Mysterious Universe

Commie Contactees

Well, it’s not often I do a post that is so close in nature to one I’ve just written, but on this occasion I’ll make an exception! A few days ago I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe addressing the theory that some of the Contactees might have been in the employ of the U.S. Government. Their purpose to make the UFO subject look ridiculous by spreading bizarre tales of trips to the Moon, Venus and so on. But there’s a variation on this theory – the notion that some of the Contactees were attempting to promote Communism under a UFO banner.

This is an issue that was addressed in the Comments section to the above-post by Glorfindel, who said: “Most of the contactee’s talked about space brothers who warned of humans not having the ‘spiritual development’ to wield Nuclear Weapons and that Nuclear Weapons should be disbanded – is it beyond the realms of possibility that the Soviets/Chinese/French and others have been funding this types of Psy-Ops to make the American public loathe Nuclear Weapons and call for their disbanding?”

Well, in answer to Glorfindel, no it is not at all beyond the realms of possibility! In fact, when we go looking, we do find evidence linking the Space-Brother movement with Communism…

On August 5, 1954, a resident of Yucca Valley, California wrote to the FBI suggesting that George Van Tassel be investigated to determine if he was working as a Soviet spy. No evidence to support such a scenario was ever found, but that the FBI dug into the theory at a deep level is notable in itself.

Similarly, in its files on George Adamski, the FBI reported in 1953 that: “Adamski made the prediction that Russia will dominate the world and we will then have an era of peace for 1,000 years. He stated that Russia already has the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb and that the great earthquake, which was reported behind the Iron Curtain recently, was actually a hydrogen bomb explosion being tried out by the Russians. Adamski states this ‘earthquake’ broke seismograph machines and he added that no normal earthquake can do that.”

The FBI continued: “Adamski stated that within the next twelve months, San Diego will be bombed. Adamski stated that it does not make any difference if the United States has more atom bombs than Russia inasmuch as Russia needs only ten atom bombs to cripple the United States by placing these simultaneously on such spots as Chicago and other vital centers of this country. The United States today is in the same state of deterioration as was the Roman Empire prior to its collapse and it will fall just as the Roman Empire did. The Government in this country is a corrupt form of government and capitalists are enslaving the poor.”

Only a year or so after his claimed 1952 encounters with Space Captain Aura Rhanes of the planet Clarion, Truman Bethurum stated the following: “Two or three fellows who had sons in Korea and who read a lot in the newspapers about the Communist underground in this country, were convinced in their own minds that I was, if making contact with anyone at all, making it with enemy agents. They even went so far as to tell me belligerently that they intended to get guns and follow me nights, and if they caught up me having intercourse with any people from planes, airships of any kind, they’d blast me and those people too.”

On a related matter, FBI records demonstrate that in December 1954, the Palm Springs Republican Club contacted the FBI to inquire if Bethurum might be guilty of “trying to put over any propaganda.”

Then there are the recollections of Saucer Smear’s Jim Moseley. In his book co-authored with Karl Pflock, Shockingly Close to the Truth, Moseley noted that in the early-to-mid 1950s, “…I had fallen under the influence of Charles Samwick, a retired army intelligence officer…Quite sincere and most convincing, he told me…‘the Communist Party has planted an agent in every civilian saucer club in the United States.’”

Similarly, in his Saucer News publication of June-July 1955, Moseley commented thus: “Let us give some very serious consideration to the many alleged space men being called to the public’s attention – all of whom invariably tell us of the dangers of war and the exploitation of atomic energy. No one desires peace any more sincerely than we do, but let us remember too that it is part of the Communist ‘peace line’ to frighten the American people into ceasing our atomic experiments. It is quite possible that some of these ‘space men’ are unwittingly playing into the hands of the Communists.”

Moseley makes a very important point with respect to the Contactee movement in the United States, and which may help to explain why a significant degree of concern was shown at an official level about the politics of the players on the scene. He told me in 2009: “Adamski and the Contactees represented an early hippie philosophy of the time – a 1950s version of what came later in the Sixties with flower-power [and] protests. A lot of what they were saying merged into the mainstream of liberal thinking at that time. So, in that way, it was a very significant movement.”

Evidence that an element of the British Police Force called Special Branch took an interest in the Contactees because of communist-related concerns is now in the public domain, thanks to the persistent research of UFO investigators Andy Roberts and Dr. David Clarke, who have uncovered once-secret Special Branch files on George King of the Aetherius Society. As the files demonstrate, in the latter part of the 1950s, King became a well-known character to Special Branch, but for reasons that had little to do with flying saucers – directly, at least.

Roberts and Clarke cite one particularly important Special Branch document that states the Aetherius Society was “still active in its campaign against nuclear weapon tests, and in this respect its policy is closely allied with that of the Communist Party.”

As this demonstrates, Special Branch was most certainly taking notice of King and Co., but not for reasons that had any direct bearing on the Contactee controversy. Rather, it was for other, more down to earth reasons and concerns relative to politics.

So, how do we reconcile all this with the idea that some of the Contactees may have been working for the U.S. Government – as opposed to the dastardly Reds – as I suggested in my earlier post?

Well, perhaps the early years of the Contactee movement was filled with players following numerous agendas.

Possibly, some really were tools of the U.S. Government. Others may have been part of some strange Soviet-inspired plot to try and convince people that the UFO intelligences were communists. And, maybe, the rest were a bizarre mixture of (a) real experiencers of something unearthly, (b) fantasists and (c) hoaxers.

The story of the Contactees, it seems, is very far from over…

 TAGS: contactees, George Adamski, Truman Bethurum