5 Journeys

In the summer of 1954, retirees Bryant and Helen Reeve sold their Detroit, Michigan home, bought a new car, and set out for Mexico. The couple had no destination in mind. “We had no particular program in mind other than going places and seeing things,” they later recalled.¹Close But this was no ordinary trip. Two years and 23,000 miles later, the pair had completed a journey they dubbed their “flying saucer pilgrimage.”

Little information is available about Helen Reeve’s background, but Bryant had been a mechanical engineer, educated at Yale University and MIT. Growing up, his family had lived in both England and Germany for a time and had traveled extensively throughout Europe. He served overseas during World War I, and afterward held both technical and executive positions in several American companies before his retirement.

By 1950, then, the Reeves appear to have been enjoying the model life of postwar America’s white middle class. One thing, though, did make them stand out from their peers. For some time, they had become interested in what they called “metaphysical studies.” This included psychical research, the paranormal, and esoteric religions from the Far East.

When reports of flying saucers first made headlines, the couple saw nothing to link them with their philosophical pursuits. But in November 1953, a friend showed up at a house party of theirs with a book, Flying Saucers Have Landed, in which one of its authors claimed to have talked to a man from Venus. Bryant thought it preposterous, but the friend insisted it was worth finding out more. “There’s only one thing to do,” he said. “Call the man up and get him to Detroit.” They weren’t able to reach the author, George Adamski, that day, but after sending him a letter and assurances of covering his expenses, he agreed.

The son of Polish immigrants, George Adamski was steeped in Western esotericism and theosophy.²Close Working as a handyman at a diner near Mount Palomar in California, Adamski was already known in the local area in the 1920s as a self-styled spiritual leader. He had founded the Royal Academy of Tibet, and over the course of the 1930s and 1940s spoke and taught courses on what he called the “Cosmic Law,” a moral and cosmological philosophy emphasizing the principles of love, humility, and the rejection of materialism. In two pieces written in 1937, entitled “The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth” and “Satan, Man of the Hour,” he portrayed materialism and militarism as the two great threats to the modern world. Salvation, however, was possible by embracing the Christ-like values of love, peace, and cooperation.

Near the end of World War II, Adamski began to direct his attention to outer space, setting up his own personal observatory with a fifteen-inch telescope. He then published a pamphlet in 1946 on “The Possibility of Life on Other Planets” and in 1949 a science fiction novel Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars, and Venus. Here he continued his theme of the need to achieve higher levels of consciousness and morality in order to avoid the destruction of human civilization. In the novel, Adamski portrays the residents of the moon, Venus, and Mars as Caucasian humanoids who once lived on earth but since have learned to embrace the Cosmic Law and to live in prosperity and peace. They also had a message for humanity: civilization on earth was still in its infancy, and its people must be careful in their use of weapons of mass destruction.

Adamski’s attention soon turned to flying saucers. In 1950, he co-authored an article in Fate magazine—titling himself as Prof. George Adamski—on how astronomers were seeing unidentified flying objects. Then, on November 24, 1952, the Phoenix Gazette reported that a few days earlier and in front of a number of witnesses Adamski had had an encounter with an actual extraterrestrial in the Colorado Desert in California. According to Adamski, he had photographed the spacecraft, and a conversation with its occupant revealed that the aliens were visiting earth out of concern over the testing of atomic bombs.³Close

Shortly thereafter, Adamski wrote British occult writer Desmond Leslie to tell him that he was in the process of writing about his remarkable experience in the desert. Leslie was intrigued. He was just about to publish his own book on flying saucers in which he argued that beings from other worlds had been visiting earth since ancient times. Leslie invited Adamski to publish his piece as part of Leslie’s book. He did, and Flying Saucers Have Landed hit bookstores in October 1953 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

In the book, Adamski explained that he himself had his first sighting of a giant, hovering spacecraft near his home in October 1946.⁴Close Curious, he kept looking for more with his telescope and caught sight of more than 180 unidentified flying objects, taking some 500 photographs of them. He eventually sent his photos to a Navy lab for analysis, but never heard back from them.

Then on November 20, 1952, he went out to the desert with friends in hopes of spotting flying saucer activity. After doing some roaming, the group spotted what appeared to be a ship circling above them and following their car. Hoping to make contact with the ship’s crew, Adamski told his companions to inconspicuously wait a mile or so away, while he went on foot with his camera and telescope.

Suddenly, after Adamski took some photographs, a man approached him. Almost immediately, Adamski realized he was in the presence of a genuine alien. The man, dressed in what looked like ski pants, appeared to be in his late twenties. He had long flowing hair “glistening more beautifully than any women’s I have ever seen,” delicate skin like a baby, “slightly higher cheek bones than an Occidental, but not so high as an Indian or an Oriental,” and white teeth that sparkled when he smiled.⁵Close Adamski was overcome with emotions.

The beauty of his form surpassed anything I had ever seen. And the pleasantness of his face freed me of all thought of my personal self. I felt like a child in the presence of one with great wisdom and much love, and I became very humble within myself . . . for from him was radiating a feeling of infinite understanding and kindness, with supreme humility.⁶Close

The two men communicated with one another through what Adamski described as “feelings, signs, and above all, by means of telepathy.”⁷Close As he came to learn, this otherworldly being’s name was Orthon, and he came from the planet Venus. He told Adamski that all the planets in the solar system were inhabited and that, while there had been previous visitations in which spacecraft crashed and crews were killed, other outer space visitors would soon be coming.

Adamski asked whether Venusians believed in God and what their purpose was in coming to earth. Orthon revealed that his people indeed followed the law of the “Creator.” He was here, he said, to warn us that the uninhibited testing and use of atomic bombs were creating radioactive clouds that were damaging to both earth and outer space.

Orthon provided Adamski with few details beyond this, but the longtime believer in prophetic knowledge took inspiration from his encounter. “Let us be friendly. Let us recognize and welcome the men from other worlds!” he concluded. “THEY ARE HERE AMONG US. Let us be wise enough to learn from those who can teach us much—who will be our friends if we will but let them!”⁸Close

When George Adamski arrived in Detroit in March 1954, he was greeted at the railway station by the Reeves and an organizing committee. Adamski first fielded questions at a news conference, then did a live radio interview, followed by a pair of lectures for a select audience held in the auditorium at the Detroit Institute of Arts. To the disappointment of many, Adamski spent more time discussing his spiritual beliefs than his experience in the desert.

The big event was a public talk at the Detroit Masonic Temple. A crowd of 4,700 packed the hall, eagerly waiting to hear about and see images of flying saucers and the man from Venus. However, many were unable to see Adamski’s slides, he appeared nervous and rambled on, and the question-and-answer period proved unwieldy, given the size of the audience. At the end, Adamski dashed off to catch a train to New York City, but it wouldn’t be the last time the Reeves would spend time with “The Professor,” as many came to call him.

Flying Saucers Have Landed went through eleven printings over its first two years of publication and made George Adamski famous among UFO enthusiasts worldwide. He would go on to publish two more books on flying saucers and extraterrestrials. In Inside the Space Ships (1955), he described new encounters he had with aliens from Venus and Saturn. In it, he provided more details about the customs and lifestyles of people on other worlds. He also related his conversations with someone he referred to as the “Great Master,” a figure supposedly over a thousand years old and who preached that before earthlings travel in outer space they first would need to embrace the values of peace and brotherhood. Adamski’s final book, Flying Saucers Farewell (1961), echoed most of the same themes he had been writing about for years, this time mixed with responses to critics, attempts to explain gravity propulsion, and references to the Bible and other ancient texts demonstrating their compatibility with the Cosmic Law.⁹Close

Unlike the many UFO witnesses who chose not to report their sighting or to remain anonymous, George Adamski came away from his experience emboldened to share his adventure and thoughts. From 1953 until his death in 1965, he regularly lectured to audiences and gave interviews to newspapers, magazines, and radio and television broadcasters. He also followed the lead of ufologists and began in October 1957 publishing a regular bulletin for subscribers, entitled Cosmic Science for the Promotion of Cosmic Principles and Truths, Questions and Answers.

Around the same time, Adamski began an outreach project he called the “Get Acquainted Program.” He decided to use a network of correspondents from across the globe he had cultivated by the summer of 1957 to pass on messages from “our interplanetary visitors” to those interested. “Information of the Brothers of other worlds, with whom I continue having more or less regular meetings, will be sent regularly to each national leader [in the community], who in turn will forward it to all of his assistants,” he told followers.¹⁰Close Local groups were encouraged to then meet to discuss content and nurture closer bonds of friendship. Within two years, Adamski’s contact list for the program consisted of twenty-two contacts from seventeen countries, including Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Rhodesia.

The Get Acquainted Program provided Adamski with the resources to organize a 1959 worldwide speaking tour that included Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Africa, and South America. Attendance at his talks was generally good, and avid devotees repeatedly hosted and escorted him as he set down in places like Auckland, Darwin, Calcutta, Rome, Athens, and London. Arguably the high point of the tour was a private visit he was granted with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands in May.

But the trip proved to be a mixed bag. Due to poor health, he had to cut it short in June. Most vexing for Adamski was the disparaging—and at times, outright derisive—reception he got from the media and some audience members. In New Zealand, his remarks were sometimes met with chuckles, and his claims left the UFO community there deeply divided between Adamski believers and Adamski nonbelievers.¹¹Close In Zurich, a dismissive crowd laughed him off stage. Adamski responded by speaking of there being an “organized resistance” to his message orchestrated by what he called the “Silence Group,” a term that had been circulating in UFO circles since the early fifties. During the last five years of his life, Adamski went on to associate this Silence Group with a host of ugly and longstanding anti-Semitic epithets, linking it to international finance and a secret conspiracy and likening its members to “the money-changers Christ drove out of the temple.”¹²Close

Despite recurring health issues, Adamski stayed busy during the years 1960–1965. He set up a curriculum, established the Science of Life school, and claimed to have attended an “interplanetary counsel” on Saturn in March 1962, held to discuss increasing tensions between the United States and the USSR. He also continued traveling. He embarked on another European tour during the spring and summer of 1963, during which he may have had a private audience with Pope John XXIII,¹³Close and went on the lecture circuit throughout the United States in both 1964 and 1965 before his death in April 1965.

Adamski’s story of making contact with the Venusian Orthon was fantastic. To some, he was a visionary and a trailblazer. To many others, his tale was preposterous, the work of a shameless fraud.

There were critics aplenty. A notable one was writer Arthur C. Clarke, who pilloried Flying Saucer Have Landed and its two authors in March 1954. He found Leslie’s use of ancient religious texts to prove the existence of flying saucers in antiquity ridiculous. “No doubt some diligent reader in two or three thousand years’ time,” Clarke wrote in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, “will employ Mr. Leslie’s technique to prove, from ancient files of Amazing Stories, that the early twentieth century had spaceships, heat rays, antigravity and robots.” Leslie may have been simply naïve, but Clarke considered Adamski a charlatan. His close-up photos of the Venusian “spaceship,” he said, bore an “uncanny resemblance to electric-light fittings with table-tennis balls fixed underneath.” But the notion that “he succeeds in meeting the representative of saucerian civilization, when he lands his vehicle in the—presumably—totally uninhabited State of California” beggared belief. The account was “as ludicrous as the idea that for years saucers have been flitting round Palomar—of all places!—invisible to everyone except Mr. Adamski and his friend.”¹⁴Close

Jim Moseley—the gadfly ufologist who trekked across the US interviewing all the big players in the UFO scene at the time—paid a visit to the “Professor” at his home just a few months after publication of the book. Moseley was skeptical of Adamski’s claims but remained open to the possibilities. In response to Moseley’s questions, Adamski provided ever more elaborate details: a Venusian posing as an earthling visited him at work one day; another Venusian had worked for the Los Angeles district attorney; he had watched film showing extraterrestrial life on other planets, likely taken by earthmen during a visit. Moseley must have appeared dubious, since at one point, Adamski told him, “If you don’t believe in the spaceships and the Space Brothers, as I don’t think you do, young man, wait until 1968 and you will find more understanding—or at the most until 1969.” Moseley came away from the conversation convinced of the Californian’s sincerity, or at least for a while.¹⁵Close

Over the next twelve months, Moseley pored over Flying Saucers Have Landed and phoned and wrote some of the principals in the case. As he did, he encountered holes, biases, and contradictions in Adamski’s stories and evidence. Some people were falsely cited as witnesses or collaborators; others went on record saying that Adamski had seriously misquoted them. The six witnesses accompanying Adamski in the desert weren’t strangers, but either worked with him or shared his occult beliefs. One of the witnesses even denied ever seeing the Venusian spaceship or spaceman in question. And Moseley wondered, why couldn’t anyone at the scene take a good photo of events, and why did Adamski tell his companions to keep a good half mile to a mile away?

In January 1955, Moseley published an eleven-page expose in his newsletter Nexus on Adamski’s alleged contact with an alien. He laid out his findings and concluded that the “Professor’s” account contained “enough flaws to place in very serious doubt both his veracity and his sincerity.” Moseley conceded that, if the book was indeed fraudulent, it was likely out of a misguided desire on Adamski’s part to dramatize his devout philosophical beliefs. “But I sincerely feel,” he added, “that if the truth concerning these mysterious flying saucers is ever to be arrived at, someone must now and then perform the rather thankless task of sifting away the ‘saucer fiction’ from the ‘saucer facts.’ ”¹⁶Close

Adamski never responded to Moseley’s points. Perhaps he knew this was unnecessary since he already had his following. He did go on to accuse Moseley of being “an agent of Wall Street.” Reflecting on this later, Moseley acknowledged, “I took this as a disguised way of saying ‘agent of the Jewish conspiracy,’ and I think that’s the way most of Adamski’s followers understood the accusation.”¹⁷Close

To this day, the man who claimed to have met a being from Venus and attended a meeting on Saturn has had as many, if not more, detractors than supporters among UFO enthusiasts. He did, however, achieve something noteworthy. What Donald Keyhoe had done for flying saucer investigation, George Adamski did for alien contact. More than simply popularize the topic by telling a compelling story, he helped create a new public career, what quickly became known as the “contactee.” The contactee was someone claiming to have not only witnessed a flying saucer but also actually interacted with the alien life forms piloting the crafts. In so doing, the contactee came away with remarkable information about the appearance, customs, and intentions of the extraterrestrial visitors, an experience that left a sense of obligation to share it with the world.

George Adamski was arguably the most successful contactee of his time, but just one of many during the 1950s and early-1960s. Following Adamski’s visit to Detroit, Helen and Bryant Reeve were determined to meet some of them as well.

Following Adamski’s stay in their hometown, the Reeves entertained saucer followers in their basement recreation room. Conversation was lively and the group mixed. There were people drawn to the topic out of love for astronomy, some with an interest in technology and engineering, and others sharing the Reeves’ philosophical leanings. Some were science fiction fans, while others were what the Reeves deemed to be “a sort of fringe of fanatics.” They all were driven by a common desire to get to the bottom of things, and Helen and Bryant believed the best way to do this was to personally meet witnesses and decide if there was a pattern in their experiences.

When a new book arrived by yet another contactee, the group was eager to meet him. Arrangements were made for Truman Bethurum and his wife Mary to visit Detroit.

Truman Bethurum was tall, burly, bald, and in his mid-fifties and had spent his life working as a laborer in California and Nevada. A soft-spoken man, he tended to talk in simple, straightforward terms, unencumbered by philosophical ruminations.

In early 1953, Bethurum published a two-page piece in the newsletter Saucers entitled “I Was Inside a Flying Saucer.”¹⁸Close In it, he described working the night shift as a construction site mechanic on a highway in Nevada in July 1952. At some point, he fell asleep, only to be awakened by a group of eight small men—whom he described as appearing to be of “Latin extraction”—standing around his vehicle in a semicircle. One of the men spoke to Bethurum in English, explaining they were fluent in any language. Bethurum got out of his truck to shake hands with the man, at which point he spotted a large flying saucer hovering a few feet off the ground.

Bethurum asked to meet the captain of the ship and was escorted inside. There he was introduced to the captain. “I think my eyes fairly popped,” Bethurum recalled, “as I saw their captain was a gorgeous woman, shorter than any of the men, neatly attired, and also having a Latin appearance: coal black hair and olive complexion.” She explained to the dumbfounded Bethurum that her name was Aura Rhanes and that she and her crew were from the planet Clarion. The visit was brief, but upon his departure from the vessel, Rhanes told Bethurum they would come again. All told they visited him eleven times in 1952.

Bethurum told his story again at the Flying Saucers International Convention held in Los Angeles in August 1953. Then, with the help of ghostwriter Mary Kay Tennison, he published Aboard a Flying Saucer in early 1954. In it, Bethurum offered more details about his meetings with the extraterrestrials. They told him they had achieved the ability to read minds and had conquered the limits of space and time. Clarion itself was free of illness, poverty, crime, and worry. Unlike our world, its inhabitants had organized their lives around cooperation, education, and religious devotion. If earth only emulated their way of life, the ship’s captain explained, “you’d have a very paradise in which to build your homes and rear your children and see your sons blossom into manhood in peace, without the nagging horror and fear of bloody death and maimed and crazed young bodies.”¹⁹Close

Aboard a Flying Saucer is unusual in donating considerable space to three melodramatic aspects of his story: Bethurum’s romantic obsession with Capt. Aura Rhanes, the ridicule he faced from peers, and tensions with his wife. The Reeves believed Mary Kay Tennison played up the apparent amorous nature of the relationship between contactee and alien. To be sure, a great deal of attention is paid to Aura Rhanes’s appearance in the book. “I told her how impressed I was that a woman was captain of such a piece of equipment; how the males of our earth would rate her as tops in shapeliness and beauty,” Bethurum wrote. And after sharing a particularly emotional moment, he recalled, “I stared at her face, trying to imprint it on my mind. I liked what I saw, the large lucid brown eyes, the straight nose, the high intelligent forehead, the firm sweet lips.”²⁰Close

Such descriptions drew sneers and jibes. At work, guys called Bethurum “Saucers” and complimented him on finding “a good lookin’ dame in the middle of the desert.” Neighbors wondered whether he actually might have met with Russian spies. His exasperated wife Mary questioned her husband’s sanity and insisted he stop talking about “those weird things.” One morning as he raised the topic at the breakfast table, she finally snapped. “That’s enough, Truman! I don’t want to hear another word! The very idea!” she yelled. “You’ll have my friends not only laughing at me but thinking I’m living with a maniac.”²¹Close

According to Bethurum, Mary eventually came around when the couple visited George Adamski in the summer of 1953. Perhaps Adamski’s faith in Truman’s account won her over temporarily, but Mary eventually filed for divorce in 1956. According to Coral Lorenzen, Mary cited Truman’s relationship with Aura Rhanes as the reason for neglecting his marriage.

A short time after meeting Truman Bethurum, in June 1954, Bryant and Helen Reeve had the opportunity to meet yet another contactee. In his late twenties, George Hunt Williamson was considerably younger than Adamski and Bethurum. Claiming to be a student of anthropology who had done some fieldwork among Native Americans, Williamson went by the title of “Dr.,” though it appears he never earned a doctorate and may never have studied the field at all.

Williamson shared with Adamski a deep interest in theosophy and the occult. In fact, he and his wife visited Adamski in November 1952, and the two were among those claiming to have witnessed his original encounter with Orthon. Months before, however, the Williamsons had apparently established their own contact with aliens.

During some fieldwork in 1951, Williamson had been struck by how Native American tribes told tales of “little people,” “flying wheels,” and “flying boats” arriving in antiquity and teaching their members how best to live. After reading the books of Keyhoe, Scully, and Heard, and then following coverage of UFOs over the nation’s capital, he became convinced that interplanetary visitors were behind all these reports.

Williamson and his wife settled in Arizona, where they befriended another couple—railway conductor Alfred Bailey and his wife—who lived nearby. The couples shared an interest in alternative religions and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. One summer day in 1952, when the Baileys were visiting the Williamsons, they decided to try their hand at automatic writing, the communication skill associated with spiritual mediums. Using supplies at hand, they created their own Ouija board and attempted to make contact with aliens.

As Williamson and Bailey later described it, they began receiving messages almost immediately from contact leaders based on Mars and Jupiter. These spokesmen—they all claimed to be male—explained that earth was known throughout the solar system as Saras and was in danger of destruction at the hands of evil forces. “Great destruction can be caused by your H-bomb. It could all come too soon. Some destruction will come for sure!” They urged, “it is most important that you organize.”²²Close

Soon, they were receiving message from other planets as well, at one point being asked by their alien liaison to boil water on the stove in order to help facilitate contact. Then on August 17, 1952, the foursome were instructed to seek out a ham radio operator, Lyman Streeter Jr. Streeter, they said, would help them communicate via radio. A few days later, Streeter, Williamson, and Bailey began receiving messages from outer space through a series of dashes and dots similar to Morse code.

The name of their extraterrestrial contact was Zo, the head of a contact group based on Mars, but whose home was on Neptune. Zo explained that the rest of the planets in the solar system were concerned about the fate of Earth/Saras:

The movie, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was for a purpose and was more fact than fiction. Watch all nature for signs of catastrophe. These signs, such as tornados, earthquakes, floods, and so on will come to Saras soon. . . . USSR is aware of us, too. Earth’s last mile, we sad [sic]. It is impossible to reason with the people of earth. Soon all could end here.²³Close

And one missive in particular stayed with Williamson. “RADIOMAN HAS DEEP SECRET IN HIS MIND,” Zo relayed. “WILL NOT REVEAL. WE ARE ALARMED.”²⁴Close

Williamson and Bailey published their chronicle of these events in early 1954. Four years later, Williamson expanded on the tale. By then, however, he had moved to Indiana and began working with William Dudley Pelley, a successful Hollywood screenwriter with a deep interest in mysticism, theosophy, and race theory. A supporter of Adolf Hitler’s takeover in Germany, Pelley founded the Silver Legion, a Christian militia whose purpose was to help create a Nazi state in the United States, one that would exclude Jews and re-enslave Blacks. Eventually imprisoned for his activities, he was released in 1950 and began publishing arguments about how visiting aliens had bred with our evolutionary ancestors and eventually saved humanity from its fallen, moral state.²⁵Close

In 1958, Williamson published UFOs Confidential, in which he revealed that the radioman Lyman Streeter was actually a so-called Wanderer by the name of Kanet, born on earth to serve as a conduit for the solar system’s Space Confederation. More importantly, Williamson shed light on the flying saucer mystery, voicing sentiments similar to those of George Adamski.

The outer space visitors had arrived, he insisted, to “wake us up,” to “prepare us for a new technology and age of our world so that we might be ready for the eventual journey through space that defies description!”²⁶Close But some on earth were bent on foiling these plans. Behind the scenes, members of “The Silence Group” were operating as henchmen of “International Bankers,” who were in league with the Soviet Union. The conspiracy supposedly included financier Bernard Baruch, US Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, US Senator Herbert Lehman, the Warburg family, and accused spy Alger Hiss. They controlled all the wealth in the world and could spark economic booms and depressions. These schemers, he said, “serve an ancient, hideous conspiracy that is nothing but the spirit of Anti-Christ,” and they knew full well that, if the Space Brothers succeeded in shepherding earth to the New Age, their days were numbered. Thus, the conspirators were intent on undermining America’s spiritual fortitude through “movies, radio, TV, magazines, etc., touting the great merits of body-destroying liquor, tobacco immorality” and using the United Nations to create a one world government.²⁷Close

Williamson went on to publish three more books over the years 1957–1959 in which he presented archaeological, folklore, cosmological, and contactee evidence to support the notion that aliens had been interacting with humanity since ancient times. Almost as soon as his star had risen, Williamson receded into the background. In 1960, he changed his name to Michel d’Obrenovic and left the UFO scene.

In August 1954, the Reeves headed off on their “flying saucer pilgrimage,” eventually crossing the border into Mexico, where they socialized with fellow saucer enthusiasts. Mexico had begun to develop its own homegrown UFO groups. When a newspaper editor organized a UFO symposium in Mexico City in January 1955, Bryant was asked to present. At one point during his talk, he asked the audience if anyone had ever seen a space man. After a long pause, a man in the back row raised his hand. The crowd became boisterous, demanding to hear his story, and he was whisked to the podium.

His name was Salvador Villanueva Medina, and sometime later, he agreed to tell the Reeves his story. A chauffeur by trade, Medina was driving two American passengers, when his car broke down. The Americans headed on foot to town to find a mechanic, while Medina worked on the automobile into the night. As he tried fixing it, a man about four feet tall with long blonde hair, dressed in a uniform, and carrying a helmet spoke to him in Spanish. The man left, only to return with another odd-looking fellow.

They told him they were from the planet Venus and over several hours described its wonders to him. The planet’s inhabitants were much more advanced than ours: solar energy was used for power, streets were metallic, sidewalks moved on automated belts, and food came from gardens and wells inside homes. The Venusians’ technological achievements were matched by their moral accomplishments. Having overcome warfare and strife thousands of years earlier, they had established a universal brotherhood ruled over by a council of wise men and guided by the principles of wisdom and love. They also explained that aliens were living on earth, in the guise of humans, in order to monitor the situation. When offered a ride in their flying saucer, Medina balked, and they flew off into the distance.

Medina’s simple tale had much in common with Bethurum’s; both lacked George Adamski’s metaphysical meditations. Nevertheless, when Adamski visited Mexico soon after, the Reeves were among a small group to attend a get-together between the “Professor” and the man now being called the “Mexican Adamski.” The meeting had more the air of an interrogation than a meeting of the minds, as a skeptical Adamski directed pointed questions at the man to determine whether he was a genuine contactee or not. How did the saucer look inside? What happened when the ship took off? Why were the spacemen here? When it was all over, the Reeves recalled, “Salvador passed his examination at the hands of a man, who having seen a saucer himself, knew how to ask about certain things which no mere imaginary contact could give the answers to.”²⁸Close

Later expanding on his original story, Medina related his five-day trip with visitors to Venus in a published account in 1958. Nonetheless, he drew little attention outside of Mexico. In the end, US contactees dominated the scene.

In April 1955, the Reeves drove back to the United States, stopping in Arizona to visit George Hunt Williamson and his family. They went on to reach Giant Rock, California, to meet George Van Tassel, the author of a book they had read during their time in Mexico, I Rode a Flying Saucer (1952).

Van Tassel had long been involved in aeronautics. At age seventeen, he was already working as an airplane mechanic. Throughout the thirties and forties, he worked for some of the country’s most prestigious aviation companies—Douglas Aircraft, Hughes, Lockheed. At Hughes, he became involved in flight-testing near Barstow, California, where he discovered his love of outdoor living in the desert. It was there that he became acquainted with a German American loner named Frank Critzer.

Critzer had created a home for himself by carving out a cave from a natural landmark known as Giant Rock in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California. During the early days of the Second World War, the US government became interested in Critzer’s activities, likely due to his storage and use of dynamite. When local police came to Giant Rock to question him in July 1942, the ensuing confrontation led to an explosion, and Critzer was killed.²⁹Close

In 1947, George Van Tassel purchased the land around Giant Rock, moved there with his wife, Dorris, and three daughters, and operated a small airport. Like so many other contactees at the time, “Van”—as friends called him—was drawn to esoteric philosophy, and he began to hold meditation readings for groups of twenty-five to forty-five people, at which he reported hearing disembodied voices. It soon became clear to him that these were coming from outer space.

Van Tassel kept notes on his communications with the “unseen intelligence,” transmissions that took place over the course of 1952 and were especially frequent around the time of the UFO flap over Washington, DC. The voices told him that they were commanders from various space stations and planets, their chief being an alien named Ashtar. Ashtar and the others explained that they greeted us in love and peace, but they expressed worries about earth’s future. They warned that “this folly in the use of atomic power for destruction will rebound upon the users” and that the presence of flying saucers was intended as a warning against employing hydrogen bombs. In addition, Van Tassel was told other planets were also visiting earth—the reason for there being differently shaped flying objects in the skies—and that those utilizing cigar-shaped vessels were “not investigating with peaceful intent.”³⁰Close

During their visit to Giant Rock in 1955, the Reeves were invited to take part in one of Van’s contact sessions. They and Van Tassel’s family were seated in a circle in a room many feet below the great Rock itself. Van sat in a corner, assuming the role of a medium, while an assistant recorded everything on tape. The family then began singing songs: some were popular, others were hymns, including one relayed to them by the space contacts. George then began receiving both “sight and sound rays” from the extraterrestrials, allowing him to both hear and see the spacemen with whom he was communicating. At times, the energy being transmitted got so strong, parts of his body were wracked by pain. All this showed, Van Tassel insisted, that aliens and their flying saucers could be alternately material and immaterial, visible and invisible, going a long way to explaining their peculiar properties.³¹Close

Van Tassel was not content with simply relaying the apocalyptic messages of Ashtar. He went on to publish a monthly bulletin, wrote books and pamphlets about his cosmic philosophy, appeared on radio and television, and established his own College of Universal Wisdom. After receiving instructions from an extraterrestrial named Solganda, he began pursuing the goal of constructing a building that supposedly had the ability to reverse the aging process. Christened the “Integratron,” the project consumed Van Tassel for the rest of his life. It was never completed.³²Close

One of Van Tassel’s most important contributions was organizing an annual Interplanetary Space Convention at Giant Rock. From 1954 until 1977, UFO enthusiasts—by some accounts, in the thousands—camped out there for two or three days to mingle with and hear talks by contactees and to purchase literature and artifacts. Apostles and agnostics, confirmed occultists and curious onlookers, mystics and ministers, high-spirited free thinkers of all sorts were drawn to the event at its height in the 1950s. Ufology’s traveling gossipmonger Jim Moseley attended the convention in May 1960 and delighted in its unconventionality.

For every serious person, there were perhaps ten True Believers of all types and descriptions. I doubt if any two people in the whole assemblage could have been found to agree entirely on any issue. Yet there was a prevailing tolerance, as strangers went around introducing themselves to each other and trying to outdo everyone else in spouting their own views and theories.³³Close

When the Reeves left Giant Rock, they reflected on George Van Tassel and his work. “He is an advanced apostle in the ‘new age’ if there ever was one!” Bryant said. Helen agreed. “I will always think of him as the sage of Giant Rock and will always be grateful for the privilege of knowing him. He reminds me of a veritable modern ‘John the Baptist’ crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare ye for a new cosmic age.’ ”³⁴Close

From Giant Rock, the Reeves headed west toward Los Angeles to pay visits to two other prominent contactees, both frequent speakers at the Giant Rock conventions. The first was Daniel Fry, an aviation technician. In the summer of 1950, he was working at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico (now the White Sands Missile Range), the site of the first atomic bomb test in 1945. On the evening of July 4, he was alone in an army camp when he saw an odd-looking light in the sky and felt a strong, prickling sensation up and down his spine. It soon became apparent that the light was an object, and when it landed near him, he saw it to be a silver-colored craft with a violet glow. One of its occupants spoke to Fry and invited him on board for a ride.

Fry learned that the extraterrestrial’s name was A-Lan and that his people were originally from the empire of Lemuria here on earth, only to be destroyed in a conflict with its enemy Atlantis. Some survivors succeeded in flying to Mars. They returned in order to help promote the earth’s scientific progress and thereby bring about the end of war between nations. Fry had been chosen for contact, A-Lan explained, because his brain was far more receptive and open to alien knowledge than any scientist’s.³⁵Close

In subsequent contacts with Fry in 1954, A-Lan urged him to tell their story “through your newspapers, your radio and television stations, and if necessary, shout it from the house-tops, but let the people know.” Fry countered that he would only draw scorn and ridicule if he went public, but A-Lan insisted. The earth’s people would only find peace if they received the simple message: understand God and one another.³⁶Close

After visiting two guiding figures in the esoteric study of UFOs at the time—Meade Layne and Mark Probert—Bryant and Helen Reeve made their way in September 1955 to the Los Angeles home of the final contactee in their pilgrimage. Like Bethurum and Fry, Orfeo Angelucci was employed in the aviation industry. Though he later learned, he said, that he had been under alien observation since 1946, he first came across flying saucers while driving home from work late one night in May 1952. Two striking figures, a male and a female, suddenly appeared before him. “There was an impressive nobility about them; their eyes were larger and much more expressive, and they emanated a seeming radiance that filled me with wonder,” he later recalled.³⁷Close

Angelucci had the chance to see earth from outer space in a remote-controlled saucer and went on to have several encounters with one extraterrestrial in particular, whom he named “Neptune.” Like the other humanoids described by contactees, Neptune sounded the alarm of a looming “bloody holocaust of Armageddon.” It was a fate, he added, that could be avoided, and the aliens were willing to help. The flying disks reported by witnesses were intended as messengers, “harbingers of mankind’s coming resurrection from the living death.” And Orfeo was given a charge. “For the present you are our emissary, Orfeo, and you must act! Even though people of Earth laugh derisively and mock you as a lunatic, tell them about us!” Moved, he could only reply, “I will . . . I will . . .”³⁸Close

Angelucci made frequent public appearances and became one of the more beloved contactees of the 1950s, widely praised for his sincerity and humility. The Reeves similarly found the “trim slender man with fine clean-cut features and deep expressive eyes” decidedly affable and generous. As their “conversation turned to the higher aspects of the flying saucer phenomena,” they noted, “we discovered that we were indeed talking with an individual of great spiritual advancement, discernment, and experience.” Like the other contactees whom Helen and Bryant met on their travels, Angelucci confirmed to them that “our advanced space brothers and sisters in the space-ships” were “coming in love and brotherhood to help us avoid mistakes and to help usher us into a great new age.”³⁹Close

The Reeves didn’t use the term “new age” lightly. “Everywhere we found people in all walks of life talking about the ‘New Age,’ ” they emphasized. “Among the humble and inarticulate it took the form of a feeling rather than words, a feeling of great expectancy—an expectancy of mighty changes ahead in the world.” The flying saucer community was, in their words, “alive with enthusiasm for new age concepts.”⁴⁰Close

By the early 1950s, a movement had begun taking shape within occult circles oriented around the promise of a momentous New Age that was supposedly just around the corner. Inspired in part by the teachings of British theosophist Alice A. Bailey, advocates of New Age thinking swore off mainstream Western religious institutions in favor of pursuing the path of individual spiritual evolution. This spiritual journey, it was thought, required opening oneself up to the wisdom of “ascended masters.”⁴¹Close

New Age philosophy was about more than simply seeking a higher consciousness and attaining personal transformation. Leading voices in the movement argued that the present world was corrupt, captive to an empty materialism. As a result, a new cycle of cosmic evolution was underway, one by which the old world would be destroyed and replaced by a new age of enlightenment, peace, plenty, justice, and contentment. That process could either be accelerated or hindered by the relative commitment earth’s inhabitants showed toward their own spiritual growth. Borrowing elements from transcendentalism, spiritualism, and theosophy, New Agers commonly saw the universe as a web of interconnected consciousnesses. This allowed them to cross the barriers of time and space by serving as mediums through which higher beings could communicate, a process called “channeling.”⁴²Close

Most of the flying saucer contactees embraced these ideas either explicitly or implicitly. Indeed, it’s fair to say that during the 1950s and early 1960s, the contactee movement was the cutting edge of the New Age movement. Publishing houses like New Age in California, Ventla in West Germany, and Parthenon in Sweden gave eager readers access to the latest works of contactees as well as to metaphysical interpretations about the meanings of flying saucers. Through their public appearances at lectures and in radio and television interviews, the contactees spread their New Age beliefs to the uninitiated.

In the postwar era and later, New Age was less a rigorous philosophy or even an organized religion than it was a broad spiritual vision encompassing a range of beliefs and practices. But its merging with the UFO phenomenon in the 1950s brought a number of prominent themes to the ongoing conversation about flying saucers: fears about nuclear war, concern for the fate of the planet, and the prospects for solving the world’s most pressing social problems.⁴³Close

The famous contactees the Reeves met during their pilgrimage—with one exception—shared some conspicuous characteristics. They were white. They were male. And they made their homes or had their experiences in the southwestern part of the United States.

Other contactees had similar backgrounds and stories. Texan Dan Martin claimed that while driving in August 1955, he came across a “very pleasant appearing” and “rather short though well proportioned” female from Mercury wearing a gas mask, who eventually took him on her ship and claimed the craft itself had been responsible for many of the miracles described in the Bible.⁴⁴Close Californian businessman Reinhold Schmidt was on the road in Nebraska in November 1957 when, he said, “a pencil-like stream of light shot out” from a large silvery vessel and hit him in the chest, leaving him temporarily paralyzed. This began one of several contacts he had with visiting aliens who warned him about the impact atomic explosions were having on earth’s atmosphere, at one point flying Schmidt to the Arctic Circle to show him how the ice there was melting at an alarming rate.⁴⁵Close In 1961, however, Schmidt was put on trial for swindling money from a pair of widows who had believed his stories about his encounters with spacemen. After young astronomer Carl Sagan testified about the scientific dubiousness of his claims, Schmidt was convicted and sentenced to one to ten years in prison.⁴⁶Close

To be sure, there were contactees from elsewhere. Missouri farmer Buck Nelson spoke in a disarmingly folksy way about being flown to Venus, the moon, and Mars by aliens who struck the familiar themes of abandoning atomic weapons and embracing the laws of God.⁴⁷Close World War II veteran Howard Menger told of having regular contact with extraterrestrials since he was a boy in New Jersey, when he was introduced to his space sister. The aliens were here, he said, in order to rouse us to our need to seek higher understanding and avoid catastrophe.⁴⁸Close

Europe, too, had its contactees. In England, George King began receiving telepathic messages from a Venusian master named Aetherium who told him he was to be the “voice of Interplanetary Parliament.” The knowledge King gained from his psychical travels to Venus and Mars inspired him to found the Aetherius Society, whose worldwide mission has been to spread the teachings of Aetherius and Jesus and prepare the way for the next Master.⁴⁹Close

All these contactees were white American and English men. Admittedly, their claims and beliefs set them apart from mainstream society at the time. Despite this, their social status afforded them access to resources often unavailable to others: publishing books, giving paid public lectures, and interviewing with radio and tv broadcasters. The stories they related about their contact experiences often featured thinly veiled erotic descriptions of their alien guides, who indulged the questions and insecurities of their human guests and left the men with a renewed sense of self-importance.⁵⁰Close

That said, there were other contactees in the fifties and sixties who were of a different ilk from the ones the Reeves visited. Brazil, for instance, was home to Aladino Félix (pen name Dino Kraspedon), who published his account of five meetings he had in 1952 with a being from one of the moons of Jupiter. Speaking to Félix in multiple languages, the visitor supposedly warned of the devastating impact radiation from atomic bombs would have on the environment and rebuked earthlings for spending their wealth on novelties and luxury goods instead of research, infrastructure, and curing diseases like cancer, leprosy, and tuberculosis. A little over ten years later, however, Félix announced on television that his claims were a fabrication. Shortly thereafter he was arrested and imprisoned for his involvement in a right-wing paramilitary group that carried out a series of terrorist attacks in 1967 and 1968.⁵¹Close

Spain had its own, slightly more theatrical version of George Adamski in Fernando Sesma, a former postal worker and amateur journalist. Since the mid-1950s, Sesma served as the spokesman for a group that gathered in the basement of a Madrid café, the Asociación de Amigos de los Visitantes del Espacio (Association of the Friends of the Space Visitors). The assembly included a priest who had authored a small treatise on flying saucers, arguing that earth had been visited by aliens interested in exploring God’s creations.⁵²Close Taking place as it did in the restrictive environment of Franco’s authoritarian Spain, meetings like these were inherently suspect. The seemingly apolitical topic of UFOs, however, offered participants a measure of freedom to associate and share opinions.⁵³Close

One day in 1962, Sesma received a phone call from someone saying he was Saliano from the planet Auco. He also began receiving letters from the spaceman, who presented his people as peaceful and interested only in studying earth. Within a few years, direct contact with the aliens had been established, and in 1965, Sesma said he was flown out of the solar system via a fourth dimension. Sesma suddenly became a celebrity, appearing regularly on Spanish television from 1966 to 1969. It all came to an end in 1970, when Saliano supposedly claimed he would appear in the flesh at the Pakistani Embassy. When Sesma fans gathered outside the building, police broke up the assembly.⁵⁴Close

Despite the dominant whiteness of American writers, speakers, and audiences, there were some voices within the African American community who drew inspiration from reports of UFOs and alien contact. Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad preached that there were Black inhabitants on Mars and other planets, a feat that remained out of reach for the white man. In addition, he told followers a giant wheel-shaped object, the Mother Plane, rested in outer space and was equipped with 1,500 military vehicles. “The small circular-made planes called flying saucers, which are so much talked of being seen, could be from this Mother Plane,” and when the right time arrived, they would smash white dominion over the earth.⁵⁵Close Later, in 1989, Minister Louis Farrakhan announced that he himself had the experience of being carried into the Mother Wheel craft by a beam of light, where he received a message from Elijah Muhammad warning that United States was preparing for war.⁵⁶Close

Arguably the most colorful and creative American contactee was Sun Ra. Born Herman Poole Blount, he was an accomplished musician and autodidact who spent much of the 1930s and 1940s reading scripture, histories of ancient Egypt, and stories about space travel and rocketry. By the early-1950s, Blount changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, abbreviated as Sun Ra, in honor of his commitment to cosmology and the legacy of the Egyptian sun god, Ra.

In 1953, Sun Ra began telling his friends of a remarkable event that happened to him around 1936. He was contacted, he said, by space men, who beamed his body to Saturn through a process of energy transformation he called “transmolecularization.” He suddenly found himself listening to a lecture in an arena by beings with antennas over their eyes and ears. They told him, “they would teach me some things that when it looked like the world was going into complete chaos, when there was no hope for nothing, then I could speak, but not until then. I would speak, and the world would listen.” Back on earth, Sun Ra soon found himself on a bench in New York City, when he looked up and saw thousands of spaceships. “You can order us to land. Are conditions right for landing?” a voice asked him. Yes, he replied, and they landed, shooting bullet-like pellets that stuck onlookers to the ground.⁵⁷Close

A few years after recounting his contact experience, Sun Ra formed a band called the Arkestra. He considered the band a “space orchestra,” one that traveled through space just as the earth did and that offered a cosmic perspective on the boundlessness of the imagination through its music. Instruments were often given celestial names like the space harp, solar bells, and cosmic side drum, and a growing number of songs made reference to outer space. By the early 1960s, Sun Ra began dressing in elaborate gold outfits, and the stage featured a flying saucer with flashing lights. For the next three decades, he continued his mission to remind people that “space is the place,” including teaching a course at the University of California Berkeley in 1971 on “The Black Man in the Cosmos.”⁵⁸Close

A small number of women were also among those claiming to have made contact with aliens. For example, the medium Dana Howard authored nine books between 1954 and 1964 in which she described her esoteric philosophy and her contact with inhabitants from Venus. She told of flying in a small plane that crashed around Arizona’s Superstition Mountains. As she came to on the ground, she recalled feeling a “tingling glow” and “the door to my mind opening and closing.” A rocket ship suddenly appeared above her, and a female figure named Diane escorted Howard into the aircraft. She, along with a Native American named Blue Cloud and a prospector named Cactus Jeff, were then taken to Venus, where Howard met the planet’s Queen Zo-na and fell in love with and married a male called LeLando. She then was returned to earth in August 1952.⁵⁹Close

Howard acknowledged that she didn’t know whether her trip to Venus was made in her physical body or not, since its inhabitants had mastered the art of “transmutation.” Her story, however, included many of the same elements as other contactees’: Venusian society was advanced and beautiful, its people comely, its governing creed based on love. On the earth, a New Age was dawning, and “the lovely lady from Venus” whom she had met after her plane crash was coming to usher in a world free of disease, poverty, and conflict. Howard’s account was different from most others, however, in that this grand regeneration was explicitly framed in gendered terms. As one of her alien guides told her, “The male is ever power-seeking. . . . It is the male being who makes our wars, my dear. Never the female. Under feminine rule the seeds of violence have little opportunity to find fertile soil.”⁶⁰Close

Venus made its appearance in tales from other female contactees as well. In South Africa, Elizabeth Klarer said she was invited onto the flying saucer of two Venusian crew members in April 1956 while walking on a hill at the foot of the Drakensberg Mountain range. Speaking in impeccable English, they informed her they had been studying earth for a while and were saddened to see its “mode of existence, precarious and always with the threat of war.” Klarer heard as well about life on Venus (“civilised and cultured”), and she spoke with her hosts “about music, real and beautiful music. Not about the primitive jungle noise that is so popular throughout this world.”⁶¹Close Klarer eventually went on to write a book about her experience in the late 1970s, in which she elaborated on her original story, claiming to have given birth to the child of an alien lover.⁶²Close

Perhaps the most tragic instance of a contactee was the case of Gloria Lee. A flight attendant with an interest in theosophy, Lee claimed to have begun receiving messages from outer space via automatic writing and telepathy beginning in 1953. She discovered, she said, she was “The Instrument” for telepathic communications from J. W., a being from Jupiter. J. W. preached a message of “freedom to love” and offered humanity urgent advice to avoid the nuclear destruction of earth by taking the next evolutionary steps in the developments of higher consciousness.⁶³Close In 1959, Lee founded the Cosmon Research Foundation, as a way to further spread J. W.’s teachings.

Three years later, in September 1962, J. W. provided Lee with blueprints for a spaceship and instructed her to give them to officials in Washington, DC. She tried to follow through on the request, but no one in power responded. According to one source, Lee then reported that the aliens were “disturbed up there because of fighting in the world and the fact the nuclear bombs might upset their planets. . . . J. W. has ordered me to go on a fast for peace until he sends a ‘light elevator’ down to take me to Jupiter.”⁶⁴Close The elevator never appeared. After two months of fasting in a Washington hotel room, Lee was rushed to a hospital, where she died a few days later. Sadly, Gloria Lee proved not to be the only casualty in the quest to make contact with extraterrestrials.

While many were fascinated by the stories of the contactees, many more dismissed them and their claims. There was no lack of critics within the UFO community itself, where prominent ufologists and organizations disparaged the contactees, seeing them as being, at best, deluded and, at worst, con artists. Even some who shared the metaphysical leanings of people like Adamski and Lee acknowledged the tales at times were difficult to reconcile with one another.

Writing in 1955, South African ufologist Edgar Sievers was buoyed by the testimony of the contactees revealing that our space brothers and sisters “have offered tidings, pronouncements, and explanations, whose content is of absolute, signal importance for the salvation of humanity.” But he was also mindful of the fact that the alien declarations came with an added twist. “At closer inspection, we find that the logic in these pronouncements leaves much to be desired. Instead of conceptual clarity and genuine meaning, we encounter obscurity and meaningless nonsense.” If the extraterrestrial visitors were heralds, they were being frustratingly opaque and mystifying.⁶⁵Close

British writer Gavin Gibbons interviewed a family living in central England that claimed to have seen UFOs hovering over their farmhouse in 1954, even catching a glimpse of some their crew. Gibbons considered them quite credible, since they were not seeking publicity and appeared to be genuinely frightened by the experience. He held contactee George King in much lower regard, finding him bombastic. Gibbons particularly disliked King’s reliance on spiritualism and trance, which he thought opened up the alien contact phenomenon to fraud.⁶⁶Close

APRO’s Coral Lorenzen wanted nothing to do with the contactees. After Daniel Fry visited Sweden in July 1970, Lorenzen wrote her friend Gösta Rehn, “I don’t know what to do about Fry—we generally ignore characters of his ilk. They like attention of any kind, good or bad, and we don’t want to get drawn into any kind of debate or verbal exchange. I can tell you one thing; he was not any kind of scientist at White Sands . . . Fry was a lousy electrician, and that was all.”⁶⁷Close

To those who held themselves up to be “serious UFO investigators,” the contactees were an outright embarrassment, their ridiculous testimonials serving only to cast the entire UFO movement in a dubious light. In 1957, UFO researcher Isabel Davis—a founding member of the Civilian Saucer Intelligence group based in New York City—published a scathing critique of the claims of the contactees in the science fiction magazine Fantastic Universe. In it, Davis highlighted the convenient and seemingly contrived patterns found in the stories told by the likes of Adamski, Bethurum, Williamson, Angelucci, and Fry. In-person contacts were “usually private, usually at night, in an isolated spot, without witnesses.” Female aliens were described in overtly sexualized terms. The spacemen all resembled “human beings of European-American descent,” and their home worlds were all utopian. The contactees experienced no serious communication problems with their guides. And yet, the extraterrestrials spoke in prophetically cryptic terms, always refusing to provide details about crucial topics. In the end, the substance of their claims revealed more about the mindset of the contactees than it did about alien civilizations. “What is unquestionably revealed to the reader, with painful clarity, are the intense, the tragic fears that haunt the apostles and disciples of the contact-communication stories,” Davis wrote. “Many passages are an almost rhythmic seesaw between terrors—of war, of soil sterility, of strange weather, of the atom—and feverish reassurances that the space beings will somehow give protection from these dooms.”

To Davis, the reports of the contactees were riddled with implausible contradictions. The space beings supposedly had awesome abilities, and yet there were key discrepancies between the spacemen’s “claim to great powers and what they are able to do.” In Adamski’s case, for example, they were able to build interplanetary vessels and communicate telepathically, but somehow when Adamski wanted to take photographs, their own photographic equipment didn’t work. Time and again, the aliens kept demanding to be recognized by earth’s inhabitants but did little to make that happen. “They blow hot and cold,” Davis bluntly put it, “it is all inconsistent.” The only consistency among the contactees was their lack of any solid proof. “There is not a line that stamps the stories as ‘unearthly.’ The alleged spacemen are not noble intelligences, but boastful braggarts, gifted chiefly at making excuses. The authors make egregious blunders; they contradict themselves and the spacemen contradict each other.”⁶⁸Close

Donald Keyhoe shared Davis’s reservations. In August 1958, he discovered that NICAP membership cards had been mistakenly mailed out to George Adamski, Orfeo Angelucci, Truman Bethurum, Howard Menger, Buck Nelson, Reinhold Schmidt, and George Van Tassel. Keyhoe responded by telegramming each of the contactees to return the unauthorized card immediately. “No contactee has ever received, or will receive,” NICAP announced, “favored attention, public or private, from this Committee, since all such claims are still under NICAP investigation.”⁶⁹Close

Over the course of the 1960s, the contactees lost the public attention and visibility they had enjoyed during the previous decade. No doubt this was related to their repudiation by prominent ufologists and organizations, but the likely finishing blow to their popularity came at the hands of US and USSR space agencies. Soviet spacecrafts Luna 3 and Zond 3 in 1959 and 1965 sent back images of millions of square miles of the moon’s surface. In December 1962, the robotic probe Mariner 2 successfully flew within 21,000 miles of the planet Venus and revealed the temperature of its atmosphere to be around 900 degrees Fahrenheit. A similar probe, Mariner 4, flew to within around 6,000 miles of the surface of Mars in July 1965 and took the first close range photos of the planet. And in December 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 orbited the moon, helping pave the way for the first moon landing in July 1969. Together, these ventures in space exploration dispelled any notion of there being intelligent life on the moon, Venus, Mars, or for that matter any other planet in our solar system.

While ufologist Isabel Davis scoffed at the uplifting stories contactees told about their conversations and friendships with extraterrestrials, she was far more accepting of another set of alien encounter reports that were circulating at the time. She referred to them as “reports of ‘little men’ who come out of flying saucers,” and they differed from the contactee accounts in three conspicuous ways. First, witnesses described the appearance of the beings as near-human, not superhuman. Second, the spacemen and their behavior were incomprehensible: they offered “no lofty messages, no explanations of ancient riddles, no admonitions, warnings, reassurances, prophecies, or esoteric doctrine.” Finally, the witnesses themselves often found the experience unsettling and more often than not remained content to stay out of the limelight.⁷⁰Close

Davis was on to something. While the contactees and their tales enjoyed a certain fame and notoriety from the early 1950s through the mid-1960s, a few voices in the UFO milieu were noting a growing number of freakishly puzzling alien sightings. Some of the witnesses in these cases went on to garner their share of public attention—fleeting though it often was—but few if any made a career out of their experiences. Whereas the hub for contactee reports was in the United States, Europe and South America appeared to be the focal point for these baffling encounters.

Tales of run-ins with supernatural little people—such as fairies, elves, leprechauns—abound in world folklore. Communities have associated such sprites with impishness, passing on knowledge, and an ability to travel great distances in an instant. Already by the 1960s, comparisons were being made with claims of alien contact, and enterprising ufologists uncovered accounts of brushes with peculiarly small men—described as being shorter than four feet tall—working around unusual airships dating as far back as 1914.⁷¹Close

Coral Lorenzen and her APRO Bulletin were among the first to track contemporary cases beginning in 1954. “APRO was the first and only UFO research organization to place any credence in these incidents. Not because we are gullible people—but rather because we had excellent sources and investigators and found a thread of continuity which lent much to the authenticity of the reports,” she wrote a colleague in early 1959. “If people reporting such incidents were to conform their experiences to a particular description, I would be exceedingly doubtful, but inasmuch as interpretations have been quite varied (and quite possibly the creatures were varied), I am inclined to accept as fact that they did see some strange creatures” (italics in original).⁷²Close

An early example of one of these incidents came from the Spanish press in 1953. That July, the local newspaper Ofensiva featured a series of articles about the claims of a fourteen-year-old herdsman named Máximo Muñoz Hernáiz. Hernáiz lived in the village of Villares del Saz, about eighty miles southeast of Madrid. In an interview with the paper’s editor, the boy described how earlier that month he had been tending to some cows one afternoon when he heard a hissing sound and saw what looked like a large, gray, glowing balloon on the ground. When he went over to it, three little men about two feet tall emerged from the object. “Their faces were yellow, and their eyes narrow,” Máximo recalled, and they wore hats with visors and blue uniforms with badges on the arm. One of the men began speaking to him, but “when I didn’t understand what he said to me, the one standing in front of me smacked my face.” After that, they got back into their machine and it flew off “very fast, like a rocket.”⁷³Close

The next year, 1954, proved to be a momentous one for stories about encounters with little spacemen. One of the most publicized and influential of these took place in France, which, like many parts of Europe, experienced a wave of UFO sightings as well as reports of UFOs landing. A little over a decade later, famed French ufologist Jacques Vallee examined 200 such reports, 156 of which occurred in France and included 42 instances where individuals caught sight of the operators of the unidentified flying object. Vallee found some variation in how witnesses described the beings they saw, but their appearance was always talked about as human-like. Ufologists at the time borrowed a term science fiction writers had made popular in the 1940s and 1950s to refer to these physical features: “humanoid.”⁷⁴Close

The French case drawing the most attention that year involved Marius Dewilde, a metalworker in Quarouble. Known in his neighborhood as something of a misfit, Dewilde was said to have made little effort assimilating into the local community. He made his home in an abandoned railway station with no electricity or running water.

At around 10:30 p.m. on September 10, 1954, Dewilde heard his dog barking and went outside to investigate. He saw the vague shape of a domed object and could also make out two figures. Aiming his flashlight at them, he could see they wore some kind of dark suit made of soft material and were short. Without warning, a beam of light from the object came at him. His felt a tingling sensation and was briefly paralyzed. The object became luminous, noiselessly rose in the air, and flew away. He then rushed to report the incident to the police, and soon, journalists and officials from the Air Ministry were on the scene.

Dewilde later told French UFO investigator Marc Thirouin about a second encounter with the beings. Around noon on October 10, 1954, he, along with his three-year-old son, saw the same machine reappear. This time, he was able to peer through a porthole and could see “human-looking beings” (des êtres d’apperence humaine) moving around inside. One eventually came out, wearing what looked like a rubber diving suit and helmet. He spoke to Dewilde in a language he couldn’t understand, but he smiled and was friendly and several times caressed his son’s head. Soon thereafter, the man headed back into the craft, and the vehicle darted off.⁷⁵Close

Dewilde’s descriptions of the men weren’t always consistent. At one point, he said the beings were about two-and-a-half feet tall, had no arms, and wore what looked like diving suits. On another occasion, he reportedly said they wore jumpsuits, were over three feet in height, and were “Mongol” in appearance.⁷⁶Close

Within days, the national and international press proclaimed France was “in the grip of flying saucer fever.”⁷⁷Close A young Jacques Vallee at the time was riveted. “I believed his story at the time. I still do,” he wrote in his diary four years later. “During the three months the wave lasted I carefully gathered such clippings and glued them into a fat copybook.”⁷⁸Close

Other cases popped up in Europe, and at times, the little men seemed to get downright rascally. On the morning of November 1, 1954, forty-year-old Rosa Lotti Dainelli left her farmhouse near Cennina, Italy, carrying carnations for the local church.⁷⁹Close As she walked, she came across a small clearing and was surprised to see a large, shiny spindle-shaped object about six feet high and three feet wide resting on the ground. Glass casing around one part of the gadget showed there to be two small seats inside.

Then, from around the object two figures—“almost like men, but of the size of children”—approached her in a welcoming manner. They wore helmets and grey jumpsuits adorned with capes. Though they looked old, they were quite energetic, talking animatedly, she said, “as though they were Chinese. They kept saying: ‘liu,’ ‘lai,’ ‘loi,’ ‘lau,’ ‘loi,’ ‘lai,’ ‘liu.’ ” At one point, one of them snatched the carnations and a stocking she was carrying out of her hands. He inspected them, laughed, wrapped the flowers in the stocking he had taken, and threw them into the machine. When the two men went back to the object to retrieve something, Dainelli took the opportunity to run away, leaving the little men at work around their spindle.

Like Dewilde, Dainelli reported the incident to local police and, later, ufologists. It was said that officers and neighbors inspecting the site found a deep cavity in the ground, but little else. The Italian press immediately took to the story and reported that several witnesses in the area described seeing an odd luminous flying object around the same time and place.

South America was also replete with little spacemen stories. One evening in February 1966, sisters aged twenty and seventeen and a friend were walking on their way home in Quipapá in northeastern Brazil. At one point, they came across a strange, disk-like object hovering in the air. Next to it lay a large man, who wasn’t moving, along with several little figures gesticulating wildly. They all wore jumpsuits and odd hats, both of which were equipped with bright lights that changed color. When a jeep suddenly drove by, the girls took the opportunity to leave the area. They returned a few minutes later to the site with their mother, at which point the group saw the disk fly off, spiraling along the way. The experience left one of the sisters in a state of anxiety that persisted for some time.⁸⁰Close

While some little men were either unaware of or outright friendly to the humans who crossed their paths, a goodly number recoiled from encounters. In October 1965, fifty-seven-year-old Jose Camilo Filho, a mechanic in Canhotinho, Brazil, was walking home, when he came across two small men under three feet sitting on a tree branch. Around their chests they had what looked like an electric arc that emitted a strong light. One of the men wore a cap with an emblem on it. While they both had white hair and white hands, Filho said, they looked “like Japanese, their faces tan and wrinkled as though they were old.” When the figures noticed the mechanic, they became so frantic that they ran into one another. One of the men leaped backward, grabbed a nearby piece of piping and aimed it at the mechanic. Filho began running off, but then thought better of it and returned to take a closer look, but by then the men had disappeared.⁸¹Close

One of the most famous encounters along these lines took place in Socorro, New Mexico, a short drive from the White Sands Missile Range—the same proving ground made famous by contactee Daniel Fry. On April 24, 1964, policeman Lonnie Zamora was driving his patrol car in pursuit of a reckless driver just before 6 p.m., when he glanced to his left and saw a white object on the ground. Fearing it might be an overturned car, he stopped to investigate and saw what he described as an “egg-shaped looking object,” about the size of an automobile, standing on four supports and stamped with an insignia. Zamora called his colleague Sgt. M. S. Chavez of the New Mexico State Police for assistance. The object then began making a roaring noise and spit out a blue flame. Fearing for his safety, Zamora moved away, and the vehicle soon rose in the air and silently flew away low to the ground.

State police and the FBI arrived on the scene. So too did the media. Overnight, the unassuming policeman became something of a celebrity. As Zamora shared his recollections, elements of his story sometimes changed. In an interview with a representative from Donald Keyhoe’s NICAP several days later, for instance, he said what first drew his attention to the side of the road had been the sound of a roar, not the sight of the egg-shaped object.⁸²Close At other times, Zamora fumbled for the right words. An important detail was the fact that he initially told reporters that he had also noticed little men near the aircraft. When local radio broadcaster Walter Shrode asked him the day after the event whether the men wore helmets like spacemen, however, Zamora replied, “No, sir, I wouldn’t say they were people, I just . . . I saw something white, white coveralls, that’s all I can say.” He added, “I would say that . . . that, that the white object turned and saw me” shortly before the craft took off. Shrode pressed the issue. Witnesses in the area, he said, claimed to have seen some unidentified flying objects at the time, and he wondered what the police officer thought about the possibility of this being something from outer space. Zamora balked at the notion. “Well, I didn’t think it would be an object from outer space because I don’t believe in things like this, from outer space.”⁸³Close

When Air Force and FBI officers arrived in Socorro, they cordoned off the supposed landing area and saw signs that “something” in fact had been there.⁸⁴Close Project Blue Book also took an immediate interest in the case, and scientific consultant J. Allen Hynek made his way to Socorro four days after the sighting. He interviewed Zamora and Sgt. Chavez over dinner, questioned local reporters, and inspected the site. Afterward, he reported back to the Air Force that “Zamora, although not overly bright or articulate, is basically sincere, honest, and reliable,” a man incapable of perpetrating an elaborate hoax. Instead, he was struck by how genuine Zamora’s fear was, and “his feeling that he had seen something truly unusual is attested by the fact that he asked whether he should speak to the priest first before saying anything about it.” In the end, Hynek believed the policeman had seen an actual flying object and “that NICAP and APRO, and possibly others, would consider this the best authenticated landing sighting on record. They will use it, very likely as a lever for a congressional investigation.”⁸⁵Close

On hearing about the sighting, ufologists indeed took notice, and several arrived within days. An investigator from NICAP, Ray Stanford, stumbled across a rock that seemed to have been disturbed by the UFO. Thinking it might contain metal traces, Stanford sent it to headquarters for analysis, but lab technicians only detected silica, a substance commonly found in the earth’s crust.⁸⁶Close

Coral and Jim Lorenzen from APRO made the seven-hour drive to Socorro from Tucson on April 25. The next morning, they arranged an interview with Zamora, with a deputy sheriff and a reporter sitting in. Zamora at first denied seeing any “little men,” but when Coral reminded him that he had said as much earlier to reporters, the policeman admitted he had in fact caught sight of them. Asked to describe the figures, he said they looked like “young boys” or “small adults,” but he couldn’t make out any definite features. He also acknowledged he saw markings on the craft, but that government intelligence officers had insisted he not discuss the matter in public.

Meanwhile, Jim Lorenzen was asking questions of the police and military on site. Sgt. David Moody from Project Blue Book, unaware of Jim’s relationship to Coral, blurted out, “there’s a woman who heads a research group out in this area—in Tucson, I believe. Her name is Coral Lorenzen. She’s a nut.” Jim shot back, “She’s my wife.” Moody giggled, turned to another military man, said “She’s his wife,” and then added to Jim, “She’s sincere.”⁸⁷Close

By the end of May, Project Blue Book investigators had explored possible candidates for the object Zamora had seen: a helicopter, a classified project at White Sands, an experimental vertical take-off and landing craft, a model of the lunar module that NASA was developing. None of them panned out, and the case remained open.⁸⁸Close

Tales of encounters with little men and their unidentified flying objects complicated the picture of alien contact. These diminutive figures were nothing like the prophetic philanthropists that featured so prominently in the claims of the contactees. The witnesses themselves also stood out from their contactee counterparts, offering next to no insight into the motivations of the extraterrestrials and remaining comparatively unaffected by their experiences.

To anyone playing close attention, there was in fact a lot more going on than stories of conversations with handsome Venusians and brushes with celestial imps. In 1966, British ufologist Gordon Creighton combed through news articles about “alleged meetings with denizens of other worlds” in Latin American newspapers dating back to 1950. He found a veritable medley of descriptions of the creatures. There were giants, tall men, medium-sized men, and small men. Some were said to be hairy, others green. There were reports of beings with one eye, beings with three eyes, and, in one instance, an entity with eyes running up and down its body.⁸⁹Close

The variations led some investigators to search for patterns in alien contact accounts. A common approach was to focus on the physical attributes of the beings encountered. In 1970, jurist and secretary of a São Paulo–based UFO research organization Jader Pereira published the results of a two-year study he conducted analyzing alien contact reports. Pereira examined 333 cases from across the globe over the previous twenty years, relying on books, bulletins, newsletters, newspapers, and magazines for his sources. Adopting a kind of zoological scheme, he categorized the entities in terms of body type and size, skin color, hair, and attire. In the end, Pereira found a good deal of variation, but reported that in almost 96 percent of cases, creatures were described as basically human in form.⁹⁰Close

Eleven years earlier in 1959, Brazilian lawyer and ufologist José Escobar Faria had pursued a similar path in one of the earliest analyses of alien contact reports. In classifying cases, he also considered the behavior of the spacemen. All told, Faria believed there to be three groups whose actions seemed tied to their racial features: peaceful beings who were white, hostile beings who were black, and an undifferentiated category of beings who were only observed from afar.⁹¹Close

The focus on race was hardly unique to Faria and Pereira. Contactees and witnesses of little men frequently turned to existing racial stereotypes in recounting their experiences. George Adamski’s Orthon, for example, possessed a mix of what followers called Nordic and Oriental features. In fact, ufology after 1980 began openly referring to aliens like him as “Nordics.” At the same time, witnesses of the fifties and sixties often made references to the “Oriental”—a term that could refer to South Asian, East Asian, or Semitic peoples—attributes of some extraterrestrials.⁹²Close Their skins were described alternately as yellow, dark, or tanned, their bodies as small, their language and faces as Chinese, Japanese, or simply “Oriental.”

The presumed racial features of aliens would become an enduring topic of discussion in some ufology circles.⁹³Close Others preferred focusing on the conduct of the outer space visitors, seeing in it a possible window into their intentions. Coral Lorenzen, for one, came around to this way of thinking already in the late 1950s. And by the mid-1970s, the Brazilian Society for the Study of Flying Saucers classified alien contact experiences into four groups: extraterrestrials viewed at a distance; extraterrestrials approaching in a friendly manner; anxious and fleeing extraterrestrials; and extraterrestrials using force in making contact.⁹⁴Close

These last set of cases were relatively rare among alien contact reports of the fifties and sixties. Some observers, like Donald Keyhoe, put little stock in them. Others took the stories deadly serious. To them, the harrowing actions of some aliens toward the human beings they encountered signaled an alarming change in alien visitation.

In the spring and summer of 1955, American ufologists Gray Barker, Coral Lorenzen, and Leonard Stringfield began receiving unsettling reports from South America and the United States of violent encounters with aliens. Witnesses provided dramatic accounts of what were often described as “little men” attacking them as they drove their cars or were going about on foot. Terrified victims often described the beings as having glowing or strangely colored eyes, hairy bodies, odd clothing, and even claws for hands.⁹⁵Close

Then, in late August, newspapers and radio stations across America reported on a remarkable series of events that happened to a family in Kelly, near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on the night of August 21. As The Kentucky New Era reported it the next day, around 11:00 p.m., two cars full of highly agitated adults and children pulled up to the Hopkinsville police station.⁹⁶Close A man in the group told officers, “We need help. We’ve been fighting them for nearly four hours.”

Apparently, family and friends had congregated at the farmhouse of Glennie Lankford and her son Elmer (wrongly reported as “Cecil”) Sutton, when something resembling a flying saucer landed on the property. Suddenly, somewhere between twelve and fifteen men around four feet tall with bizarrely large eyes and hands and wearing metal plates got out of the ship. Elmer and his friend Billy Ray Taylor grabbed their guns, fearing the worst.

As one of the little men pressed his face against a window of the house, Elmer fired his shotgun, and the figure disappeared. Sutton and Taylor went outside to see if they had downed the creature. When they did, a big hand reached down from the low-hanging roof above the front door and grabbed Taylor by the hair. Taylor managed to wriggle away. They then spotted other little men, one in a nearby tree and another on the roof of the house. Sutton fired his shotgun, knocking one of them down. Appearing uninjured, it ran off.

The melee lasted hours, as the men fired what they estimated were around four boxes of shells, though a neighbor said he heard only about four shots all night. The bullets, in any event, appeared to have little effect on the invaders. When the household saw a chance to escape, they jumped into cars and drove to the police station for help. Officers arrived to find no trace of the little men, staying on the property for more than two hours. Two policemen returned to the Suttons’ home early in the morning, when it was reported that the little men had in fact reappeared at around 3:30 a.m.

Newswires took up the story right away. “Cops Probe Spaceship Visit: Little Green Men Harass Kentucky Farm Family” was just one of many headlines appearing the next day.⁹⁷Close In short order, reporters began descending on Hopkinsville.

As word spread about the apparent attack by extraterrestrials, Jacqueline Sanders, an editor at Gray Barker’s bulletin, The Saucerian, headed to Kentucky to investigate. When she arrived, she found that the entire household had left town in response to their property being overrun by sightseers. At one point, the family put up a sign charging fifty cents to enter the grounds, a dollar for information, and ten dollars for taking pictures. It did nothing to stem the tide of tourists.

Even without an opportunity to talk to the main characters in the drama, Sanders was able to fill in more details by talking to police and others. Witnesses apparently recalled that the creatures had not just huge eyes and hands but large, pointed ears and arms that hung almost to the ground. The little men also appeared to be “nickel plated,” and they seemed to float rather than walk.

Sanders was also able to confirm that police found no evidence of anything landing on the property, no footprints or tracks, and no signs of scratches on the roof. Nevertheless, local police Chief Russell Greenwell noted that when he interviewed the mother, Glennie Lankford, the morning after the incident, she was “almost petrified with fright.” He, for one, believed the witnesses were sincere. “Something frightened those people,” he told Sanders.⁹⁸Close

While the Air Force did not carry out an official investigation, reservist Major John Albert from nearby Campbell Air Force Base was asked to drive out to Kelly to look into matters. He questioned Lankford, who told him that around 10:30 p.m. that evening, she had looked out the back door and “saw a bright silver object about two and a half feet tall appearing round. I became excited and did not look at it long enough to see if it had any eyes or move.” She said the same kind of object appeared at her bedroom window later that night around 3:30 a.m. Despite the vagueness of her description, she insisted that her family and friends in the house all “saw this little man that looked like a monkey.”⁹⁹Close

Although press coverage of the farmhouse confrontation soon dissipated, some ufologists remained captivated by the incident. The following year, Isabel Davis from Civilian Saucer Intelligence made her way to Hopkinsville to conduct her own investigation over four days in June 1956. After inspecting the house and property and interviewing family members, policemen, and local reporters, she submitted her findings to her group in New York City.¹⁰⁰Close

Though ten months had passed, Davis was able to add a few more pieces to the puzzle. She found that most of those involved in the incident were unwilling to speak about it, having faced months of ridicule from people in the community. Chief Greenwell, however, proved more than amenable and admitted that he himself had seen a UFO in 1952—a stationary glowing object in the sky that stayed in place for about a half hour, then flew away at high speed. Billy Ray Taylor, it turned out, was widely dismissed as a loudmouth; even members of the Sutton household believed he embellished his stories and relished the publicity.

Perhaps the most interesting evidence Davis turned up came from Andrew “Bud” Ledwith, a local engineer and radio announcer. Ledwith had gone to the farmhouse the morning and evening after the fracas, interviewed the witnesses there, and even drawn a sketch of one of the little men based on their descriptions. He found that there likely had been only two or three of the creatures at the farm, but that it had seemed like more at the time because the figures were able to disappear and reappear quickly. Their movements were especially weird. The creatures uttered no noise and made no sound moving. Every time they approached the house, they walked slowly with hands raised, exhibited no signs of hostility, and never actually tried to enter the home. When shot in a tree or on the roof, they appeared to float to the ground, but when one was knocked over on the ground, it ran away on all fours.

Among those dubious about the sensational claims made by those in the farmhouse that night, explanations were plentiful. Some suspected the group was drunk. Others wondered whether it was a case of mass hallucination. Still others noted that both Billy Taylor and Elmer Sutton regularly worked for a traveling carnival, a business often associated with trickery. Maybe, then, the whole thing was nothing more than a hoax carried out for attention, amusement, or profit. Or perhaps a monkey had escaped from a circus caravan, since rumor had it one stopped near Hopkinsville around this time.

When asked two years later to offer his recollections, the officer from Campbell Air Force Base who visited Kelly the day after chalked the incident up to rural ignorance and the family members’ fevered state of mind:

Mrs. Glennie Lankford was an impoverished widow woman who had grown up in this small community just outside of Hopkinsville, with very little education. She belonged to the Holy Roller Church and the night and evening of this occurrence, had gone to a religious meeting and she indicated that the members of the congregation and her two sons and their wives and some friends of her sons’ (sic) were also at this religious meeting and were worked into a frenzy, becoming very emotionally unbalanced and that after the religious meeting, they had discussed this article which she had heard about over the radio and had sent for from the Kingdom Publishers, Fort Worth 1, Texas and they had sent her this article with a picture which appeared to be a little man when it actually was a monkey, painted silver.¹⁰¹Close

Years later, Isabel Davis wasn’t buying the military man’s explanation. Lankford didn’t belong to a Holy Roller Church, she said, and there was no evidence that anyone had attended services that day. Instead, Davis kept coming back to one thing that even skeptics in the local community commented on: the fear of everyone at the farmhouse. If their incredible claims were true, their reactions made perfect sense. “Their genuine, extreme terror is explained and fully justified,” she concluded. “They were frightened beyond reason because what they had seen was beyond reason: weird, unearthly, invulnerable creatures.”¹⁰²Close

The case of the “Hopkinsville Goblin,” as it came to be known, was only one of several episodes during the first two decades following Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in which witnesses claimed to have had threatening encounters with the crews of flying saucers. The stories were spectacular, the aliens menacing, the fear of eyewitnesses seemingly all too real. Indeed, the terror expressed by those reporting these incidents was often what left the deepest impression on those investigating them.

While terrifying tales like the one from Kelly remained relatively rare, during the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, they assumed a greater prominence within ufology circles. They also seemed to grow increasingly more sinister. On the international scene, people like Coral Lorenzen at APRO and Gordon Creighton at Flying Saucer Review took the claims seriously and tracked developments.

One incident was said to have taken place in September 1964 in the mountains northeast of Sacramento, California.¹⁰³Close When rumors of it had reached members of APRO, Coral Lorenzen contacted one of her organization’s advisers, Berkeley engineering professor James Harder. Harder contacted the principal witness involved, Mr. S. (who wished to remain anonymous), and taped an interview with him.

According to the man, he and two friends went out one weekend to do some bow-and-arrow hunting in the woods. One night as dusk approached, S. was heading back to camp on his own when he came to a canyon with sparse brush. He suddenly heard crashing sounds and thought it might be a bear. Concerned, he set up some signal fires to get the attention of rangers. Off on the horizon, he saw what looked like a light from a lantern. His first thought was that these belonged either to his friends or to a search party out looking for him. As the light grew nearer, he became uneasy and climbed a nearby tree.

After nightfall, the light drew close enough to circle around S’s tree. He could make out some objects moving in unison with the light as well as a large dome-shaped object that fell nearby. Soon he was able to determine that there were three figures moving about. The first two were about five-and-a-half feet tall, covered in silver-grey material, with no facial features. The third, which S. called a “robot,” was dark grey or black with no neck, but two reddish-orange glowing eyes and a mouth that simply dropped open.

When the things spotted him, the first two tried to help each other up the tree but failed. The “robot” then began repeated attempts to “gas” him with smoke it released from its mouth, while the other two looked on and tried again to climb the tree. S. decided to fight back. He threw down a canteen and some coins and set fire to some of his clothes, flinging those at his adversaries. At one point, he shot arrows at the robot, which set off sparks when it hit its chest. The robot then emitted more gas in his direction. This time, S. became light-headed and lost consciousness. He soon woke up, nauseous and coughing. All night, they went back and forth. Around dawn, the three entities assembled around the tree, and with their chests glowing, a cloud of gas enveloped the area. S. blacked out. When he regained his senses, they were gone, perhaps leaving him for dead. Sick, frightened, and exhausted, he made his way back to camp and told his friends.

South Americans were telling similarly bizarre stories. Back in England, Gordon Creighton used his transatlantic connections to keep tabs on them. For example, there was an incident covered by Belo Horizonte newspapers in Brazil in 1962 involving a twelve-year-old boy, who claimed floating shadowy figures visited his house one night threatening to kill his father. The next morning, the boy said, he watched as two ball-like objects with antennas and tails cover his father in a haze of smoke and dust, after which the man completely disappeared. In another instance from 1963, a truck driver from Córdoba in Argentina told newspapers about how three mysterious beings emerging out of a spacecraft used a vaporizer of some sort to shoot an abrasive liquid in his face. Doctors, he said, confirmed the burns but could not explain what the substance was.¹⁰⁴Close

It was an earlier case, however, that caught the attention of several ufologists, first in Brazil, then in the United States, and eventually in Europe. The stunning details were unlike anything seasoned researchers had come across before. Coral Lorenzen considered it a pivotal moment in the history of UFOs but resisted talking about it publicly for years. Never one to shy away from the sensational, Gordon Creighton simply referred to it as “the most amazing case of all.”

In November 1957, João Martins—a Brazilian reporter who had written several articles about UFOs for the magazine O Cruzeiro—received two letters from twenty-three-year-old Antônio Villas Boas, who claimed to have a remarkable story that might interest him. Apparently, a month earlier he had had a disturbing encounter with a UFO and its crew at his family’s farm (fazenda) in São Francisco de Sales in Brazil. Martins’s curiosity was piqued, and he invited the man to Rio de Janeiro to discuss the matter with him and his associate, physician and ufologist Olavo Fontes, consultant to the American organization APRO. Villas Boas arrived in the city in February 1958, where he was given a physical exam and invited to tell his story.¹⁰⁵Close

On the night of October 15, 1957, Villas Boas was out ploughing his field, something he regularly did when it was especially hot out. At around 1 a.m., he saw what looked like a red star in the sky that rapidly grew larger. The egg-shaped object was moving toward him so fast, he had no chance to react. It descended to about fifty yards above his head, engulfing him and the ground around him in its light. It soon dropped to the ground, and he saw it was actually a machine with three metal supports. When his tractor engine suddenly died, he decided to run. That’s when somebody grabbed one of his arms.

Three short men dressed in strange clothes and helmets took hold of his arms and legs and dragged him into the contraption. Once inside, he was forcibly escorted into a room with silvery metal walls. While they held him, the men spoke to one another in an unintelligible language that sounded like the barking of a dog. Having finished their conversation, they began undressing Villas Boas. He resisted as best he could but to no avail. A wet sponge was rubbed over his naked body, and he was taken into yet another room.

There, one crew member applied a tube to Antônio’s chin, and blood was extracted. After this, he was left alone, but after about a half hour, the room was filled with a suffocating smoke from what looked like shower heads. Nauseous, he vomited. After some time, a door opened, and a nude woman walked in.

Villas Boas described her as “beautiful.” She had white hair, large, slightly slit and blue eyes, high cheekbones. Her body, he said, “was slim, with high and well separated breasts, thin waist and small stomach, wide hips and large thighs.” She rubbed her head against his face. Antônio became aroused, and the two had sex. Afterward he remained “still keen,” but she had no interest and tried to avoid him. It angered him. “When I noticed this, I cooled off too. That was what they wanted of me—a good stallion to improve their stock. In the final count that was all it was.”

One of the men entered the room, and she proceeded toward the door. And then she did something he found chilling.

But, before going out, she turned to me, pointed at her belly and then pointed towards me and with a smile (or something like it), she finally pointed towards the sky—I think it was in the direction of the South. Then she went out . . . I interpreted this gesture as a warning that she was going to return to take me away with her to wherever she lived. Because of this, I am still frightened even today. If they come back to catch me again, then I’m lost.

Finally, the crew returned with his clothes, and Villas Boas was directed to get dressed. He did and was eventually escorted out of the vessel. Outside, he watched as the ship flew from sight in a matter of seconds. All told, the whole experience had lasted about four hours.

Martins and Fontes had never heard anything like it. The story seemed beyond belief, though they found Villas Boas completely sincere. A physical exam showed some signs of scarring on the man’s chin. Other than that, there was only Antônio’s word for what happened. Martins decided there wasn’t enough to publish the man’s story.

Olavo Fontes, however, told his associate Coral Lorenzen back in New Mexico about the case. The two began a feverish correspondence with one another, in which Fontes shared his ideas about the significance of what happened to “Lover Boy,” as the two privately referred to Villas Boas. When it came to discussing the sexual intercourse that took place, the Brazilian was less than forthcoming, considering it inappropriate to discuss such matters with a woman. Lorenzen persisted, and eventually Fontes divulged the salacious details.

Lorenzen was torn about how to handle the incident. Privately, she believed Villas Boas and thought his experience deserved to be publicized. Fontes, on the other hand, worried that its sexual nature made it too lewd for a wider audience. Lorenzen, who described herself as holding “broad opinions of sex,” personally found nothing shocking in “the Lover Boy incident.” She decided, however, to keep the story in house, only mentioning it to a select few people in the APRO organization. She wouldn’t raise the matter in public until the end of 1962.¹⁰⁶Close

Nevertheless, by the fall of 1959, Lorenzen and Fontes had come to see the Villas Boas episode as crucial in piecing together the intentions of the alien visitors. It, along with other recent UFO activities, led the two to an alarming conclusion. “In short, we expect an attack of some kind in the not-too-distant future,” Lorenzen wrote Swedish ufologist Gösta Rehn in October. “We think we know how they will do it and control the panicked population at the same time. We are convinced they are building bases in preparation, at the present time.”¹⁰⁷Close

In November, she filled Rehn in on the details of what she was calling “the Big Plan” of the extraterrestrials. Its full scope, she insisted, could only be seen by following the patterns in UFO activity since Kenneth Arnold’s original sighting. From 1947 to 1950, the primary targets of unidentified flying objects were missile ranges and atomic bomb testing sites. In 1952, a new kind of operation was set in motion, as American and Canadian military installations experienced an uptick in flying saucer activity. This was followed by flaps in Europe during the years 1952–1954 and then South America in 1954. In both cases, Lorenzen pointed out, “Little men, usually engaged in collecting various flora and fauna and soil and rock specimens, were all over the place.” A worldwide wave took place in 1956, with a heavy concentration at first in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, culminating in a renewed focus on atomic bomb bunkers in the United States in the fall of 1957.

To Lorenzen and Fontes, all these facts taken together revealed premeditation. From 1946 through 1955, the aliens were performing reconnaissance. In 1956, reinforcements were brought in. They were on the brink of an incursion, one that would take place no sooner than 1966. The instances of electrical blackouts worldwide and the frequency of UFO sightings on roadways indicated the invaders planned to disrupt surface transportation and knock out the power supply to achieve their aims.

The Villas Boas encounter added one final piece to the puzzle. The extraterrestrials decided to send out a ship with a woman on board in order to experiment and discover if interbreeding with humans was possible. Lorenzen explained their logic.

I believe for the reason that if colonization were planned, they would want to know if cohabitation and fraternization would weaken the hold of their troops on earth. The reason a woman was used instead of a man is obvious. An earth woman (if they could find one small enough or one of their men large enough for suitable mating) would be rendered useless at the moment of kidnapping, because she would probably lose her mind from the shock. If not that, she might be rendered sterile from the shock, or, if she conceived, would miscarry from shock or loneliness. She would have to be hauled away so that scientists could observe the period of gestation and the end product. The way it was accomplished was ideal—their own woman, cued to the job at hand was ready, accomplished her task and was taken back to headquarters—wherever that is—for observation. There, (the baby would be born en route) the product could be studied for intelligence, physical health, etc. Very neat.¹⁰⁸Close

It was a breathtaking, if not unnerving, argument. It was also a stunning intellectual achievement—even granting that no such invasion took place. Basing their analysis on twelve years of often conflicting flying saucer reports and coverage from across the globe, Lorenzen and Fontes found a way to methodically link what seemed inconsistent strands of the UFO story into one, cohesive account. That chilling account, of course, stood in marked contrast to the hopeful message relayed by the contactees.

Back in Sweden, Gösta Rehn seemed unfazed by the prospect of an alien conquest. He wrote Lorenzen back telling her that “the idea of mass landings and attacks suits me very well.” Given the state of the world, it might well bring a needed change.

I am misanthropic enough to welcome such a solution of the messy human problem. Fake-democracies, bounderish lowdown commercialism rampant, almost everybody suffering from stress, neurotic bodily ailments due to a civilization that promotes evil and stunts biological and mental growth . . . the stupid resistance against a planned economy compared with which Sovjet (sic) becomes a hope . . . and the impossibility of total disarmament unless we get a world government with an armed police force. Perhaps the saucer catastrophy (sic) will force the nations to form that world government.¹⁰⁹Close

When in 1962 she published her first book—The Great Flying Saucer Hoax—Lorenzen laid out her case to the general public for what came to be termed the “hostility thesis” about UFOs.¹¹⁰Close Still, she continued to keep the Villas Boas story under wraps. Others did not. That same year, two members of the Brazilian Society for the Study of Flying Saucers—Walter Bühler and Mario Prudente Aquino—published a piece on the encounter in the group’s bulletin after traveling to the man’s residence and interviewing him there. They chose to keep him anonymous, however, and referred to him only as “A.V.B.”¹¹¹Close

Bühler sent a copy of the newsletter to Gordon Creighton at Flying Saucer Review in London. Like Lorenzen, he sat on the story for another two years in the hope that more evidence would come to light. Then, in early 1965, Creighton relented. Apologizing “to any reader who may find this bizarre story offensive,” he published the first of nine separate articles on the Villas Boas case to appear in the magazine from 1965 to 1968.¹¹²Close In making sense of the incident, Creighton suggested that folk traditions might hold the key. Lore about encounters with incubi, succubae, spirits, goblins, and ghosts, he proposed, might well be chronicles of human contact with beings from outer space. If so, what happened to Antônio Villas Boas that night in 1957 was something that had been going on for centuries.¹¹³Close

The Villas Boas case has been widely seen as the first instance of a person claiming to have been abducted by aliens. To be sure, the episode contains many of the elements that later would come to stamp classic alien abduction stories in the 1980s and 1990s: coercive entities, being taken on board a spacecraft, uncommunicative extraterrestrials, a clinical setting, and a sexual dimension. But the incident must be understood on its own terms and context. Journalists and ufologists at the time generally found it weird, far-fetched, and out of step with all the other accounts circulating about contact with extraterrestrials. The sexualized nature of the encounter not only added to its strangeness, but also made it offensive to prudish sensibilities of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was for these reasons that it took so long for the case to be publicized, and even once it reached the reading public, it mostly remained relegated to the UFO milieu.

That said, speculation about flying saucers kidnappings was not unheard of in the fifties and sixties. Pulp science fiction literature for decades had titillated male readers with images of scantily clothed damsels captured by nefarious spacemen. In a series of articles in the Forteana magazine Magonia, Peter Rogerson showed that starting in the mid-1950s, ufologists reported isolated incidents that hinted at kidnapping attempts by extraterrestrials.¹¹⁴Close Over the course of the 1960s, these kinds of stories—presented sometimes as fiction, other times as non-fiction—became more prevalent, especially in Europe and Latin America.

One American account of an alien abduction from the 1960s, however, achieved a unique status of renown. It was said to have taken place on a rural road in the state of New Hampshire the night of September 19–20, 1961. The people who reported it were a respectable, middle-class couple, Betty and Barney Hill.¹¹⁵Close

The Hills were no ordinary couple. Betty came from a white, church-going New England family. Growing up during the Depression, she was a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of a New Deal and remained an ardent liberal activist. After divorcing her first husband, she began seeing Barney in 1957 and became a social worker shortly thereafter. Barney came from a Black family that earlier in the century had moved from Virginia to a middle-class neighborhood of Philadelphia. Like Betty, Barney had recently divorced his first spouse and had grown up dedicated to progressive causes and activism. When he eventually proposed to Betty, she worried how the two would navigate the challenges associated with being a biracial couple in 1960s America. After seeing a marriage therapist, they married in May 1960. They settled in Portsmouth, Barney commuted to a post office job in Boston, and they joined a local Unitarian church, attracted by its commitment to open-mindedness and social justice.

In September 1961, the Hills decided to take a car trip to Montreal. Barney later told a journalist he had had an “ominous feeling” beforehand, so he had placed a pistol in the trunk of the car. In fact, throughout the trip, Barney was on edge, and he recalled thinking to himself, “I should get a hold of myself, and not think that everyone is hostile.”

After a one-night stay in Montreal, they drove home late at night on September 19. As they did, they saw an odd light in the sky. Talking about it the next day to friends and family, Betty became increasingly uneasy. She said that Barney’s shoes were scuffed, and her dress was torn, and they didn’t know how it had happened. They felt somehow “unclean” and worried they had been exposed to radiation. A police officer friend advised that they report the whole thing to the Air Force.

An Air Force official spoke to the couple twice over the phone on September 21 and wrote up a report. According to these interviews, Betty and Barney were driving on New Hampshire Highway 3 around midnight when they noticed a continuous band of lights in a cigar shape with extended wings. They got out of the car to look at it with their binoculars, at which point the object began to descend toward them. That’s when they decided to leave. Barney sped off, but not before the UFO swooped down emitting a loud buzzing noise, a sound they heard thirty miles later down the road.

The day after talking to the Air Force, Betty picked up a copy Donald Keyhoe’s book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy at her local public library. She found it compelling, and three days later she wrote Keyhoe and told her about the UFO sighting. This time, she introduced some new details about her husband’s experience.

As it glided closer, he was able to see inside this object, but not too closely. He did see many figures scurrying about as though they were making some hurried type of preparation. One figure was observing us from the windows . . . and [they] seemed to be dressed in some type of shiny black uniform. At this point, my husband became shocked and got back in the car, in a hysterical condition, laughing and repeating that they were going to capture us.

She added that they were searching for any clues that might help Barney recall what he saw. “His mind has completely blacked out at this point,” Betty wrote. “Every attempt to recall, leaves him very frightened. We are considering the possibility of a competent psychiatrist who uses hypnotism.”¹¹⁶Close

NICAP sent investigator Walter Webb—the same man who later wrote up the Lyndia Morel incident in 1973—to Portsmouth, and on October 21 he talked with the couple for six hours. He was impressed, especially with Barney. Once again, the Hills provided more information about the incident.

As the UFO stopped mid-air in front of the car, it hovered in a slightly tilted position. Barney stopped the car in the middle of the road, picked up his gun from underneath his seat, and put it in his pocket. He then started walking toward the craft, stopping at times to use the binoculars. As he did, he could make out eight to eleven figures watching him at the windows. They were human in form and wore “shiny black uniforms and black caps with peaks or bills on them.” He likened them to the “cold precision of German officers” as they moved about. One of them in particular seemed to be the leader, and Barney was extremely afraid of him; he said he could almost feel the figure’s intent to carry out some kind of plan. Barney was convinced he was going to be captured “like a bug in a net” and that there was something not human about the people inside this aircraft. Barney didn’t remember anything that happened after that.¹¹⁷Close

While Betty did not recall seeing any of the unsettling figures inside the UFO, she did begin to share Barney’s anxieties. Following a series of nightmares since the incident, she wrote down the substance of these dreams in November 1961, with the title “Dreams or Recall?” Though it came from multiple dreams over two months, Betty decided to organize the content into one single, chronological narrative, rather than in the order of the dreams themselves. This gave her written statement the feel of a seamless story, with a beginning, middle, and end. It is this document that has provided the key elements of the Hill abduction tale as it has been passed down in print and film.¹¹⁸Close

In this dream version of the event, Betty that night saw eight to eleven men standing in the middle of the road when they went around a turn. As Barney slowed down, the car motor died. The men then surrounded the car. “We sat there motionless and speechless, and I was terrified. At the same time, they opened the car doors on each side, reached in and took us by the arm.”

The figures were about five feet tall, with grey complexions, dark hair and eyes, large chests, and long noses (“like Jimmy Durante’s”). They were, Betty said, “very human in their appearance, not frightening.” When communicating with her, they spoke English with a foreign accent.

The men escorted the couple through some woods. Barney seemed to be “sleep walking” and didn’t respond to her. As they proceeded, one of the men told her there was no need to be afraid, that they only wanted to perform some tests. Reaching a clearing, they saw a saucer and were directed to enter it.

Once inside, a pleasant, reassuring examiner asked some questions and then began performing a physical examination on Betty. Her entire body was closely looked over and her dress removed. Some scrapings were taken from the skin of her arm. A machine with wires like an EEG was used to test her nervous system and reflexes. Next, she was given what she was told was a pregnancy test. When the examiner brought out a four-to-six-inch needle, Betty became worried. “I asked what kind of pregnancy test he planned with the needle. He did not reply but started to insert the needle in my navel with a sudden thrust.” Betty immediately was in great pain. Seeing that, one of the men waved his hands in front of her eyes, and the pain subsided.

After the examination was over, Betty spent some time talking with the man she presumed to be the leader. Smiling and friendly, he apologized for giving the couple such a fright. When asked where they were from, the leader tried to show Betty on one of their maps, but it proved unintelligible to her. She did, however, ask if she might keep one of the books lying in the room as proof to others that the event had actually taken place. At first the leader agreed, but then he took it back, explaining that “it had been decided that no one should know of this experience, and that even I would not remember this.” Betty was furious, insisting that she would remember. The leader laughed but said he would do his best to makes sure that was not the case. “He added that I might remember but no one would ever believe me; that Barney would have no recollection of any of this experience; in case that Barney night (sic) ever recall, which he seriously doubted, he would think of things contrary to the way I knew them to be. This would lead to confusion, doubt, disagreement.”

Betty and Barney then left the ship, with the crew accompanying them to their automobile. From their car, the couple watched them leave and the disk fly off into the distance. Betty patted their dog and said, “There they go. And we are none the worse for the wear.”

Despite the happy ending to Betty’s dream version of the incident, both she and Barney had lingering concerns about their physical and mental health. Betty remained troubled by her nightmares, while Barney was plagued by different ailments. He had high blood pressure, found small warts around his lower abdomen, and developed ulcers so severe that at one point he had to be hospitalized. He also began drinking heavily. Though it’s unclear who suggested it, someone associated with NICAP working on the case encouraged the couple to consult with a psychiatrist trained in hypnosis, as Betty had proposed. The hope was that such a technique might help overcome the amnesia that seemed to be the source of the Hills’ ailments.

Using hypnosis to unlock lost memories, widely known as “hypnotic regression,” was a common practice at the time. Predicated on the assumption that memory operated like a recording, the technique was believed to be capable of recovering and replaying otherwise forgotten recollections through hypnotic suggestion. From the end of World War II through the seventies, hypnotic regression enjoyed robust support among clinicians, police, and criminal courts.¹¹⁹Close

In retrospect, it is perhaps no surprise to find that this kind of forensic hypnosis also made its way into UFO research as well. Nevertheless, when the Hills in December 1963 began to meet with Dr. Benjamin Simon, a Boston-based psychiatrist and neurologist who worked with technique, they were embarking on a pioneering path in the study of UFOs. In looking to clinical hypnotic regression for assistance, they and the NICAP investigators involved were treating their incident not simply as emotionally troubling but as a crime scene.

By contrast, psychiatrist Benjamin Simon perceived his role and the role of clinical hypnosis quite differently. He followed the thinking of many of the leading researchers in the field at the time—University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist and psychologist Martin Orne being perhaps the most prominent—that hypnosis helped to produce confabulations, flights of fancy that could easily be folded into genuine recollections. Simon told John Fuller—the journalist to whom the Hills turned to write a book about their experience—as much in an interview in March 1966. “Hypnosis will confirm a fantasy as strongly as it will a reality,” he emphasized. “In other words, the fact that they proved it under hypnosis does not prove that it was a reality. It only proves that they believed it.”¹²⁰Close Simon therefore did not understand his job as determining whether the alien contact actually took place; it was to help manage the anxieties that plagued the Hills.

From the end of February to the end of March 1964, Simon interviewed Betty and Barney separately under hypnosis. He taped the sessions, which he then played back for the couple to encourage more discussion. In the taped interviews, which are widely available online and transcripts of which were included Fuller’s book The Interrupted Journey (1966), Betty mostly stuck to the story she had put together in “Dreams or Recall?” and seemed little bothered by the incident. Barney, however, presented the picture of a man overwhelmed by dread and panic. At several points, he screamed and burst into tears recalling how the UFO seemed to stalk them and how the men stood in the roadway. He also remembered the exam he was given, during which he focused on the leader’s “slanted” eyes as a cup was placed around his genitals and a tube the size of a cigar inserted into his rectum.

Simon, however, was more drawn to the fact that Barney expressed being constantly on edge, living in perpetual fear of racial discrimination. During the entire Montreal trip, he had worried about how the white people he encountered would treat him. When the hotel they wanted to stay at said it had no vacancies, he suspected it was because he was Black. At various points during the trip, he was attuned to perceived slights that he believed were directed at the couple. He admitted he originally brought the gun along because “I believe in the hostility of white people, particularly when there is an interracial couple.”¹²¹Close That said, he confessed he rarely shared his racial anxieties with Betty, who at times seemed oblivious to his experience as a Black man.

The Hills ended their treatment with Simon in the summer of 1964. As he explained a decade later, Simon was convinced that the Hills had had a genuine UFO sighting, but that he was “also sure that the ‘abduction and examination’ did not take place except as Betty’s dreams.”¹²²Close The psychiatrist concluded that an anxious Barney had then assimilated Betty’s nightmares into his memories of the incident. Simon’s refusal to accept their recollections as reality angered the couple, and from that point on, the Hills began exclusively seeking out experts who would validate their version of events.

Barney Hill died of a cerebral hemorrhage in February 1969: he was only forty-six years old. Betty would live well into her eighties. Over time, she increasingly found inspiration in New Age thought and entertained the possibility that she and Barney had had the misfortune of meeting the “evil” aliens. She remained adamant that the abduction had taken place.

In 1975, the Hills’ experience was made into an American film for television, The UFO Incident starring Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones. The case eventually became the subject of countless articles, books, and broadcasts. Their story has been told and retold, dissected and debated so many times it has come to assume canonical status among readers and enthusiasts of UFO lore.

These retellings mirror what took place between the initial incident in September 1961 and publication of The Interrupted Journey in 1966. Barney and Betty both gave multiple statements during this period, including some based on dreams and others while in a hypnotic trance. Some details remained consistent, while others changed. Walter Webb, Benjamin Simon, and John Fuller then came along at different stages not just faithfully recording the Hills’ accounts but giving them a sense and translating the information into new narratives. No one doubted that something happened to the Hills on that deserted road in New Hampshire. But as their experience was increasingly transformed into stories for and by others, that experience grew ever more elusive.

In 1954, Bryant and Helen Reeve got in their car and headed off on an adventure. Seven years later, Betty and Barney Hill did the same. Two very different couples. Two very different journeys, with two very different destinations. Their paths, both literally and figuratively, reveal a good deal about the early history of contact with the occupants of flying saucers.

Like UFO sightings, alien encounters and the people who claimed to have them came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There were some patterns, however. Contact could be spectral and disembodied, something achieved through higher consciousness. It could also be a flesh-and-blood meeting, one that more often than not took place outside or in public places. Despite this, other witnesses rarely observed the event.

The aliens were always identified with superior knowledge, evident in their technological achievements and mastery of languages. The visitors were taken as confirmation of an evolutionary view of civilization, the ideal of the inexorable march of progress. The contactees, for one, believed this extended not only to the realms of knowledge, society, and politics but also to morality: our space brothers and sisters were principled, virtuous, and empathetic. These beings who epitomized beauty were here to help. On the other hand, the little men and disconcerting figures who also occasionally popped up were frequently described as cold, inaccessible, even mischievous. These figures offered no messages of hope, but instead seemed as curious about us as we were about them. We might be putting the aliens under our telescopes, but they meanwhile seemed to be putting us under their microscopes.

As for those claiming to have had an encounter, there were those who actively sought out contact (Adamski, Fry, Van Tassel) and those who didn’t (Villas-Boas, the Hills). The experience trigged a variety of reactions. Some were simply left baffled. Many considered the experience to be of spiritual, even cosmic, importance. The contactees, for instance, came away feeling special; they were now messengers and prophets with a calling to announce the beginning of a New Age. Others, like the investigators at APRO and NICAP, took a forensic approach. They were detectives trying to piece together disparate facts in order to make sense of the Big Plan.

As was the case with ufology in general, men continued to occupy a privileged position in the alien contact milieu. Yet, women could be far more prominent and play a more active role in this domain—in some measure, women had historically occupied positions of authority as mediums in occult circles. Regardless of gender or background, those claiming to have met extraterrestrials regularly faced the ridicule and derision of friends, co-workers, and the general public. No wonder most witnesses sought out reassurance.

Alien contact helped promote one other form of contact: connections between like-minded people. The Reeves, the Hills, George Adamski, George Van Tassel, Marius Dewilde, and Antônio Villas-Boas all reached out to others. Some organized or attended UFO group meetings, some sought out the help of UFO investigators, some looked to reporters, and in one conspicuous case, a psychiatrist was consulted. Those claiming to have had an extraterrestrial encounter frequently made the effort to initiate contact with their fellow human beings. Contact could lead to community.

Of course, outside the contactee scene, the voices of skepticism were pronounced. The claims being made seemed ludicrous, fantastic. For many, they were so preposterous as to be utterly implausible. Surely science could easily dispatch such nonsense. At first, few scientists seemed willing to chime in about unidentified flying objects and the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations, but that was about to change.