Contact across the Solar System

Why George Adamski?

Cristina looked at her notes and she said "Let's move on to the SSC's first contact attempt. I think I'll mostly discuss the Adamski contacts since most other contactees seem to have had different SSC contacts. Is that correct about them?"
Orthon responded "Yes. Different teams were involved with different contactees."
Cristina continued "There was a big problem with the Adamski contacts. The poor quality of corroborating evidence. It was mostly Adamski's say-so, and there were good reasons to believe that Adamski was not very reliable."
"Orthon, let me explain with an analogy. If you told me you walked into this room, I would believe you unless I had some reason to think otherwise. But if you claimed that you used a Star Trek transporter, I would be *very* skeptical, and I'd be skeptical for *very* good reason."
She looked at her notes again. "That's what Carl Sagan meant when he said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"To take one example, Adamski's colleagues Desmond Leslie and Carol Honey both wanted to take rides with Adamski in SSC spaceships. Yet you turned them down. Having extra witnesses would have been valuable, even if there was no reason to doubt Adamski's truthfulness. He could have misunderstood something or failed to note something important."
Orthon responded "We were trying to be cautious. We wanted to be very careful about our contacts."
Cristina responded "Caution is all well and good, but look at what your caution got you. It made it look like Adamski could have made the whole thing up. Everything. Including you. That's what all the skeptics say about his accounts -- that he made the whole thing up."
Orthon said sadly "I understand." It was his idea to contact Adamski, and that contact had given him a lot of grief and embarrassment. Now Cristina was rubbing it in, and Orthon read her mind about how seriously concerned she was.

Cristina checked her notes and then said "It may be worse than simple caution. Here is what some people have speculated about. Disinformation. That's deliberately spreading falsehoods. Deniability. That's being able to plausibly deny something that one did. So in this speculation, some SSC people lied to your contactees. It doesn't have to be outright lying, but things that are technically true, but misleading."
Orthon said "If any of us has done that, it has been hidden from me also."
"Fair enough. Someone might have given disinformation to you, so all you'd end up doing is relaying it to Adamski."

Cristina then got into George Adamski's character. "Look at him. He said a lot of things that are just plain bullshit. I can't think of a better word. Bullshit. Mierda de toros."
As Cristina's entourage laughed, Kalna explained the literal meaning of that profanity to Orthon, and the two tittered.
"Like saying that the Sun doesn't shine in visible light. That's preposterous. How can anyone possibly claim something like that?"
Ilmuth said "Your guess is as good as mine. I once thought of dragging him aboard a scout and taking him into space and showing him the Sun. I decided against it, however."
Cristina checked her notes. "Adamski claimed that the Sun lights up our atmosphere, and that's why we see it in visible light. But we see it in visible light from everywhere, so our atmosphere has nothing to do with it."
"Yeah. That was something. Kalna and I racked our brains with what might be going on with that."

Cristina continued. "There's a weird one. One of Adamski's visitors claimed that Adamski claimed that he was once a super bootlegger of illegal alcohol. There is no way that that could have happened. He would either have gotten busted for it or else he would have had to pay the cops to look the other way, and that would have been a big scandal on its own. Also, his Royal Order of Tibet never got very big."
Orthon didn't respond.

She continued "Look at this. Adamski said when he looked at the Earth that it looked like some featureless ball, sort of like Venus. When I saw the Earth yesterday, it didn't look like that at all. I could see lots of detail on it. It isn't just me. That's what everybody else sees. That's what's in everybody's pictures. What was going on here? One of my staffers speculates that this may have been a long-exposure picture for seeing the stars. The Earth would have gotten overexposed."
"Another thing. I didn't see any of those 'fireflies' that Adamski claimed he saw. No one else has ever seen them. Space looked pitch black - as black as can be."
Orthon said "Yes, his books are full of errors."

She then said "I think I'll skip over Admaski's other odd assertions. It would take all day, and I think I made my point. So let's turn to some other business. Didn't you ever try to set him straight?"
Orthon responded "We hoped that he would be good at transmitting our message that the people of his world can have better lives than what they now suffer through. So we didn't try to set him straight on a lot of things. We thought that trying to educate him would have taken a lot of time, and that he would have gotten very annoyed."
He then said sadly "Cristina, I get your point about what nonsense he said, and how it doomed that contact effort. People would point to it, and they'd say that his contacts with us are total nonsense."
"Thank you," Cristina said. "Orthon, it's great that you acknowledge the failures of your contact efforts."

Cristina checked her notes and continued "Aside from what he said, why did you choose him to contact?"
Orthon responded "We wanted someone with charisma and drive, someone who could be good at spreading our message, but someone who didn't already have a successful career."
Cristina said "Yeah, that's what some people said about me in my beauty-salon years."
Lots of laughs.
She continued "Before his contacts, Adamski ran a small study group called the Royal Order of Tibet. That name ought to have been a red flag. For a long time, Tibet was a theocracy ruled by Buddhist monks, not a monarchy. That study group's materials also feature Jesus Christ, even though he isn't anyone in Buddhism. Its materials don't have a lot of Tibetan details. Not even Buddhist details. No monks or monasteries or books or vocabulary. Buddhists like to call their communities 'sangha'. So why wasn't it the 'Tibetan Sangha of Los Angeles'?"
Orthon said "Yes, we knew about his career. He wasn't very successful with his little group. When we reached out to him, he and his followers were running a restaurant on Palomar Mountain."
Cristina continued "In our research into Adamski, we fell down a rather deep rabbit hole. We encountered the world of Theosophy and its founder, Madame Blavatsky. She had a very interesting life, but she made it sound even more interesting. She was very loose about truth. For a while, she worked as a spiritualist medium, channeling people's dear departed relatives. But one day, she started channeling Tibetan masters, and she wrote, quote unquote, some big books. I say that because her quote-unquote writings are full of plagiarism."
Orthon responded "I think we may have had some contacts with her. I'd have to check."

She then said "One last thing about Adamski. His command of English was never very great. His writing was almost impossibly clumsy, and he depended on his followers to clean it up. He came to the US at age two, and English was almost his first language. I started later in life, and a lot of people think that I speak English very well. And write it very well. So what's with Adamski?"
Orthon responded "We never looked into that issue very much. I once spoke some Polish to him - that was his first language - and he liked it. But you're right. He was deficient there."

Cristina checked her notes and then said, "I think I'm done with Adamski, so let's turn to some other contactees. I'll start with Howard Menger."
Orthon responded "We here are not the best people to talk to about other contactees. Other SSC people handled them. But we kept in touch during our contacts with them."
He continued "About Howard Menger, we are mystified by his recanting his contacts and then recanting his recantation. He was not being threatened by anything that we knew about."
Cristina said "I agree that that's weird. I don't recall anyone getting much of a clue about that."
She continued "Another thing. How might I get in touch with some of Menger's contacts?"
"I can find his main contact, Khessini."
"Khessini?"
"She was that woman on the rock who contacted him when he was a boy."
She then asked about Truman Bethurum and Aura Rhanes.
"Has anyone else noticed how weirdly Aura Rhanes is dressed for her job? Seriously. Don't get me wrong. She's well-dressed - well-dressed in general. But she's not very well-dressed for anything heavy-duty. Look at how people dress for construction work. Industrial work. Military work. Even myself, when I do outdoors stuff, I like to dress in a flannel shirt and blue jeans and stuff like that. Yeah, I dress like my husband when I do that, but that's what's good for that sort of thing. You yourselves like to wear jumpsuits when on the job. So why wasn't Aura Rhanes dressed like that?"
Kalna responded "You're right about that. We've long wondered what went wrong in that contact. Let me tell you something about work clothing. When Ilmuth and I went to a Star Trek convention in one of our Earth trips, we decided to use the absolute original uniforms -- colored shirts and black pants. The original series's minidresses were an absolute absurdity. I can't imagine how anyone could possibly think that those minidresses are good work clothes."
Cristina smiled and said "Great minds think alike. You also see how it just plain doesn't fit."
After discussing more details of Bethurum's claimed contacts, they moved on to some other contactees, like Daniel Fry and George van Tassel and George King and Reinhold Schmidt.