extraordinary%20encounters

96 Extraterrestrials among us
sidewalk café outside Adamski’s hotel when
she happened to notice a handsome young
man wearing sun glasses. She was unable to
place his nationality. Shortly thereafter,
Adamski, who had been resting in his room,
came outside, smiling broadly, “his eyes
sparkling with pleasure.” He was also smiling
at the young man, who smiled back. Adamski
was unable to keep his eyes off the man, who
eventually departed, “greeting George and me
with a most friendly and prolonged smile”
(Zinsstag, 1990). When Zinsstag asked
Adamski if this were one of the Venusian
“boys,” he said yes.
Another account comes from Adamski associate
C. A. Ho n e y, who recalled, “I was
with Adamski in 1958 during a meeting
with three little people who he claimed had
come to Earth from Venus. I saw them and
talked with one of them but I don’t know if
they we re anything other than what I saw—
little people” (Ho n e y, 1979). In an earlier
version of the story, Honey told of seeing a
small, blond woman in a roadside café while
he and Adamski we re on a trip to Ore g o n .
Noticing that Adamski appeared “s h o c k e d , ”
Honey studied her care f u l l y. From a distance,
he said, she looked to be no more
than twe l ve years old, but up close she app
e a red middle-aged. She “let me know she
was reading my thoughts” (Ho n e y, 1959).
The next day, when Honey told Adamski he
thought she was a spacewoman, Ad a m s k i
a g reed and later asserted that space people
had informed him that she was the sister of
Kalna, a Venusian spacewoman friend of
Ad a m s k i’s .
Another prominent 1950s contactee, Truman
Bethurum, claimed to have encountered
his spacewoman friend Aura Rhanes on a
sidewalk in Las Vegas. When he greeted her,
she “turned around but did not seem to want
to be recognized, for she shook her head and
just walked across the street and joined a
crowd waiting for a bus,” according to Bethurum
(Bethurum, 1954).
Much contactee doctrine concerning earthbound
extraterrestrials focuses more on the
souls of these beings than on the particular
bodies they happen to inhabit. Within the
contactee underground, many people believe
they themselves were space people in previous
incarnations; a lifetime or lifetimes ago they
made the decision to be born as earthlings so
to work toward the changes that will prepare
humankind for membership in the Galactic
Federation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the concept
of “Star People,” championed by writer
Brad Steiger, gained popularity in New Age
circles. Steiger wrote that Star People were ostensible
humans but in fact reincarnated extraterrestrials;
Star People shared certain physical
and psychological features with each
other, and they also had experienced otherworldly
realities all their lives, even if consciously
they did not recognize their significance.
Less benignly, some writers have
suggested that the menacing men in black
who threaten investigators and witnesses are
evil aliens.
In the era of UFO abductions some researchers
reported that their female subjects
had undergone mysteriously terminated pregnancies,
only to be abducted at a later date to
be shown an alien-human hybrid child who,
they were led to believe, was their own. These
hybrids had both human and alien features in
varying proportions. On occasion, abductees
would encounter the more human-looking
hybrids in real-life situations. David M. Jacobs,
in The Threat (1998), proposed the
alarming theory that hybrids are being bred to
replace the human race at some point in the
not-distant future.
The abduction era also produced a story
told by a man whose credentials seem impeccable,
a New York book editor and former
Washington correspondent for Newsweek.
There was also a confirmatory witness, the
man’s wife. In January 1987, the publishing
house William Morrow had just released the
destined-to-be bestseller Communion, Whitley
Strieber’s account of his personal abduction
experiences. The editor, Bruce Lee,
claimed that just as the book was starting to
show up on the stalls, he and his wife ven-