On November 20, 1952, George Adamski first made contact with
extraterrestrials-including a long-haired youth from Venus named
Orthon-in the California desert.or so he claimed. He offered
photographic proof. He wrote books about his encounters, including the
sensational bestseller Flying Saucers Have Landed. He never stopped
advocating the truth of his claims even as he came under extraordinary
ridicule. And in the process, however inadvertently, Adamski invented
the modern mass counterculture. This new edition of Colin Bennett's
modern classic posits, in the author's uniquely engaging style, Adamski
as a kind of unwitting performance artist who "structured one of the
most blatant acts of visionary cheek of the twentieth century,"
introducing the jittery postwar Western world to the image of the UFO,
which confounded and tweaked authority while also fully embodying Cold
War neuroses. Whether Adamski was telling the truth or not is almost
irrelevant-though Bennett has his own ideas about Adamski's veracity.
What remains compelling about Adamski's bizarre and compelling tale of
alien visitations is the transformative power of stories, even if
they're false, to warp our culture on a grand scale. In the course of a
delightfully misspent youth, COLIN BENNETT was employed as both a
musician and as a mercenary soldier. He was far better at the second
than at the first. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, he is the author
of the novels Infantryman and The Entertainment Bomb, and paranormal
nonfiction including Politics of the Imagination, a biography of Charles
Fort; and An American Demonology, about the head of the 1950s
UFO-hunting agency Project Blue Book.
