The Desert Center Contact

By his own account, Adamski had been trying to photograph craft from the grounds of his Palomar Gardens campground and diner for several years. On 20 November 1952 he travelled to the desert near Desert Center with six others. He said he left the group and walked toward a bell-shaped craft that had come down among the hills, where he met a being who appeared to be a young man. Adamski described him as about five feet six inches tall, roughly 135 pounds, and about twenty-eight years old, with sandy hair worn to the shoulders, a chocolate-brown one-piece garment, and oxblood shoes. The only spoken sound Adamski reported was a reply to a question about atomic weapons: "Boom! Boom!" Everything else, he wrote, passed between them by telepathy and hand signs. He said the visitor came from Venus and was concerned about radiation from nuclear testing on Earth.

Six people who travelled to the desert that day signed sworn statements, witnessed before notaries, attesting that they "were a party to and saw the personal contact between George Adamski and a man from another world." They were Alice K. Wells, who had helped fund the Palomar Gardens property in 1944; Lucy McGinnis, Adamski's secretary, who had ghostwritten his 1949 novel Pioneers of Space; the fellow contactee George Hunt Williamson, who said he had taken plaster casts of the visitor's footprints; Williamson's wife Betty; and Al C. and Betty J. Bailey. The signed, notarised affidavits became part of the account's presentation in print, lending it the apparatus of legal testimony.

The witnesses were members of Adamski's immediate circle, and the statements documented their involvement as much as the claimed event. Years later, Al C. Bailey told the UFO investigator James Moseley that he had not seen a UFO or an alien during the desert trip, a recollection that contradicted the affidavit he had signed.

The Desert Center account reached readers less through specialist journals than through the popular press. In December 1953, the Melbourne weekly Australasian Post serialised Flying Saucers Have Landed across six pages, billing it on the cover and packaging it with a commissioned colour illustration, a photograph of a luminous object over New York, and the reproduced affidavits. It was one of the primary channels through which the contactee narrative entered Australian public consciousness.