Space Brothers: The aliens George Adamski claimed to meet in 1952
Space Brothers may sound like the most wonderful Blaxploitation Star Wars knock-off to never exist, but life is nothing if not a profound kick in the dick. In fact, it actually refers to something a lot more bleak and depressing, cooked up by George Adamski.
Adamski was a German-born American. He was the son of Polish parents who moved him and his family to New York City at two years old. In the 1920s, he relocated to the West Coast with his wife and began flitting about in occult and alternative circles. While he was a janitor and a mechanic by trade, Adamski fancied himself a teacher, studying theosophy and working on his own brand of mysticism, a mix of Western and Eastern religious practices.
Adamski earned the label of “the professor” by his small, tight-knit group of followers despite the fact that he held no qualifications that made him a genuine professor. The highest grade of education he’s received was third. Yet, here he was, a man deemed worthy of having followers. Followers that only bloomed in the 1940s. You see, as time went on, Adamski added astronomy and astrology to his teachings, adding a large wooden telescope to the compound he taught and lived on with his family.
When the UFO craze began in 1947 with the first widely reported UFO sightings in the US, Adamski saw an opening and started regaling anyone who’d listen with anecdotes of how he’d witnessed over 184 UFOs through the telescope on his compound while he’d been living there. His lectures started to contain discussions about alien visitors, leading his followers to start asking about his personal experiences with life from other worlds.
Adamski wasn’t a man to leave his followers unfulfilled so shortly afterwards, he started talking about not just experiencing UFOs, but the creatures within them first hand.
What did Adamski claim to meet?
In his lectures and his writings, Adamski claimed that he had been visited by an inhabitant from the planet Venus. One had come down to his compound in the same cigar-shaped UFOs that had been photographed from the earth called Orthon. Using a combination of telepathy and hand signals, he warned “the professor” about the dangers of nuclear war. For proof of this meeting, he created a plaster cast of Orthon’s shoes and took a close-up picture of his ship.
Sceptics claimed that anyone could have made a plaster cast of some shoes and that the photograph of “Orthon’s ship” looked like a slightly blurry photo of a Chicken brooder, a piece of farm equipment meant to warm newly hatched poultry. Something that Adamski, who lived on a farm, would probably have had access to. However, that being highlighted didn’t stop Adamski from discussing the “Space Brothers.”
This was a term that Adamski and fellow grifter Desmond Leslie coined in a book they co-wrote about their “experiences” of extra-terrestrial life. Annoyingly, the message is quite nice. That these extra-terrestrial beings were coming to us as emissaries of peace, warning us against extinction at our own hands and promising us a better world is possible. The problem is that trying to spread a message of peace and love via the medium of space aliens probably does more harm than good in the eyes of people who actually matter.
After that, you’re just left with the truth of the matter, which you can draw your own conclusion to decipher.