Please accept our Best Wishes for Mother and Child.
0
"You can write about anything you like, just as long as it has some kind of western US angle,” said Skylaire Alfvegren recently, when she invited me to pen a guest editorial for the League of Western Fortean Intermediatists. Well, given the nature of Skylaire’s invitation, it wasn’t difficult to come up with a subject-matter.
After all, as some of you may know, just a couple of months ago New Page Books published my most recent title: Contactees – A History of Alien-Human Interaction. And as just about anyone and everyone who has ever dared immerse themselves in the strange and twilight realm of all things of a long, blond-haired and space-brotherly nature will know, the West-Coast – and specifically California - is where most of the other-worldly action occurred.
After all, there were the “Four Georges”: Adamski, the transplanted Pole, and surely the definitive Contactee, whose purported CA-based encounters with Orthon the E.T. in the early years of the 1950s helped make his Flying Saucers Have Landed book (co-written with Irishman Desmond Leslie) a mammoth-seller; Van Tassel, of both Giant Rock and Integratron fame; Hunt Williamson, who memorably contacted the Space Brothers via the medium of the Ouija board; and King, founder of the Aetherius Society, who ultimately wound up in California, after leaving behind his homeland of England.
And, of course, there was Orfeo Angelucci – a weak character whose life was dominated by ill health and anxiety. That is, until the early 1950s, when his Los Angeles-based encounters with the space-hippies elevated his mind and body to whole new levels and uncharted realms.
Captain Aura RhanesAnd who can forget Truman Bethurum? Certainly not me! Although Bethurum’s infamous 1952 encounters with the hot and flirty Captain Aura Rhanes occurred on Mormon Mesa, Nevada, it was L.A. where Bethurum and his wife made their home – that is, at least, until the marriage collapsed after the gorgeous Aura succeeded in getting her cosmic claws into lucky old Truman.
In other words, it’s pretty much impossible to have a discussion about the Contactees without bringing the West Coast firmly into the equation. Okay, moving on…
I’m often asked why – as someone who primarily digs into the issue of UFOs and governmental secrecy – I’m so interested in the stories of the West Coast Contactees. The answer is actually very simple: despite what the naysayers may loudly proclaim, that strange and surreal band of largely long-gone characters provides us with a deep insight into what really lies at the heart of the UFO puzzle that has for so long dazzled and dumbfounded us.
And here’s what I mean by that:
One of the biggest problems that has long beset the Contactee movement is that the believers and the doubters rigidly insist (for the most part, at least) on looking at the phenomenon from purely black-and-white perspectives. For them, the claims of the Contactees are overwhelmingly bogus, or must be accepted literally in the fashion the Contactees described them. Both groups, in my view, however, are totally missing the point.
Even the most cursory study of the Space Brother controversy makes it abundantly clear that far from being a mystery of just the last 60 years or so, in reality it’s a very, very old phenomenon indeed, and one that has probably been with us ever since the first spark of intelligence popped into the brain of the most primitive of all proto-humans.
Source
