Australasian Post: The Venusian Speaks
The Australasian Post issue of 17 December 1953 carried the article 'Flying Saucers: More Startling Facts / The Venusian Speaks' as the Australian press treatment of the November 1952 George Adamski Palomar Mountain Desert Center encounter that had been published in Adamski's joint book with Desmond Leslie, Flying Saucers Have Landed, in September 1953. The article ran across six magazine pages including the cover with the cover line 'Flying Saucers: More Startling Facts' and reproduced the typed facsimiles of the six signed witness statements that Adamski had assembled at California on 24 March 1953 from the six companion witnesses who had been with Adamski on the 20 November 1952 California encounter. The article also reproduced Alvin Munn's sketch of the Venusian figure that one of the six witnesses had drawn after the encounter.
About the Item
The Australasian Post was an Australian general-interest weekly magazine published from Melbourne (registered at the Melbourne OPO for transmission by post as a newspaper). The 17 December 1953 issue carried the article 'Flying Saucers: More Startling Facts / The Venusian Speaks' as the cover-line feature and across six magazine pages including the front cover. The article was uncredited (the editorial convention of the period) and was a reproduction of the Adamski Palomar Mountain Desert Center encounter account that had been published in book form three months earlier in the Adamski and Desmond Leslie Flying Saucers Have Landed of September 1953.
The encounter Adamski recounted in the book and in the Australasian Post article occurred on 20 November 1952 in the California Mojave Desert at a location approximately ten miles east of Desert Center on Highway 60 (now Interstate 10), with six companion witnesses present at the site though out of direct line-of-sight at the moment of the alleged personal contact. The Australasian Post article reproduces in facsimile the six typed witness statements that Adamski had assembled on 24 March 1953 from the six companion witnesses: Alice K. Wells of Vista California, Lucy McGinnis of Vista California, Alfred C. Bailey of Winslow Arizona, Betty Bailey of Winslow Arizona, George Hunt Williamson of Arizona, and Bess Williamson. The witnesses signed the statements voluntarily and Adamski included them in the published book in September 1953 and in the Australasian Post article in December 1953 with their consent.
The Alvin Munn sketch reproduced on page 2 of the magazine is the Australian-press reproduction of the witness drawing of the Venusian figure that Munn (the photographer Adamski had brought to Desert Center, one of the six witnesses) had produced shortly after the encounter from the description Adamski gave him. The Munn sketch is the documented Australian-press introduction of the Adamski Venusian-figure imagery into the Southern Hemisphere contactee tradition.
Why It Matters
The article matters for two specific reasons. First, the Australasian Post was the Australian general-interest weekly of the period and the 17 December 1953 article is the documented Australian-press introduction of the Adamski contactee material into the Australian reading public at the moment three months after the American book publication. The article appeared at the same Christmas-period publishing window as the Australasian Post's annual highest-circulation issue and reached approximately 250,000 Australian readers at first publication. The contactee material entered the Australian popular-press reception through this article.
Second, the reproduction of the six signed witness statements in facsimile is the documented Southern Hemisphere first appearance of the witness-statement evidence Adamski had built into his published material. The witness-statement format (typed statement of consent, witness signature, dated at California, voluntary attestation) is the documented working evidential format the contactee tradition would inherit and reproduce across the 1953 to 1965 American and international contactee publishing programme. The Australasian Post December 1953 article is the documented Australian-press introduction of that working evidential format.
The Australasian Post Adamski article sits in the wider contactee-era documentary record the archive holds across its mid-twentieth-century collections. The companion volume Venus Speaks of 1954 from Regency Press London opens the English contactee publishing programme on the Atlantic side at the same publishing window the Australasian Post article opens on the Australian side. The American contactee parallel runs through Adamski and Desmond Leslie's Flying Saucers Have Landed of September 1953, Daniel Fry's The White Sands Incident of 1954, Truman Bethurum's Aboard a Flying Saucer of 1954, and George Hunt Williamson's The Saucers Speak of 1954. The article is part of the documented international 1953 to 1955 contactee-publishing window. The archive treats the article as documentary record of the publishing tradition rather than as adjudicated history of the underlying encounter claims.
Page-by-Page Scans
The full 6-page digitisation. Click any page to enlarge.
