Venus Speaks
Venus Speaks: Direct Revelation Regarding Flying Saucers and Life on Venus appeared from Regency Press at 43 New Oxford Street, London W.C.1 in 1954, with a simultaneous New York imprint. The book sets out itself as the direct verbatim transmission from K.B., who claims to be the Chief Scientist of the planet Venus, through the English intermediary Cyril Richardson. It is one of the documented mid-1950s English contactee-tradition books that ran in parallel to and slightly behind the George Adamski Flying Saucers Have Landed of 1953 and the Daniel Fry The White Sands Incident of 1954. The archive holds the full book in 36 page scans.
About the Item
Venus Speaks is a sixty-four-page hardcover published from Regency Press at 43 New Oxford Street, London in 1954 with a simultaneous New York issue. The book is structured as the verbatim record of channelled transmissions K.B., who identifies himself as the Chief Scientist of the planet Venus, dictated to Cyril Richardson at sittings the book does not date precisely but locates in the period 1953 to 1954. The transmissions cover the propulsion mechanics of Venusian space-craft (described as operating on gravity-magnetism principles incompatible with the rocket-thrust paradigm Wernher von Braun and the American post-war rocket programme were then developing), life and civilisation on Venus, atomic-power warnings directed at humanity, and prophetic statements about the consequences of continuing terrestrial warfare. The book closes with a peace appeal addressed to the United Nations.
The Cyril Richardson named in the book as the intermediary appears in the contemporary English spiritualist and contactee press of the mid-1950s without corroborating biographical material. The Regency Press imprint at 43 New Oxford Street is the documented mid-1950s London vanity-press publisher of contactee and spiritualist material; the same imprint carried the 1955 George King You Are Responsible that opened the Aetherius Society publishing programme. The dual London and New York imprint indicates the Regency Press was placing the book into the working Atlantic contactee publishing market of 1953 to 1955 that George Adamski, Daniel Fry, and Truman Bethurum were also working in.
The archive treats Venus Speaks as documentary record of the mid-1950s contactee publishing tradition rather than as adjudicated history. The Venusian-scientist channelling format the book uses is the principal mid-1950s English-language English-tradition variant of the documented American contactee material; the parallel American figures (Adamski, Fry, Bethurum, Williamson) produced their own books across the same 1953 to 1956 publishing window. The interest of Venus Speaks for the archive is its documented contribution to the English-language contactee publishing tradition of the period.
Why It Matters
Venus Speaks matters for two specific reasons. First, the English-language mid-1950s contactee tradition is documented principally in the American figures (Adamski at Palomar Mountain, Fry at White Sands, Bethurum at Mormon Mesa, Williamson in Arizona); Venus Speaks is the documented English contribution to the same publishing window from a London publisher under an Atlantic publishing arrangement. The book preserves the English-side cultural-reception of the American contactee material at the moment of its 1953 to 1955 international transmission.
Second, the Venusian-scientist channelling format Venus Speaks uses is the structural template the Aetherius Society of George King would adopt the following year (1955) and develop into the working twenty-year contactee-and-mediumship tradition the archive's contactee-era page documents. The Venus Speaks template (Venusian Master communicating gravity-magnetism propulsion mechanics and peace warnings to humanity through an English intermediary) is the documented immediate precedent for the George King Master Aetherius transmissions of 1955 onwards. The book is one of the documented English-language contactee precedent texts of the period.
Venus Speaks sits in the wider contactee-era documentary record the archive holds across its mid-twentieth-century collections. The parallel American contactee tradition runs through the George Adamski Flying Saucers Have Landed of 1953 (with Desmond Leslie), the Daniel Fry The White Sands Incident of 1954, the Truman Bethurum Aboard a Flying Saucer of 1954, and the George Hunt Williamson The Saucers Speak of 1954. The English-language Atlantic contactee publishing window of 1953 to 1955 is one of the documented intellectual sub-currents of the period the archive's pre-1960s holdings document.
Page-by-Page Scans
The full 36-page digitisation. Click any page to enlarge.
