The cover illustration shows a cylindrical object plunging toward a snow-covered Siberian landscape. “Crash of a ‘cosmic ship’ in Siberia in 1908?” reads the caption. Inside, the lead article presents the Soviet hypothesis that the Tunguska explosion of 30 June 1908, which destroyed eighty million trees across two thousand square miles of Central Siberia, was not a meteor but a crashed spacecraft from Venus. Professor B. Liapunov of the Moscow Academy of Sciences theorised the “cosmic ship” had selected Mongolia as its landing site for the flat terrain, orbited Earth, missed its target due to mechanical difficulties, and found itself over Tungusia a thousand miles north. The evidence: no crater was found, the trees were felled in “islands” rather than radially from a single point, and a 1957 Russian expedition found “particles of iron which were not part of a meteorite.” On the day of the explosion, a French astronomer had sighted an unidentified object in space through his telescope.
The editorial, however, belonged to George Adamski. “The story of George Adamski, who is on a lecture tour in Australia, is extremely fantastic,” A.P. Tomas wrote. “No wonder Mr. Adamski is a source of controversy.” Tomas adopted the posture of a judge: “Good journalism must never bow to these idols. It must be objective and impartial to the utmost. Like a Judge in Court the editor of a publication such as this must be neutral. The evidence for and against the case should be presented. The judge does not pass a verdict. It is the jury who must come to an unanimous decision. YOU, the readers of this Bulletin, are the jury.”
The evidence for the defence ran to four pages. Elizabeth Fry, a sales executive with thirty years’ experience, described meeting Adamski in America in March 1957, examining the plaster casts of alien footprints and six sworn affidavits, and finding the corroborating reports from other countries persuasive. She documented photographs from five nations (an American airline captain’s sketch, a German mayor’s account, a Brazilian magazine’s disc photograph, an English schoolboy’s snapshot, a Scottish writer’s image, and the Brazilian Navy’s “Barauna” photograph) and noted that the Polish Air Force’s official magazine, Skrzydlata Polska, had published Adamski’s photograph with a two-page article. “Can you find six good friends, or relatives, who would sign a sworn statement and risk perjury just to perpetrate your hoax?” she asked.
The evidence for scepticism came from Dr. F.P. Szeibert in “U.F.O. Research or Cosmic Fiction,” a sharp and literate analysis. Szeibert observed that contactees “conspicuously commercialise their remarkable experiences in the form of popular books, but strangely avoid any publication of a scientifically composed critical treatise.” Of all sighting data, he noted, “approximately 97% were explainable. It is the remaining 3%, representing a formidable collection, which mainly interests us.” His conclusion: “Material evidence for the UFO is sadly lacking. This vacuum cannot be filled with faith. Seriously-minded people are inclined to regard some UFO organizations with forgivable contempt.”
Between these poles, the issue published Adamski’s own account of life on other planets, compiled and “approved for publication by Mr. George Adamski.” The detail is comprehensive: social structure (scientists and philosophers rule; no national states), economy (no private ownership, no money), ideology (“Our Space Brothers do not worship anything. They feel themselves particles of the great Cosmic Whole”), food (largely vegetarian), language (thought transference, “slightly reminiscent of Chinese”), and history (Atlantis confirmed, the Great Flood confirmed).
From Rio de Janeiro, Dr. Olavo Fontes contributed the issue’s most striking piece. “A War of Worlds?” presented a military analysis of a potential UFO invasion of Brazil. Fontes, one of the most serious civilian researchers in South America, had been part of a small group preparing the Brazilian public for the possibility. “Our purpose is not to show the public that UFOs are real , this is self-evident, but to explain what the UFOs are, what they are doing here and why.” He reported evidence that UFOs had surveyed Brazilian military installations: “Army’s bases, fortifications, fortresses, arsenals, supply and communication centers, headquarters, weapon plants, etc. as well as the Navy and Air Force’s bases and airfields.” His military assessment was blunt: “In case of an invasion from space, the UFOs are going to win easily the first round. Our defenses against air attack will collapse in a few hours.” But ground warfare would favour the defenders: “Stopped on the ground, their craft will become easy targets for our guns and bazookas.”
Michael G. Duggan’s “Not Alone in the Universe” provided the cosmological frame. Two hundred million island universes recorded by the Hale telescope at Mount Palomar. A conservative estimate of a billion habitable planets in our galaxy alone. The Jodrell Bank radio telescope, ten times more powerful than any other, receiving signals from six billion miles. The maser, under development, capable theoretically of detecting “the sputtering of a noisy automobile on Mars.” The Doppler Effect making interstellar communication “far from insurmountable.” Martin Caidin’s observation that “man, adrift in a cosmos whose shores are beyond his wildest imagination, battles incessantly among himself over issues which a single glance through a telescope would show to be utterly inconsequential.”
Professor Herman Bondi, visiting Sydney from King’s College London, told the press that conditions similar to Earth “can exist in other planetary systems in our galaxy” and that intelligent life “completely foreign to human concept” could develop on unsuitable planets. “By that I mean intelligent insects of any size or form.” Rear-Admiral George Dufek, retiring commander of Operation Deepfreeze in Antarctica, said the existence of flying saucers “must be considered possible.”
The April 1959 issue is a document of the moment when the contactee movement reached Australia, and of the range of responses it provoked: a sales executive’s defence, a scientist’s scepticism, an editor’s judicial neutrality, a Brazilian military analyst’s invasion scenario, and a cosmologist’s billion-planet arithmetic. The subscription price was two shillings.
