Contactees by Nick Redfern (New Page, 2010)

The history of the human race is full of anomalous phenomena but no one set of border experiences has captured the attention of  paranormal investigators more than the alleged interactions between members our species and those of the extraterrestrial. Since the modern UFO era broke open in 1947 after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of an unidentified flying object over Mt. Ranier in Washington St. authors have been delving into the relationships between our race and the alleged one from the other. British author Nick Redfern adds another chapter to this legacy with his latest book, Contactees. While most alien interaction books are obsessed with the modern stereotype of the X-Files style abduction, Redfern takes a novel approach to the topic by looking at the contactee movement of the 50′s and 60′s. A movement characterized by the Space-Brothers, blond haired and silver suited aliens that run counter to the big-eyed grays of modern alien folklore

Contactee history begins with a “Mr. Jones” of Los Angeles who reported to a local columnist in 1947 that he encountered a large silver object in an isolated location which contained life from another planet that had, “become curious as to the reaction caused by the atom bomb causing trouble in an expanding universe”. In this single incident we can see the trend of many following events in the history of the contactees, Jones lived in California and referenced concern over humans and their use of the atom bomb. Just a few years later in 1952, George Adamski became the poster child of contactees when he encountered a being claiming to be from Venus that emerged from a silver craft in the desert. This Venusian was named “Orthon” and warned of atomic weapons and wars before departing in his craft. The contents of this encounter were eerily similar to that and many of the events described in Adamski’s 1949 novel, Pioneers of Space. But this isn’t the only reason to cast doubt on Adamski’s experience. George Adamski continually expanded his story to even more outlandish proportions and later faked an infamous saucer photograph, the Adamski disk. However, this was all the beginning of a pattern that would spread world-wide.

In 1952, a construction worker named Truman Bethurum had repeated encounters with a silver saucer in the Nevada desert which had a hot female space captain from the planet Clarion, Aura Rhanes. Bethurum’s obsession with Rhanes was the final nail in the coffin of his marriage and his repeated encounters with the lady from Clarion continued as Rhanes repeatedly fulfilled her promises to return time and again until one night in 1953 when she didn’t. Bethurum was crushed and eventually re-married after writing about his encounters and then dying in 1969. As with other contactees, Bethurum’s encounters were filled with discussions of pseudo-scientific language and seemingly obfuscated details.

Redfern continues by detailing the encounters of Orfeo Angelucci, George Van Tassel (of Integratron fame, a giant machine he built in the desert for healing) and several others before drawing similarities between their interactions. Some of these contactees were likely planted by governments (or at least manipulated by them) while others could have come into contact with a phenomena that released endogenous di-methyl-tryptamines leading to modulated psychedelic experiences. Perhaps some even encountered a race that evolved alongside humans concerned about our agression and claiming to be from the sky so we didn’t find them here. The brown mountain lights of western North Carolina even enter the discussion, because widely reported interactions with similar orb’d entities that might be an undiscovered biological intelligence. Each of these possible explanations (as well as others) are given due diligence by Redfern completing his balanced reporting of the historical contactee phenomena. Contactees is a highly entertaining and fascinating survey of a curious time in human history and is truly an outlier in a genre saturated with re-hashed abduction stories.