extraordinary%20encounters

A related rumor held that the government
did not dare to release its knowledge of extraterrestrial
visitation for fear of panic. Therefore,
it had embarked on an indoctrination
program through which, by judicious leaks
and UFO-themed movies and television
shows, the public would get used to the notion
and therefore be able to handle the news
when it was time to deliver it.
In the early 1980s, a darker version of the
legend came to the fore. This time it was tied
to nightmarish conspiracy theories, in which a
m a l e volent “s e c ret gove r n m e n t” worked with
hostile aliens to enslave the world’s population.
Via abductions the aliens re c e i ved certain biological
materials they needed to surv i ve, and
the secret government, in turn, got access to
a d vanced extraterrestrial technology. T h e s e
speculations we re tied to traditional conspiracy
theories, sometimes with barely concealed
a n t i - Semitic ove rtones. One of the movem
e n t’s critics, Je rome Clark, coined the phrase
“ Da rk Si d e” to characterize it. One principal
Da rk Si d e r, Milton William Cooper, claimed
to have read highly classified documents that
re p o rted that alien technology made time
t r a vel possible. Both the space people and the
s e c ret government had learned that World Wa r
III would erupt in 1995 and escalate into nuclear
conflict in 1999, preparing Earth for the
Second Coming of Christ in 2011.
See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Adamski, Ge o r g e ;
Contactees; Holloman aliens; Williamson, Ge o r g e
Hu n t
Further Reading
Andrews, George C., 1986. Extra-Terrestrials Among
Us. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications.
C l a rk, Je rome, 1998. “Da rk Side.” In The UFO En c y -
clopedia, Second Edition: The Phenomenon from the
Be g i n n i n g , 301–319. De t roit, MI: Om n i g r a p h i c s .
Cooper, Milton William, 1991. Behold a Pale Horse.
Sedona, AZ: Light Technology Publishing.
Ellis, Bill, 1991. “Cattle Mutilation: Contemporary
Legends and Contemporary Mythologies.” Con -
temporary Legend 1: 39–80.
“Let’s Talk Space: ‘Flying Saucers Are Real,’” 1956.
Flying Saucer Review 2, 1 (January): 2–5.
“Report Tells of ‘ Top Brass’ Attending Saucer Landing,”
1955. Flying Saucer News-Service Research
Bulletin 1, 9 (August 20): 3.
Extraterrestrials among us 95
“Rolf Alexander, M.D.,” and “Thoughts on UFOs
by Dr. Rolf Alexander,” 1965. Flying Saucer Re -
view (March/April): 9.
Williamson, George Hunt, 1953. Other Tongues—
Other Flesh. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.
Extraterrestrials among us
According to flying-saucer contactees, humanlike
beings from other planets walk the
streets of the Earth, undetected and unsuspected
by oblivious earthlings.
George Hunt Williamson, for example, declared
that the program to infiltrate Earth
began in the late nineteenth century. “Space
visitors were actually deposited and left on our
world to mix, mate, and marry with us,” he
wrote. “The new ideas and theories first came
out in book form [in various scientific and occult
texts], and this was the prelude to the appearance
of spacecraft in the skies of Earth”
(Williamson, 1953). In our time, the extraterrestrial
agents, whom Williamson called the
Wanderers, have helped turn our attention to
science fiction and space travel, among other
things. In a subsequent book, Williamson
would argue that the Hopi and Navajo tribes
long ago came to Earth from Mars and Lucifer-Maldek
(a destroyed planet whose remains
comprise what we now call the asteroid
belt).
In February 1953 Williamson’s friend
George Adamski met a Martian on the streets
of Los Angeles. The Martian told him, “At
our work and in our leisure time, we mingle
with people here on Earth, never betraying
the secret that we are inhabitants of other
worlds” (Adamski, 1955). Those who knew
Adamski took his claims of Earthbound extraterrestrials
seriously because they believed that
on occasion they had seen these beings. Lou
Zinsstag was Adamski’s most energetic European
supporter, and she accompanied him
during much of a lecture tour he conducted
on the continent in 1959. Adamski confided
to her that Venusian men—he called them
“boys”—regularly had been meeting with him
in his hotel rooms on mornings. One afternoon,
Zinsstag recalled, she was sitting in a