extraordinary%20encounters

70 Contactees
nessed something that, whatever else it may or
may not have been, was not a meteor. Observers
would describe it as resembling a huge
bullet-shaped object with batlike wings and a
searchlight that it occasionally swept over the
ground. Dark, except for two red lights along
its side, it stayed in view for an hour and a
half, moving at both slow and fast speeds.
During the sighting, Probert phoned
Layne, who urged him to see if the craft’s occupants
were interested in a telepathic exchange.
According to Probert, the experiment
succeeded. The crew members revealed themselves
as peaceful people with lightweight, illuminated
bodies. They had been trying to
contact earthlings for many years. Though
they were afraid to land openly, they would
meet with scientists in some isolated area or
on a mountaintop. They had mastered antigravity,
and their ship was called the Kareeta.
The San Diego Union carried a humorous
piece on the sighting, including Probert’s assertions,
in its October 18 issue.
The UFO age began the next year with
p r i vate pilot Kenneth Arnold’s June 24 sighting
of nine shiny objects that the press would
soon call “flying saucers.” In the wake of
A r n o l d’s re p o rt, many other people came forw
a rd to recount their own encounters with
u n k n own aerial phenomena. Among the
most outlandish claims to see print was one
told by Ole J. Sneide. In a letter to the Sa n
Francisco Chro n i c l e appearing in the July 3
issue, Sneide stated that the flying discs, also
k n own as flying saucers, we re spaceships fro m
other planets. (This is one of the ve ry earliest
public attempts to link the new public sensation
with extraterrestrial visitors. Nearly all
other speculation held the saucers to be natural
phenomena or advanced terrestrial aircraft.
The association of flying saucers as
spaceships did not take widespread hold until
the early to mid-1950s.) Sneide also said the
saucers had a base on the dark side of the
moon. He knew as much because he re g u l a r l y
t e l e p o rted himself around the galaxy. A foll
ow-up article in the C h ro n i c l e d e t e r m i n e d
that Sneide, a student of occultism, was seri-
ous. Though nothing more is known about
Sneide, he may have been something of a
contactee before the word and concept had
come into curre n c y.
The contact movement, however, did not
emerge into cultural visibility until January
1952, when aircraft mechanic George W. Van
Tassel began holding open weekly meetings in
the high-desert country of southern California.
At these gatherings Van Tassel would
channel messages from starship (“ventla”)
commanders, introducing, among others, the
destined-to-be ubiquitous Ashtar. That same
year, Van Tassel published I Rode a Flying
Saucer!, the first modern contactee book (albeit
with a misleading title; it would not be
until the next year that Van Tassel would
claim his first physical contact and spaceshipboarding).
The year 1952 saw a flurry of contact
activity. In Prescott, Arizona, George
Hunt Williamson, his wife, Betty, and companions
were communicating with Martians,
Uranians, and other extraterrestrials from the
solar system via ouija board, radio, and mental
telepathy. In July, in the Nevada desert,
Truman Bethurum met the crew of a “scow”
from the planet Clarion, invisible to earthly
eyes because it is always on the opposite side
of the sun from Earth.
Though arguably Van Tassel was the most
i n fluential of the first generation of contactees,
the most famous was George Ad a m s k i .
Adamski had a long history in California—
going back to the 1930s—as a kind of minor
g u ru. When flying saucers rose to pro m i n e n c e
in the late 1940s, Adamski produced photographs
of spaceships in the atmosphere and
near the moon. On November 20, 1952, accompanied
by six associates, including Ge o r g e
Hunt Williamson, he went out into the desert
to meet a landed saucer and its pilot, a blondh
a i red, angelic fig u re whom Adamski would
call Orthon. Adamski went on to write books,
l e c t u re all over the world, and become the
single most controversial saucer personality of
the 1950s. Though despised by conserva t i ve
ufologists, who charged that his accounts of
meetings with Venusians, Ma rtians, and Sa t u r-