Looking for Orthon [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

~ (Author), John Michell (Foreword) "George Adamski was born in Poland on the 17th of April 1891 of parents Joseph and Frances Adamski..." (more)
Key Phrases: saucers have, desert contact, space folk, Flying Saucers Have Landed, George Adamski, Desmond Leslie (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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, 20 November, 1952, when George Adamski met Orthon, a long-haired youth from Venus. It happened in the Californian desert in the presence of witnesses. From that moment the cat was out of the bag, the space people were among us, and nothing has ever been the same since… The effects of this on popular culture are to be seen everywhere… In the modern imagination the UFO is a constant, not just a space-craft but a reminder that the world is not as rational as our educators pretend.. [Adamski] was an impressive old rogue, like Madame Blavatsky and in the same tradition. Such people, according to Plato are the kind whom the gods choose to enlighten us.” -- From the Foreword by John Michell, author of The New View Over Atlantis and Who Wrote Shakespeare?

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

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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.com Sales Rank: #1,818,440 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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)

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 3 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)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Adamski: No Mere Flying Saucer 'Kook', January 25, 2007

By	Regan Lee (Oregon) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.