George Adamski
The founder of the contactee movement, who claimed to meet a man from Venus in 1952.
Adamski was a Polish-born American who ran a hamburger stand near the Palomar Observatory and taught a mystical philosophy. In 1952 he said he had met a long-haired, fair-skinned visitor from Venus in the California desert, and produced photographs of a bell-shaped 'scout craft'. His book Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), with Desmond Leslie, was an international bestseller.
His photographs were later shown to resemble household objects, and Venus is uninhabitable, but Adamski created the template of the benevolent, human-looking 'Nordic' visitor with a message about nuclear weapons. Every contactee and much of the later channelled literature descends from him.
Known for The 1952 Desert Center contact; the Nordic archetype
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