Looking for Orthon: The Story of George Adamski the First Flying Saucer Contactee and How He Changed the World

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 Bennetts modern classic posits in the authors 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 Adamskis veracity. What remains compelling about Adamskis bizarre and compelling tale of alien visitations is the transformative power of stories even if theyre 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.