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Looking for Orthon by Colin Bennett |
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Book Description |
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In a literary tour-de-force, Colin Bennett advances the daring thesis “that the defining moment of the twentieth century will prove to be 12.30 pm on Thursday, 20 November, 1952, when George Adamski met Orthon, a long-haired youth from Venus. It happened in the Californian desert in the presence of witnesses. From that moment the cat was out of the bag, the space people were among us, and nothing has ever been the same since… The effects of this on popular culture are to be seen everywhere… In the modern imagination the UFO is a constant, not just a space-craft but a reminder that the world is not as rational as our educators pretend.. [Adamski] was an impressive old rogue, like Madame Blavatsky and in the same tradition. Such people, according to Plato are the kind whom the gods choose to enlighten us.” -- From the Foreword by John Michell, author of The New View Over Atlantis and Flying Saucer Vision. |
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Reviews |
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“This
study of Adamski has got to be one of the most eagerly-awaited UFO books
to appear in the last few years. A worthy book indeed for every student of
flying saucers.” (Bob Girard, Arcturus Books) “Bennett walks a subtle, sophisticated, and
brilliant line between idolatry on the one hand and harsh scientific
scepticism on the other.” (Gazelle Books Esoterica Catalogue) “One of the most brilliantly written UFO books
I have ever come across” Jeff Rense, Paranet Radio “No book better illuminates how UFO lore
originated than Looking for Orthon” Louise Lowry, World of the Strange “This book shines a whole new light onto
America’s most known UFO Spotter - was Adamski a hoaxer? One thing is
for sure you cant ignore Looking for Orthon by Colin Bennett. - C.Whitlock
UFO UK “…the potential to be one of the all time
greats in the history of Ufology … a masterpiece” Sheryl
Gottschall, UFO Encounter “…if you choose to acquire Orthon you
will not be disappointed by its contents.” Kate Miller UFO Magazine
(Britain) |
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“Just
finished the book: brilliant, masterpiece!!!!!!!!!!!!” Michele
Bugliaro http://utenti.tripod.it/ufopsi “Thanks for a very perceptive book” Jacques
Vallee, author of Passport to Magonia. “We are reading the book with very much
interest and amazement” Jun-ichi Kato, Director of the Organization
of UFO Research Japan (OUR-J). “…fascinating, amusing, confounding,
occasionally insightful, and all in all delightful Looking for Orthon”
Karl Pflock author of Roswell : Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe “Looking for Orthon is the ufological dog’s
bollocks. It will put the sceptics to rout”. Panzerben Sharkley, F**K Magazine “We actually read this Bennett book word for
word, and that is a rare thing for us to do. He is an intellectual of the
old school.” Jim Moseley, Editor, Saucer Smear “.. original and most excellent…all
ufologists should read this outstanding book” John Chambers, Fortean
Times 160 “I loved it! Send it to Jacques Vallee!”
Hal Puthoff, author of Mindreach “Put Looking for Orthon on top of the
book pile for reading this summer, right next to the new edition of Loren
Coleman’s classic biography of Texas oil millionaire Tom Slick. The tone
of Bennett’s book is set in the Foreword by John Michell. Colin
Bennett is quite right in what he says here, that in the world of art and
literature, during and after Adamski’s time, talk of UFOs and related
subjects was in no way cool, hip, PC or the proper thing. Right-wing
types disliked it for upsetting established patterns of thought, while
intellectuals saw it as a plot to divert attention from their
revolution.” Kenn Thomas, Steamshovel Press. “Plainly stated, 'Looking for Orthon' is one of
the most compelling treatments of the UFO phenomenon ever written.
Superficially, 'Looking for Orthon' can be read as a biography of the late
flying saucer contactee George Adamski, but it's much more; Bennett probes
the innards of 20th century society with an intellectual and literary
dexterity seldom encountered in popular works on UFOs.
Bennett treats Adamski's bizarre story as the multilayered mythological
enigma that it is, recreating the heady and beautifully weird
circumstances in which Adamski, good-natured opportunist and hobbyist
astronomer, came into contact with a man from Venus: an event, Bennett
argues, that rattled the world's epistemological bedrock - even if it
never happened. There aren't very many books that address
reality-challenging issues as ably or as wittily as Bennett's. 'Looking
for Orthon'. It is a must for anyone seeking the roots of the postmodern
condition, and destined to be a classic.” Mac Tonnies “Bennett questions the value of
accepted norms such as true or false, real and fake, frequently
characterizing such distinctions as “industrial”. In
Hindu/Theosophical thought, (which Adamski followed) the phenomenal world
itself is illusion. Therefore, anything can happen – or sort of happen,
especially if there is a collision of “metaphors”. This combination of
biography, polemic and amateur ontology by a Robert Anton Wilson
wannabe, shows Lee Harvey Oswald as being the same sort of pan-dimensional
figure as Adamski.” David F. Godwin (Fate July 2002) “…a knock-out work of solid history…a
complete view of the pathos and chicanery that was George Adamski…a
fascinating and raucous trip” Wendy Connors, author of Summer of the Saucers Copies of Looking for Orthon may be obtained from
Amazon, Arcturus Books (rgirard321@aol.com),
or in Great Britain from: Susanne Stebbing, 41 Terminus Drive, Herne Bay
Kent CT 66 PR s.stebbing@bushinternet.com Lionel Beer, 115 Hollybush Lane, Hampton,
Middlesex TW12 2QY (020 8979 3148) Turnaround Publisher Services, Unit 3, Olympia
Trading Estate, Coburg Road, Wood Green, London N22 6TZ 0208 829 3000. ISBN 1-931044-32-5 Published by Paraview Press 1674 Broadway, Suite
4B, New York NY1009 patrick@cloud9.net 1. When we Imagine We Create a Form
of Life
2. Meeting in the Desert
3. Saucer Nights on Palomar
4. Enter Desmond Leslie
5. Orthon’s Shoes and Mr. Silas
Newton
6. Cargo Perspectives 7. The Ufonauts are the Liars, Not
the Contactees 8. The Doll’s House Machine 9. The Last Contact
10. Entertainment State is Born
11. Management of Mysteries
12. The Sub Plot
13. America Mystica: 1958
14. Adamski’s 1959 World Tour
15. Winter on the Magic Mountain
16. Miracles Must be Small and Not Happen Very
Often 17. Things that Haunt the Outer Edge
Afterward “Adamski had something in him of the dark
genius of the covered wagon and riverboat rascals of Mark
Twain and Herman Melville. Like Howard Hughes and L. Ron Hubbard, he
brought down fire, if not from heaven, certainly from an elemental
somewhere. But unlike Hughes and Hubbard, he didn’t make any money, and
so America ignored him. But America will have to face Adamski sooner or later, and bring him, if reluctantly, into the pantheon of scarred American heroes. Like many with a streak of genius, he didn’t really know the difference between work and play, dream and religious impulse, inspiration and rational thought. But his faulty intellectual grasp saved him: it allowed him to play with all these things, and in playing he chanced upon something that talked to him. But like Francois Seurel in Alain-Fournier’s novel Le Grand Meaulnes, Adamski was to lose the enchanted house in the forest that once he saw. Like Ahab, the quest finally consumed him, and like Hemingway’s Old Man, he was left with only fragments of wonder as a magical defiance of time and decay. When we say that what Adamski saw was created by his “imagination,” we show how far our world has fallen, not progressed. We seem to have forgotten that there is nothing at all which is not conceived by the imagination, and that includes “fact” in itself. In forgetting this, we have lost the long trail between the ravings of visionaries in back rooms, the launch of a space station, and the death of a President. If Adamski’s life can do anything at all, it can teach us how to rediscover that trail.” |
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“For sheer ability Colin
Bennett probably has no equal…a marvellous work.” |
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The Life, Work and Ideas of
Charles Fort |
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Colin
Bennett is the author of Looking for Orthon (Paraview Press, New York,
with Foreword by John Michell), The Entertainment Bomb (New Futurist
Books), and The Infantryman’s Fear of Open Country (Fourth Estate). He
is also a feature writer and reviewer for the Fortean Times. Politics of the Imagination is
published by Critical Vision, an imprint of Head Press, Manchester, with a
Foreword by John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies Born in Albany, New York, in 1874, Charles Fort
spent almost his entire life searching through periodicals in the New York
Public Library and the British Museum, compiling evidence to show that
science was a mere façade which concealed as much as it claimed to have
discovered. In a series of four books –the Book of the Damned, New
Lands, Lo! And Wild Talents – he argued that explanations are far more
fantastic than the things they are supposed to explain, and that we only
use them to get some sleep at night. Science, believed Fort, was a new
form of social control whose object was to conceal the fantastical nature
of the universe by means of editing out paradoxes, contradictions,
miracles, paranormal events – anything that was unusual or which did not
fit into a set scheme of things. This earned him the title “foe of
science” as the New York Times described Fort in its obituary. |
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Chapter
1: Imagination Wars Chapter 2: Walter Mitty Strikes Back Chapter 3: Gas Lamp Theatre Chapter 4: Marketing Belief Chapter 5: Intermediate States Chapter 6: The Quest for Oswald: Facts as Art
Form Appendix: Scepticism as Mystique "Scepticism as Mystique is fabulous, and
radical. It's easily the best essay I've read on sceptics in many, many
years. It could be a bolt of lightening for those far outside the Fortean
community" George Hansen, author of The Trickster and the Paranormal. Price £12.99 Pages 176pp Size171x240mm Publication July 27, 2002 Publisher Critical Vision, an Imprint of
Headpress, 40 Rossall Avenue Radcliffe, Manchester, M26 1JD Great
Britain. Tel/fax +44 (0) 161 796 1935 email david.headpress@zen.co.uk http:www.headpress.com/ VAT registration 719 4672 08 Available to the Trade UK&Europe/Turnaround
020 8829 3000 USA&Canada/CBSD Toll free:1 800 283 3572 Politics of the Imagination may be purchased from
any UK bookshop, or online from Amazon.co.uk In the USA, it can be ordered
from Arcturus Books 1443 S.E. Port St. Lucie Boulevard. Port St. Lucie,
Florida 34952 “Politics of the Imagination follows on from
Bennett’s successful Looking for Orthon. It exercises your brain like it
has rarely been exercised before. Don’t find yourself without it” Bob Girard, Arcturus Books. “…this excellent new work
delves deep into the into the changes that racked society in the dying
days of the 19th century. While mention of the quirks and foibles of the
cosmic joker is made they are used as the thinnest of skeletons for the
author to hang his image of Fort as an anarchist flying the face of
scientific convention. The work is concise, well written and scholarly.
Although the approach makes this a complex book to read, the effort is
repaid tenfold. Some of the insights almost literally leap from the page
and lodge in the reader’s brain.” Brian Allan http://www.beyondpublications.com “I was delighted to read your book. Reading through it I kept being by the thoughts it inspires. It is good to see work like yours coming out. Congratulations!” John Michell. |
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Previewing in Philosophy Now
(October/November 2002 No 38). Major New Scientist review coming up this
Autumn, with FATE magazine review by Sean Casteel.