I was raised in a flying saucer family. Throughout
the late 1950s and early 1960s, many a weekend found my parents packing
a picnic lunch and loading the car for their latest saucer-spotting excursion
into the clear-skied desert outside their Phoenix, Arizona home.
Born in 1963, I spoke my first words and took my first stumbling steps
thrilling to stories of their early UFO adventures – blazing fireballs
turning night into day, a giant cigar-shaped cruiser tottering like balanced
scales on a mountaintop, a period of missing time before anyone had ever
heard of “Alien Abduct-ion”...
Flying saucer stories were like Bible stories in my family:
a bright narrative tapestry of strange encounters with a Mysterious Unknown,
facts that never quite fit ordinary experience, the ever-present hint of
some deeper meaning lurking behind the details, all mixed with the spine-tingling
hope that at any moment IT (whatever IT turned out to be) might drop down
out of a clear blue sky, make itself finally and unquestionably known ,
and release us all forever from the confining shackles of everyday reality...
As a pre-teen, most weekends found me at the local public
library with my nose in a book, anxiously tracking down those Elusive Answers
to Big Questions we all begin to ask at that age – Why are we here? How
should I live? Where do we go when we die? Building on my “spacey” heritage,
I spent a lot of time digging through the UFO and paranormal sections,
working to somehow pull the wild speculations of the 1970s flying saucer
flap, the increasingly bizarre reports from the National Enquirer, and
my own family history together into a coherent worldview that not only
answered the Big Questions, but that might also lead to the promising future
I saw reflected in movies like Steven Spielberg’s Close Encoun-ters of
the Third Kind, TV’s Star Trek, and the many science fiction novels that
captivated my, then, almost-teenaged imagination.
That's when I encountered George Adamski's classic narrative
Inside the Spaceships. It took me by surprise because, by some strange
trick of the Dewey Decimal system, Mr. Adamski's book was not filed in
the 001s with the other UFO titles, but rather with the Aviation and Rocketry
books, a section of the library I didn't get around to until Junior High.
I was 12 when I read this work by America’s first and best-known alien
“contactee,” and it changed my life in a number of ways – not all of them
good.
On the upside, the book made it clear to me that flying
saucers were real, that extraterrestrial contact had already begun, that
beings from beyond earth were as advanced spiritually as they obviously
were technologically, and that if we earthlings could just cast off our
greed, violence and hunger for power we could live as they did and join
their ranks among the stars.
I encountered the downside when I ran home, breath-less,
the book clutched tight in my fingers, my mind reeling with questions of
why we consider UFOs a mystery when so much is already known, why we didn't
all treat each other the way Adamski’s “Space Brothers” said we should,
and most of all, in the 20 years since the publication of Adamski's book
(released in 1953 – so now it’s been over 50 years!), why had we not already
joined the peaceful, Star Trek-like federation of planets awaiting us just
beyond the sky?
"Mom!" I shouted as the screened kitchen door cracked
shut behind me like gunfire. "Have you heard of this Adamski Guy?
Do you know what this book says?"
I quickly learned that even those who have themselves
encountered the Mysterious Unknown often doubt the claimed experiences
of others. My mother didn't believe
Adamski. She said it was a hoax, that I should just forget
it.
I most certainly did not "just forget it." My mother's
adult skepticism fell like rocket fuel on the fire my 12 year old imagination.
I redoubled the intensity of my search,
voraciously devouring the works of UFOlogy's greats,
from the metaphysical George Adamski (Flying Saucers Have Landed, Inside
the Spaceships, Flying Saucers Farewell) to the conspiratorial Donald Keyhoe
(Flying Saucers Are Real, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, The UFO Conspiracy)
to the sensationalistic Harold T. Wilkins (Flying Saucers Uncensored, Flying
Saucers on the Attack, Strange Mysteries of Time and Space) to the humble
Truman Bethurum, whose book Aboard a Flying Saucer, told the story of his
repeated desert contacts with a UFO crew from the planet Clarion – a story
recounted in detail in the final chapter of this book.
Over the course of many years, and eventually decades,
of research, I gradually became, as an adult, an accom-plished UFO historian,
as well as a first-hand investigator of contemporary extraterrestrial encounters.
Between early 1997, which was the 50th anniversary of the famous 1947 UFO
crash in Roswell, New Mexico, and Halloween 1998, I wrote, edited and published
nine fun and inform-ative issues of The Golden Age of Flying Saucers Newsletter,
a bi-monthly exploration of the earliest years of the UFO phenomenon.
My primary goal in publishing The Golden Age of Flying Saucers Newsletter
was to bridge what I, as a UFO historian, had come to see as a disturbing,
and even dangerous gap in a lot of people’s understanding of the ET contact
phenomenon.
People born after 1975 or so tend to identify terms like
extraterrestrial, alien, and UFO mainly with the image of the bulb-headed,
black-eyed “Grey Alien” abductors made famous by New York artist and amateur
hypnotist Budd Hopkins’ books Missing Time and Intruders, and horror author
Whitley Strieber’s Communion and its many sequels. Over the years,
the details of the standard “alien abduction” story have been worked out
in dozens of popular books, in movies like Fire From The Sky, The Arrival,
and Signs, and even such TV blockbusters as The X-Files, Dark Skies, and
Steven Spielberg’s 2003 twenty-hour SCI-FI Channel mini-series Taken.
This scary, 1980’s version of alien contact, while not wholly unprecedented
in the history of UFO encounters leading up to it, so violates the hopeful,
adventurous, exciting spirit of what came before that I’ve felt driven
for more than a decade to do everything I can set the record straight.
I’m not saying that the creepy, gray “intruders” of modern
alien abduction lore are not real – thousands, and possibly millions of
people around the world certainly claim to have experienced their presence
first-hand. But I am saying that such encounters do not, by a long
shot, tell the whole story of extraterrestrial contact, which has been
going on in a wide variety of forms for over 50 years now.
I am saying, as well, that such unhappy encounters with
beings from space, even if they are real, cannot be proper-ly understood
outside the context of the UFO contact phenomenon as a whole – a phenomenon
rooted in both a fascinating (but not necessarily frightening) mystery
and an inspiring call to Look Up! from our petty fears and earthly worries,
to think about the universe and what’s possible within it in a much larger,
more open-minded way, and to embrace a bright vision of Humanity’s future
among the stars.
That bright vision came most solidly to Earth during
The Golden Age of Flying Saucers, a time-period I identify as spanning
the years 1943 to 1975. This book covers many of the important UFO sightings
and contact encounters from the first decade of that period. Future
volumes of this series will flesh out the vision, decade by decade, so
stay tuned!
Growing up in a flying saucer family taught me to open
my mind to the unexpected, to the surprising, to all the fascinating-but
not-yet-explained phenomena taking place in the world all around me. A
lifetime spent studying UFO sightings and accounts of ET contact has helped
me grow into an adult who dreams big dreams, who believes anything is possible,
and who Looks Up! to a glorious future for Humankind so far above and beyond
the muck and mire of today’s headlines that I never, ever lose hope.
For me, the bright vision never fades.
Think of this book as a packet of psychic seeds (“star-seeds,”
if you like), seeds of that bright vision, of enthus-iasm and wonder, of
boundless hope for the future of our tiny planet floating in an endless
sea of stars.
As you read the true stories that follow, water the seeds
they plant in your mind with this constant thought: We are not alone. We
have never been alone in the universe. More than 50 years of eyewitness
testimony strongly indicates that we have not been alone on this planet
since at least 1947.
Extraterrestrial contact is not only possible, it is
real and on-going. It is happening all over the world, right now. As you
read these words, someone, somewhere is sighting a UFO, or even meeting
an extraterrestrial. Someone is in contact.
Will you be next?