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UFO Contactees: Whatever Happened To...?

Maksutov

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There are so many loose threads, apparent dead ends in reconstructing the early history of the "Contactees".

Whatever happened to Charles and Lillian Laughead after the Dorothy Martin debacle, including whatever happened in the Andes?

Whatever happened to Bryant and Helen Reeves after their "Flying Saucer Pilgrimage"?

What *really* happened to George Hunt Williamson when he took on other identities, saw von Daniken steal his ideas and died penniless in a spare room supported by a more wealthy friend?

How did Williamson and Miller really meet? How many of these people connected through Meade Layne's spiritualist/Fortean groups and publications?

What role did the movements of William Pelley, Guy Ballard, Psychiana and the theosophists play in the development of the cultic milieu that birthed and sustained the early activities?

And so on...so many questions! Am I in the right place or is there another, more appropriate or specialized UFO forum? :)
 
These questions are interesting, but apart from a Google search I do not know if htere is any way to find out.
 
According to a fascinating weekly documentary program on TBS called People of Earth, they prefer the term, "experiencers".
 
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Well, Travis Walton gives talks, and he appears on silly shows where his accounts get more and more vivid and detailed each time he tells them, often containing new pieces of information he's apparently never had the urge to mention before.
 
Homer Simpson's reaction to being kidnapped by aliens: "Don't eat me, I've got a wife and kids! Eat them!".
 
Maksutov said:
There are so many loose threads, apparent dead ends in reconstructing the early history of the "Contactees".

Whatever happened to Charles and Lillian Laughead after the Dorothy Martin debacle, including whatever happened in the Andes?

Whatever happened to Bryant and Helen Reeves after their "Flying Saucer Pilgrimage"?

What *really* happened to George Hunt Williamson when he took on other identities, saw von Daniken steal his ideas and died penniless in a spare room supported by a more wealthy friend?

How did Williamson and Miller really meet? How many of these people connected through Meade Layne's spiritualist/Fortean groups and publications?

What role did the movements of William Pelley, Guy Ballard, Psychiana and the theosophists play in the development of the cultic milieu that birthed and sustained the early activities?

And so on...so many questions! Am I in the right place or is there another, more appropriate or specialized UFO forum? :)
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I do believe that the 'contactee' or 'experiencer' movement fizzled out about 50 years ago.

From the 1960's to the 1990's the UFOs got rather nasty with anal probing and forced cross-breeding of humans and aliens.

However, since then, the UFOs have gotten very, very quiet. In fact, there was at least one UFO convention that I heard of which was cancelled because there were so very few people interested in attending.
 
It's possible to see a sort of evolution of the UFO believer subculture.

It began out of science fiction readers, Fortean enthusiasts, esoteric religious followers, spiritualists and theosophists, reacting to the fear of nuclear apocalypse and the growing reality of space flight. The first wave were those who claimed to ride the flying saucers, who met spacemen and traveled to other worlds. The stories varied slightly but had common themes. They were most successful among believers in spiritualism, readers of Ray Palmer's Fate magazine and mail order cultists. A small cluster of people connected to eachother through Meade Layne's Borderlands Science Research Association. Right before the UFO explosion, Layne had been highlighting the seances of a San Diego medium named Mark Probert. Probert claimed, like many spiritualists and theosophists before him, to be in contact with extraterrestrials. His sessions were promoted heavily and he had also claimed to be one of the first witnesses to a UFO, having contacted the "Kareeta" batwinged craft as it flew over California, before Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting of the "saucers".

But after the contactees (Adamski, Angelucci, Fry, van Tassel, Menger, Howard, Bethurum, ad infinitum) there came the next waves of explainers and alternate historians and conspiracy theorists. Just as the second wave of spiritualism helped set the stage for theosophy.

The conspiracy theorists and paranoia took over from the initial blissful space brother encounters. Government coverups, assassinations, men in black, abductions. All of these things have gone on to expand, creating revisionist histories, sacred sites, holy events, etc to satisfy the most ardent and well-funded true believers. All of these different stages still exist within the movement as something like sectarian divisions. It's really quite a fascinating phenomenon. I think it sheds a good deal of light on how major religions begin.

The study of Dorothy Martin's flying saucer cult produced one of the major scholarly productions on the study of cognitive dissonance. Another similar work was recently published on a more contemporary UFO religion. It continues to be a fruitful field for research in human behavior.
 
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Maksutov said:
What *really* happened to George Hunt Williamson when he took on other identities, saw von Daniken steal his ideas and died penniless in a spare room supported by a more wealthy friend?
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The Secret Life of Alien Contactee George Hunt Williamson [FULL VIDEO] - YouTube
A documentary on his life.

What role did the movements of William Pelley, Guy Ballard, Psychiana and the theosophists play in the development of the cultic milieu that birthed and sustained the early activities?
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There is a book that may contain some hints about that: "The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds", edited by James R. Lewis.

Guy Ballard of the I AM Activity of the early 20th cy.? He once claimed that he and some other people were invited into a cavern in the Royal Teton mountain. Once there, 12 Venusians teleported in in a blaze of light, played a concert, showed off some scientific and technological advances on a large mirror, and predicted happier times for us Earthlings.

Most of the earlier contactees did their contacts telepathically or went on astral journeys, like Emanuel Swedenborg around 1750. Travel by spacecraft was not common for them. Most others also did not go on long trips as he had, mainly contacting inhabitants of Mars, Venus, and the Moon. They got around language differences with telepathy.
 
I play around on Quora all the time, and whenever questions about aliens, abductions, or UFOs pop up, we have a small but very vocal cadre of individuals who will cite chapter and verse about the more spectacular “incidents”, and/or claim to be personally in contact with alien races (usually by telepathic or psychic means).

I usually refrain from calling these folks out, as quite likely they are suffering from some sort of delusions or hallucinations. I usually just point out the normal logical reasons for the lack of alien “visitors”, and the total lack of any actual evidence.
 
I've started a thread about a blog that covers UFO stories that made it into the press, but didn't make it into either Project BlueBook or the UFOlogical literature, my comment to the reply to my OP mentions one case of a 1967 Danish contactee appropriating George Adamski's contact Orthon and convincing people to build a bunker (To survive WWIII which was going to break out on Christmas Day 1967) and then to invest in a free energy machine (To power a home-built flying saucer that would take believers to meet Orthon in person...)

The link below will take readers to that thread.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=322938
 
Graham2001 said:
... and then to invest in a free energy machine (To power a home-built flying saucer that would take believers to meet Orthon in person...)
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A free-energy machine? I'll believe it when I see it. Free energy suppression conspiracy theoryWP is about alleged conspiracies to suppress any of
  • Renewable-energy technologies
  • Cold fusion
  • Perpetual motion machines
  • Zero-point energy
  • Reverse-engineered or donated extraterrestrial technology
  • Other weird sources
That extraterrestrial one goes back to at least 1958, when George Adamski friend Desmond Leslie published his novel The Amazing Mr Lutterworth, a novel that he claimed was 75% nonfiction and based on George Adamski's mission.

In it, the titular character suffers an accident in an ocean liner as he crosses from Britain to the United States, one that makes him lose his memory. He finds that he has 78 mysterious crystals, and he spends the rest of the novel finding out what he is supposed to do with them. On the way, an oil-company executive offers a large sum of money for them, but he declines. He also goes to southern California, where he meets someone much like GA.
In the end, he gets his memory back and he appears before the United Nations General Assembly, distributing the crystals to all the delegates there. It is for a super energy source:
“This power, I tell them, shall change the face of the Earth. No more shall small groups, nor even single men, be able to rule multitudes through hunger in their bellies; for there shall no more be hunger nor want nor cold; and in time again there shall be no more disease, for as man learns to live in harmony with nature, instead of continually struggling against it, he will destroy the cause of disease.”
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Desmond Leslie also stated that conspiracy theory in the documentary UFO SECRET: Alien Contacts - FEATURE FILM - YouTube

One of GA's other associates, a certain Charlotte Blob, apparently also stated it near the end of Rainbow Bridge (film)WP.
 
Bikewer said:
I play around on Quora all the time, and whenever questions about aliens, abductions, or UFOs pop up, we have a small but very vocal cadre of individuals who will cite chapter and verse about the more spectacular “incidents”, and/or claim to be personally in contact with alien races (usually by telepathic or psychic means).
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Carl Sagan had been written to by lots such people. From "The Demon-Haunted World" (Ch. 6: Hallucinations):
Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in "contact" with extraterrestrials. I am invited to "ask them anything." And so over the years I've prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, "Please provide a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem." Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat's Last Theorem. So I write out the simple equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like "Should we be good?" I almost always get an answer. Anything vague, especially involving conventional moral judgments, these aliens are extremely happy to respond to. But on anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything beyond what most humans know, there is only silence. Something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions.
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Most such mathematical problems are mainly of theoretical interest, but there is one with great practical importance because of its importance in computational complexity: P vs. NP. P is is the set of problems that can be solved in polynomial time in the problem size. NP is the set of problems where one can verify a solution in polynomial time but not necessarily find a solution in polynomial time. Every member of P is a member of NP, but it is unknown whether or not every member of NP is also a member of P, and nobody has ever shown that there is some member of NP that is not a member of P.

Related to it are some algorithms important in optimization and cryptography where the only known solution methods are exponential or factorial in size. If certain polynomial-size ones could be shown to exist, then that would make cryptography essentially useless. But if polynomial-time ones could be shown not to exist, then we'd be safe there.

Turning to something nonmathematical, exoplanets are much harder to find than to verify. One has to look at lots of stars to find observable exoplanets, but once one finds an exoplanet, one knows where to look. So some purported extraterrestrial contacts could send over a catalog of exoplanets, along with unit and coordinate conventions. We ought to be able to observe at least some of them.
 
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