Looking for Orthon [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Colin Bennett (Author), John Michell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2001

In a literary tour-de-force, Colin Bennett advances the daring thesis that the defining moment of the twentieth century will prove to be 12.30 pm on Thursday, November 26, 1952, when George Adamski claims to have met Orthon, a long-haired youth from Venus.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

COLIN BENNETT was born in Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest, within arrow-shot of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s castle. He left school after studying mathematics and science, became a professional musician, then a mercenary soldier for a time, before reading English at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He had several plays performed on the professional stage in London, including the Royal Court Theatre, before retraining as an electronics engineer to cure what he calls a bad dose of left-liberal decadence. He then ran his own electronics consultancy and printing firm. He has had two novels published, The Infantryman’s Fear of Open Country, and The Entertainment Bomb, and he lives within spear-throwing distance of Portobello Road

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

  When we view the shattered life that George Adamski weaves between his books, we glimpse multiple dimensions of establishment and military intrigue, and Intelligence allied with conspiracy. Like many visionaries, his life was finally a broken affair, fragmentary and incomplete, and almost as unbelievable as a Cottingley fairy photograph. But if humanity ever loses such heroism born of Adamski’s deep refusal to believe in the world as received, it will be lost forever. If he had ever looked down from his tightrope, he would certainly have fallen, another victim of the breathless cheek of the sheer intellectual eroticism of all prophecy and vision. If most people are terrified by the unusual, those whose lives are committed to thought (as Adamski’s life certainly was), are equally disturbed by the everyday mundane scale of affairs. They see any social conformity as a vast imposture, just as evil as more obvious moral demons.

Adamski had something in him of the dark genius of the covered wagon and riverboat rascals of Mark Twain and Herman Melville. Like Howard Hughes and L. Ron Hubbard, he brought down fire, if not from heaven, certainly from an elemental somewhere. But unlike Hughes and Hubbard, he didn’t make any money, and so America ignored him. But America will have to face Adamski sooner or later, and bring him, if reluctantly, into the pantheon of scarred American heroes.

Like many with a streak of genius, he didn’t really know the difference between work and play, dream and religious impulse, inspiration and rational thought. But his faulty intellectual grasp saved him: it allowed him to play with all these things, and in playing he chanced upon something that talked to him. But like Francois Seurel in Alain-Fournier’s novel Le Grand Meaulnes, Adamski was to lose the enchanted house in the forest that once he saw. Like Ahab, the quest finally consumed him, and like Hemingway’s Old Man, he was left with only fragments of wonder as a magical defiance of time and decay.

When we say that what Adamski saw was created by his “imagination,” we show how far our world has fallen, not progressed. We seem to have forgotten that there is nothing at all which is not conceived by the imagination, and that includes “fact” in itself. In forgetting this, we have lost the long trail between the ravings of visionaries in back rooms, the launch of a space station, and the death of a President. If Adamski’s life can do anything at all, it can teach us how to rediscover that trail.

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Paraview Press; illustrated edition edition (December 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931044325
• ISBN-13: 978-1931044325
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,275,682 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, December 12, 2002

By 

Stacey Harlan (Chico, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Looking for Orthon (Paperback)

I was disappointed in this book.Perhaps I was wrong in expecting something more akin to a biography of Adamsky rather thenan overly long social essay.The author carries his coy andbemused portrayal of Adamsky onfar too long--what at most shouldhave been a brief essay grew tobook length. After a while theone-dimensional semi-joke he attempts to make Adamsky out to be--something akin to how onewho is a little fond of a pet with an entertaining foible mightportray the animal--chasing itstail, for example, grows very, very thin.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Spaced Out..., January 12, 2006

By 

Rory Coker (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Looking for Orthon (Paperback)

The typical pseudoscience book has the characteristic that each chapter deals with a different topic and is completely unconnected to previous and subsequent chapters, and to the book's supposed title or theme. Colin Bennett has found a new paradigm! Each of the 17 chapters in this book, supposedly about 1950s "contactee" George Adamski, is THE SAME! Each chapter starts with a bit of completely unreliable "information" about Adamski, and then veers into precisely the same diatribe, reworded only slightly from chapter to chapter. The word "pandimensional," as a result, occurs on just about every page in the book. Invariably, we hear about the irredeemable and total evil of science, scientists and indeed scholarship or scholarly integrity of any kind in any context. Then we hear about Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Then we hear about Uri Geller, the long forgotten Ted Serios the bellhop and "thoughtographer," Pacific Cargo Cults, and the same few Adamski followers. And then we get an incoherently presented Fortean account of a saucer sighting or a haunting or whatever pops into the author's mind at that particular moment. Then we are told Adamski was unintelligent and an obvious liar, but really, really charming. Then we are told that everything Adamski said was true, because there is no difference between lies and the truth, between fact and fiction. [In fact the author repeatedly uses the undefined, ambiguous and confusing noun "faction," by which he appears to want to imply that fiction and fact are never distinguishable. I have the strong suspicion that if a neighbor ran up to him on the street and blurted out that Bennett's home had just burned down, and that he had lost his entire family, pets and possessions, he would be able fairly directly to determine whether the report was true or false, and that the truth or falsity of the claim would be of deep significance to him.] Then on to the next chapter where the same themes and rants are repeated with only slight variation.

As it turned out, just before reading this volume I had researched Adamski to write a brief profile of him. There is pretty much nothing in the 224 pages here that is either (1) reliable, or (2) different from what is fairly readily available on the Internet. The only "new" aspect to Adamski to be found in LOOKING FOR ORTHON is the claim that he was a homosexual who frequently seduced or tried to seduce handsome young followers (see for example p. 42), but no reason is presented within the text to take the claim seriously. I was reminded by the present book that there is a rich and detailed word-portrait of Adamski in a second printing of a book by Edward J. Ruppelt, a printing available only through the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club back in 1960. I'm impressed that Bennett has even seen a copy. I myself treasure the one I bought in 1960.

Adamski is a very important and very typical character in the history of 20th Century pseudoscience. He deserves a good, detailed, researched biography in english. This is not it, and I do not know of any.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unlike any UFO book I've read, October 27, 2002

By 

Mac Tonnies (Kansas City, MO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Looking for Orthon (Paperback)

Plainly stated, "Looking for Orthon" is one of the most compelling treatments of the UFO phenomenon I've read in years. Superficially, "Looking for Orthon" can be read as a biography of the late flying saucer contactee George Adamski, but it's much more; Bennett probes the innards of 20th century society with an intellectual and literary dexterity seldom encountered in popular works on UFOs. Bennett treats Adamski's bizarre story as the multilayered mythological enigma that it is, recreating the circumstances in which Adamski, good-natured opportunist and hobbyist astronomer, supposedly met a man from Venus. Bennett argues that Adamdki's claimed contact rattled Western society's ontological bedrock, regardless if it actually happened. There aren't very many books that address reality-challenging issues as ably or as wittily as Bennett's. "Looking for Orthon" is a must for anyone seeking the roots of the postmodern condition, and destined to be a classic.