Adamski saucer

This article is about the craft. For the contactee, see

George Adamski

.

The Adamski saucer, also called the Venusian scout ship or Adamski scout ship, is a bell-domed, disc-shaped exotic craft of alleged non-human technology — a small translucent-metal scout vehicle carried on three spherical landing balls and deployed from a much larger cigar-shaped mothership — as it was established in the record by the contactee George Adamski, who reported meeting it on 20 November 1952 near Desert Center, California and photographed it through his six-inch telescope at Palomar Gardens in the weeks that followed; by his co-author Desmond Leslie, who carried the account into print in Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953); by the six people who signed affidavits to the desert meeting — Alice Wells, Lucy McGinnis, Alfred and Betty Bailey, and George Hunt Williamson and Betty Williamson, who watched from roughly a kilometre off and photographed the footprints left at the site; and by Michel Zirger and Warren P. Aston, who re-examined the ground, the witnesses, and the surviving documents in Authenticating the George Adamski Case (2018). From the craft, in Adamski's account, emerged the fair-haired humanoid Orthon, said to be a Venusian of the Space Brothers; the design became the type specimen of the 1950s contactee-era disc, alongside the cigar mothership above it and the German Haunebu disc to which later researchers have compared it.

Were the craft what Adamski described, a crewed non-human scout vehicle would have been photographed at close range in daylight, on a schedule its occupants kept, five years before Sputnik — establishing not a fleeting anomaly but a routine, repeatable landing traffic between a mothership and the Californian desert. The photographs instead became the most reproduced saucer images of the era and, with them, the definitive shape of the popular flying saucer.

Doubt attaches on two axes. On how the account can be known, everything but the affidavits rests on Adamski's own camera and word: the six desert witnesses attested to the meeting from a distance and to circling low-flying aircraft, not to the craft's occupant at close quarters, and no independent instrument record of the object exists. On the object itself, a common argument among those who take the photographs for a fabrication is that the "scout ship" reproduces manufactured household hardware — the German rocket scientist Walther Johannes Riedel identified the landing balls to the ufologist James Moseley as 100-watt General Electric light bulbs, and in 2012 the researcher Joel Carpenter matched the main hull to the reflector shade of a widely sold 1930s pressurized-gas lantern. A separate line of in-field reading grants the craft but denies the provenance, holding the machine terrestrial and German rather than Venusian, or the photographs a deliberate intelligence product.

Photographs and design

In the weeks after the Desert Center meeting, Adamski reportedly photographed the scout craft through his six-inch telescope at Palomar Gardens; the now-iconic photograph of 13 December 1952 was said to have been taken during Orthon's return visit. The design — a domed disc with three spherical landing spheres beneath — became one of the most reproduced UFO images of the era.

A witness report from 1942 by one John Bleasdale, describing a bell-shaped craft over Morecambe Golf Course that "closely resembled the 'Venusian Scout Ship' that was to be brought to wide public attention, years later by George Adamski," suggests the design had a lineage of sightings predating Adamski's 1952 photographs.

Interpretations

The scout-ship design has since been compared by Michael Salla and others to the German Haunebu disc developed during World War II. Vladimir Terziski argued that the occupants were not Venusians at all but Germans operating out of Antarctica as part of a post-war continuation of the German saucer program, and Joseph P. Farrell likewise notes the "Nazi connections of the famous 1950s 'contactee' George Adamski," situating the scout-ship design within a broader suspected Nazi saucer program. Former Navy intelligence briefer Dan Willis argued the photographs were part of a coordinated CIA psychological warfare operation, pointing to a memo by Walter Bedell Smith authorizing use of the flying-saucer phenomenon for psychological warfare shortly before Adamski's contacts began.

A common argument among those who consider the photographs a hoax is that the "scout ship" resembles ordinary household objects: skeptics variously likened it to the top of a chicken brooder or a streetlight, while German rocket scientist Walther Johannes Riedel told the ufologist James Moseley the "landing struts" were 100-watt General Electric light bulbs bearing the round "GE" logo. In 2012 the UFO researcher Joel Carpenter identified the reflector-shade of a widely available 1930s pressurized-gas lantern as an identical visual match to the main body of the saucer.

See also

• George Adamski
• Orthon
• Haunebu
• Space Brothers

References

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