Within a few years of the flying saucer craze that swept American in the late 1940s, a group of people began claiming to have made contact with beings from space. One of them, Daniel W. Fry, said he encountered a saucer during a late-night walk at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. He stepped aboard the empty craft and flew to New York City and back in a half hour, traversing the skies at an astounding 8,000 miles per hour. An alien controlling the UFO remotely communicated with him throughout.
In 1952, George Adamski claimed to have met a Venusian on November 20, 1952, near his home in Palomar Mountain, California. Adamski later had a chance to fly with the Venusian, along with a Martian and a Saturnian. These exploits are recounted in his 1955 book, Inside the Space Ships.
Truman Berthurum wrote about his flying saucer adventure in 1954’s Aboard a Flying Saucer. He learned that the aliens land on lots of planets. “Also we have made many landings in different places on your earth,” an alien told him. “Our only purpose in landing is for our own education, and to relax a bit and replenish our atmosphere thanks, since when we travel our scow is sealed tight against outside influences.”
Not to be outdone, Dana Howard wrote My Flight to Venus to share the goodwill intent shown by the second planet from the sun: “I sincerely believe the Venusians and other planetary beings are here to help us build new thought forms upon which to mold our future.” She claimed to have married a Venusian and started a family with him.
By 1960, at the suggestion of the spacemen, a man named Gabriel Green organized the Space-Age ticket in an attempt to overtake Nixon and Kennedy for the presidency. Fry served as his campaign chairman.
These people (along with others) were known at the contactees. Aside from their many books, they held lectures and spoke at UFO conventions to share their experiences with aliens. Oftentimes their message was one of peace, warning us humans to tread carefully in the atomic age. With the Cold War raging, nuclear weapons posed a threat to all of us (and still do, of course), as well as our planetary neighbors.
Much more about the contactees can be found in my book, We Are Not Alone: The Extraordinary History of UFOs and Aliens Invading Our Hopes, Fears, and Fantasies (Quirk Books).
Since writing We Are Not Alone, I’ve acquired a new book allegedly written by “A Being from Jupiter” through an airline attendant and psychic named Gloria Lee. Contact was first made in September 1953 at the Los Angeles International Airport. Her book, Why We Are Here! (1959) offers wisdom and warnings from our solar system’s largest planet. After all, the being claimed his people had a 2,000-year evolutionary head start on us. The biggest warning: Russians were about to bomb America, but aliens would swoop up many us first and carry us to safety.
“I was sort of a psychic secretary,” Lee told the press. At first, she thought the experience was impossible. “I must be deluding myself,” she said. But then her pencil wrote, “No, you have made contact.”
Below are a few excerpts from a Q&A section in Lee’s book, with the being identified only as “J.W.”:
Question: Do all people on the different planets breathe oxygen?
J.W.: Not all breathe oxygen as you do. They breathe various substances, some containing oxygen perhaps. Some of a similar physical nature to yours cannot stand the vibration of oxygen in their lungs. However, we from the higher planes breathe of the gaseous nature of the plane depending totally on our bodily makeup.
With myself, I can breath oxygen but of the higher ethers of the atomic structure of oxygen. However, we of Jupiter, breathe a mixture of a gas you have never heard of, combined with a certain part of oxygen, and for short periods only we can lower our vibration into your physical level and breathe your oxygen. It would be similar to your skin-divers breathing helium mixed with oxygen. Under pressure, their lungs are better able to assimilate the needed oxygen without ill effects.
So it would be with us, but this could only last a very short period of time. In lowering our physical vehicle in vi-bration, we feel a tremendous amount of pressure. It’s most uncomfortable to us and we prefer not to do it.
Question: Will you give me more information on the moon?
J.W.: (To what was in my mind) Yes, Gloria, the moon contains many caverns. These caverns have been so situated that they do exist right to the center of the moon. Now, contrary to the popular belief of your science, the inside of a planet is not hot molten material but is hollow. This occurs because the centrifical force of the atoms in the construction of a planet are thrown outward, and thus it is, the center is hollow.
No, Gloria, it is not dark inside, but illumined completely by natural light. This light is nothing more than the free energy I spoke of before. The people were given this knowledge so they could light the inside of their small world.
There is really no night or day for them with this continuous light. When these people first developed their mode of living underground it was dark, of course, and they used fire light.
But it was seen there was a need and they were developing well spiritually, thus, they were given the knowledge of using this gift of God. This is also the reason they developed their way of walking on all fours, as you say. When they first began to explore the moon’s caverns, it was naturally easier to crawl over the rocky and uneven terrain. And as nature developed their bodies to adapt to this situation, the arms became like another pair of legs although they still retain fingers.
Incidentally, the moon will remain static when your planet moves into the new orbital position and attracts two new moons!
Question: Will any other countries be bombed?
J.W.: No, at present the only country in the plans of the Russians for bombing is the U.S.A., to be bombed in eight major cities. No other country, as far as we know, is in such a plan.
Question: Will the space people pick up any other individuals not in the United States?
J.W.: Oh, yes. We have a good supply of ships that can go into the different countries surrounding the United States first. These people, of course, will be in the most danger of any immediate fallout, should this event occur, and will be picked up first. Those who are in countries in Europe or else-where, should there be any danger, will be picked up last.
Some of our ships can carry as many as twenty thousand people in the physical. These are the ships you call “mother ships,” and are from my planet Jupiter. Some of the ships are large enough to accommodate ten thousand people and again we have ships only large enough to take five thousand.
However, the ships that will pick up the people will be the small “scout” ships, as you might say, or the “flying saucers” which will land. Also, we have wing ships which are crescent in shape to take the people up.
At the time, we’d yet to definitively prove there were no other intelligent inhabitants in our solar system. Today, of course, there is still belief that alien life may exist on exoplanets many lightyears away. Some believe they may be visiting us.
The government has taken UAP sightings (unidentified aerial phenomena) more seriously in recent years, but in a February 2024 report, the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) concluded: “To date, AARO has not discovered any empirical evidence that any sighting of a UAP represented off-world technology or the existence a classified program that had not been properly reported to Congress.”
Or perhaps a being from some place far beyond Jupiter told them to say that.
