George Adamski Inside the Flying Saucers (1955)
This seems to be one of those print on demand reprints undertaken because somebody or other noticed that the copyright had expired, leaving the book in the public domain. The somebody or other would presumably be the IlluminNet Press - as they are identified in the first few pages of this edition - which sounds promising, obviously.
While I can appreciate the fact of people undertaking this sort of reprint, particularly because it keeps a work in circulation and means I don't have to pay a fucking fortune for an old battered copy which, in any case, may turn out to be a pile of unreadable crap; it would be really nice if they bothered to proofread what came out of the other end of their shitty optical character recognition software; because it's tiresome reading a body of text which routinely converts a word such as he to lie, and such errors suggest that the publisher is either stupid or couldn't give a shit. Proofing a body of text is not that difficult.
Anyway, as to whether it was worth reprinting…
George Adamski was arguably the first person to claim abduction by aliens in modern times, although his own close encounters didn't seem to involve any element of coercion, rather taking the form of a series of highly informative rides in flying saucers piloted by talkative beings from Venus very much resembling humans. I personally tend towards scepticism with this sort of thing for reasons which should be frankly fucking obvious, and yet I often find this kind of narrative intriguing. It may well be nothing more than horseshit, but there's always the possibility that some of it may be true, or that it may have been experienced by the author as truth; and that's what keeps me reading. Unfortunately in this instance, the case for the defence somewhat shoots itself in the foot in the first paragraph of Charlotte Blodget's introduction referring to those who have been trained to reject everything not yet proven in the familiar three dimensions.
That's right, Charlotte, the only reason I reject all that comical hogwash clogging up the Metaphysics section of the book store is because that's how I've been trained, you fucking clown. You might have helped your cause some if the very first line wasn't the usual overly defensive protestation about supposedly closed minds delivered with all the conviction of Jimmy Savile reassuring us that Uncle Jim only says he hates children as preventative to certain accusations.
I gather Charlotte Blodget was the ghostwriter who convinced simple, plain-speaking, unassuming farm hand George Adamski that the world needed to hear his story, to which we now turn our attention.
Adamski had already described his first meeting with Orthon of Venus in Flying Saucers have Landed, co-written with Desmond Leslie, and this book describes what happened next. What happened next was more of the same, usually beginning with a peculiar premonition inspiring Adamski to drive to Los Angeles and book into a certain hotel, generally to find his alien friends waiting for him in the lobby - these being alien friends of the kind who can pass as human. Having met, he often accompanied them to a parked saucer in some isolated spot outside the city, then off into space for lengthy conversations in which the aliens point at different parts of the saucer and explain how they work, much like the wizard who rules the magical sky kingdom in a Rupert Bear annual. That said, it isn't all gravity controls and natural faster than light power systems, and a lot of time is spent yacking about the utopian societies of other planets, and how there is air on the moon with people living there - a claim I am unfortunately unable to take seriously due to my training. Inevitably much of the point of this seems to be that the people of Earth really need to stop acting like wankers, and maybe, you know, mellow out a bit; which is fair enough.
Regardless of what he's actually describing, Adamski's testimony is surprisingly compelling, even convincing, so Inside the Flying Saucers can, for the most part, be read with the idea that he seems to have experienced something, even at the most ludicrous instances of distended credibility such as the casino on the Saturnian mother ship. In fact, the peculiarly religious tone creeping in half way through the book - acknowledging a supreme creator and Jesus Christ as having been an earlier messenger from above - is sort of intriguing with its parallels to the Book of Enoch and allegedly historical religious encounters.
So it's a decent read, roughly speaking, at least up until the last couple of pages. Charlotte Blodget somewhat re-blows it all in her final summation with a short biography of simple, plain-speaking, unassuming farm hand George Adamski, revealing how he actually spent most of his adult life as a sort of low-level cult leader, a home-schooled mystic, self-proclaimed new age guru, and exactly the sort of person who would stand to gain from the fabrication of this kind of tale; which is disappointing, and somewhat sucks the fun out of the preceding hundred or so pages.
Of course, that's only what I've been trained to say.
This seems to be one of those print on demand reprints undertaken because somebody or other noticed that the copyright had expired, leaving the book in the public domain. The somebody or other would presumably be the IlluminNet Press - as they are identified in the first few pages of this edition - which sounds promising, obviously.
While I can appreciate the fact of people undertaking this sort of reprint, particularly because it keeps a work in circulation and means I don't have to pay a fucking fortune for an old battered copy which, in any case, may turn out to be a pile of unreadable crap; it would be really nice if they bothered to proofread what came out of the other end of their shitty optical character recognition software; because it's tiresome reading a body of text which routinely converts a word such as he to lie, and such errors suggest that the publisher is either stupid or couldn't give a shit. Proofing a body of text is not that difficult.
Anyway, as to whether it was worth reprinting…
George Adamski was arguably the first person to claim abduction by aliens in modern times, although his own close encounters didn't seem to involve any element of coercion, rather taking the form of a series of highly informative rides in flying saucers piloted by talkative beings from Venus very much resembling humans. I personally tend towards scepticism with this sort of thing for reasons which should be frankly fucking obvious, and yet I often find this kind of narrative intriguing. It may well be nothing more than horseshit, but there's always the possibility that some of it may be true, or that it may have been experienced by the author as truth; and that's what keeps me reading. Unfortunately in this instance, the case for the defence somewhat shoots itself in the foot in the first paragraph of Charlotte Blodget's introduction referring to those who have been trained to reject everything not yet proven in the familiar three dimensions.
That's right, Charlotte, the only reason I reject all that comical hogwash clogging up the Metaphysics section of the book store is because that's how I've been trained, you fucking clown. You might have helped your cause some if the very first line wasn't the usual overly defensive protestation about supposedly closed minds delivered with all the conviction of Jimmy Savile reassuring us that Uncle Jim only says he hates children as preventative to certain accusations.
I gather Charlotte Blodget was the ghostwriter who convinced simple, plain-speaking, unassuming farm hand George Adamski that the world needed to hear his story, to which we now turn our attention.
Adamski had already described his first meeting with Orthon of Venus in Flying Saucers have Landed, co-written with Desmond Leslie, and this book describes what happened next. What happened next was more of the same, usually beginning with a peculiar premonition inspiring Adamski to drive to Los Angeles and book into a certain hotel, generally to find his alien friends waiting for him in the lobby - these being alien friends of the kind who can pass as human. Having met, he often accompanied them to a parked saucer in some isolated spot outside the city, then off into space for lengthy conversations in which the aliens point at different parts of the saucer and explain how they work, much like the wizard who rules the magical sky kingdom in a Rupert Bear annual. That said, it isn't all gravity controls and natural faster than light power systems, and a lot of time is spent yacking about the utopian societies of other planets, and how there is air on the moon with people living there - a claim I am unfortunately unable to take seriously due to my training. Inevitably much of the point of this seems to be that the people of Earth really need to stop acting like wankers, and maybe, you know, mellow out a bit; which is fair enough.
Regardless of what he's actually describing, Adamski's testimony is surprisingly compelling, even convincing, so Inside the Flying Saucers can, for the most part, be read with the idea that he seems to have experienced something, even at the most ludicrous instances of distended credibility such as the casino on the Saturnian mother ship. In fact, the peculiarly religious tone creeping in half way through the book - acknowledging a supreme creator and Jesus Christ as having been an earlier messenger from above - is sort of intriguing with its parallels to the Book of Enoch and allegedly historical religious encounters.
So it's a decent read, roughly speaking, at least up until the last couple of pages. Charlotte Blodget somewhat re-blows it all in her final summation with a short biography of simple, plain-speaking, unassuming farm hand George Adamski, revealing how he actually spent most of his adult life as a sort of low-level cult leader, a home-schooled mystic, self-proclaimed new age guru, and exactly the sort of person who would stand to gain from the fabrication of this kind of tale; which is disappointing, and somewhat sucks the fun out of the preceding hundred or so pages.
Of course, that's only what I've been trained to say.
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