Then there was
George Adamski.
He started out in the California occult scene, teaching a mishmash of Xianity and Eastern religions. He founded the "Royal Order of Tibet", and he did a big business in wine because he had gotten a religious exemption for it during Prohibition.
The end of it made him search for another source of income, and he eventually found one in flying saucers.
In 1952, GA claimed that he met someone from a flying saucer that had landed in the southern-California desert. Like Space Sister Aura Rhanes and her flying-saucer crew, this Space Brother looked human. He had long blond hair and tanned skin. He and GA communicated by hand signals and telepathy, with the Space Brother learning a few English words. This Space Brother was from Venus and he was very concerned about how destructive and dangerous nuclear weapons are. GA related this contact in his 1953 book,
Flying Saucers Have Landed.
In his 1955 book,
Inside the Space Ships, he describes going aboard and going on some trips. The saucer that he first encountered and the saucers that he traveled in were all short-range scout ships carried aboard big mother ships where the Space People live as they travel. These ships were well-furnished with lots of interior decoration, seeming like some fancy hotel lounge.
He met that Venusian Space Brother again, learning his name: Orthon. He also met some more Space Brothers and some Space Sisters, people who came from Venus, Mars, and Saturn. They liked to wear long robes and gowns, though both sexes of them changed into jumpsuits for various sorts of work.
Seems like a
Crystal Spires and Togas - TV Tropes esthetic.
They also expressed concern about nuclear-bomb tests, and they looked down on us Earthlings for fighting wars. One of them called GA's smoking a silly habit. GA also met some of their spiritual teachers, and their beliefs were a mixture of a sort-of-Xian God and New Agey beliefs. They did not fear death because they expect to be reincarnated.
GA got a look at the far side of the Moon, and he saw snow-capped mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, and even a small animal that ran by.
From Desmond Leslie's foreword to
Inside the Space Ships:
There have been many other landing reports in the past two years: some have turned out to be obvious hoaxes, of which category there will undoubtedly be many more to come. I do not believe they are all crackpots and hoaxers. The only trouble is that against their testimony we have the whole weight of modern astronomy which claims to have pretty well proven that life in our form on other planets in this system is impossible. Either one or the other must be wrong. It is all too easy to dismiss a mere handful of men when we have "science" to back us up, but that is the lazy way out. The claims that the world was round, that wax could record sound, that the ether could carry radio waves, that rays could penetrate and "see inside" matter, that a heavier-than-air machine could fly, have all been dismissed in their day as impossible and contrary to scientific knowledge. The latest book to appear concerning the planet Mars has been written by Dr. Hubertus Strughold (This Green and Red Planet). It proves that if our instruments and their information are correct, intelligent organic life as we know it could not last ten seconds on Mars. But Strughold ends by admitting that perhaps we have overlooked "some crucial factor" and really the only way to be quite sure is for us to travel to the other planets for ourselves and find out firsthand.
There is an alternative: that men from these strange worlds come to visit us first. That they reveal to us a little of their art, their life, their lore, their science, their religion and philosophy from which we may benefit a little.
That is exactly what some people swear by their life has already happened. George Adamski, for one, tells of the many illuminating hours he spent in the company of men from more highly evolved worlds and he has managed to recapture some of the spiritual beauty of their knowledge and philosophy.
At first, there appear to be only two ways in which you can take this amazing document. Either it is true or it is not. I cannot prove to the reader it is true any more than I can prove it is not. Each will have to decide for himself.
Hubertus Strughold's book was published back in 1954, and it was subtitled "A physiological study of the possibility of life on Mars." I haven't been able to find it, but I've found
1958PASP...70...43S Page 46. It is a 1958 paper by Hubertus Strughold on surviving on Mars. He uses a pressure value of 70 mm Hg, or 90 millibars.
As to traveling to other planets, we've only gone as far as the Moon, but we've visited all the other planets by proxy, using automated spacecraft. Not only all the other known planets, but also several moons and asteroids and comets.
