From Chapter 9

The Last Contact

Almost a year later: August 23, 1954. The last contact. Flying Saucers Have Landed has now been published, and both Adamski and Desmond Leslie are in great demand. On this date, the visiting Desmond Leslie is away lecturing in Los Angeles. Adamski says that he tried to get Leslie aboard, but the space brothers wouldn't have him. What a disappointment for Leslie. He missed the farewell cake and the sexy dance, which made a wonderful change from impenetrable discussions about Universal Brotherhood, Holy Writ, and the Age of Aquarius. Unfortunately on this trip the master is back, and gives forth a blast about the "right path." If this is "enlightenment" then the Earth is in far greater danger than even Adamski ever thought.

Another perfect Bogart scene. Adamski finds himself back in his lonely hotel room in deep withdrawal. This time the fix hasn't worked so well. The pushers are holding back and increasing their prices. There is a monkey is on his back; it won't go away, and the new world he has found is starting to eat him alive. We can hardly blame him. He was on the edge of an emerging cosmos where all events and significances were to become disposable, "virtual," or "hyperreal." Some thirty years later, Baudrillard describesl0z well the Los Angeles to which Adamski travelled from his magic mountain to meet his space men and women:

"Los Angeles is a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless unreal circulation-a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is noth­ing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion machine, needs this old imaginary makeup of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system."

And so, as Adamski leaves his metaphysical city, the story of these trips comes to an end. However, in "An Unexpected Postscript" at the end of Inside the Space Ships, Adamski makes a move straight out of Citizen Kane. He describes dashing into his publishers "even as the presses are rolling on this book," possessed by yet another funny feeling.

April 25, 1955. The frame of reference "all day yesterday" gives this whole episode the feeling of a surreal time sequence in a science fiction novel. Unable to sleep, Adamski tells us he caught a coach to Los Angeles but this time he carried his own Polaroid camera, apparently with the space folk's prior permission. An unnamed "Brother" he has not seen before greets him at the hotel, but warns him that the magnetic fields inside the space ship might interfere drastically with the pictures. Once inside the ship, this Brother takes the Polaroid, saying that he will take the pictures while Adamski has a chat with Orthon, who has appeared almost on cue. Three of the pictures taken with this camera appear in the British Edition of Inside the Spaceships, published in 1956.

What a story. And it has not been done. The life, the vision, and the contacts-neither film nor television makers have touched the confusions and the tragedy. Writing in 1970, Desmond Leslie comments:

"George, dammit!” I once expostulated. “Do you swear by all that's sacred that you are telling the truth?”

"'Desmond,' he answered quietly, `You know my religious beliefs? One of these days I shall have to face my Maker. Do you think I'd dare face Him with a lie like that on my conscience?'”

"There was no doubting the man's sincerity."

However, even telling Leslie that "Those guys were human just like you and myself," on occasion Adamski would hedge his bets, if only to con­fuse, as was his way. When he last saw Leslie shortly before his death in 1965, he was still unwilling to admit anything other than a flesh and blood series of contacts. But Leslie does admit that on one occasion, Adamski said "no one of us could be taken to another planet in our system and see the home world of its inhabitants in his present bodily form or condition."

Much rich comedy has been provided over the years by many and var­ied attempts at constructing a single, elegant, unified solution to the UFO problem. Explanatory offerings have been as mad as anything Adamski had to offer. They range from "earthlights" resulting from geomagnetic strain and electromagnetic pollution to J. Allen Hynek's swamp gas expla­nation for the 1966 UFO sightings over Michigan. The very British "psy­cho-social" explanations (now fortunately howled off the international stage) have been particularly hilarious. If we reverse the psycho-social equations, then we have a much better focus. Laboratory rats may not be the only creatures within an experimental maze. Certainly contact with an alien Intelligence will rid us of all previous ideas of what intelligence is and how it works.

If we dismiss Adamski, it must be remembered that from his time onwards, the Western world became a huge doll's house, just like the inside of his space-ships, and gradually the entertainment-media complex becoming integrated with the military-industrial complex. Those who scoff at the idea of "fairy kingdoms" might well consider that our own Entertainment State is such a kingdom come about. Some cynics would say that the inside of the media-entertainment head is identical to the inte­riors of Adamski's space ships, both are doll's house machines with plenty of blood around if we happen to open the wrong door. If there was such an alien invasion, it was a long time ago now, and it was silent, overwhelm­ing, completely effective. It is still striking deep inland from its beach­heads, and building new dolls for new walk-on parts in cyberspace.lo³ Through people like Adamski, invading agendas reached their targets, and the future was born.

We don't have to be Internet addicts to see "agendas" as pure disem­bodied information fields that are alien life forms in themselves. Adamski was in all likelihood seduced by a phenomenon that was pure manipulated suggestion, the kind of web-like information-field that will replace even­tually all pulleys, levers, and even our beloved electronic pulsations. His achievement is that he was one of the first to introduce the world to levels of post-industrial power as pure suggestion, performance, mimicking and virtual products, which last not more than a minute of old crankshaft time. In the sense that he introduced ideas of power and control as cool things and not old-Hitler hot, he was a highly significant first modern.

The age was changing in Adamski's head, and one such head is enough. Time in that sense exists in very few individuals. Like Yali of Melanesia, he was to be left marooned and confused; time dropped him and he could not complete his stories. But perhaps initiation of the first stories is sufficient; after that, the mission of such a manic information ­animal as Adamski is complete. His offspring were the eggs of a story­ virus. Death comes only when the story cycle has lodged within the host. Then our teller of tales must go on to other story cycles beyond the sun and moon. Like Shakespeare, he leaves his fast-breeding stories behind as a form of immortality.

Adamski created a permanent pan-dimensional masterwork: his

books, his films, and his photographic collection. Seen as a whole, this complex is as good as any in the twentieth century artistic portfolio. Just like his distant mentor, Charles Fort, Adamski's images serve as modern protective talismans against all solutions, singular or final, partial or ele­gant. He is a major constituent of the strange power of the UFO. Even young skeptics of a very different generation jump up and down like natives round a beating drum and take extreme counter-ritualizing meas­ures against his very name.

            Meantime, contactees keep faith. They worship bits of very odd metal, unusual plastic, strange implants, and even a tasteless biscuit or two for similar protection against old industrial Fact. Against the Western twi­light, they hold up these hosts and watch the sky.