George Adamski with William Sherwood
“As a man I am no different than any of you, so I am not free from making a mistake. But when I do, I correct it as soon as I can or am permitted to do so. By mistakes we learn the better way if we are big enough to admit them…” (Cosmic Bulletin, December 1963, p.5)
As this overview of allegations and facts shows, this is more than can be said of Adamski’s detractors, who continue to perpetuate these disproven claims.
Allegation: Adamski was only in it for the money.
Sources: Henry Newlin-Stokes 🔗 in his review of The Invisible Ocean in The O.E. Library Critic (March-April 1935), and many others since Adamski’s rise to prominence in the mid-1950s for his contacts with visitors from space.
Facts: (1) The suggestions of Adamski selling snake oil to fund the Temple of Scientific Philosophy in Laguna Beach were never backed up with sources, records of complaints, lawsuits, or arrests. (2) Historical records show that Adamski never owned the Laguna Beach property — his supporter Lalita Johnson did, who sold it in 1935 to another supporter, Mrs Marguerite Weir. The records also show that the projected alterations never materialized. (3) In his 1970 Commentary, Desmond Leslie writes that Adamski sent him his entire set of pictures of flying saucers, “along with permission to use them for free. I thought what an extraordinary man. He takes the most priceless pictures of all time and wants no money for them.” (4) According to author Charles Bowen, “it is known that [Adamski] declined to accept anything for his part of Flying Saucers Have Landed when publication was being planned.” (Flying Saucer Review, July/August 1965)
(5) Adamski’s life style shows nothing but modesty. As Tony Brunt 🔗 (2010) reports: “Adamski owned no real estate, at least until he left Palomar and moved to a house in Carlsbad as he approached the age of 70. His UFO books brought in some money, but generally he lived on a tight budget.”
Allegation: Adamski was a hoaxer.
Source: James Moseley, self-confessed hoaxer and prankster 🔗, in his Saucer News ‘Special Adamski Expose Issue’, October 1957 – followed by many other “researchers”.
Facts: (1) James Moseley and his friend Gray Barker 🔗 “enjoyed playing pranks at the expense of others”. In 1957, they wrote seven letters on stolen US Government stationary 🔗 addressed to various well-known people and organisations, “to throw long-term confusion into the UFO field”. One of these letters, purported to be from ‘R.E. Straith’ of the ‘Cultural Exchange Committee’, was sent to Adamski to trick him into using it to support his claims that the US Government was aware of the authenticity of his contacts. (2) Even if Adamski accepted the R.E. Straith letter’s authenticity in good faith, and many Adamski followers still believe it was authentic, it was not George Adamski but Mr Moseley who hoaxed the public, confessed to it, and exposed his own untrustworthiness. (3) The claims made by Moseley against Adamski in his ‘Adamski Expose Issue’ have since been proven incorrect, false, or based on a lack of understanding (see Recent research 🔗). (4) About the claim made by Ray and Rex Stanford that Adamski had shown them the models which he allegedly used to make his photographs, US researcher William Hamilton III wrote: “If Adamski had been constructing small models of his craft, then the large-sized original was making its appearance known in various parts of the world.” (Alien Magic, 1996)
See also: His photos 🔗 | Vatican visit 🔗
Allegation: Adamski had gotten into “all this saucer crap” because the end of Prohibition meant his wine distilling operation under the guise of the Royal Order of Tibet was no longer profitable.
Source: Ray and Rex Stanford in a 1976 letter to ufologist Richard W. Heiden about a statement Adamski made when they visited him in 1958*, first published in an article by Jerome Clark (1978), replicated by Curtis Peebles (1993), and taken for granted and copied by bloggers, “researchers”, and even “historians” ever since.
Facts: (1) In 1977 Mr Heiden 🔗 “wrote to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to inquire about a wine permit issued to Adamski and/or the Royal Order of Tibet. They had no record of such a permit.” (2) The Royal Order of Tibet operated from a studio apartment in LA and a hotel suite or conference room in Pasadena, neither of which lend themselves for a wine distilling operation — legal or illegal. (3) From there, the Royal Order moved to the Temple of Scientific Philosophy in Laguna Beach in January 1934, while Prohibition had already ended on 5 December 1933. (4) The unrelenting public interest, scientific derision, and media scrutiny meant that Adamski must have been living and working under immense social and psychological stress. As Desmond Leslie (1970) and Tony Brunt (2010) pointed out, Adamski often used “knock-about humour” and the “macho combination of exaggeration and self-deprecation” to deal with the pressures brought on by his mission. (5) When the Stanford brothers visited Adamski in 1958 they were in their late teens, which means they simply did not have the life experience to understand Adamski’s character or correctly gauge the context or the frame of mind 🔗 in which he made the statement about his supposed wine distilling efforts, which Mr Heiden himself has known to be unfactual since 1977. (6) The Stanford brothers were given a lift to Palomar Terraces by William Hamilton III, who would later become a well-known UFO researcher. He wrote: “Although Ray claims that Adamski virtually admitted that he had no need of contacts to describe what he had written in his books, I received no such impression from the man.” (Alien Magic, 1996)
*Different sources give different years; William Hamilton says it was 1959.
Allegation: Adamski was trying to play down the philosophical/religious side of the Royal Order of Tibet, because it “might have potentially harmed his ‘flying saucer business’.”
Source: Richard W. Heiden 🔗 (2016), attempting to square the circle of Adamski’s own boisterous incrimination of his efforts with the Royal Order of Tibet.
Facts: (1) Adamski’s philosophy in his earliest publications for the Royal Order, The Invisible Ocean (1932) and Wisdom of the Masters of the Far East (1936), shows incontrovertibly that it is entirely consistent with his philosophy as set forth in later works, such as Inside the Space Ships (1955) and Cosmic Philosophy (1961). (2) Adamski’s interest in space is already evident in 1938, when he installs a 6-inch telescope at the Royal Order of Tibet’s Temple of Scientific Philosophy in Laguna Beach, that was gifted to him by his associate and benefactor Mrs Lalita Johnson. Also, in 1946 Adamski publishes The Possibility of Life on Other Planets, which is a clear and early indication of his conviction that life is not confined to planet Earth, well before Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting of ‘flying saucers’ over Washington in July 1947 generated the massive public interest in the phenomenon. (3) In a letter to Gray Barker, dated 11 March 1955, he references the lessons which he gave as an instructor on philosophy with the Royal Order: “These lessons were entirely philosophical talks on the Laws of Life from a Universal concept which every person should know, and in knowing, would find more joy in living.” And in a letter dated 11 December 1962 Adamski wrote: “I have been in this work since 1925, and Mrs Wells since the early thirties”, which shows that he saw his mission as continuous, rather than as separate endeavours with different teachings or aims.
See also: Early life 🔗 | His teaching 🔗
Allegation: Adamski “recycled” his Royal Order of Tibet teachings as new philosophy inspired by space visitors in his Science of Life course.
Source: Former Adamski associate Carol Honey to Timothy Good, November 1979, based on a copy of Wisdom of the Masters of the Far East (1936) where the words “Royal Order of Tibet” had been struck out and substituted by “Space Brothers”. As reported in George Adamski – The Untold Story, p.191.
Facts: (1) A first-hand side-by-side reading of both texts will show that these texts are entirely different in tone, structure, and presentation. (2) If the Space Brothers are the extraterrestrial exponents of the evolution of consciousness beyond the human stage, just as are the Masters of Wisdom on our planet, it is only to be expected that their teachings coincide. (3) This is also reflected in the fact that Adamski did not disown his earlier teachings, but actually compiled much of it in Cosmic Philosophy (1961), alongside teachings he received from his space contacts. He also included his 1937 text ‘Satan, Man of the Hour’ — an allegory about mankind’s seeming inability to overcome its separativeness and strife — in his book Flying Saucers Farewell (1961), stating when it was first written and pointing out its continued relevance. (4) The fact that Adamski was open about this, and possibly tried to show Honey the similarity in teaching by substituting his attribution, and that it still causes suspicion about his motives, might also be seen as evidence of how necessary his work was, and still is: educating humanity about the spiritual nature and interconnectedness of life and the universe, and the need for right human relations.
Allegation: Adamski had far-right or fascist sympathies, or else was an unwitting pawn in a fascist plot to rule the world.
Source: Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception (1979), quoting unidentified sources. These claims have since often been dutifully repeated without due diligence or supporting facts.
Facts: (1) Adamski’s view of life was already on record in Wisdom of the Masters of the Far East (1936): “As God is everything in the universe and manifestations differ only in forms and degrees of manifestations, cosmic brotherhood would have to be an unchangeable, indisputable fact. There is only one cause, one Father.” None of his later writings or statements speak against this view of life. (2) Research by Michel Zirger (2018) shows that the only ‘link’ that existed between Adamski and the far right is a reply from Adamski in a periodical published by William Dudley Pelley: “Contrary to the rumor spread by Jacques Vallee, the very content of the letters published in Valor of August 1953, prove that neither Adamski nor [his associate Lucy] McGinnis had any contact whatsoever with Pelley” before Adamski’s contact experience in November 1952. (3) Allegations of fascist sympathies are also laughable because from 1952 until his death in 1965 Adamski is known to have been under FBI scrutiny for suspicion of communist sympathies, and the communist block, of course, was instrumental in defeating the Nazis in the 1940s. Yet, in the 1950s, when the world was in the middle of an ideological standoff between capitalism and communism, Adamski told his audiences that the Space Brothers do not support any specific form of society on Earth: “Such support would be complying with our custom of divisions. They recognize no false divisions of any kind.”
Even though long disproven, these allegations continue to be paraded in “conclusive” arguments that George Adamski was a conman, and that his accounts and photographs were elaborate hoaxes. However, as these facts show, those who limit their efforts to repeating unfounded or previously invalidated accusations, ignore historical contexts, and deny or lack the understanding of a broader reality than their own should be the last to question Adamski’s motives.
With a sound underpinning from post-materialist science for Adamski’s philosophy, and the latest documentary and photographical confirmation 🔗 of his claims, the controversies or paradoxes in his life and work that remain should not be clung to as proof of malice, but as proof that we simply don’t have all the facts, insights, or a complete understanding. It is easy to judge what we don’t understand, but some generosity in acknowledging that there are things about George Adamski’s mission that we do not yet understand seems more than justified.
See also George Adamski Foundation LLC’s rebuttal of some allegations levelled against Adamski, here 🔗.
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