extraordinary%20encounters

270 Wilson
celebrity. His last book, which he wrote under
the pseudonym “Brother Philip,” was published
the same year. Soon, however, Williamson—now
calling himself Michel d’Obrenovic—retired
from a public career and was so
little heard from that many thought him
dead.
During his heyday, critics accused Williamson
of a range of shortcomings and base motivations,
among them bigotry, paranoia, and
charlatanism. His shrillest attackers, associated
with James W. Moseley’s Saucer News,
debunked Williamson’s assertions about his
academic background (far from being a
Ph.D., as he said he was, he did not have even
an undergraduate degree), and one reviewer
noted similarities between the supposedly
nonfictional Road in the Sky and a science-fiction
series by Isaac Asimov. After his death,
however, scientist and UFO historian Michael
D. Swords acquired the bulk of Williamson’s
collection, which includes a massive amount
of private correspondence and other material.
Based on his reading of it, Swords concludes
that for all his exaggeration and credentialinflation,
Williams was essentially honest. In
his estimation Williamson “actually believed
all the stuff—the wild, amazing, impossibleto-believe
stuff—that he wrote about. . . .
Williamson is not easy to explain and cannot
be deposited into some conveniently labeled
box” (Swords, 1993).
See Also: Adamski, George; Affa; Contactees; Sister
Thedra
Further Reading
Brother Philip [pseud. of George Hunt Williamson],
1961. Secret of the Andes. Clarksburg, WV:
Saucerian Books.
Griffin, John, 1989. Visitants. Santa Barbara, CA:
self-published.
Ibn Aharon, Y. N. [pseud. of Yonah Fortner], 1960.
Review of Road in the Sky. Saucer News 7, 2
(June): 6.
Leslie, Desmond, and George Adamski, 1953. Flying
Saucers Have Landed. New York: British Book
Centre.
Moseley, James W., and Michael G. Mann, 1959.
“Screwing the Lid down on ‘Doctor’
Williamson.” Saucer News 6, 2 (February/
March): 3–5.
Swords, Michael D., 1993. “UFOs and the Amish.”
International UFO Reporter 18, 5 (September/
October): 12–13.
Williamson, George Hunt, 1953. Other Tongues—
Other Flesh. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.
———, 1958. Secret Places of the Lion. Amherst,
WI: Amherst Press.
———, 1959. Road in the Sky. London: Neville
Spearman.
Williamson, George Hunt, and Alfred C. Bailey,
1954. The Saucers Speak! A Documentary Report of
Interstellar Communication by Radiotelegraphy.
Los Angeles: New Age Publishing Company.
Williamson, George Hunt, and John Mc C oy, 1958.
U F Os Confidential! The Meaning behind the
Most Closely Gu a rded Se c ret of All Ti m e . C o r p u s
Christi, TX: Essene Pre s s .
Wilson
During the spring of 1897, American new spapers
re p o rted frequently outlandish accounts
of mysterious “airships,” dirigible- or
cigar-shaped stru c t u res whose origins we re
(and still are) shrouded in mystery. So m e
people speculated that they housed Ma rt i a n
visitors, and indeed some spectacular hoaxe s
p l a yed to that belief. The more common theo
ry, howe ve r, held that an enterprising American
had invented advanced aircraft and was
flying it around the country with a crew of
a e ronauts. Stories carried in the press rep
o rted meetings with the enigmatic inve n t o r,
though most we re contradictory and dubious.
Historians of aviation have ignored this
episode, and today only ufologists have examined
it care f u l l y, holding that the airship scare
was an early UFO wave. Among the more curious
accounts to be published in the press of
the period we re a series of ostensibly re l a t e d
incidents, all but one of which occurred in
Texas, involving an aeronaut identified as
“Wi l s o n . ”
Someone who may have been Wilson appears
first in an alleged encounter near
Greenville, Texas, late on the evening of April
16, according to a letter C. G. Williams published
in the Dallas Morning News on the
nineteenth. Williams reportedly saw an “immense
cigar-shaped vessel” as he was taking a