“…it is not what we become through personal recognition, or other rewards of one kind or another that really counts, but what we do that others might be free of confusion and misunderstanding. Only in this manner can we ever hope for the good of these interplanetary visitations to come to all the people of Earth.” -George Adamski, 8 June 1955

With a focus on proving their own perception or understanding of reality as evidence that Adamski is a fraud, his critics almost collectively ignore the fact that his teachings and views were far ahead of his time, or else they try to diminish their significance by brushing it aside as a “new kind of UFO religion”. Yet,

While his critics come in various shapes and sizes, a common feature of their work is to oversimplify, conflate or deliberately misrepresent the facts or statements before interpreting them, and then finding people willing to support or confirm their interpretation. A quick glance through most of the existing “research” about Adamski will show there is no shortage of such people, and even the Wikipedia entry on Adamski 🔗 is largely based on such widely parroted misconceptions.

James W. Moseley posed as an objective, albeit sarcastic, flying saucer “researcher”, and his Saucer News ‘Special Adamski Exposé’ (October 1957) is mysteriously still widely referenced today as the “first really serious analytical investigation” (Wikipedia entry on Moseley 🔗) of Adamski’s contact claims.

Contrary to all the facts 🔗, Mr Moseley maintained that “ ‘contactees’ such as George Adamski who claimed to have spoken to space people on the ground or ridden in their ships, are solely profit-seekers and therefore not to be believed”, but he later confessed that he himself was a hoaxer 🔗. He and fellow publisher Gray Barker pretended to be rivals, attacking each other in print, but privately they were close friends who collaborated on various hoaxes. (Source: Gabriel Mckee, ‘A Contactee Canon 🔗’, in The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape, 2019)

In December 1953 Moseley gained access to Adamski “by a false letter of introduction stating that he was gathering information for an author who wished to write about Flying Saucers: that he personally wasn’t interested.” (Alice Wells, in a letter of 9 February 1955). Towards the end of his day-long private conversation with Adamski , Moseley asked him directly: “…just between the two of us is all of this the truth – or were you merely writing an exciting book?” Adamski replied: “When you are older you may learn the truth about the mission of the space brothers. What I have told you and the others tonight is absolutely true. But… You must not only take my truth, but you must discover the truth for yourself. In that manner, you will truly believe, as I do.” (Moseley, UFO Crash Secrets, 1991) This contradicts any claim that Adamski privately revealed any other intentions.

Unaware of his collusion with Moseley, on 3 January 1954 Adamski wrote to Gray Barker: “…when Mr. Moseley visited me, I was able to read him like a book. He is young and is seeking notoriety on sensationalism without firmly adhering to actual fact. He has much to learn along the path of life, and at present he is traveling the rough road of his own choosing.” In a letter to another correspondent, in January 1955 Adamski repeated his observations: “He is a young snip who has brains which he has never learned to use except toward the distorting of truth.”

That same month, Moseley published ‘Some New Facts About Flying Saucers Have Landed’ in his newsletter Nexus, including the first attempts to debunk Adamski’s photographs, that would form the basis for his ‘Special Adamski Expose’ of October 1957. Over the years, the objections brought forward in Mr Moseley’s ‘Exposé’ have fallen by the wayside one by one, as proper research 🔗 was conducted and more facts, documentation and evidence were brought forward that disprove Moseley’s allegations.

Another critic, as unrelenting as his work is unreliable, is Belgian Marc Hallet, who began as a devoted flying saucer enthusiast and a local representative for BUFOI, the Belgian chapter of the Get Acquainted Program 🔗, and even translated Inside the Space Ships in French (1979). With the help of US ufologist Richard W. Heiden, Mr Hallet unearthed some previously unknown details about Adamski’s history, but his Critical Appraisal of George Adamski (2016) doesn’t offer anything substantially new to the oft-repeated claims of Adamski’s dupery, other than a few more people willing to denounce him.

In light of the perspective offered on this website Hallet’s work is a textbook case of ‘confirmation bias 🔗’ — whereby everything the author doesn’t understand, cannot explain, or thinks cannot or should not be explained as anything other than deceit, is presented or interpreted to Adamski’s disadvantage. It is impossible to address the countless instances where Mr Hallet appends unsupported suppositions to his findings, so here are just a few examples that illustrate his methods.

Despite claiming in one paragraph “I wanted to stand only on facts and not on beliefs” (p.6), in the next he immediately proves he has great difficulty in keeping the two apart, when he bluntly asserts that Alice Wells “surely knew the [Rodeffer] film 🔗 had been faked” (p.7). [Note: The history of how these films were tampered with and discredited is recounted at length by Rangvald Carlson in ‘UFO Contact: The Day Before Yesterday 🔗’, pp.35-39.]

On page 28 of his Critical Appraisal he includes Adamski’s author biography 🔗 that was published in FATE magazine in 1951, which states explicitly that the title of ‘Professor’ was given to him by his students. But on pages 233-234 Mr Hallet claims: “Adamski used not only the term ‘professor’ but also pretended to be a former scientist at the Palomar Observatory with a degree of ‘Doctor’.” He then presents four newspaper clippings from 1953 that “attest that he was using these terms when he presented himself at lectures”. However, the clippings contain no direct or indirect quotes from Adamski about his presumed titles, and are merely examples of editorial write-ups that repeat existing misconceptions (e.g. “formerly an astronomer with Mount Palomar”, and others like those exposed under His motives 🔗). Likewise, ‘Doctore’ is the customary way to address a professor in the Spanish language, which has had a significant influence in California since the Spanish colonization.

When all his attempts to expose Adamski’s efforts as money-making schemes draw blanks, Mr Hallet concludes: “Even if his saucer business did not really make him rich, it still helped him to live simply without really working hard.” (p.183) Despite hailing himself as a hardcore researcher, he seems oblivious to the gruelling lecturing schedule that Adamski had kept up since he was thrust into the limelight in 1953 despite his recurring health problems, and continued until two weeks before his death. And when Adamski, nearly 68 years old, agreed to a world lecture tour, Mr Hallet concludes: “Adamski considered his world tour a vacation” (p.117).

In his account about Adamski’s private audience with Pope John XXIII 🔗, (pages 135-136 and 138-140) Mr Hallet omits to say that this event only became publicly known after Adamski’s death, which means Adamski didn’t use it to boost his image, although Hallet’s account implies such. He also carefully circumvents the sequence in which the details of the story only gradually became public through five (former) co-workers, and attributes claims or mistakes made by others to Adamski so as to cast doubt on the latter’s trustworthiness.

However, it is Mr Hallet’s trustworthiness that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. For instance, he writes: “Adamski claimed to have been given an ovation in Rome by forty cardinals! This extravagant lie was repeated by his followers, who never stopped to think how absurd it was.” (p.121). In fact, Adamski only described how, at the close of his lecture on 16 June 1959 Italian co-worker Alberto Perego 🔗 “announced my presence, and asked me to come to the platform that I might answer questions from the audience. I arose, and as I walked down the aisle, people started cheering… When the question period was over another ovation began.” (Flying Saucers Farewell, p.172). For the sake of his argument that Adamski could not be trusted, Mr Hallet conflates this statement with the report which Danish co-worker Hans C. Petersen made of Adamski’s talk in Denmark in May 1963 from notes or a recording. According to Major Petersen Adamski said: “…those who really understood the problem, like the forty Cardinals, accepted it on scientific grounds” (Report from Europe, p.37). Hallet’s convictions preclude the possibility that Major Peterson might have heard “forty” where Adamski perhaps said “fourteen”. As it happens, photos of the event in Rome show military and clergy present in the audience, whose size would not make it impossible that there were 14 cardinals present. (See also: World lecture tour 🔗.)

In response to an article that Hallet wrote in 1997 Auguste Meessen, Professor of Physics at the Catholic University Leuven, Belgium, who also has an interest in the UFO phenomenon, shows this has long been a hallmark of Hallet’s method: “Either we give precedence to the facts observed and we try to explain them, even if that implies calling into question certain notions that seem to be well established. Or else, we give precedence to those notions, by immediately rejecting everything that upsets them. The article by M. Hallet … illustrates the second approach…” (Source: ‘Le Phénomène OVNI et le Problème des Méthodologies 🔗‘, 1998)

Thus we see how Mr Hallet’s zeal showcases his talent for letting the facts — those that he presents, in the way that he presents them — speak for his perception of things, rather than letting the facts speak for themselves. In the Gospel according to Matthew we read, “Seek and ye shall find.” Perhaps Matthew should have added that, typically, what we find depends on what we seek, and how we seek it.

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