extraordinary%20encounters

down an old logging trail that took him
deeper into the forest. As he entered a
clearing, he saw a hovering UFO that, he later
related to a local newspaper reporter, “appeared
to be made of a glowing, sun-colored
substance similar to plastic and was shaped
like two saucers fused together. I judged it was
about eighty feet horizontally and thirty-two
vertically” (“Centralian Tells,” 1950). Equally
peculiar was the sight of tanned, fine-featured,
naked children playing on steps that led from
the saucer to the ground.
Excited, Thompson approached the craft,
feeling a mild heat emanating from it—the
cause, he would learn subsequently, of its occupants’
tanned skins. As he came nearer, his
presence brought the adults—beautiful and
nude, with dark blond hair—to the door.
They seemed frightened of him. He told them
he meant no harm, and they relaxed. After
asking him in clumsy English to remove his
shoes and socks, they invited him inside,
where he spent the next forty hours.
He learned that they we re from Ve n u s .
The ship was also their home. It carried ten
men and ten women as well as twe n t y - five
c h i l d ren between six and fifteen years old. Int
e rv i ewed a few days later by private pilot and
we l l - k n own UFO witness Kenneth Arnold,
Thompson said the Venusians we re friendly
and cheerful but curiously naïve. He comp
a red them to animals, meaning that instinct
rather than intellect governs their activities.
They knew nothing of the technology that
p owe red their ship; they knew which buttons
to push and levers to pull to get where they
wanted to go, and that was it. They had no
sense of time and no curiosity, and because of
their eating habits—they we re ve g e t a r i a n s
and stayed away from cooked foods—they
n e ver got sick and lived long lives. Their ve getables
we re like those found on Earth, and
Thompson ate some while on the “s p a c e s h i p”
(the word the Venusians used for their craft).
He pronounced the food “just gre a t . ”
Venusians fear earthlings because human
aircraft had shot down some of their spaceships.
Earth is considered a bad planet, but
Thompson’s Venusians 243
Mars is even worse. There are twelve inhabited
planets in the solar system. Each resident
is born under the sign of the planet on which
he or she is born, except for Earth, whose
problems stem from the fact that each person
is born under a different sign. Venusians and
earthlings long ago were very close, sharing
“the first religion ever known,” but the people
of Earth eventually became corrupt, and a
curse was cast upon their planet. Venusians
and other space people are now reincarnating
on Earth; their goal is to reform the earthlings
and prepare them for Christ’s Second Coming
in A.D. 10,000.
After sleeping overnight in a chair in one of
the ship’s bedrooms, Thompson asked for permission
to go home and pick up a camera.
They did not know what a camera was. When
he explained, they said he could go but asked
him not to bring anyone else along. The photographic
experiment came to nil. It was “just
like trying to take a picture of the sun,” he
told Arnold. “It has a glow to it. That film was
just blank. I wanted to get some of them right
onto the ground to take some pictures of
them, but they wouldn’t come out” (Clark,
1981).
The Venusians left on Ma rch 30, cautioning
Thompson to keep certain information to
h i m s e l f. If he ever saw them again, no one eve r
k n ew. For many years his story was little
k n own, with a brief newspaper account the
only re c o rd of it. In 1980, Arnold gave a tape
of his early April 1950 interv i ew with T h o m pson
to Fa t e magazine, and an article largely
based on it appeared in the Ja n u a ry 1981
issue. Arnold re m a rked on T h o m p s o n’s ignorance
and lack of imagination, and he was
convinced that Thompson believed his story,
its outlandish, even absurd, qualities notwithstanding.
Arnold speculated that he had undergone
some sort of “p s yc h i c” experience.
See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees; Hopkins’s
Martians
Further Reading
Arnold, Kenneth, 1980. “How It All Began.” In
Curtis G. Fuller, ed. Proceedings of the First Inter -
national UFO Congress, 17–29. New York:
Warner Books.