Chapter

rolling their eyes—and quite understandably. On the other hand, Adamski still has a faithful following to this day which shows no signs of going away anytime soon. For the FBI, though, it wasn’t so much whether Adamski’s claims were true or not. Rather, it was the influence that Adamski was having on the American public that had them worried. Deeply so, too.

Had Adamski just told his readers, and listeners, tales of exciting encounters with spacemen and spacewomen from other worlds, then, in all probability, the FBI would not have cared. But things didn’t end there. According to Adamski, his aliens were communists. He claimed that the Soviet way of life was also the way of the future. That the Russians would be the victors in a looming Third World War, and that the Space Brothers would then usher in a new era in which alien communists would sculpt a new Earth.

Today, much of this might sound farcical and far-fetched, but the thousands upon thousands of people who completely bought into all this had the FBI concerned. As a result, J. Edgar Hoover ordered a file to be opened on Adamski. It ran from 1952 to 1965, amounts to around 130 pages, and is now available under Freedom of Information legislation. The file makes it very clear that the Bureau was far from impressed by anything Adamski had to say about his alleged alien encounters. The issue of how Adamski insisted on spreading the word of communism, though— and doing so via the message and the medium of the Space Brothers— continued to worry and vex the FBI. The bureau even speculated on the possibility that the Russians had staged the UFO encounter in Parker, Arizona—possibly to the point of using a Soviet agent posing as an alien! Even more troubling to the FBI was the fact that in the wake of Adamski’s claims, more and more people reported very similar encounters. One of them was George Van Tassel. He, too, would soon become the subject of a government file.

The FBI and Ancient Extraterrestrials

Born in 1910, George Van Tassel had a deep interest in aviation as a child and teenager—and he eventually paved for himself a good career at Hughes