For that matter, why did Leonard Cramp draw up plans of it too?According to a "Twigsnapper" post, Bergier came to Washington in 1953, the year that Linda first saw the silver model of the scout ship. Are these events connected?
Strangely, in Linda's memory of events, it was only after the model appeared, that Townsend asked family friend and engineering draftsman Tommy (Of Tommy and Barbara, last name forgotten) to draw up large scale plans of it it. Why did he want them and what did he do with them?
One might well say that the Adamski "Scout Ship" has a rather bell-like appearance to it, yes. For me, it's always given off creepy Nazi vibes, but that's probably just because it's built with 1930s design language (sort of midway between "streamlined" and "brutalist") and that decade's industrial products always creep me out.
On Adamski, I find myself personally most convinced by Mark Hallet's "A Critical Appraisal of George Adamski" (2015) - https://archive.org/details/ACriticalAp ... ceBrothers and the argument by Joel Carpenter (p58) that the top of Adamski's saucer exactly matches a lantern lid from Turner Brass Company. Certainly Adamksi's weird plate-based Brownie-camera with fuzzy optical telescope could not have taken snapshots of any moving object in real time. Although for some reason I have also always been drawn to Håkan Blomqvist of UFO Sweden (https://ufoarchives.blogspot.com/) who has mapped out the deep psychedelic strangeness in the reports of people around Adamski who, apparently, saw something very like the Scout Ship on multiple occasions.
Hallet's timeline:
November 1933 - George Adamski and his wife Mary buy a large house in Laguna Beach, California (the Claude Bronner house) to be the headquarters of Adamski's new spiritual group "The Royal Order of Tibet". He was previously preaching for a spiritual group "The Order of Loving Service".
1940 - for unknown reasons Adamski and his followers (and Mary, who fades from the historical record at this point) leave Laguna Beach and move to a farm in Valley Center near Mount Palomar
(It's probably a coincidence that Townsend Brown later moves to Laguna Beach in the 1940s... but presumably Laguna was a bit of a hotspot for people with off-mainstream ideas)
"early 1940s" - Ray Palmer (of Fate Magazine, but at that time editor for other SF magazines) receives a manuscript from Adamski for a science-fiction novel involving Jesus returning to earth on a spacecraft, which he chooses not to publish because the subject was too scandalous
1944 - Adamski moves to "Palomar Gardens" on Mount Palomar and builds a cafe and sets up a (poor quality, badly mounted) telescope
1944 - Adamski "writes" (actually ghostwritten by his secretary Lucy McGinnis) a science-fiction novel "Pioneers of Space", which contains many elements that would later appear in "Inside the Flying Saucers", and which might be a toned-down version of his rejected Ray Palmer submission
6 October 1946 - during a meteor shower in San Diego, Adamski claims to see a cigar-shaped object motionless in the sky with several other witnesses. One of these witnesses was apparently (per Loren E Gross) the medium Mark Probert, friend of Meade Layne, of Borderland Sciences Research Foundation/Associates. Meade Layne knew nothing about Townsend Brown at this time, and wouldn't until December 1954 at the very earliest (per letters in the Gray Barker collection - Layne, like others in the UFO community, and apparently like Jacques Cornillon if we believe his words, only learned about Townsend because of the 1952 Mason Rose "Flying Saucers" publicity wave and paper, and even then not until 1954/55. Once Layne, and then his successor Riley Crabb, learned about Townsend's gravity claims, he became an advocate in his Borderland circle, though he just added Townsend - and for some reason the Philadelphia Experiment - to his many other UFO/psychic/radionics interests).
June 1947 - Kenneth Arnold sighting puts "flying saucers" in the public eye
1949 - Adamski shifts from lecturing on post-Theosophy to lecturing on flying saucers
1950 - Frank Scully's "Behind the Flying Saucers" (claimed to be a fraud in 1952 and 1956 by John Philip Cahn in True Magazine) describes a story reported to him of an alleged saucer crash in Aztec, New Mexico, introducing the concepts of dead alien bodies, military cover-up, and a three-hemisphere landing gear
March 21, 1950 - Adamski lectures on flying saucers are published in San Diego Journal and Tribute
July 1951 - Adamski writes articles (with Maurice Weekley) about viewing strange lights in the sky with telescopes, published in Ray Palmer's Fate Magazine
September 18, 1951 - classic SF film The Day The Earth Stood Still opens featuring Klaatu, a silver-suited spaceman
1952 - Ray Palmer republishes Adamski's articles, with others from Fate Magazine, in "The Coming of the Saucers" with Kenneth Arnold
June 1952- radio personality Walter Winchell mentions that "a scientist from Mount Palomar" (Adamski) had met extraterrestrials
November 18, 1952 - Adamski claims to meet a saucer at Desert Center, with several companions, who do not actually see the saucer. He describes to his friends the "Venusian" he meets, with a costume much like Klaatu from TDTESS, and also claims to have photographed the saucer
November 24, 1952 - the Phoenix Gazette, Arizona publishes the first blurry Adamski saucer picture (p37 in Hallet, a reconstructed version - original provided by veteran Forteana researcher Michael Swords. This photo was apparently ignored by the UFO community until republished in 2000 by Hallet.)
December 13, 1952 - Adamski reports a second contact with a moving aerial saucer at Mount Palomar, with clearer pictures (taken, extremely improbably, with his cumbersome plate/Brownie/telescope camera which would take "over 40 operations", presumably minutes, to set up each shot).
(These extremely unconvincing photos of 1952 - for some reason - become famous in the UFO community, even for highly connected military-adjacent people like Townsend Brown.)
( 1953 ) Clara Little John's "The Little Listening Post" republishes and completely rewrites the November 24 Phoenix Gazette story, including reports of the December 13 1952 pictures.
(1953) Waveny Girvan from publishing house Werner Laurie in London reads "The Little Listening Post" account. He also has a manuscript for a UFO book by Desmond Leslie. He contacts both Adamski and Leslie and sets up a joint book deal.
(when in 1953 exactly did Linda see the Scout Ship model? and when exactly did Clara John cross Townsend's path?)
September 30, 1953 - The Adamski/Leslie book "Behind the Flying Saucers" is released in the UK and then later in the USA. Adamski becomes an international celebrity.
February 15, 1954 - 13-year-old Stephen Darbishire in Coniston, Lancashire claims to see UFOs looking like the Scout Ship, and takes photographs. It turns out later that he had already seen photos of the Scout Ship from Behind The Flying Saucers advertising material, and Hallet's suspicion is that he faked his photos using 2D images. Stephen later (circa 1959, after meeting and becoming disillusioned with Adamski) claims that he did fake them, but later still in life (2001, to David Clarke and Andy Roberts) will neither confirm nor deny and merely say that he photographed "an object". See Clarke and Roberts' 2001 article in Magonia Magazine, which is a little more ambiguous and suggests Stephen still believed in 2001 that his experience was real: http://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/201 ... shire.html
(1954) Leslie meets Darbishire and involves Leonard Cramp of the British Interplanetary Society (a serious rocket advocacy group; Arthur C Clarke was Clairman 1946-1947 and 1951-1953p: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_I ... ry_Society) who believes the saucer is a real object.
May 15, 1954: An article about Darbishire by Leslie published in Australian magazine "Pix":
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-473090858/vi ... 8/mode/1up
(1954) Cramp publishes "Space, Gravity and the Flying Saucer" involving his detailed imaginary "plans" of the Venusian Scout Ship, and his speculation that it runs on gravity. (A fairly Townsendian line of thinking). Introduction by Desmond Leslie. Republished in the USA in 1955. Available to read on Internet Archive (login and borrow required): https://archive.org/details/bwb_W7-CRL- ... 5/mode/2up
One of the things mentioned very early in Cramp's 1954/55 book (p32) is a "falling leaf" or "pendulum" motion of flying saucers, which we know Townsend Brown also commented on as being "ours", whatever that meant to him.
Two Brazilian reporters, Ed Keffel and Joac Martins... Ilha dos Amores (Isle of Lovers), in the district of Barra da Tijuca, Brazil... 7th May 1952... "a circular disc moving soundlessly... blue-grey in colour and definitely not glowing, but metallic in appearance... started tp slip in 'pendulum fashion', losing height just like a falling leaf from a tree. It then accelerated at a terrific rate and disappeared the way it had come, out to sea.
September 1952... Topcliffe, Yorks R.A.F. Station... object was silver and circular in shape, about ten thousand feet up... while descending it was swinging in a pendulum fashion from left to right... it stopped its descent and hung in the air, rotating as if on its own axis. Then it accelerated at an incredible speed to the west, turned south-east and then disappeared.
Meanwhile (1956)
Ding! There's that British Interplanetary Association connection again.The second dumpling is this, taken from published newspapers account of the founding of NICAP. According to Townsend, he hoped the organization would be able to raise enough money to put out a magazine called Space Flight... Curiously, that was the same year the British Interplanetary Association published the first edition of their venerable SpaceFlight magazine.
The Internet Archive doesn't have full issues of Spaceflight, but it does have indexes. Here's the index for Spaceflight's first two years, October 1956 to October 1958. https://archive.org/details/sim_spacefl ... x/mode/1up
We've seen how the Adamski story jumped straight from California to England. What exactly was Townsend doing in London in November 1955, and for who? We know about the Paris link, but London? As that article says:
The British UFO scene quietly included a lot of very high-ranking people, as Clarke and Roberts mention in 2001:He expects to be around for Nov 15, when he goes back to London as research director for Whitehall-Rand. He's also a consulting physicist in Paris for a French aircraft company.
Flying saucers arrived in the British Isles in the late summer of 1950, when two popular weekend newspapers, the Sunday Dispatch and the Sunday Express, launched a major media promotion campaign. Both papers competed to serialise the seminal books by Major Donald Keyhoe Flying Saucers are Real, Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers and Gerald Heard’s Riddle of the Flying Saucers. Behind the scenes, the editor of the Sunday Dispatch, Charles Eade, was quietly encouraged to promote flying saucer stories bv his friend Lord Mountbatten, whom he had served as Press officer during the Second World War (3). Mountbatten, who was at that time a personal believer in the ET origin of the saucers, felt the subject should be taken seriously and wanted to make the public aware of the ‘evidence.’
Hallet thinks of this spiritual "midlife crisis" of Darbishire's parents as a very bad thing, and while that could be the case, it doesn't necessarily have to have been. It would be interesting to know what the ultimate effect of it was, looking back.Before the March was out Stephen had been invited to a saucer-spotters convention in London where delegates scrutinised blurry enlargements of his photograph. He recalls how “it all got rather hysterical and one chap leapt up and said he could see a face in a porthole.”
It was during this visit to London in March 1954, that Stephen and his father were secreted into a car and driven to Buckingham Palace to meet one of the Duke of Edinburgh’s private secretaries. It was claimed the invitation came from the Palace via Desmond Leslie who had contacts at ‘the highest level’. In fact, the Sunday Dispatch got wind of the meeting soon afterwards and reported how Prince Philip had read about Stephen’s sighting in the newspapers “and wanted to know more.” (14)
The Royal Equerry, RAF Squadron Leader Sir Peter Horsley was at that time involved in his own “saucer” study with the blessing of the Duke, and “the Darbishire boys” became the latest in a series of saucer-spotters who were invited to his office to discuss their sightings. In his autobiography, Horsley says he was “impressed by their story and truthfulness” and notes Dr Darbishire “was not relishing the publicitv and notoriety the family were receiving from the newspapers.” Horsley sent a report of the meeting to the Duke, who was in Australia at the time, and asked a professional photographer, Wallace Heaton, to examine the negatives. His conclusion said, in summary: “Yes, they could have been faked but they were so good it would have cost quite a lot of money.” This left the RAF veteran puzzled: how could an ordinary farming family find the money to finance an elaborate hoax and even if they had, what was their motivation? “Was there a wider conspiracy?” he mused. (15)
Stephen Darbishire’s visit to Buckingham Palace was just the beginning of a series of adventures which led him and his family further and deeper into the bizarre world of the flying saucer cult. Visitors called in at the Darbishire family home without invitation, and letters arrived by the sackful including one from none other than Lord Dowding, the Battle of Britain hero – another highly placed saucer believer at that time. In 1959 Stephen was introduced by Desmond Leslie to George Adamski at a meeting held in London during the contactee’s lecture tour of Britain and Europe. Stephen, who was by then attending art school, remained “unimpressed” by the contactee who he dismissed as “mad, mad as a hatter… somewhere else altogether.” It was at this stage, Stephen told us in 2001, that he asked himself: “How can I be involved in this, how can I actually be sitting here with these people?”
The teenager was by now feeling increasingly that he was pawn in other people’s games, that the photo was no longer his property “…all I was being used for was an instrument of verification.” As a result he decided the best way out was to put the word around that his photos were in fact fakes so he could go back to living a normal life.
In a letter sent to UFO author Timothy Good in 1986 Stephen told how “…in desperation I … said it was a fake.” (16) But as Alex Birch and others who followed in Stephen’s footsteps were later to find, the ‘hoax’ declaration did not bring an end to the notoriety – rather the opposite: “I was counter-attacked, accused of working with the `Dark Powers’ … or patronisingly ‘understood’ for following orders from some secret government department.”
While Stephen remained detached from the strange characters and even stranger beliefs that surrounded his experience, he found the biggest impact of all was upon the lives of his parents. Following the experiences of 1954, Dr Darbishire underwent what his son described as “a midlife crisis.” The visitors and attention his family received from the flying saucer movement opened up a whole new world of possibilities and Darbishire senior became drawn into the world of the occult, collecting a huge library of books on a range of esoteric subjects. The workshop at his farm became a laboratory where he constructed strange machines that utilised revolving lights to detect the human aura and effect alternative cures. Similarly, Stephen’s mother was also profoundly affected by the experience and became more interested in the spiritual world.
In 2004, Darbishire was still claiming his encounter was real to the Westmorland Gazette:
https://www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk ... t-and-ufo/
Regards, NateSpeaking to The Westmorland Gazette, well-known artist Mr Darbishire, now 63 and living in Whinfell, wished the artist luck but said the encounter with the flying saucer had definitely not been faked.
"We just went up the fell and took the photograph of it. I was with my cousin at the time. This thing, whatever it was, appeared, we took a photograph of it. I fell over the camera at one point. When we took it down, everybody laughed at us. I've no idea what it was."
He said the publication of the photograph, encouraged by his father, generated years of unwelcome attention. "For two years, every weekend was taken up with people coming and sitting on the lawn. Most of the people who came were sort of on some religious trip, that's the best way to put it. To a 14-year-old, it was a bit of a joke."
