George Adamski, UFOs, and the Occult

Readers who recall my posts of years ago rebutting the misguided claims of Msgr. Corrado Balducci that the UFO issue had nothing to do with the demonic and the occult will appreciate this post by Nick Redfern on one of the more famous contactees in UFO history, George Adamski.

Way back in 2008 I took Balducci to task for denying what would be obvious to anyone who’d looked into the contactee literature. Alternative Religions Movements scholar Christopher Partridge devoted a good deal of space in an essay in his edited volume UFO Religions to Adamski. Here’s the quotation I offered in a post correcting Balducci:

“[Adamski was] . . .  a Polish-born Californian occultist who, in 1936, founded the theosophically-oriented Royal Order of Tibet . . . Hence it is unsurprising to find in his influential book, The Flying Saucers Have Landed (co-authored with British occultist Desmond Leslie), not only numerous references to theosophical themes and doctrines, but also a bibliography that is little more than a short list of key theosophical and occult writings by authors . . . Furthermore, Adamski’s ‘Space Brothers’ are not the almond-eyed aliens most commonly reported by contemporary contactees, but are rather ‘humanoid,’ resembling popular theosophical descriptions of the masters.¹