UFO Contactee

History

UFO Contactee is the only sustained English-language Japanese contactee publication in the archive. It was published from Tokyo by GAP-Japan, the Japanese branch of the Get-Acquainted Program that George Adamski had founded in 1956 as a global Adamski-tradition correspondence and study network. The editor across the entire English run was Hachiro Kubota, who had begun corresponding with Adamski in 1953 after reading Flying Saucers Have Landed and had launched GAP-Japan in 1961 from Shimane-ken in western Japan.

The English edition that the archive holds was the international outreach arm of a much longer Japanese-language run. By the May 1985 launch of the English edition, the Japanese UFO Contactee had been published quarterly for twenty-four years and had reached its 89th issue. Circulation of the Japanese edition stood at approximately 2,500 copies per issue, of which 1,400 were sold through bookstores in major Japanese cities. GAP-Japan itself held approximately 1,000 members organised across eighteen regional branches: Osaka, Niigata, Fukuoka, Nagoya, Sendai, Yamagata, Sapporo, Shizuoka, Asahikawa, Matsuyama, Gunma, Aomori, Okinawa, Akita, Kanagawa, Ibaraki, Nagano, and Wakayama. The Tokyo headquarters ran a monthly Adamski-philosophy study meeting that averaged seventy attendees, and each regional branch ran its own parallel monthly meeting built around tape recordings of Kubota's lectures. An annual Tokyo general assembly drew members from across the country for lectures and a dinner.

1985 to 1989: The English Edition Launch and the Sightings Reports

Issue 1 of May 1985 opened with Kubota's framing essay "George Adamski the Cosmic Man" and a detailed organisational profile of GAP-Japan that doubled as the publication's prospectus for its new English-language readership. The essay positioned Adamski's Inside The Space Ships, Cosmic Philosophy, Science of Life, and Telepathy as the doctrinal foundation that the Japanese members were studying and practising. It cited the Apollo 15 Mount Hadley tracks (Scott and Irwin, August 1971), the May 1978 Pioneer Venus incandescent-lights observation, and James Irwin's appearance on Japanese television claiming a UFO encounter during the Apollo 15 mission, all as supporting evidence for the Adamski position that the planets of the solar system were inhabited.

The same issue carried two Japanese-witness sighting reports that the archive treats as documentary record of the publication's Japan-specific case file. Kazuhiko Fujimatsu, then a sixteen-year-old high school student of Onomichi in Hiroshima-ken, was reported as having photographed a five-shot sequence of an Adamski-type saucer with a Kodak Instamatic 20 at approximately 6:30 a.m. on 11 October 1974. Yoriaki Tsuda, then a seventeen-year-old member of the photography club at his school in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, was reported as having photographed a domed Adamski-type craft with four portholes using a Canon with a 35-70mm zoom lens at approximately 1:30 p.m. on 9 May 1982. The Tsuda sighting was reportedly made during a regular-day school closure.

Issues 2 to 5 (February 1986 through March 1989) developed Kubota's serialised interview with the contactee figure Harukawa, framed around the development of psychic faculties through Adamski's "Science of Life" methodology. The interviews addressed telepathy training, the dangers of unguided psychic development (the Harukawa text warned of telepathists going insane or being killed in vehicle accidents and medicinal poisoning), and the synthesis Kubota was attempting between Adamski's writings and ancient Japanese Shinto, the Cabala, primitive Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Taoism.

1990 to 1994: The Anti-Abduction Position

The Harukawa interview series continued across the early 1990s under the umbrella title "A Young Japanese Man Visits Other Planets", reaching at least Part 4 by Issue 7 of August 1991. The August 1991 issue carried the publication's clearest editorial response to the abduction tradition that had become dominant in Anglophone ufology through the work of Budd Hopkins and Whitley Strieber. Kubota's interviewer-led framing dismissed reports of "monster spacemen" and "dwarf spaceman" kidnapping cases as deliberate disinformation released to mislead the public, citing in particular cases where the abduction reports came accompanied by claims that the victims had been taken aboard flying saucers.

This 1991 editorial position is the doctrinal centre of the contactee tradition's late-twentieth-century survival. The contactees and the abductees were presenting two incompatible accounts of human-NHI contact, and the Adamski lineage stayed with the benevolent-Space-Brothers framing that the original Cosmic Philosophy material had established. The Harukawa interview also developed the reincarnation framework that would carry through to the Jesus material of the closing issues: the proposition that advanced beings from other planets selected human families on Earth to incarnate into, in order to carry out missions of guidance.

1994 to 1998: Cosmic Philosophy Synthesis and the Closing Issues

The final four issues of the run carried Kubota's mature Cosmic Philosophy synthesis essays. The closing Issue 13 of November 1998 ran a substantial piece titled "Jesus: Who He Was" that argued the reincarnated-Venusian-Jesus position directly from Adamski's Inside The Space Ships. Kubota framed the case through the Kalna passages from pages 104 and 105 of the original edition, in which the Venusian woman Kalna tells Adamski that volunteers from other planets were being brought to Earth in physical bodies, that their identity was never revealed except in rare circumstances for definite purposes, and that Jesus had been one such volunteer sent through actual incarnation rather than the safer later method.

The same November 1998 issue introduced correspondence with Patricia Finch of the Axminster Light Centre in England, confirming that by the late 1990s GAP-Japan was a working node in a transnational contactee-tradition network that included the British esoteric-research circuit. The Finch material included documents that the November 1998 piece described as the Pontius Pilate report to Tiberius Caesar on Jesus, allegedly held at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., and a description of Jesus attributed to Publius Lentulus that the piece traced to the writings of Saint Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century. The archive notes that the historicity of both documents has been disputed in mainstream scholarship since the nineteenth century and treats the November 1998 reproduction as documentary record of the late-twentieth-century contactee tradition's appropriation of disputed religious texts rather than as adjudicated historical record.

Connections

The archive treats this material as documentary record of the Adamski tradition's late-twentieth-century survival in a non-Anglophone civilian-research community, rather than as adjudicated record of the contact claims it reports. Every named figure, every adjacent publication, and every theme the publication carried has its own home in the archive.

People in this collection and the contactee lineage it inherited

The Tokyo editor and his Adamski-correspondence anchor, plus the 1950s American contactee figures whose tradition GAP-Japan was the late-twentieth-century continuation of.

• Hachiro Kubota, the GAP-Japan founder and UFO Contactee editor who corresponded with Adamski from 1953 and ran the Japanese-language quarterly from Shimane-ken from 1961
• George Adamski, the founding figure whose Inside The Space Ships, Cosmic Philosophy, Science of Life, and Telepathy were the doctrinal foundation Kubota carried into the Japanese edition
• George Van Tassel, the Giant Rock convention founder and Brotherhood of Cosmic Christ author from the same 1950s American contactee circle
• Truman Bethurum, Aura Rhanes contactee figure from the original Adamski-era lineage
• Howard Menger, the High Bridge, New Jersey contactee whose From Outer Space to You (1959) sat alongside Adamski's writings in the same doctrinal tradition
• Daniel Fry, contactee author whose Understanding Inc. publishing operation ran parallel to GAP from the late 1950s
• Orfeo Angelucci, the Los Angeles contactee whose Secret of the Saucers (1955) carried similar visionary-encounter material
• Frank Stranges, the contactee minister whose Pentagon-Venusian-meeting claims sat in the same late-twentieth-century survival of the tradition
• Meade Layne, the BSRA founder whose ether-ship doctrine ran parallel to the Adamski tradition through the earlier 1940s and 1950s American esoteric-research circuit
• Jim Moseley, the Saucer News editor whose running engagement with the contactee figures spanned the same decades from the outside

Cases and reports the newsletter carried

The Japan-specific case file the publication built across its English run, treated as documentary record of the tradition's claims rather than as adjudicated history.

• The Kazuhiko Fujimatsu Onomichi photographs of 11 October 1974, a reported five-shot sequence of an Adamski-type saucer photographed with a Kodak Instamatic 20 from Hiroshima-ken
• The Yoriaki Tsuda Asahikawa photograph of 9 May 1982, a reported domed Adamski-type craft with four portholes taken with a Canon zoom lens by a Hokkaido high school photography club member
• The Harukawa contactee testimonies serialised across Issues 2 to 7, framed around Adamski's "Science of Life" telepathy training and the reincarnation framework that closed the English run
• The Apollo 15 Mount Hadley tracks of August 1971 and the May 1978 Pioneer Venus incandescent-lights observation, treated by Kubota as supporting evidence for the Adamski position

Related publications

The contactee-tradition publications that ran parallel to UFO Contactee across the late twentieth century, and the earlier American newsletters whose lineage GAP-Japan inherited.

• Cosmic Awareness Communications, the parallel late-twentieth-century channelled-material publication from Olympia, Washington running the same tradition through Paul Shockley's trance-medium work
• Round Robin, Meade Layne's BSRA publication whose ether-ship doctrinal lineage ran parallel to the Adamski tradition from the earlier 1940s
• Little Listening Post, Helen Jackson's 1950s newsletter covering the original contactee scene including Adamski
• Saucer News, Jim Moseley's New Jersey publication that engaged with the contactee figures across the same decades from a sceptical-curious editorial position
• Space Newsletter and Space Craft Digest, the 1950s and 1960s contactee-era publications from the same doctrinal lineage
• Interplanetary Space Patrol, contactee-tradition publication from the same channelled-material register
• Saucers (Max B. Miller), the Los Angeles 1950s publication whose Giant Rock and Van Tassel coverage forms part of the same documentary chain

Cross-cutting themes and surfaces

• Contactees, the publishing tradition UFO Contactee was the late-twentieth-century Japanese continuation of
• Abductions, the parallel tradition the newsletter's August 1991 editorial position explicitly rejected as disinformation, marking the doctrinal divide between contactee and abductee accounts
• Japan, the country exhibition the GAP-Japan branch network sits inside
• United States, the country exhibition the Adamski-tradition lineage UFO Contactee inherited originated in
• Newsletter Archive, the catalogue surface for all 246 newsletter collections