Customer Reviews

Messages from the People of the Planet Clarion: The True Experiences of Truman Bethurum

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This appears to be an unedited reprint of Bethurum's last published book, THE PEOPLE OF THE PLANET CLARION, which first appeared in 1970 shortly after his death. Bethurum was the second of the 1950s "contactees," curious characters who claimed to have met and talked with completely-human-appearing space aliens from other planets in our solar system. The first and best-known contactee was George Adamski, whom Bethurum seems to have been on fairly friendly terms with.

The first 44 pages are mainly an autobiography of Bethurum, and evoke a fairly interesting time in the early 20th Century history of a rural part of California. The text sounds as if it had been dictated by Bethurum to a tape recorder; alas, no one seems to have cared enough to ask him to elaborate in the many places where he lapses into unintelligibility. The next few chapters sort of orbit around the events of Bethurum's first book, ABOARD A FLYING SAUCER (1954), getting eventually to a space alien "commandment" of December 1955 for Bethrum to found a religious commune, the "Sanctuary of Thought."

The rest of the 139 pages are a random grab-bag of newspaper clippings plus a FAQ section about the planet Clarion and its people. I found it amusing that although "Tru" claimed to have chatted with the lovely Captain Aura Rhanes of Clarion nearly a dozen times, for substantial parts of an hour each time, the "information" about Clarion consists of a few isolated and generally incomprehensible sentences, already contained in ABOARD A FLYING SAUCER, repeated over and over. One gets the impression "Tru" and Aura spent most of their time together breathing heavily instead of conversing.

The 1950s contactees have generally been dismissed by those in the field of "ufoology" as harmless and often charming charlatans. Others have depicted them as evil tools of the CIA, who deliberately set out to convince the public of the inherent absurdity of any attempt to "study" flying saucers. It's only necessary to read the books of the contactees to see that essentially all of them were in fact motivated by deeply-held religious convictions (and most already led, or came ot lead, a religious cult), and that they were trying in their own way to bring simplistic, fundamentalist religious concepts into some kind of harmony with the science fiction/space travel ferment of the early 1950s.

I believe this book is true but it did not all happen as Aura wanted. Which means she has more work to do here or, on the other hand, it is about over.

Something NOT being disproven[sic] doesn't make it true. Example: You can't prove there isn't a tooth fairy.