Contact across the Solar System

Contact Aftermath

George published his account of some of his further contacts in his book "Inside the Spaceships", 1955. He congratulated a certain Charlotte Blodget for giving written form to his accounts of his experiences, and she wrote an introduction for that book. Desmond Leslie showed up again, writing a foreword for it. He wrote that we can't know for sure what the other planets are like unless we visit them, something his fellow Earthers would do in the decades to come.

George and some other contactees called the SSC people the Space People and the Space Brothers and Sisters. From an Earthbound vantage point, that was appropriate, but to some SSC people, that was a bit of misnomer. Most of them lived on planets or large moons or large planetoids, even if many of them liked to travel between these worlds. Not as much as George seemed to imply in his books, maybe, but still a lot.

Some time later, Orthon, Kalna, and Ilmuth got a copy of that book from a covert resident who brought it on board the Aurora. The three SSC spacecraft pilots read that book, and they were baffled. It captured a lot of aspects of them and their society very well, but it was full of weird howlers. The inhabited far side of the Moon was just one of them. Did George mistake the inside of the SSC's Moon base for the surface of the Moon? Did George's coauthor Charlotte Blodget also misunderstand some things? Or was there something deeper going on? Something more troubling.

It was an awkward dilemma. Either try to explain to George that a lot of his beliefs are just plain wrong, or else live with his numerous errors and hope that he can continue to show his fellow Earthers what they can get if they behave themselves. That they don't have to live with many of their miseries, and that they can enjoy the nice things that the SSC people enjoy. They had to choose between a risk of alienating George and a risk of making George seem like a kook. They decided that they wanted him on their side, even if it made him seem like a kook to many people.

Then there was the problem that some of George's pictures seemed like, to put it delicately, artist's conceptions. Was it worth confronting him about that also?

There was a further risk that the Earthers would make it into outer space and see for themselves some of the errors in that book. Though the Earthers only had vague speculations about SSC-spacecraft propulsion, they were investing heavily in rocket technology, despite it being almost incredibly crude and inelegant by SSC standards. Their rockets were getting better and better, and it was only a matter of time before they sent something into orbit around their homeworld, and beyond there to the rest of the Solar System.

There was another aspect of the negative reaction to George's accounts that the three only slowly picked up on. Many people found his accounts so bizarre that they found it easier to believe that he was inventing tall tales rather than describing what he had actually experienced. This included many "UFOlogists", students of odd aerial apparitions. By then, the US Air Force had officially named them "Unidentified Flying Objects" or UFO's, a name that many of these students found more dignified than "flying saucers". They were willing to accept that their fellow Earthers saw the SSC spacecraft, but not that any fellow Earther had ever ridden in them. It took some time for the contacters to recognize that George needed much better evidence, and that their caution was thus part of their effort's undoing.

Orthon and his fellow Earth observers could not help but wince at the accounts of George's meeting Queen Juliana of the Netherlands in 1959. Some big-name Dutch officials dismissed George as a kook, and some journalists editorialized on how terrible this event was. They said things like "The man's a pathological case" and "A shame for our country" and "We are not opposed to a court jester on the green lawns of the Royal Palace, provided he is not taken for an astronomical philosopher." George described this misadventure in his 1961 book "Flying Saucers Farewell", which he later retitled "Behind the Flying Saucer Mystery". But that book did not do nearly as well as "Flying Saucers Have Landed" and "Inside the Spaceships", and Orthon felt like a failure.

Then in early 1962, George went on a trip to Saturn. Or at least so he claimed. Orthon contacted Ramu about that, and Ramu contacted Zuhl about that, and neither Saturnian knew anything about George visiting the Saturnian system at that time -- or at any other. A year later, George visited Vatican City and he claimed that he met the Pope there. Orthon came to suspect that the Vatican people had hoaxed him just to get rid of him, that they had someone pose as the Pope for him. George also made other bizarre assertions, like how the Sun does not shine in visible light. When Ilmuth found out about that, she was so annoyed that she thought of dragging George aboard a scout and taking him up into outer space so that he could see for himself. Kalna agreed, and both of them tried to think of what might have given him that idea, without any success. It was glaringly obvious to both women that the Sun shines in visible light.

But by then, the contact effort had essentially ended. All of the Adamski Gang, as they would later get called, Orthon, Kalna, Ilmuth, Firkon, Ramu, and Zuhl, had gone off to other things or had become semi-retired. Kalna and Ilmuth had taken up a new Earth-related career: chronicling and studying Earther spaceflight.

Contact efforts with other Earthers had not gone well, either. Howard Menger of northern New Jersey was as erratic as George Adamski, if not more erratic. On one occasion, he repudiated his accounts of his experiences with the SSC people. That did not go well with his contacts. Reinhold O. Schmidt of Nebraska and California was even worse. He claimed that his SSC friends had found a deposit of quartz with medicinal properties, but it was quartz already being mined by someone else. Even worse, he tried to go into the business of mining it. His contacts suspected that he was trying to cheat people out of money, and they tried to warn him about what a bad thing it was for him to do. They were not alone. In 1961, some Earther authorities tried him for fraud and decided that he was guilty of it, and he then spent some years in Earther jails.

Reinhold Schmidt's trial was the first public appearance of astronomer Carl Sagan, later to become a big celebrity. He argued in it that Saturn was inhospitable for humanity and thus that that gentleman's extraterrestrial friends could not exist. That was already becoming a common line in the Earther scientific community, that the early contactees were wrong because the rest of the Solar System is uninhabitable by humanity without a *lot* of protection. But such protection was what the people of the Solar System Community already had, even if they had failed to get it across to their contactees.