Chapter

as Aura Rhanes; Orfeo Angelucci, a man who also spread the word that communism was not a bad thing, after all; George Hunt Williamson, who was a friend of Adamski; and Frank Stranges, who claimed that benign extraterrestrials had infiltrated the heart of the Pentagon and the US government.

It was much the same overseas, too. For example, in the late 1950s, an arm of the British police force called Special Branch—which today largely handles cases of domestic terrorism—began secretly watching the Aetherius Society. It was a contactee-driven group created in 1954 by an Englishman named George King. He too claimed encounters with aliens who, physically, could pass for us.

The United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act has shown that George King and his Aetherius Society were the subject of a secret Special Branch file which ran to dozens of pages. And as Special Branch saw it, there was a damn good reason for that: according to King, his alien buddies had informed him that we all needed to disarm our nuclear arsenals. If we didn’t, there would be nothing but death and disaster for one and all. When members of the Aetherius Society took to the streets of London in 1958 and 1959 to make their views on nuclear weapons known, Special Branch agents were in the crowds, listening to and noting every word.

Why the Contactees Are Important to the Abduction Issue

What all of this demonstrates is that secret government interest in the claims of people who say they have met aliens dates back more than sixty years, that agencies of government quietly opened files on those same people, and that the surveillance was due to the concerns the FBI and the Special Branch had about the contactees suggesting that our visitors from the stars were commies.

Whatever any of us might think about the controversial claims of the contactees of the 1950s, there’s no denying the extremely important fact