GLORIA LEE stood out among the contactees of circa 1960 in more ways than one. First, she was female, and second, she was a beautiful brunette. She was employed as an airline stewardess until her marriage in 1952; she then began to take an interest in the claims of George Adamski to have met and talked with entirely human-appearing men from the planet Venus. Gloria Lee seems to have earlier studied the synthetic religion of Oahspe (1882), as devised by a character named J. B. Newbrough (1828 - 1891). Newbrough's holy text, created by him supposedly via automatic writing, falls about halfway in terms of content between Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon (1830) and H. P. Blavatsky's roughly contemporary Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1885). As soon as Lee decided to make psychic contact with a space alien, she wound up communicating daily via automatic writing with an inhabitant of the planet Jupiter, known as J. W., whose teachings and wisdom bore a very marked resemblance to the teachings and wisdom of Oahspe. When J. W. transmitted plans for “a space vehicle,” Lee tried to bring them to the attention of “authorities in Washington DC,” with no success and with tragic consequences for Lee, who died in 1962 during a protest fast.

DANA HOWARD was a follower of spiritualism, and specifically of spirit medium Rev. Bertie Lilly Chandler. During one of Chandler's weekly seances, in the mid 1950s, the Reverend accidentally managed to summon up and materialize a spectacularly beautiful, 8-foot-tall blonde Amazon from Venus, who immediately befriended Dana Howard. How spirit mediums, who professionally are supposed to communicate with the spirits of the dead, could materialize a living native of the planet Venus, did not seem to puzzle Howard or anyone else in the congregation. Perhaps the Venusians, as taught by Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy, are so spiritually advanced that they coexist as “pure spirit” and as living being! Howard soon learned to communicate with the Venusian, Diane, simply by laying down and closing her eyes. She also conveniently “remembered” past meetings with Diane, stretching back to her childhood, when she had been carried to Venus in the flesh in a flying saucer made of transparent crystal. Naturally, after some additional instruction by Diane, she was eventually able to visit Venus herself at will via astral projection. Howard was a prolific author, publishing something like eight different Venusian wisdom books or pamphlets between 1954 and 1964. However, I find virtually no information on the Internet about her. Too bad, because I would particularly like to know if she ever met four other infamous Venusian women, Jill, ViVenus, Christina and Onmec Onec! [And that's not even counting the wife of Howard Menger.] Or even the amazingly, exotically beautiful Dolores Barrios, who by accident resembled a painting of a Venusian that Adamski often exhibited during his talks.

HOWARD MENGER followed so closely in the footsteps of George Adamski that he often seemed to be consciously or unconsciously parodying him. While Adamski talked and telepathed to and chummed about with Venusians, Menger said he had married one! He was also given the secret of a perpetual motion machine (which, oddly enough, never seemed to work), a sure-fire extraterrestrial weight-loss diet, and new methods of farming! In his most amazing feat, he even brought back music as composed and performed on the planet Saturn, re-created by him for a 33-1/3 rpm LP record album, which he sold during his lecture tours. Occasionally (for example in 1960) Menger would confess in public, during an interview, that he was obviously making it all up— again, perhaps following in the footsteps of Adamski, who was fond of shocking new acquaintances by confessing in private that he was inventing everything connected with his contactee claims... for a good cause, of course, namely the popularization of the profound teachings of the various religious cults he had led since the 1930s. It is possible that Menger played a key role in a famous contactee hoax, involving self-proclaimed Venusian ambassador Valiant Thor. Menger was the only one of the 1950s contactees to live into the 21th Century, dying at the age of 87 in 2009, and still publishing saucer books almost to the very end.  If you search, you can find some YouTube interviews that he and his wife did during the past decade.

ORFEO ANGELUCCI always seemed to make the best impression in person of any of the mid-1950s contactees. The general impression I get from reading accounts of these gentlemen's interview and platform styles is that George Van Tassel made the worst overall impression, speaking in a strained voice and never making eye contact with the audience (I diagnose stage-fright), while founding father George Adamski was always genial and laid-back, but Orfeo (also known as Orville) Angelucci radiated enthusiasm, sincerity and humility, in a very winning combination.  It didn't hurt that Orville was thin and aesthetic-looking.  The usual contactee was a taxi-driver, mechanic or sign-painter in daily life, and it always showed. Angelucci didn't found his own religious cult, unlike most of the contactees, but he did use his space-brotherly communications to give validation to the many strange ideas about physics, astronomy and biology that he had been “working on” for decades before his initial contact claims.

TRUMAN BETHURUM— In time order, Bethurum was the second in line of the 1950s contactees, and he seemed to want to make his account as different from Adamski's pioneering story as possible. While it is difficult to rank the contactee stories according to level of absurdity, since they are all at some level utterly absurd, still the stories of Bethurum and of Buck Nelson stand out as falling far into the decidedly comic category. This uncredited illustration from Gavin Gibbons' They Rode in Space Ships captures the comic aspects pretty well. The saucer's crew of spacemen, according to Bethurum were dressed “like bus drivers,” while the Captain of the particular small saucer he was invited inside was a beautiful and sexy woman who dressed in terrestrial style and spoke standard English, but in rhyme. The artist has for some reason given her a halo! Bethurum was the first of the contactees to establish what soon became the standard “repeater” pattern— that is, he said he had had regular visits from and conversations with the space people, up to a dozen by the time he hesitantly visited George Adamski.  Bethurum was  nearly the only contactee who didn't base his story in whole or part on Theosophical lore, especially lore about the planet Venus and its godlike inhabitants.

GEORGE VAN TASSEL tended not to make a good impression when speaking about his Venusian contact experiences, and especially when “channeling via tensor-ray beam” messages from various Cosmic Masters of Wisdom such as Ashtar and Solgunda; this unintentionally very comical performance was a regular feature of his Giant Rock, CA flying saucer conventions held yearly from 1953 to 1978. Apart from Giant Rock itself, and George's cafe, the only attraction in the vicinity was George's Integratron, a small building shaped vaguely like an astronomical observatory. The secret of its construction was, of course, supplied by the Masters of Wisdom, aka the Council of Seven Lights, but somehow it never seemed to get finished, and what it was supposed to do once finished was left extremely vague. James Moseley, the great historian of what he aptly calls Ufoolology, explained why the conventions came to an end: “What killed it was that there were a lot of hard-ass bikers showing up and raising hell and it wasn’t the sort of gentle, New Age crowd that Van Tassel was catering to, and he sort of got tired of it. While it was going on, it was a wonderful circus, with thousands of people, each on their own wavelength, who would come out there and camp. He wouldn’t charge them, except if they ate food at the diner he had out there. He didn’t really make a lot of money on it, he was just a nice guy, and I really liked him.” Van Tassel died about a year after the final convention was held.

For several minutes listeners heard only a one-sided conversation. "NOW who am I talking to? Well, somebody else keeps butting in! CONFOUND IT, YOU KEEP SWITCHING AROUND ON ME! Let's settle on who is to do the talking tonight!"

GEORGE KING— British taxi driver and yoga enthusiast, came a bit late to the Contactee Circus, making his first claims in 1956, but he quickly founded a fairly successful religion, which continues to the present day, and got his followers involved in some unique ways in various highly original projects. In one of the efforts, which occupied 1958 through 1961, King was obeying the commands of the Cosmic Masters of Wisdom to climb something like 18 small peaks, all very conveniently located in Great Britain, so he could use his powers as a “channel” to charge these pinnacles with pure cosmic energy. These mountains are apparently now safe for all to climb and sit down to meditate and absorb, or send out their own energies. However, there's no definitive list anywhere of specifically which peaks were energized, or even how many. King's most famous innovation, very likely, was the Prayer Battery. It looks like a small empty box, but for many years, in regular services, scores of followers charged the prayer battery by directing toward it all manner of powerful prayers and mantras. This collective energy should be able to alleviate all the evils, miseries and disasters of the world, but somehow it never has. King died in 1997 at the age of 78, and without his continual guidance, his official cult, the Aetherius Society, has pretty much gone adrift. The official web page has not been updated since 2006.

George Hunt Williamson in 1959

Dorothy Martin becomes very difficult to trace through the next few years. A rumor that she was going to be arrested and confined to a mental hospital spread through her acquaintances and followers, and she dropped out of sight. Sources disagree as to where she spent the next 10 years. One report is that she moved to Arizona, renewed her interest in Dianetics and went on to get involved with Hubbard's infamous Church of Scientology. Her own later claim was that she spent years in Peru trying to help contactee pied piper George Hunt Williamson set up a monastery! Those who were actually with Williamson in Peru don't recall Martin; Williamson spent most of his time wandering around looking fruitlessly for traces of ancient cities built by Cosmic Masters of Wisdom, as guided by jungle Ouija-board sessions. However, Martin did definitely know Williamson, and she learned a major life lesson from him... to start over, you have to change your name... as many times as necessary. [Williamson became known after the 1950s under a variety of assumed names, including Brother Philip.]

Sister Thedra toward the end of her life.

However Martin spent the decade, she came back strong, popping back into public sight in Arizona in 1965 as Sister Thedra, and founding a new religion, the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara, yet another variant of the already-variant-Theosophical dogmas that almost all of the classic 1950s contactees were using as an underlying basis for the Masterly Wisdom communicated to them by Space-Brotherly sources. Breathlessly she related to new converts that while she had been in South America somewhere, or maybe Yucatan, she had suddenly developed incurable cancer and that almost at once, good old Sananda had appeared in the flesh to heal her completely, and to permit his photograph to be taken! You will be disappointed to see, if you look up the photo on the internet, that it's just a standard pencil sketch of the standard Sunday-School version of Jesus. It's not even autographed! After relocating the cult from Arizona to her old stomping grounds near Mt. Shasta, she relocated it yet again, this time to Sedona, Arizona, where she continued in the role of Cosmic Mother Superior and Primary Terrestrial Mental Channel for the rest of her long life, dying at the ripe old age of 92.

WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY had a significant impact on the early 1950s contactee movement, although it's difficult to document from surviving sources just how the influences flowed to and from Pelley. At about 20, Pelley entered journalism as a career, editing small-circulation magazines and small-town newspapers, eventually becoming a mildly-famous foreign correspondent in the days immediately following World War I. Upon his return to the US, he started a new career writing novels, short stories and silent film scripts; you can find his fiction in many large-circulation slick and pulp magazines in the 1920 - 30 era.

In 1928, he asserted that he had been spiritually transported to Heaven for 7 minutes, where he was greeted warmly in person by all three members of the Trinity, and returned to found a new religion that was a bizarre mix of fundamentalist Christianity, Spiritualism, Theosophy and Theocracy. The Theosophy he had probably picked up during his years in Hollywood. There was practically a revolving-door relationship between Pelley's cult and the I AM cult created by Guy and Edna Ballard. Pelley also had many bizarre political and social ideas, not completely dissimilar to ones espoused by current congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul. Pelley took Adolf Hitler as a particular inspiration and as a role model, and in 1933 he founded the Silver Legion, aka the Silver Shirts, a militant fascist organization, as well as a political party, the Christian Party.

AUTOMATIC WRITING appears so often as a medium of communication on this page that a short history of it is advisable, particularly since I can't find any good discussion of it anywhere on the internet. During the half-century from 1850 to 1900, the craze of Spiritualism swept the world, and spirit mediums scrambled to find an efficient yet impressive means of creating the illusion that the “information” they conveyed to sitters did come from a supernatural source rather than the medium herself. [Almost all the famous mediums were female, with a few notable male exceptions such as Henry Slade and Daniel Home.] One early solution was the stylus planchette. This was a miniature table, which rolled easily on top of the table around which the sitters were seated. The medium, and one or two other sitters, placed their fingers lightly atop the planchette, and a piece of paper was pinned to the tabletop. Then, once spirits were contacted, the planchette began to move apparently on its own and actually write messages on the paper... messages from the Spirit Realm! In practice, this turned out to be fairly clumsy, so various mediums began simply to hold a fountain pen directly in their hands, but in an unusual grip, or using a specially-made holder. The medium then simply wrote the spirit messages straightforwardly on a piece of paper, which she held fixed with her other hand. The final evolution of the scam was for the medium just to hold the fountain pen normally and write normally, while going through the ritual of establishing communication with a specific spirit before beginning the writing. However, there was a parallel development, which has never been very popular among mediums. Typewriters were evolving rapidly throughout the 19th Century, and by the post-Civil-War era, male American mediums like J. B. Newbrough, the creator of Oasphe, were doing their automatic writing efficiently, legibly and rapidly on the typewriter!

Use of a typewriter actually solves a problem that mediums encountered when faced with intelligent and/or skeptical sitters. It was easy to see that if an opaque barrier were placed between the medium's face and her hand doing the writing, the writing quickly devolved into an unintelligible scrawl, indicating to all but the most stupid that it was the medium herself, and not some imaginary supernatural source, producing the messages. However, once the typewriter keyboard design had standardized, it was easy to learn to type by touch, which meant that the typist did not need to be able to see the keyboard or his or her fingers in order to type texts. [Of course this raised the separate question of how a spirit dead for many years, or a space alien from another planet, knew how to type rapidly on a late 19th or early 20th Century typewriter!]

Throughout the 20th Century, female mediums have almost invariably preferred the traditional versions of automatic writing for sitters, using either the increasingly rare fountain pen, or an ordinary pencil if necessary. [Fountain pens are still the most popular devices for the purpose, since they can be adjusted to require little or no pressure between pen tip and paper to provide a bold, legible line.] I haven't yet encountered automatic e-mails, or automatic text messages from the Spirit Realm or the Space Brothers... but it may be only a matter of time.