Contact across the Solar System

George Adamski

Late in 1952, "Professor" George Adamski, a slender early-sixties man with brown eyes and a shock of gray hair, got a mysterious hint that something great was going to happen a bit north of Desert Center in the southern California desert on November 20, something that he had wanted to experience for some time.

Born in what is now Poland in 1891, his parents came to the United States when he was a little boy. Despite his calling himself "Professor", he never got much formal education, but he later taught himself a lot of stuff. He served in the US military on the Mexican border, and he then worked at a series of odd jobs. In the early 1930's in the Los Angeles area, he founded an organization for promoting his eccentric Theosophy-ish philosophical ideas, the Royal Order of Tibet, and he also planned to found a monastery. But those endeavors flopped.

George moved to Mt. Palomar, with his wife and some followers, and they lived in a commune under rather primitive conditions. After trying to do some farming, they started the Palomar Gardens Cafe, owned by one his followers, Alice K. Wells, an early-fifties brunette woman. George worked there as a handyman, but he continued to develop his philosophical ideas. An admirer gave George a telescope, and he would often look at the night sky with it. The good viewing from that mountain was why the California Institute of Technology -- Caltech -- built an observatory on top of it. This observatory included the Earth's largest telescope for nearly 30 years, the 200-inch / 5-meter Hale Telescope.

George became convinced that humanity inhabited planets all over the Universe, including the Solar System's other planets. This was despite mainstream astronomers becoming more and more skeptical about their habitability. The giant planets? They don't have solid surfaces. The asteroid belt and the outer Solar System? Too cold. Mars? Cold and with a thin atmosphere. The Moon? Next to no atmosphere. Mercury? Too hot. Venus? There was a chance there. Beneath its perpetual clouds, there was a tropical jungle. Or an ocean of water. Or an ocean of hydrocarbons. Or a desert.

George also started seeing what large numbers of other people were seeing: flying saucers. Some of them were balloons, some of them were Venus and other planets and bright stars, some of them were meteors, some of them were our airplanes, and some of them were various other things, but some of them were something else entirely: extraterrestrial spacecraft. As he observed them and tried to photograph them, he longed to go aboard these vehicles and meet their operators.

So on November 18, after feeling that mysterious hint, he arranged for some friends to meet him in the southern California desert near Blythe, CA, and they would proceed from there to the spot that he got that intuition about. These friends were Alfred C. and Betty Bailey, and George Hunt Williamson and Betty Williamson, friends who lived in nearby Arizona. George Hunt Williamson, then a young man, liked his hair wavy.

On 1 AM November 20, he, Alice Wells, and his secretary Lucy McGinnis, an early-fifties blonde woman, got up and headed to Blythe. He did not like to drive on highways, so he got the two women to take turns driving. Despite some trouble from a tire getting a nail in it, he met the other four near Blythe. After eating breakfast, they headed to Desert Center, then northeast to Parker, AZ. George felt himself getting closer and closer, and after driving a little more than 10 miles north from Desert Center, they decided to stop and have lunch along the side of the road.