Aliens Then And Now

The “weirdly titled book” being held by a smiling woman in the photograph featured in your “Readers’ Album” in the September issue brought back many memories.

Flying Saucers Have Landed by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski was a supposedly factual account of Mr. Adamski’s meeting with a man from the planet Venus in the California desert in the early 1950s. George Adamski was one of a number of people during that time who claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrials. These people, known as contactées, wrote books, gave lectures, and were frequent guests on radio talk shows. They all described the aliens as beneficent “space brothers” who were coming to earth to warn humanity of the danger our nuclear weapons posed to the order of the universe. Mr. Adamski’s next book, Inside the Space Ships , described his journey around the moon and visits with Venutians, a handsome race of long-haired Nordic people. My parents were fascinated by all this, and we spent many a summer night on our roof in Brooklyn, telescopes in hand, looking for flying saucers.

How things have changed. Flying saucers have become UFOs, and the beautiful, wise, well-meaning space brothers have been replaced by reports of large-headed, bug-eyed little creatures who snatch people out of their cars on late-night roads and bring them into spaceships where painful experiments are performed on their bodies.

But possibly it is we as a society who have changed and the aliens are but a reflection of ourselves.