UFOs
UFOs
May, 2005
There are three types of Adamski fans :
I was a young man when I discovered Adamski. After having exchanged letters with May Morlet-Flitcroft, then a co-worker of George Adamski, I met her and we became friends. Later, when I delved into her personal files and library, I found so many apparent proofs that Adamski was not a liar, that I became totally convinced that he was telling the truth. Since then, some UFO researchers have openly asked me how was it possible for me to believe the "absurd" claims of this "ridiculous contactee"? My response is that during the 1950s there was no historical criticism in the UFO field: cases were judged only by the standards of simple logic and scientific feasibility. Also, the stories that Adamski had told were far more believable than those being told by present day abductees who even claim to have been raped by strange grey monsters who can pass through solid walls. How could I fail to be impressed by the Vatican medal, the Rodeffer film, the extraordinary pictures...
In 1976, May Flitcroft asked me to work on a first critical biography of Adamski. It was the beginning of the end for our friendship because she couldn't accept what I found...
This article contains a short summary of my findings. Some have already been published in various books and articles, written only in French. My conclusions were that Adamski was nothing more than a liar...
After The First Alleged Contact
Let's look first at what Adamski said after his first contact claim in Desert Center. Inside The Space Ships (ITSS) was first published the first time in 1955. The book, signed Adamski, was in fact ghost written by Charlotte Blodget on the basis of what she had been told by Adamski. It contained stories of alien contacts, journeys into space and trips around our Moon inside a gigantic mother ships and its saucers.
Adamski and his believers have said that the book contained the description of a phenomenon that only a real space traveler could have known about : the fireflies which were explained by Adamski as natural little luminous particles filling space between the planets. According to Adamski American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts also described these fireflies during their space journeys years later. This is a clear example of a lie that has been repeated hundreds of times. In fact, the particles seen by the astronauts and cosmonauts originated from their own capsules and were never described by them as a natural phenomenon.
According to Adamski himself (see Flying Saucers Farewell in the chapter Answers for the Skeptics), the space people told him of the Van Allen radiation belts in 1953 and that he wrote about them in ITSS long before they were discovered by Explorer IV. In fact, if we examine pages 91-92 of ITSS as Adamski clearly referred to, we see that he spoke about an artificial radiation zone created by nuclear explosions and not at all the natural Van Allen radiation belts. In 1963, when he wrote Flying Saucers Farewell, Adamski still believed that the Van Allen belts were of artificial origin bust this claim has been disproven by many subsequent space probes and experiments from Earth.
It is obvious that these two essential "proofs" which have been used so many times by Adamski believers, are based only on their very poor scientific knowledge and their unfamiliarity with the writings of Adamski himself.
In fact, Inside The Space Ships is nothing more than a science fiction book. The best proof we have of this is that it is a "remake" of a science-fiction book entitled Pioneers of Space which Adamski wrote in 1949. That book was ghost written by Lucy McGinnis and is now very rare. You can order a microfilm copy from the US Library of Congress and easily compare its content with Inside The Space Ships.
To your surprise you will discover that these two books give exactly the same descriptions of space (with the fireflies), the Moon (with snow on mountains, forests, lakes, artificial hangers and even small running animals), the scout ship (with the great lens in the middle of the cabin and the graphs on the walls), the mother ship (with its two "skins"), and even little details such as the portrait of the Great One in the mother ship, the famous Saturnian badge with the balance, etc... You will also be pleased also to see that the Masters' pompous statements are exactly the same, something that demonstrates that Adamski had a poor imagination and was unable to create new or original philosophical concepts. His lack of imagination was so great that his book Cosmic Philosophy published in 1961 was mainly based on texts he had written in the '30s and that Alice K. Wells was stupid enough to publish again in her Cosmic Bulletin after Adamski's death. So, thanks to Mrs Wells, it is proved that Cosmic Philosophy was definitely not inspired by space people!
US UFO researcher Richard W. Heiden discovered another clue that Inside The Space Ships was a book of pure fiction. He compared what Adamski had said about the weather that prevailed on the day he described one of his contacts to the official data registered about meteorological conditions on the same day. They were completely different. It apparently never crossed Adamski's mind that this little detail would be checked for accuracy by anyone.
Inside The Space Ships had a postscript in which Adamski explained he had been photographed inside a mother ship from a nearby scout ship. Four pictures depicted what seemed to be a dark area flooded with an irregular beam of light in which five black portholes were visible. Behind two of these portholes were what seemed to be two white heads : one was supposedly Adamski himself whilst the other was a space being. Technically, these photographs were gross impossibilities.
Adamski explained that the mother ships were made of at least two walls or "skins" with different kinds of "machinery" between them. Due to that particular structure of the mother ships, Adamski explained that each porthole was in fact a long tube with a "glass" at each end. Adamski also said that in the middle of these tubes was a lens that permitted a person to enlarge what was being looked at outside the ship. Let us suppose for one moment that Adamski was telling the truth. At the time the photographs were taken from inside the smaller saucer, he would have been at least three "windows" separated from each other by several meters. Now, remember what is going on when you take a photohraph with a flash in the front of a window: the things behind the window are completely masked by the flash gun light that is reflected by the window itself. And that's why the photographs presented by Adamski in ITSS are, from a strictly technical point of view, gross impossibilities. In fact, these photographs seem to have been made just like many were made a long time ago by poor photo-portraitists: two figures were simply photographed behind a scene-painting in which holes have been cut.
After the first supposed contact in desert, Adamski told marvelous stories about his new contacts but everything was pure evention. Another proof of this is that none of his alleged space friends told him that the famous Straith letter was a joke perpetrated by a well-known UFO researcher. That extraordinary story has now been published in the United States and I do not find it useful to elaborate further here.
The Vatican Medal
Of course there are the Vatican Medal and the famous Rodeffer film that seem to prove that Adamski was in any and every case the ambassador of the space people on Earth. Let's look at these two pieces of evidence.
According to May Morlet-Flitcroft and Lou Zinsstag's testimony, it was on May 13th, 1963 that Adamski met Pope John XXIII. On St Peter Place, Rome, Adamski asked his two friends May Morlet-Flitcroft and Lou Zinsstag to stay there and wait for him. Then, he crossed through the crowds of tourists and disappeared behind a distant door.
More or less thirty minutes afterward, he reappeared and told the two women that he had seen John XXIII who was defenitely ill, for sure, but had a pink carnation, and not the olive one that cancer sufferers have when they are dying. He also said that through the windows of the papal room he had seen the famous Vatican gardens.
Contrary to what Adamski said to his two female friends, Pope John XXIII was dying. Three days later he was dead. Many testimonies as to the Pope's long agony were published at the time. Also it is well known that the papal room faces St Peter's Place, just opposite the gardens.
As to the notorious "pure gold Vatican medal", Adamski believers have only the expertise of Lou Zinsstag who could speak with any authority because she was the daughter of a jeweler (!). I have checked the authenticity of the Vatican Medal. Thanks to a Roman expert numismatist, I have discovered that the famous object has very little value because it is nothing more than a "tourist souvenir" made by a commercial company in Milan. This explains why the medal was in a common plastic box. I am sure that Adamski believers will be very embarrassed to prove the contrary by a written statement from the Medagliere della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana!
On that day, Adamski did exactly the same as he had done in the Desert in 1952: he asked his friends to stay where they were and wait for him, went into the distance, disappeared, then came back again later saying that something very important had taken place. This method is based upon the same psychological method used by conjurors who give their audience the impression that something extraordinary is taking place when, in fact, something very ordinary actually happens.
The Rodeffer Film
And now, to the famous Rodeffer film. I recall the time when my friend May Morlet-Flitcroft told me, with assurance, that a film like that couldn't be faked. She was so sure that she gave me her personal copy (received directly from Adamski) and asked for an expert opinion. What an error! The film was shown to an expert who directed my attention to some interesting clues that were very strange, in particular to the movements of the camera.
Some days later (in 1976), I put the film under a professional Olympus microscope in order to examine some very important shots. In a very short sequence, the Venusian scout ship seemed to move into in the distance and pass behind the branch of a tree. I focused on that branch and discovered that the density of the emulsion's particles was higher, exactly at the intersection point between the scout ship and the branch. In other words, the two objects were superimposed and, to tell it crudely, it was the unquestionable proof that the film was a trick produced by a double exposure. I have published the microphotograph for the first time in my book George Adamski published in France in 1983 (Michel Moutet Publisher) and I did it again in January 2000 in a monograph entitled Biographie d'un escroc (Biography of a Swindler) which was privately publisher for French UFO groups. That picture is reproduced here in a black and white negative form with three arrows pointing to the denser area where the "saucer" and the branch are superimposed. I defy Adamski believers to find an alternative explanation than that of a double exposure.
Of course some of the Adamski believers will say immediately that the scout ship is changing shape constantly, something which is impossible to do with a little model. They have sung that song for many years. None of them seems aware that something can easily seem to change shape when its image is filmed in a distorting mirror or with a distorting lens. And no one seems to know that a little model can change shape if it is made of several free parts held on an axis. If you have a video copy of the famous Rodeffer film, look at it and you will see that the vertical axis of the scout ship always remains totally steady.
When you fake a film by means of a double exposure with non-professional materials, some bad sequences are generated with poor contrast and light quality which will have to be eliminated. In 1978, Madeleine Rodeffer explained to UFOlogist Timothy Good how she had been disappointed when she saw the film for the first time, the film that Adamski had taken, and that she had agreed to endorse it as if it had been taken by her (in order to be more credible). Madeleine told Good that the film looked so strange that it couldn't be the original one she had been shown by Adamski. She explained to Good that the first film looked so obviously faked that it was found impossible to show it in that state. Adamski himself seemed disappointed with the film. He explained to Madeleine Rodeffer that maybe he had filmed the shadow of the scout ship rather than the craft itself. Of course, this sounds completely foolish as if a shadow could be mistaken for the real thing. The film probably looked unconvincing because of the double exposure. Madeleine, who knew nothing about photography and the camera, believed Adamski who finally suggested that government agents in the developing laboratory had made a copy of his original and inserted fraudulent images in it to discredit him. What an extraordinary explanation!
So, with Fred Steckling's help, Adamski eliminated the so-called "inserted images" and produced what was called "the Rodeffer film". I take these testimonies from George Adamski The Untold Story by Lou Zinsstag and Timothy Good, chapter 16, but of course I have explained them in a very way from the way they were explained in the book.
And now, we can go back to 1952...
The Photos Of The Venusian Scout Ship
According to his own testimony, Adamski took his best telescopic saucer pictures on December 13th, 1952. For Adamski believers, things are very clear because