George Adamski (1891-1965).
documentedsource_actorContactee & UFO Religion
Polish-American occultist and the first and most famous 1950s contactee; founder of the pre-war 'Royal Order of Tibet'. A real, well-documented figure whose alien-contact claims and photographs were judged hoaxes by mainstream investigators.
[DOCUMENTED] Real person; ran a small telescope/restaurant near Mount Palomar (cultivating a false impression of the famous observatory) and earlier founded a neo-Theosophical 'Royal Order of Tibet'. Co-authored the bestseller Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953, with Desmond Leslie); books Inside the Space Ships (1955) and Flying Saucers Farewell (1961). [DOCUMENTED] His bell-shaped scout-ship image became the archetypal 'flying saucer' in global popular culture, especially Japan. [DISCREDITED] J. Allen Hynek (Project Blue Book) called the photos crude fakes; Walther Riedel identified the 'landing struts' as GE light bulbs; James Moseley found his named witnesses contradicted him; the books were ghost-written; his habitable-Venus claims contradicted planetary science. Held no real academic degree.