In 1953, the most famous UFO Contactee, George Adamski, gave a number of lectures in the Los Angeles area, stating that his data on UFOs and aliens had “all been cleared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Air Force Intelligence.” It most definitely had not been cleared. Personnel from both the FBI and the Air Force heard of this and descended on Adamski, warning him to quit his crap. For a while, Adamski did exactly what he was told to do: Stop! Unfortunately for Adamski, he was a magnet for publicity and praise. So, yet again he told his foaming fans he had supporters in the FBI and the Air Force. That the FBI had agents sitting in every lecture Adamski ever gave in California in the fifties, meant that Hoover’s finest were getting more and more frustrated and angrier by the day. They made a decision: they paid Adamski another visit. Whereas on the first occasion Adamski was “warned” to stop, on the next occasion, as the now-declassified reports show, the FBI “severely admonished” him for all of his extra-terrestrial idiocy. The FBI demanded that Adamski would never, ever again make such claims about the military and the FBI. To ensure that, one of the FBI agents whipped out an official document they demanded Adamski sign. He did. One of the agents signed it too, as did a somewhat bemused Air Force officer who thought the whole thing was a farce of epic proportions. Surely that would have made Adamski get the message. It didn’t. The man who claimed to have met 1960s-era hippy-looking aliens was about to find himself in a bucketful of serious shit with a band of unsmiling G-Men.
Declassified into the public domain by the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (and free for anyone to read and use) is just one page of Adamski’s 300-pages-plus FBI file.
It was roughly nine months further down the line when the FBI’s Los Angeles office received a visit from a representative of the L.A. Better Business Bureau. Staff of the BBB were concerned that Adamski’s 1953 book Flying Saucers Have Landed (co-written with Desmond Leslie) was one big scam. One way or another, their staff was determined to get the answers. One of the BBB went knocking on Adamski’s door. The whole story of alien encounters was true, Adamski said earnestly to the man. It’s hardly surprising that the BBB was having none of this book of lies and exaggerations. Adamski hit back by saying his book was endorsed by the U.S. government. To prove this, Adamski pulled out of his pocket a document that had a “blue seal in the lower left corner, at the top of which appeared the names of three Government agents,” as the FBI described things. One of those names was attached to an Air Force officer. Two were of FBI agents. Incredibly, and recklessly, what Adamski had shown to the BBB employee was actually that document Adamski had been ordered to sign some nine months earlier, at the order of the FBI. Worse still for Adamski, he had altered the document. He’d taken real FBI paperwork, fiddled around with it, and changed it for his benefit. This was the last straw for the men in black suits. An FBI summary of this run-around, of December 16, 1953 reads:
(Nick Redfern)
“[Deleted] instructed Willis to call on Adamski at the Palomar Gardens Café, Valley Center, California. (This is located five miles east of Rincon, California, near the Mount Palomar Observatory.) Willis was told to have the San Diego agents, accompanied by representatives of OSI if they care to go along, call on Adamski and read the riot act in no uncertain terms pointing out he has used this document in a fraudulent, improper manner, that this Bureau has not endorsed, approved, or cleared his speeches or book, that he knows it, and the Bureau will simply not tolerate any further foolishness, misrepresentations, and falsity on his part. Willis was told to instruct the Agents to diplomatically retrieve, if possible, the document in issue from Adamski. Willis said he would do this and send in a report at once.” Adamski was very lucky he didn’t end up with some degree of jail-time. Maybe, that would have given him even more publicity, something both the FBI and the Air Force were extremely keen and careful to avoid. That Adamski had the wrath of God put into him finally ensured that his document-doctoring days were over. And, by the late-1950s, Adamski’s “career” as a ufological guru began to tail off. He lived until 1965, by which time many people in Ufology had dismissed the man and his wacky, “I flew to Venus”-style pseudo-science.