Contactee

Contactees were a wave of mostly American figures in the 1950s — George Adamski, Daniel Fry, and George Van Tassel among the best known — who claimed friendly, often repeated and welcomed contact with beautiful, human-looking visitors bearing peaceful, spiritually tinged warnings about atomic weapons and humanity's future. The contactee movement is sharply distinct from the later "abductee" movement that displaced it in public attention from the 1980s onward: contactees described consensual, benevolent encounters they were eager to publicize on lecture tours and in self-published books, while abductees describe traumatic, unwilling experiences they often struggle to disclose at all. Howard Menger, an American contactee whose claimed decades-long relationship with Nordic-type "Space Brothers" is documented in UFOMYST's dossier on his case, exemplifies the genre's mix of sincere belief, showmanship, and lucrative book-and-lecture careers that made contactees a fixture of 1950s pulp culture. Mainstream ufologists of the era, including Blue Book's own consultants, largely dismissed contactees as embarrassments that damaged the field's credibility, since none produced physical evidence and several were caught contradicting their own accounts. The contactee aesthetic — peaceful blond humanoids delivering cosmic warnings — nonetheless survives today almost unchanged in New Age Pleiadian-channeling culture.