in on intimate seances held in a dark room with the curtains drawn, in a suburban house like any other. Witnesses spoke of his ability to leave his body and watch himself transformed into a loudspeaker for supposed extraterrestrial voices.
On an especially clear and chilly night in 1963, Don Elkins found himself in that same dark room.