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.