Customer Reviews

Looking for Orthon

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Colin Bennett summarises this book when he says that "the problem here is that in the 20th century we have lost the relationship between imagination and fact".
Bennet will be viewed as either an apologist for [George Adamski], or as having the insight to see beyond the superficial straw that Adamski worked with to perceive the small but priceless quantity of gold produced. In fact both views are correct and at the same time. In other words we are in contradictory territory here and Bennett is a wise guide.
In discussing the power of metaphor (central to his thesis) Bennett says attempts to alter meaning will cause "forces beyond all belief to be summoned". This is truly stated and can be easily inverted to produce an equal truth. Such is the nature of this perplexing book - all is ambiguity.
The old showman that was George Adamski deserves this book. It offers a wonderful, rich, rewarding and finally fabulous journey to the dream/reality factory. Go visit.

George Adamski, the subject of Colin Bennett's `Looking for Orthon,' was not simply a flying saucer "nut." Adamski, probably the world's most famous UFO Contactee, was both a complex individual, and a simple, at times naive, man. This naiveté does not mean that Adamski's experiences were hoaxes or delusions. It might surprise some readers to know that Adamski's saucers were witnessed by many people. Adamski `s experiences did not exist in a vacuum. Adamski's story is exciting, certainly interesting and strange, and at times, including towards the end, poignant.


Bennett not only writes about Adamski's experiences, but puts Adamski, and the Contactee movement, into a wonderful, dizzying context of American culture, of world culture at that time, making often times surprising (yet, upon reflection, perfectly sensible) connections.

Colin Bennett goes deeper than this however, for he also addresses the phenomeana itself. Bennett is no true believer, but he is also vehemently anti "chronic, or cultural, skeptic" (his terms) and tells us exactly why. It is not Adamski that is up for critique, even while addressing his faults, it is everything else as well; culture, skeptics, politics, true believers, military, classism, history, and more.

Bennett's writing style is not only knowledgeable, but extremely funny much of the time, and always insightful. His wit and humor should not be mistaken for shallowness or mere facetiousness.


If you are new to the Contactees of the 1950s and 1960s or to George Adamski's story, this book will reveal not only the basic facts, but a rich backdrop that creates understanding and insight into not only Adamski, but UFOlogy, American culture, and history as well.

This is an interesting book about the Adamski case: not a believer, nor a skeptic but a balanced research into his life and his words. It's full of insights...I strongly recommed this book.