Alternate Perceptions Magazine, June 2021
George Adamski and the blustery night
by: Richard W. Heiden
Adamski 4-22-1953 .PDF
George Adamski was by far the most (in)famous of the flying saucer contactees. Very few of his contact claims included specific details that could be confirmed, or—on the contrary—that could be disproved.
One such claim involved the alleged contact of Dec. 1, 1958. Adamski said that his train from Kansas City to Davenport made an unscheduled ten-minute stop just twenty miles outside of Kansas City, and he got out and completed the trip in the waiting flying saucer. Arthur C. Campbell of Donald Keyhoe’s National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) investigated this. All of the railroad personnel that Campbell obtained statements from (the conductor and two attendants) said that there was no such stop, nor was the door of the car left open (its design did not allow for closing from the outside). Moreover, the train could not have made up the lost time. This last point was corroborated additionally by the engineer, the fireman, and the brakeman. (1)
In 1978 I researched another of Adamski’s contacts. This was the contact of April 22, 1953. Some information on this was included in a book review I wrote for the “APRO Bulletin.” (2) The present article includes additional details that have not been published before.
In chapter 7 of “Inside the Spaceships,” Adamski wrote that he had gone to Los Angeles in April of 1953. On April 22, he went for another ride in a flying saucer. He first had dinner with Firkon, his Martian friend. Adamski suggested dinner at 7:15 p.m., and they walked to “a little café close by” the hotel. (3) “We had lingered over our meal while Firkon talked.” It was probably at least 9:00 p.m. when they left the café, at which point Adamski noted that “It was a blustery night, but I scarcely noticed the storm.” (4)
The records of the U.S. Weather Bureau (U.S. Department of Commerce) say otherwise. The fastest wind that evening was only 8 mph (13 km./hr.), at 8 p.m.. And the wind was even slower as the evening progressed. At 9:00 p.m. the wind speed was just 4 mph (6 km./hr.); at 10:00 p.m., a mere 2 mph (3 km./hr.); at 11 p.m., 3 mph (5 km./hr.); and at midnight, 4 mph (6 km./hr.). (The hourly readings are taken between 1 and 15 minutes before the hour.) The Weather Bureau officially designates 8-12 mph as a “gentle breeze,” 4-7 mph as a “light breeze,” and 1-3 mph as “light air.” So it was far from blustery. The fastest wind all day was 14 mph (23 km./hr.) (“moderate breeze”), at 1:46 p.m.
My wind data are not from the weather station at the Los Angeles International Airport, but rather from the “City Office,” just a couple blocks from the hotel from where Adamski walked to dinner. And what was Adamski’s hotel? How I learned that is a story in itself. Adamski wrote that he always stayed at the same hotel whenever he visited Los Angeles, but did not name it. (5) However, Laura Mundo, a follower of Adamski’s who lived in Michigan, wrote in one of her books that she once met with Adamski at the Hotel Clark. I was still not satisfied. So on July 1, 1979, I called Alice Wells, Adamski’s old friend since 1934. (6) She was evasive, first saying she did not remember the name of Adamski’s preferred hotel in Los Angeles, and then that he stayed at many hotels. Then I asked her directly if it was the Hotel Clark, and she confirmed that indeed it was.
Now confident of the hotel’s identity, a few days later (when I was in Los Angeles on the way to the MUFON symposium in Burlingame, outside San Francisco) I stopped by the Hotel Clark. Of course, even if his hotel stays could be confirmed, that would not confirm any alleged contacts at the time. However, the hotel manager informed me that the hotel had been sold in 1961 and again a few months before my visit. He did not know who the previous owners had been, nor where the guest registers from 1953 might be.
This information will only confirm the opinion of those who don’t buy Adamski’s claims anyway. And as for others, they might just make excuses for him, like saying that Adamski (or his ghost writer) simply got the date wrong. That’s why it would be useful to check the guest registers of the Hotel Clark. Maybe somebody can still do that.
However, if George Adamski did NOT have an actual contact on April 22, 1953, it is entirely consistent with what he himself said five years later, in the spring of 1958. Adamski was speaking to a group that included brothers Ray and Rex Stanford and Bob R. Matthews. Ray Stanford relates the following:
“Adamski actually said, in telling us that he, Lucy McGinnis, and Alice Wells, and a ‘Mr. and Mrs. Black from San Diego’, allegedly had experienced a sighting of what was said to have been a huge, long ‘mothership’, was, ‘Hell!’ ‘That was the closest I’ve ever been to one of them things!’ Suddenly Adamski’s face showed shock at what he realized he had let slip. ‘OH! I mean, of course, excepting when I been inside!’ (No details were given, as to description, but I suspect he, Lucy, or Alice would have described such had there been any details worthy of mention, so I wonder if [it] might have been an oblique view of a lenticular cloud produced by a low-pressure wave over the nearby mountain top.)
“I don’t recall either Lucy or Alice chiming in to say how amazing the alleged ‘mothership’ was, but it’s possible one of them might have uttered some very brief, assenting remark.” (7)
Please bear in mind (as Adamski neglected to do) that in his seminal contact with Orthon in the California desert on Nov. 20, 1952, he claimed to have actually touched the craft—or come within a foot of it anyway, before his arm was jerked by the alleged force field around it. (8) Yet on that occasion he did not go inside. So even with his clumsy attempt to correct his slip-up, Adamski was admitting to having hoaxed his alleged contacts.
Getting back to Ray Stanford, he goes on to say:
“More condemning than that off-the-cuff slip-up, was the morning when, over his third (or later) cup of ‘Ekknog’ (as Adamski pronounced eggnog), he told us he, ‘... never had to have any physical contact with space people...’ to write what was in the book Inside The Space Ships... Adamski stressed he learned everything by ‘a unified state of consciousness’ with ‘space brothers and their craft.’...
“Understandably, people ask me why Adamski confessed those things... Well, I think the answer was that, under the influence of the well-spiked eggnogs, he took compassion on us relative youngsters and was trying to steer us away from his ‘saucer crap’ into a world of reality. I think maybe he saw us as bright young men (not yet 21) whom he really, deep down in his heart, didn’t want to see wasting their lives following his merchandised ‘space brother’ fantasies.” (9)
I am not given to puns, but I cannot help saying that Adamski was “just blowing wind,” and not just in regard to the contact of April 22, 1953.
FOOTNOTES:
1. “The U.F.O. Investigator” (NICAP, Washington, D.C.) 1:8, June 1959, pp. 1 and 3-4.
2. “APRO Bulletin” (Tucson, Ariz.) 32:5, Aug. 1984, p. 5.
3. George Adamski, “Inside the Space Ships,” Abelard-Schuman, Inc., New York, 1955, pp. 114-115.
4. Op. cit., p. 117.
5. “Following a custom of many years when visiting Los Angeles, I registered in a certain downtown hotel,” in op. cit., p. 34.
6. Alice K. Wells in her “Cosmic Bulletin,” March 1974, p. 3. She wrote that she had gone to meet Adamski after reading the article about him in the Los Angeles “Times” of April 8, 1934. When my sister was studying at the University of Southern California in the late 1970’s, she looked the article up for me. The article (on p. 5 of Part II) was about Adamski’s Royal Order of Tibet. I sent the article to various organizations and individuals in the UFO field, and it was subsequently reprinted by Gene Duplantier in Delve (Willowdale, Ont., Canada) no. 5, [probably 1990], p. 11; and cited by Jerome Clark. On Nov. 20, 1952, Wells was one of six co-witnesses (from afar) to Adamski’s initial contact with Orthon. Finally, upon Adamski’s death in 1965, Wells was the sole beneficiary of his will, and was bequeathed his entire estate.
7. Ray Stanford, letter to the author, Sep. 27, 1976; e-mail to the author, Dec. 14, 2011.
8. Desmond Leslie and George Adamski, “Flying Saucers Have Landed,” the British Book Centre, New York, 1953, p. 208.
9. Ray Stanford, e-mail to the author, Dec. 14, 2011.
== == About the Author:
Richard W. Heiden was assistant editor of the “APRO Bulletin” from 1978 until its end in 1988. He started researching George Adamski in 1976. He lives in Milwaukee (Wisconsin), and is an accountant.
This article was originally written for “Fate” magazine (Lakeville, Minn.)
