Secrets of the Space Bothers

By Nick Redfern

The controversial era of the flying saucer was well and truly ushered in on June 24, 1947, when an American pilot named Kenneth Arnold had an extraordinary airborne encounter at the Cascade Mountains, Washington State, USA. It was around 3.00 p.m. on the day at issue, and Arnold was deeply engaged in looking for an airplane that was reportedly crashed on the southwest side of the huge and sprawling Mt. Rainier.

In Arnold’s very own words: “I hadn’t flown more than two or three minutes on my course when a bright flash reflected on my airplane. It startled me as I thought I was too close to some other aircraft. I looked every place in the sky and couldn’t find where the reflection had come from until I looked to the left and the north of Mt. Rainier, where I observed a chain of nine peculiar looking aircraft flying from north to south at approximately 9,500 feet elevation and going, seemingly, in a definite direction of about 170 degrees.”

Arnold added that the mysterious craft were closing in rapidly on Mt. Rainier, and that he was highly puzzled by their overall design: “I thought it was very peculiar that I couldn’t find their tails but assumed they were some type of jet plane. The more I observed these objects, the more upset I became, as I am accustomed and familiar with most all objects flying whether I am close to the ground or at higher altitudes. The chain of these saucer-like objects [was] at least five miles long. I felt confident after I would land there would be some explanation of what I saw [sic].”

Even J. Edgar Hoover’s all-powerful Federal Bureau of Investigation was puzzled and impressed by Arnold’s character and his story: “It is difficult to believe that a man of [Arnold’s] character and apparent integrity would state that he saw objects and write up a report to the extent that he did if he did not see them,” the FBI reported at the time in then-secret memoranda. No firm conclusion for Arnold’s now-historic encounter ever surfaced, and the mystery concerning the specific nature and origin of the nine objects he viewed on that fateful day continues to be hotly debated more than sixty years later.

As the skies of the United States, and pretty much just about everywhere else too, became populated with more and more flying saucers during the heady summer of 1947, the U.S. military quickly realized that finding an answer to the mystery was an issue of paramount, and possibly even profound, importance. As a result, investigations were put into place, and which became unified under the banner of an official operation named Project Sign. In 1948, Sign was replaced by Project Grudge; which, in turn, became Project Blue Book – the latter being the Air Force’s most famous and publicly visible UFO study program, and which continued until 1969, when it was finally closed down.

Although the Air Force grudgingly admitted that of the 12,618 reports it had investigated between 1947 and 1969, no less than 701 seemingly defied definitive explanation, military officials were adamant that no evidence existed in support of the notion that alien beings were visiting the Earth. But perhaps the Air Force’s apparent inability to resolve the matter was because the phenomenon did not behave in a fashion that its personnel – carefully groomed and trained to respond quickly to threats of both a confirmed nature and a potential nature – might have anticipated or expected of them. For example, there was never any War of the Worlds or Independence Day-style invasion of the planet; and human-beings were not secretly replaced by alien look-a-likes, in some macabre, real-life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But, equally, there was no friendly, en-masse, worldwide landing on the part of the aliens either. And there was certainly no historic touch-down of an extra-terrestrial vehicle on the lawns of the White House, in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, or outside the doors to the Kremlin.

Indeed, there are reasons for believing that those whose role it was to protect the free world from hostile invaders were seemingly looking for the aliens in all the wrong places: while the military was busily dispatching its jets to chase flying saucers in the skies above, or carefully scanning its radar-screens for any evidence of unknown objects violating American airspace, it was at distinctly ground-level that strange and remarkable things of an other-worldly nature were reportedly afoot.

Since the late-1940s, countless people, all across the world, have claimed face-to-face contact with eerily human-like aliens from far-off planets. The aliens in question are usually seen dressed in tight-fitting, one-piece-outfits, while sporting heads of lush, long and flowing blond hair. Not only that: our cosmic visitors assure those of us who they deem worthy of contact that they are deeply concerned by our warlike ways. They wish us to disarm our nuclear arsenals, live in peace and harmony with one another, and elevate ourselves to whole new spiritual levels. The aliens in question have become known as the Space-Brothers; while those whose lives have been touched and forever changed by their encounters with such alleged extra-terrestrial entities are an elite body of people known as the Contactees.

If the testimony of the witnesses can be considered valid, in the early years of contact the aliens took a decidedly alternative, novel, and – some would argue – even quaint approach to their liaisons with the people of Earth; something which may explain why the military had such a hard time definitively proving the reality of the UFO phenomenon. Allegedly preferring face-to-face encounters with normal, everyday members of society (rather than with, say, presidents, prime-ministers, queens, kings, and other allegedly illustrious heads-of-state), the Space-Brothers are said to have arranged their clandestine meetings at such out-of-the-way locations as blisteringly hot deserts, dense forests, stark mountain-peaks, and even within isolated diners situated on long stretches of dusty, sand-and-wind-blasted highway. And California was a particularly favorite haunt and haven of the Space-Brothers, too, as will soon become acutely apparent.

Moreover, in many cases on record, the aliens did not even greet their elite, chosen ones in glistening, futuristic spacecraft. Rather, exhibiting surprisingly good-taste and a high degree of flair and panache, in the formative years of contact they sometimes preferred far more conventional forms of travel, including cool-looking cars of the type that dominated 1950s America. Or so we are earnestly told, at least.

The history of the Space-Brothers is packed with fascinating and controversial characters with equally fascinating and controversial other-worldly accounts to relate, including: George Adamski, the man who claimed to have met aliens from Venus and taken a trip to the Moon; the elderly woman who believes that human-like extra-terrestrials have successfully infiltrated the heart of the Pentagon and the highest levels of Government; Daniel Fry, an employee of the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, who maintained he had repeated encounters with human-looking aliens that generously took him for a flight across the skies of the United States in their futuristic spacecraft, and warned him that unless humankind changed its ways, it would very soon become extinct; Truman Bethurum, who is alleged to have become far more than friendly with the hot, female “Space Captain Aura Rhanes,” whose repeated appearances in Bethurum’s life subsequently led his enraged wife to divorce him; George Hunt Williamson, who was a friend of George Adamski, and who maintained that he, too, became the target of the aliens’ activities, and who was urged by his cosmic contacts to both write and lecture about his alien experiences; the elderly Maier sisters – whose mid-1950s claims of being contacted by extra-terrestrials (via the less-than-sensational medium of shortwave radio, no less) led to a secret visit from agents of the CIA; George King, who founded the now-famous Aetherius Society, and who went from taxi-driver to mouthpiece of the aliens practically overnight; Sir Peter Horsley, a leading figure in the British military, who said he had a face-to-face encounter with a mysterious visitor from space who called himself “Mr. Janus;” the controversial Claude Maurice Marcel Vorilhon (who, today, goes by the moniker of Raël), the founder and leader of the UFO-themed religion known as Raëlism; and Eduard “Billy” Meier, a farmer born in the town of Bulach in the Swiss Lowlands, who says his first other-worldly contacts began in 1942 at the age of five - with an elderly, human-looking extra-terrestrial named Sfath.

What is the strange truth behind these claimed encounters of the cosmic kind? We will only know the answer to that question when all the pieces of the unearthly puzzle finally fall into place.

Nick Redfern is the author of the new book, “Contactees,” to be released December 2009 by New Page Press (EAN 978-1-60163-096-4).