Somewhere in the Skies - Take Me To Your Influencer: The Original Space Bros of the Contactee Era

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

In this in-depth conversation, Ryan sits down with historian, author, and host of The Saucer Life, Aaron Gulyas. They break down the fascinating exploration of the Contactee Movement, those early UFO claimants who said they met benevolent “Space Brothers” from Venus, Mars, and beyond. From George Adamski’s iconic photographs and cosmic philosophy, to George Van Tassel’s channelings of Ashtar and the rise of the Integratron, to the absolutely wild saga of Reinhold Schmidt, a part-time grain buyer, part-time flying saucer felon. Aaron breaks down the origins, motives, influence, and patterns behind these enduring stories. They also discuss how contactee lore still echoes through modern UFO discourse, why these narratives keep resurfacing, and whether any of these individuals might have experienced something genuinely anomalous. Find The Saucer Life at: https://saucerlife.com/ Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple. Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] All Socials and Books: https://linktr.ee/somewhereskiespod Email: [e-mail] SpectreVision Radio: https://www.spectrevision.com/podcasts Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Copyright © 2025 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. #HighStrangeness #ContacteeMovement #SaucerLife #CosmicMystery #AlienContact #SpaceBrothers #ParanormalHistory #PodcastInterview #MysteryPodcast #SomewhereInTheSkies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Spectrevision Radio. This is Ryan Sprague and I am here with my UK friends and this is... Somewhere in the Sky! While our government's official position is not to speculate on this subject, We can choose to let our minds explore other possibilities to use our imaginations. For if we consider that astro-scientists agree on one point, that the possibility of life elsewhere is not only quite probable,

some feel if is there without a doubt. Let us suppose them that these objects are real space vehicles, extraterrestrial origin, and not an illusion of the mind. I'm Ryan Spray, and you are now somewhere in the skies. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I am your host, Ryan Sprague, and I thought, what better time to bring on the person. In my personal opinion, the expert on the contactee movement. He is the host of the Saucer Life podcast, one of my favorite shows to listen to.

So without further ado, I'm going to bring him on. Aaron Gullias, welcome to Somewhere in the Skies, brother. Hey, Ryan, how's it going? Good, good. Now, I have to admit, I think this is the first time I'm having you on the show, just you. I think so, yeah. You've been featured in the show. Yeah, I've done some audio from your lecture at a conference we did together in Nova Scotia.

But this is the first time I actually have you on. So it's an honor and pleasure, man. That's great to be here. Thank you. Thank you. Well, let's talk about that. Before we get into your origin story and how you got involved with all this craziness, Let's talk about esotericon 2018.

It was amazing. It seems like a million years ago, right? But, man. And you were there and Tim Bonal and Greg Bishop and Walter Bosley and Micahanks. So it was Holly Stevens. And it was just a great, great event that Paul Kimball put together out there in Halifax. Absolutely. I mean, I will always cherish those memories of stayed up till two, three, three.

in the morning chatting with you guys all about all this UFO stuff, paranormal, everything in between Paul put on an incredible, incredible event. Are there any other memorable moments you have from that esoteric on that you can drum up for us here? I think probably my, one of my favorites was just being in the Airbnb house we were all in, recording an episode of Greg Bishop's Radio Mysterioso podcast. That was, it was, I'm not sure, I don't think it made it into the archives, just because there were so many people in the room talking. I can't imagine that.

Too much profanity, right? A lot of profanity. one of those things where it was much more if you had to be there a sort of thing so from a listener point of view it might not have been the greatest experience but I I love that some incredible conversations and on things ranging from UFOs to ghosts to to cryptids to the whole the whole weirdness gamut was sort of run there so I really enjoyed that yeah it was a time I will never forget and my first time meeting you in person and I And the lecture you gave was by far my favorite. And we'll get to the lecture because that's kind of what I want to talk to you about a little later on here in the conversation. But I got to ask, Aaron, how did you get involved with all this? As a kid, like junior high age or so, I watched a lot of In Search of as a kid, old In Search of reruns with Leonard Nimoy from back in the 70s. And so this was like, you know, the mid-80s.

So they were on in the afternoons. Whenever the Cubs game got done early, they'd slap on an in-search-of episode on Sunday afternoons or whatever. So I was aware of UFOs and the whole paranormal thing. And then I can't remember the exact name of the book, but it was by a guy named Daniel Cohen, who wrote books like the world's most famous ghosts and lots of young reader-oriented UFO and paranormal stuff. And I just sort of got into it. And then in high school, I think I was a senior in high school when the X-Files premiered. So I remember being like 17 and watching that first episode of The X-Files and then going to read Howard Blum's book out there, which was my introduction to the whole MJ12 nonsense and all of that.

And so I then I just went off to college in 94 and discovered the end. internet. And once you discover the internet, the rest is history with some of these things. And got into the contact East stuff, mostly because it was different. It was not graze and abductions. It just went from there. And then sort of, you know, got involved in in commenting and conversations on the UFO blogosphere in the early 2000s and 2010s, which is where I met, Greg Bishop and Paul Kimball and Mac Tonys and all of those guys. And then, you know, ended up expanding my thesis into my first book, Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist, which sort of narrowed down things to the contactees.

And it just sort of went from there. And then in 2017, I started The Saucer Life just because I saw room for a UFO podcast that wasn't an interview format that was more of a documentary format that was sort of envisioned it as sort of like Dan Carlin's hardcore history, but with UFOs and not episodes that are eight hours long and coming out more than once a year. So that was sort of the impetus for that. And now I've sort of expanded beyond that a little bit with a new podcast with a co-host, my friend Samantha Engel, called Great Lakes lore, where we look at weird history and paranormal stuff. more from the perspective of professional historians looking at these things. So it's been a fairly

constant presence in my life for the last almost 30 years, which is troubling. But yeah, yeah, there and sort of branching out into more political conspiracy culture and the more time I spend with all of it, the goofier I think it all is. Yep. It's a gift and a curse, I know. It is for sure. Well, okay, so the contacting movement, I want to use that buzzword contactee for a moment with you. For any of our listeners who may not be familiar with what that is, what it really entails, when it all kind of rose to prominence, I guess. Would you mind giving us, as a professor, kind of your cliff notes version of what the contacting movement is? Yeah, please.

Yeah, the sort of thumbnail sketch of the contactee movement. So in the 1950s and into the 1960s, one of the sort of strands of flying saucer research that was out there, a flying saucer culture that was out there, was this group of people who claimed that they had had some kind of personal contact with extraterrestrial beings. It might be physical, like an actual physical encounter. It might be a channeled experience, sort of psychically channeled. It might be even something sort of kind of like psychic channeling, even automatic writing in some cases. So these contact the experiences have some commonalities. For the most part, almost entirely, the extraterrestrial visitors that we see in these cases. have come from cultures that are that are remarkably earthlike.

They come mostly from planets within our solar system. Venus was very popular. And this is before we knew that Venus was basically an ammonia atmosphere, hellhole, right? So they're human in appearance. They're like us. They're like earthlings. Their civilizations were once like Earth, but they evolved beyond that. that. They evolved beyond things like warfare and destruction and greed and environmental degradation

and racial strife and things like this. And so they wanted to help Earth by warning humans of the dangers of especially nuclear warfare and atomic weapons, that there were threats, that if humanity were to have a nuclear war, a global nuclear war, it would not only be destroy the earth, it would cause cosmic repercussions to all these other planets. So the contact e-movement, contact the experiences tend to have these similarities, and probably the biggest one is that in some way there is some kind of message, some kind of social message, political message, economic message, some kind of, some kind of of preaching in a way, a didactic lesson on how humanity, how humanity can evolve.

And these groups are these people are all from advanced civilizations, but they're civilizations that had once been as bad as us, but overcame that. Humanity on Earth still in the cosmic kindergarten is a phrase that was used a lot. And we have a lot of growing up to do. The movement faded by the early 60s as uphology. That's a sort of anachronistic term at the time, but uphology became more focused on nuts and bolts. Let's just catalog sightings of supposed craft.

And if we catalog enough sightings, we'll learn something. I think we're still waiting for, you know, to hit whatever critical mass that is of sightings we collect before we know answers. Things moved more toward. There's a CIA Air Force cover-up of things. The NICAP organization model of UFO research kind of takes over. We need to approach this with a scientific mind and look at this as a, you know, very serious sort of aerospace-based threat. the contactees were an embarrassment. It didn't really help that many of their stories were easily debunked, easily dismissed, easily proven to be hoaxes. And they make outrageous

claims that they can't really back up. But they do persist. Contacteism does persist through the 60s into the 70s by the 80s. And one of the contactees I'll be discussing in a bit is largely responsible for one of the ways, one of the reasons this continues. But there are, there are contactees today. As you mentioned, there are contactee elements to Anjali's story. There are also contactees, or they're also contactee adherents, believers who cling to the original messages that were spread by some of those contactees from back in the 1950s and 60s. So it appeared. It was a big sort of thing, and then it kind of faded, but persists sort of as a, as an undercurrent of what's still part of the UFO tapestry today.

No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can. can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Well, I should mention I've got the book right here, one of my favorites. I believe you signed this one too. Yep, I did. I think so, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the words in there in the title is American. And I might be getting ahead of my

myself here, Erin, because we're going to talk about your top three favorite contact these stories tonight, but I know there's hundreds. Is this primarily something you found in your research that is very Western or even more specific, very American? It is in its origins, but there are contact these stories that happen in various parts of the world. The episode of the Sasser Life, I'm finishing up right now is about an experience in Great Britain. There are a couple of contactee experiences in Great Britain. Our most recent episode went to, went to East Asia with some cases of weird humanoid sightings in Malaysia and contactee experiences in Japan.

There is a, there are a few prominent, one in particular prominent contactee case in South Africa. What is significant, though, I think, and what sort of links this to the American context is that these contact the experiences in other parts of the world follow the American model. And in some cases are, especially in the case in Japan that I mentioned, are explicitly sort of experienced by people or reported and interpreted by people who are devotees of those American. contactees. I think in in places like Africa, in South Africa in particular, there's there's sort of two strands of of and this is a huge topic to get into so I'm just going to sort of narrow it down a little bit. There's sort of two strands of of African UFO contacts. There's one that is sort of different and very sort of indigenous African in context and then there's a, especially during

the 50s and 60s and 70s and even into the 80s, there's a strand of African uphology that is basically what I would term colonialist ufology. It's white people living in Africa in the aftermath of the end of colonialism, sort of being an outpost for European or American euphology, if that makes sense. So, in some cases, what you have is, is this sort of colonialism in the, in the, in the, what had been the colonized world, sort of sort of, sort of mimicking and or, or just remaining true to their own sort of colonialist roots and saying, you know, I'm, you know, you can say this is an African UFO case. It's like, well, this is an African UFO case in the sense that it's a white person of British descent living in apartheid era, South Africa. That's not necessarily, you know,

putting yourself in a position to say, well, it's very multicultural. This white person's from over here. You know, so it's, you know, one of those, one of those things where, but then there's other, other African UFO stories that are, that are, you know, distinct and different and, and sort of more fundamentally local to the area and to the, to the, to the indigenous population, if that makes sense. But there, there are, there are, there are, global aspects to it, but often the pattern is the one set by the American contactees. Yeah, it seems to always be that way, right? I mean, our influence around the world, our media being the number one import we have,

or influence around the world, it even stretches into these weird realms of how certain cultures interpret and experience they have. We actually just spoke about UFOs in Africa a couple weeks ago here on the show. And you're right. A lot of these stories from the indigenous people are there's alone. And it's seen through the lens in which their culture has seen it. And there's, you know, a reason we don't hear a lot about them because a lot of them are believed to be given. These are our ancestors who are coming back to visit us.

So why would I report this to a white UFO researcher living in Africa at the time? It wasn't a UFO to me. It wasn't an alien to me. It's a given. And I find that fascinating. How many reports we might have had had that been the case. Right. And it might have broadened our perspective if there were people from a different

from a different cultural context, not only reporting it, but interpreting it and explaining it and presenting their own viewpoint rather than, you know, sort of run-of-the-mill euthologists saying, well, something like this happened in Iowa last week. And it's like, did it? Or are you just taking that from it? Because that's that's your point of view and your your, your, your perspective. So, yeah, the sort of sort of global aspect of contact these stuff is, is something I'm hoping to get into more on the show. Because I don't want to say I'm running out of contactees from the United States.

But, but, but I'm running out of interesting ones in some cases. Gotcha. Yeah. You know, everyone always has. asks me, you know, how long are you going to do this podcast for about UFOs? There's only so much you can talk about. And I tell, trust me, there's enough for 10 lifetimes. Yeah.

We'll find it. If it's out there, we'll find it. There are some big topics that I haven't gotten to yet because they're just so big that it's like, oh, that's, that's golf breeze. It's like, I don't want to do golf. I haven't even tackled that yet. Man, you're a braver man than I. I don't want to do that.

I will end the show before I do a Roswell episode. I'm just I'm just not gonna. It's fair. Nope. But yeah, there's a lot. There's an infinite number of topics. There's an infinite number of ways to get into these things and to explore them. Absolutely. Well, that's a perfect transition.

Let's explore. Now, again, the reason I had you come on is we're heading towards the new year. Countdowns are the big thing. And a lot of people love doing these lists, you know, top five, top 10. So I had to ask you, you know, with all of the stories you've presented on the saucer life or in your books, your top three favorite. If you don't mind, Aaron, wherever you want to start as much as detail as you want, man, I'm just going to let you go. Okay. And I'll spring in my dumb jokes throughout.

So please, man, what is your number three? three for your favorite contact East story. Okay, well, instead of ranking them, I'm just going to go in chronological order. If that's okay, because... They're all your favorites. They're all favorites, and some are favorites, some are

too significant not to talk about. Gotcha. You know, especially if there's members of the audience who want the straight dope on this, you know, there's a couple of, you know, really significant things. And I've got two really significant ones. And one that is just my out and out favorite for goofiness, because it's just fun. But I think we've got to start with George Adamski.

Absolutely. I think I got his book right back here, or at least a cover of his. I've got multiple copies of some of his books because I've clearly got a problem. But George Adamski was born in Europe to Polish parents, migrates to the United States as a child, serves in World War I. settles in California and during the 1920s and 1930s gets involved in in spiritualist organizations sort of connected to to older theosophical societies and movements and things and he establishes something called the Royal Order of Tibet which is kind of a kind of a mishmash of different sort of pseudo eastern philosophical traditions later it was

that he said to somebody that the only reason he did it was because they used wine in one of their ceremonies and it was a way to get around prohibition. So it was sort of a bootlegging operation and a spiritual retreat. Love it. In the 1940s, as even before the UFO thing starts to take off, he claimed that in 1946, he and some followers saw a cigar-shaped UFO. He didn't really talk about this before the whole 1947 UFO era kicks off. So it's kind of suspect.

But beginning in 47, he starts saying that here, my little telescope at Mount Palomar. So Mount Palomar was an observatory in California. And this is one of the things Adamski did that was sort of clever. He says, from my telescope at Mount Palomar, I've seen these and photographed these things, which gives the impression that he was doing this at the observatory at Mount Palomar. No, he worked at a hamburger stand down the road from Mount Palomar, sort of down the slope and had a small telescope there. So, yes, it was a telescope.

Yes, it was Mount Palomar, but it was not Mount Palomar Observatory. We all beef up our resumes, right, sometimes? I mean, it's kind of the euphological way. He was a pioneer in this sort of resume padding. Yeah, he starts lecturing. He's got photographs of UFOs. Some are remarkably clear. And they all sort of set the pattern for what the generic UFO is going to look like.

It's a flying saucer. It's got the dome at the top. It's got the little landing balls underneath, the sort of skirt thing that goes around it. Yep, that ab, yep, there it is. That is the, that is the Adamski saucer right there. So in 1949, and this is one of the things I love about him, in 1949, he publishes a book called Pioneers of Space. And it's a science fiction novel about some earthlings who go around the solar system and meet people from Venus. and Mars and Saturn and the moon.

And what I love about it is the moon people are called the moonenites, which I just think is just delightful. Amazing, yeah. Yeah, and of course, each of these civilizations he meets are superior to humans on Earth, but it's presented as fiction. And then in 1952, near the end of 1952, he claims that he and some friends, friends were out driving around near desert center California and he has an experience with a landed spacecraft and communicates telepathically and via you know mime with the occupant a long-haired

blonde person in a jumpsuit whose name is orthon and orthon explains that he is from venus and that the Venusians are very worried about humans' nuclear weapons testing because it might destroy the universe. And this is published and related in a book called Flying Saucers Have Landed, which was mostly written by a guy from Britain named Desmond Leslie. And it was sort of an overview of things that might have been flying saucers throughout human history, sort of a proto ancient astronauts, you know, what about Ezekiel's Wheel sort of stuff? Could it be? Yeah, you know, so could these have all been UFOs back in the day?

And Adamski's story is sort of appended to the end of this. But it takes off like wildfire. All the UFO newsletters are talking about it. Newspapers are talking about it. Wire services are picking it up. Adamsky goes on all sorts of speaking tours, talking about this, UFO clubs organized to talk about his ideas. It's pretty major. And then later in 1955, he writes a book called Inside the Spaceships, which is mostly about

his conversations about cosmic philosophy and higher thought and the way humans should live in peace and harmony. He goes on several trips with Venusians and Saturnians. He gives them all sort of funny George Lucas-style names, Furkan, Ramu, you know, just kind of goofy names. Critics have pointed out that a lot of the things that he claims happen to him in inside the spaceships are basically recycled bits of his pioneers of space science fiction novel from a few years before. But he maintains his popularity, despite his photos being out. as hoaxes and things like that.

He's interesting. And one of the things he does is in his contactee works and in his talks, he puts in a lot of material about the ways humanity needs to improve. Our economic systems need to be more fair. We need to live in harmony with each other. War should not be a thing. That sort of, you know, peace and, sort of peace and love thing gets him noticed by people because it sounds vaguely like communism

at the time. His FBI file makes it clear that a lot of people in flying saucer clubs around the country that heard his talks, contacted the FBI, wondering if he might be sort of a subversive. And the FBI looked into it and mostly found that he probably wasn't a subversive, but he did spend a little too much time claiming to have contacts in the government that he probably didn't have, and so they kept an eye on him for those reasons. He traveled the world lecturing and promoting his books. Transitioned from just UFO stuff to more philosophical stuff

by the late 50s, early 60s, has a book, actually more of a booklet called Cosmic Philosophy, where he sets out the science of life that all the aliens kind of adhere to, and people took class. and formed study groups all over the world. And some of those lasted a long time. The Japanese contactees I mentioned earlier, I found those stories in the English edition of the George Adamski

Get Acquainted Organization newsletter from the mid-1980s, and that was being published up until the 90s in Japan. So he sets out, his significance is he creates this pattern that later UFOs are going to, later UFO contactees are going to follow of humans from other planets who are concerned about our development and are offering us a way forward. They're not going to do it for us. It's sort of a Star Trek-y prime directive kind of thing. They can't get involved.

They're not going to land on the White House lawn, so don't even ask. You know, they're, but it sets out these patterns. And like I said, there's still believers today in that. the George Adamski Foundation is deeply committed to promoting the truth and debunking the debunkers and selling copies of his books. And one thing, just an aside, you mentioned my contact e-book. Hardest part of the book was getting photo permissions from the Adamsky Foundation. I had to be very clear that, no, I'm not debunking him. I'm not ridiculing him.

I'm not being snarky. This is a sort of historical examination of this phenomenon. And even then, the pictures all had to have sort of this caption across them that they put in with their website address and everything, which really kind of irked me. It's like, I'll put that in the captions. Settle down. Just give me a clean picture. They're all about branding, man. Come on.

They are. And I'm very happy they were generous and cooperative. But yeah, very tenaciously clinging on to, to Adamski's ideas, despite, you know, the rest of, of UFO world having moved on. It's so interesting. And you brought up one aspect that kind of reminded me of Elron Hubbard. You have this idea of a writer starting out with sort of science fiction, writing these pulp novels and everything. and then gradually it almost becomes a new religion or almost a, you know, using aspects of the science fiction and claiming that it's now real.

And you saw that with Adamski as well. It's fascinating how much these writers and these individuals kind of work off of each other in terms of what they do. Yeah. And I would be fascinated to know if Adamski and Hubbard had any. contact because they're doing their thing right at the same time. I mean, the chronological overlap is significant. And the argument I've always made about contactees is especially Adamski, more so than all the others, is the social messages, the political messages, the cultural messages,

those things are clear in his writing before UFOs come on the scene. In the 1930s, he's writing in the lead up to World War II, sort of condemning the coming violence and condemning this warfare. He's condemning economic inequality. The basic messages that the aliens have for us are messages he's been talking about already. And my sort of position on this is that Adamski saw the UFO thing as a means for promoting his political

and social and cultural messages in a way that would appeal to the masses, or at least more of the masses than his Royal Order of Tibet had. And also, sort of fly under the radar as not being politically subversive because it's just goofy flying saucer stuff. A lot of the FBI documentation sort of bears that out. They're concerned about fraud. They're concerned about him misrepresenting himself as a, you know, advisor to the government on the alien question and things like that. They're concerned about sort of things they can actually prosecute. They're not

like, well, this guy's talking about peace, you know, lock him up, which is sometimes some authors give that impression that, you know, they were, you know, concerned about his message. They're like, his message is he's a peace, Nick, but flying saucer guy, you know,

not a huge deal. Later writers don't have that pre-saucer pedigree that a damn does. But he sets this pattern that makes it acceptable to merge these ideas with flying saucerdom, if that makes sense. Absolutely. Flying saucerdom, I love that term. Well, and, you know, it's so innocent in so many ways to Aaron, I think, when it comes to someone like him, because then later, in, you know, decades later, you start having these cults pop up where these sort of messages and contactees, as it were, became not only dangerous, but deadly many times as well.

So I love knowing the fact that with the Damsky, no matter what you think about his philosophy or if any of this is real, his messages were pretty clear. Maybe this was his way of funneling it out to the public. And, hey, there you go. I think, you know, that was a perfect person to start with. in terms of all of that. So yeah, unless you have anything else you'd like to add about Adamski, yeah, the floor is yours, man.

We can move on to the second one. Another guy named George, a lot of George's during this era. In the 50s and 60s, they're all named George in the 80s and 90s. They're all named Bill. Hey, guys, Ryan Sprague here from somewhere in the skies. The podcast has always been and always will be completely free for you to listen to. But creating it every week takes a lot of time, research and resources. And to be honest, it's just never been free for me to create.

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hit that subscribe button right at the top of your Apple podcast feed. Thank you so much for listening, for supporting and as always keep looking up. So you sort of get these names, but George Van Tassel is another contactee who in many ways follows the Adamsky pattern of having messages from outer space that he is conveying. But he's a little bit different. He claims that in 1952, same year as Adamski, earlier than Damsky, which is another sort of contactee thing. So, Adam'ske says, I had my contact in

November, 1952. Every contactee who comes after says, well, I didn't say anything about it before, but mine happened in the summer of 1952, or in 1951, or in 1923.

They're always sort of saying, I didn't say anything, but really, I was the first one. You know, you've got the whole UFO wave in Washington the same year. That's, That's kind of weird. I'm sure there's something to do that. I think there might be something to it besides. I mean, I think it's predominantly wanting to establish some kind of precedence. Right. I didn't want to talk about it, but it happened to me too. And a month before that guy.

So of course, yeah. Of course, right. So he receives messages from numerous beings and these messages are channeled messages, messages rather than physical messages. And he does travel in spaceships, but he does so more astrally, more in a non-physical way. And the key figure he's receiving messages from is a figure called Ashtar. And that one of the things that is significant about George Fantassel, but Ashtar's message was that he and a number of other beings that shared names with the some some of whom shared names with figures like ascended masters in theosophical and esoteric belief systems they were all commanding ships that there was a galactic organization that was defending earth against a coming cataclysm if you believed if you were if you were part of the ash tar

movement, you would be saved. There were ships in place in orbit around the planet to remove the worthy before any disaster hit. It's the flying saucer rapture, right? So Van Hassel writes some books, some sort of short booklets about this. He claims to have gotten information from the aliens about designing a device, a building, sort of a hexagonal dome-shaped building called the Integritron that will provide strength and enlightenment and rejuvenation, and he actually builds it.

He owns an airfield out in California near a place called Giant Rock, where there's a giant rock. And he stages UFO, flying saucer conventions there where every major, especially contact e-figure of the time spoke throughout the 1950s and 1960s. It was a major sort of flying saucer cultural happening every year. So Van Tassal significance is not just the Integritron, which still stands today.

I think you can visit it. Not just Giant Rock, which was sort of the dawn of UFO conventions in a lot of ways. But I think the biggest piece of significance from Van Tassel and his Ashtar contacts is that because this was a channeled message, anybody can kind of claim to be receiving messages from Ashtar. And I mean, what proof is anybody going to ask for? You're not going to say, well, where's your photos? Well, here's a photo of me sitting there in a chair in a trance telling you what Ashtar said. You know, you don't, there's no way to prove or really disprove this. So even in the later 1950s, you've got other authors coming forward at saying, I received revelations from Ashtar as well.

And sometimes they would match up with what Van Tassel had written. Sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes there were conflicts. In the 50s, there was a big split in the Ashtar community over not just the message. but over people being upset that others were inappropriately commercializing and profiting from the Ashtar channelings. And it would continue into the 1970s in the 1980s. There was a woman who called herself Tuella, which channeled a lot of Ashtar stuff in the 1980s,

books like Project World Evacuation and Ashtar, a tribute where everybody, she channeled channels messages from like 15 different other aliens talking about how awesome Ashtar is. It's kind of weird Ashtar fan fiction. I love that. It's so strange. And these, these, these, these, this fleet is still surrounding our planet as guardians to us. And when Tuella passes away, other people take up the torch. If you go on the internet right now, you will find people channeling Ashtar, channeling Hatan,

channeling Katumi, channeling all these beings that sort of first appeared back in the 1950s when George Van Tassel first started this. So again, some deep significance, not necessarily the goofiest, weirdest flying saucer story out there, but long-lasting significance just like Adamski, still believers, still people following these things. And what is amazing is that the Ashtar stuff is. in present day times crosses over with other elements of, of paranormal and parapolitical things.

I've got a book coming out at the end of the year, I think, about, about what I call triumphalist conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories with happy endings, where you're not getting, the good people in America are not gonna get hauled off to the FEMA camp. They're going to be the ones who win. So I look at elements of the UFO disclosure movement, particularly the ones that promise that as soon as everything shakes out, we're going to get free energy technology and nobody will ever be hungry again. You know, that aspect of it.

I look at Nassara, which was sort of a financial scam where there's a secret law that Congress passed back in the 90s, but they rigged September 11th to prevent the law from being implemented. This law would wipe out all consumer debt, redo the money supply. everybody will be rich all the time. All the bad guys would go to jail. And before I knew it was going to be such a massive thing, I thought QAnon would be a great sort of another example of this, which forced me to melt my brain for a year with that. But what's weird is you've got people channeling Ashtar talking about Nassara.

talking about QAnon, talking about these things. There was a UFO, a massive UFO disclosure, some popular figures in the UFO disclosure movement, sort of dabbling their toe in the Q&ON waters, saying, well, these Q-drops are, you know, ISBN numbers for these UFO books, if you look at them correctly. Very strange stuff.

Some of the big disclosure names were smart enough to stay way away from that. Some weren't. But, you know, Ashtar shows up endorsing QAnon, depending on which Ashtar channel are you believe. So these things, you know, get sort of pigeonholed as sort of early Cold War 1950s, 1960s things, but elements of them persist. Very interesting. And I do want to talk about that repetitive nature of these things with Aaron in a little bit.

But that's so fast. I'm imagining Ashtar like in his mom's basement, like on the computer being like, oh, yep, any day now. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. Well, one more question for you. If I'm, maybe I'm remembering this wrong. Was Ashtar the one from the famous like news interruption? broadcast. Do you remember that?

Yeah. That was weird, man. I remember it coming across that. Ashtar breaks into, I can't remember where it was, but breaks into a news broadcast. Well, for negotiations,

this represents to know the Ashdard Galactic speaking to you. For many years, you have seen us as might,

and us. Introducing the new best skin ever ultra-slim precision concealer from Sephora Collection. It's full coverage with a matte finish and perfect for any look, whether you're building it up for a full glam moment or targeting correction for a more natural vibe. At only $12, it's great for affordable touch-ups on the go. Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. Yeah, luckily something that's been up to your brothers and sisters all over this, your clarity.

Yeah, luckily somebody recorded it and it's been digitized and it's out there, but just, just fascinating stuff. There's a band called Ashtar Command, which is sort of the name of the fleet. So Ashtar has penetrated some elements of the fringes of pop culture in a way that Adamski didn't, But the Adamsky Flying Saucer is such a sort of cultural icon. The sort of embarrassing myself here, but I'm an old school Transformers fan. And there's a transformer from the 80s that was a little Adamsky style spaceship. And in Japan, the name they gave it was Adams. That was that character's name.

So sort of an Adamski reference there as well. So these things persist. longer, longer than we think they do. Yeah. I always go back to Guardians of the Galaxy, like clearly inspired by something like a space command that would sort of govern or police the entire universe, as it were, which is, again, all of these contactees have had, no matter what their message was or how they faded into obscurity,

they all have a lasting place, I think, in pop culture in many different ways. They do. Same thing with I think the Green Lantern Corps. That same sort of a space police force, guardians of, answering to the guardians, those little blue guys. And yeah, there's these elements seeped into pop culture, pop culture fed into the contactee movement. I don't think, I think we absolutely need to mention the day the Earth stood still, as a sort of, you know, a benevolent humanoid alien comes and has a message of peace for mankind. That usually gets trotted out as, well, this is where the contact E's got all the stuff from.

The timelines don't work for that. But it's definitely something that might have been influenced by contact E culture. And also, it's, it was a dangerous time. It was a frightening time. people were worried about nuclear war, people were seeing UFOs. You didn't have to be, you know, completely immersed in contactee teachings to come up with the idea of, hey, what if an alien showed up and, you know, stopped nuclear war. I mean, that in many ways I would have been shocked if there hadn't been

a movie like that, you know, regardless of of the contactee influence or not. Very interesting. Yeah. I have echoes of Reagan many, in many years later with his famous speech. You know, if an alien force came, bring us all together, hopefully, hopefully. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, all right. Well, we're on our third one already, man.

We're freezing through these. I love it. What do you got for me? This is, this is the one that, you know, listeners, you might have heard of Adamski, you might have heard of George Van Tassel. You might have heard of Ashtar. I can almost guarantee you've not heard of Reinhold Schmidt.

Ooh. Reinhold Schmidt. It was a grain buyer, worked in agribusiness out in Nebraska. And in 1957, November of 1957, he had or claimed to have an encounter. And this is first week in November of 57. So this is right in the middle of the huge wave of sightings that were sort of centered around the level land, Texas flap, right? So, Reinhold Schmidt is driving along in Nebraska, and he comes across a landed flying saucer. And I'm sort of compressing the story a little bit.

But he meets the flying saucer people. They're a group of men and women in jumpsuits and things like that. They all speak English. They all speak English with a German accent, which is very strange. he tries to find somebody to tell the story to ends up going to the police with it he is committed to a psychiatric facility for evaluation um and a lot of times that's you know sort of oh my gosh they took this seriously and we're trying to shut him up they let him leave on his he was able to check himself out so it wasn't like a sort of criminal psychiatric hold sort of thing um but he keeps telling the story writes a pamphlet about it goes on on some lecture tours. And then what is fascinating to me about this is, is he hooks up with, with some other contactees. Daniel Fry is one of them.

There are some others he hooks up with on these lecture tours. There's some great newspaper articles from the late 50s and early 60s, where my favorite one is he's going to lecture. at a high school for like a high school assembly, which is educationally negligent on the part of the high school. Oh, man, I would have killed to see that in my gymnasium. Are you kidding me? All we got was don't do drugs, don't drink and drive, and, you know, be positive. Those were like the assemblies we had. Join the Navy. You know, it was another big one. Join the, not join the Galactic Federation. Right. That would have been very cool. So he's telling about how he's been on subsequent.

trips with the with the space people and um they took him to egypt and he was able to read some ancient scrolls in one of the pyramids that um you know and the high school this is all reported in the paper high school student asked well how were you able to read it and he's like it was in english and the students are like but why would it be in english and then the students just start peppering him with these questions and knocking holes in his story it's it's hilarious skeptical high school, right? It was just, I mean, his stories were so goofy that the basic astronomy was wrong. And, you know, he was getting wrong stuff that these students learned in their science classes.

So they called him out on it. And then he hooks up with a movie director who had been interested in UFO stuff, a guy named Ron Ormond. And Ormond had directed some sort of low-budget movies, probably the most, well-known one was the mesa of lost women but ormond makes a movie called the edge of tomorrow don't try to google it all you'll get is the tom cruise movie um but it's called edge of tomorrow about schmidt's contact experience and schmidt stars in it as himself it's crazy it is i love that wild it's like imagine edwood sort of an edwood movie but and you're excited because oh wow this is going to be a great, you know, contactee movie. And it's not commercially available. I was able

to watch a copy with the promise I'd never share it with anybody else because the rights are apparently owned by a mining company somewhere. It's very strange. But the problem is with this movie is that most of it is just Schmidt sitting with an interviewer who's asking him questions. And it's like the worst example of telling not showing in a film. Yeah, screenwriting 101. Yeah. I want more on the spaceship set and the very, very 1961-looking spaceship crew. It goes out into theaters.

It has a Hollywood premiere that is not very well attended. Mood is kind of low at the Hollywood premiere because during it, Schmidt is actually out on bail having been indicted for fraud. He is an actual saucer felon. He is a flying saucer felon, a flying saucer fraudster. And he had a previous criminal record of petty theft and ripping people off. But what he did was he started talking in his lectures about how the aliens had shown him various places on Earth where valuable crystals could be mined. in order to heal various diseases.

And he was hitting up mostly elderly women to invest and buy shares in his mining company, which did not exist. So after, you know, investing lots of money, this little old lady goes to the, I think she goes to her bank and the bank's like, we're calling the FBI. And so Schmidt is arrested. He's put on trial. The newspaper accounts of that, this was in the early 60s, the newspaper accounts of the trial are hilarious. Schmidt must have gotten the worst lawyer money could buy because as part of their defense,

they showed the jury the movie, Edge of Tomorrow. as part of the defense. Also part of the defense. That's a first. It's insane. And also as part of the defense, the defense attorney cross-examines the little old lady

who is the victim of all of the, or alleged victim at the time, alleged victim of all this, and brings her to tears in front of the jury. Oh, just what kind of defense attorney? It's like, okay, this very, very sympathetic, person, we're going to look like absolute monsters. Between that and my flying saucer movie,

I think we've got this caseona. It's like, actually it's like what I wish Law and Order would be. Season 24, do something like this with Law & Order. This would be outstanding. But get the SVU folks involved on an alien probing case. That would be. Dick Wolf, if you're listening, we got something for you. You call our people. We've got ideas. Check out the saucer life. Please. That's right. That's right. I'm willing to work a deal. So Schmidt is convicted of fraud and selling securities without a license and selling securities that don't exist, which I think is a separate crime. He goes to prison for four or five years, something like that. He dies in the early 1970s. He never tries to make a fly

sauce or comeback or anything. And I'm not sure there's any wider significance to this story other than the degree to which when, you know, debunkers and and sort of hardcore, sort of no fun style of skeptics talk about UFO people being frauds and there ought to be laws and this is criminal. It's like, look, there's no, it's not fraud if you sell somebody a book and some of the stuff in the book isn't true. You paid 10 bucks for a book. You got a book. You know, it might not be true. There were real crimes out there that were committed.

Schmidt is one example. There are some others. Some of these crimes are UFO related like this. Some of this, the crimes are like, these are sleazy people who were involved in the UFO thing. I think sometimes we can go overboard on accusing people who might be making up a flying saucer story with somebody, who's an actual criminal who's done legally actionable harm.

So I've just always loved the Schmidt's story. It's just got so much kind of fun, goofy stuff. It's not fun if you're the little lady who got ripped off. But other than that, yeah, it's just one of my favorites. So those three, two sort of serious long-term significance to the history of uphology. Love it. Those were perfect. I couldn't be happier with your choices.

Well, I mean, you do see, you start to see, like you mentioned earlier, these patterns. Like even these three stories have a lot of common in many different ways. And this was what your lecture was about at the esotericon. Again, my favorite part of the conference. And it kind of blew me away because I never had really sat down and thought about that, Aaron, of how we see these, narratives sort of recycling themselves throughout the decades. And we are seeing trace elements of that happening again today with stories like Anjali. And there have been other contactees in the past few years.

A lot of them have been outed as clear frauds. Others are still preaching their messages and still have large followings, giving them swaths of money and whatnot for transcendence and whatnot. That's an episode in itself. But I'd love to ask you about that lecture. What really inspired you to do that? And what were some of those specific patterns that you really nailed down in terms of these narratives, I guess? Yeah. I think what was sort of inspired it for me was just, I'm trying to remember at the time, that was 2018,

that there was something that was happening that was particularly inspiring to me. Gosh, yeah, I'm wondering, too. I can't think of anything. I think were people talking about meta materials at that point? I think there might have been the first hints of we've got some meta materials that are being analyzed. I believe you're right. Which sort of made me flash back to arts parts back in the 90s. Somebody had sent Art Bell and to earlier sort of Roswell-related things and all the way back to some stories in the 1950s.

crash retrievals, UFO crash retrievals, so many in such a confined space during the same years that we get them confused with each other sometimes, and a lot of them being traced back to Franks, Frank Scully's sort of debunked and fraudulent stories. But in the talk itself, some of the things I talked about are, I think one of the biggest things I talked about sort of as an example is this recurring sort of story beat of Eisenhower having a meeting with the aliens at fill in the name of the Air Force Base because it changed his name a couple times back in 1954. And this sort of being traced to a letter that was written to a guy named Gerald Light, who was involved in an organization called the Borderland Science Research Association.

which had a weird sort of mystical interpretation of UFOs and predated UFOs by a few years as an organization. But this Eisenhower meeting the alien story will get worked and reworked and reworked into conspiratorial UFO stories going forward. It's just a constant theme. It's still out there. And there are there are variations on it. and there are, you know, sometimes the year is given as different. Sometimes there's talk of a treaty that comes out of it, either the Treaty of Grenada or the Treaty of Greata,

which isn't a word. And I think sometimes what you have is this story is, it's like a game of telephone, right? Only with people mishearing things and then writing them down. So somebody says Treaty of Granada, somebody hears that on a on a garbled audio clip of Phil Schneider talking about his days working in an underground base and they hear Greata. So on their their website, they're at the Treaty of Greta was blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's not a word.

So these things just keep just keep going and getting recycled and just getting woven into whatever new narrative is out there. The contact e stuff like I've mentioned gets talked about. and remodeled. And I think if you look back in the 1990s, some of Stephen Greer's very early disclosure project stuff and C-SETI stuff with his promise of, you know, new energy sources and new technology that will happen, you know, there's a happy ending down the road.

The aliens are more advanced and they want this for us. Even more so, there is a guy named Richard Boylan, who I think is still out there. who talks about the Galactic Federation and alien fleets and these people have names. And he says that he's one of their diplomats now serving as a liaison between Earth and the aliens. And this is nothing but warmed over contacteism with about 50% of the fun sort of subtracted from it. So these things do happen over and over and over again. Yeah, it's amazing.

And like I said, it just, it really puts things into perspective when you look at everything happening today. And that actually leads into, I've got two listener questions, Aaron, if you're willing to stick around for those. Thank you. And we're also, Aaron is going to be sharing one more contact these story with our Patreon subscribers. So be sure to head on over to patreon.com slash somewhere skies. And you can check out that little bonus jam he's going to give to us. That's my shameless plug. Moving on to our first listener question, Aaron. This comes from Dennis.

He wants to know, because you focus so much on contactees and sort of the influence they've had on pop culture and vice versa and culture in general. What do you personally make of all the stuff going on today? We have the military UFOs, the Pentagon getting involved. Like you mentioned, we're kind of living in a very nuts and bolts euphology right now with the government. Where do contactees lay in all of this? That seems to be a big question right now. When will it be their time to get involved with this huge conversation happening right now? What do you make of all of it?

I don't think the contactees need a time. I think it's always contactee time for the contactees and for those who are susceptible to their message, open to their message. Because the contactee movement, contact the ideas, unlike the nuts and bolt stuff, unlike the military connection, unlike the, what is the government hiding and who knows what, and we need congressional investigations and things like that, unlike those things, the contactees rely on faith and don't need proof. The proof is in the obvious truth of the message of the Space Brothers. Does it not resonate with your soul, Ryan, that we should live at peace with each other.

Universal, man. If I was being very cynical, I would say that the nuts and bold stuff relies a lot on faith as well. Faith that people are telling the truth when they said they had these encounters. Faith that the videos are sourced from where they actually say they're sourced. Faith that this isn't some sort of gigantic op being run for whatever reason we can't understand and might not understand yet. Faith that people had the jobs they say they had.

You know, there's a lot of faith involved in the nuts and both side as well. But I think one of the reasons that the contactees have persisted is because it's always their time. The message is timeless. It can be tailored for particular contexts, but it's not as tied to the news cycle. And it doesn't rely on the acceptance and attention of mainstream media and politicians and scientists getting on. board. I think sort of traditional nuts and bolts uphology has this sort of inferiority complex and desire to be accepted and embraced by by regular scientists who aren't scientists with a UFO predilection. Contactees don't need that. They've got all they need because Orthon told me,

or Orthon told Adamski or Ashtar channeled this message. It's very much similar to the divide between science and spirituality, I think, in a lot of ways. There's no level of scientific proof that could validate or invalidate an individual's personal experience. So, and the personal experience aspect is so at the heart of the contact-Eway of doing things or way of thinking about things, that sort of rationality doesn't really enter into it. It's almost, it's very much a separate sphere. And I think it will simultaneously always be the contact these time, but never be the contact these time. I love that. Yeah, it's, it's contact D o'clock somewhere all the time. It is. It really is. Well, that bleeds into our last

listener question here. Lisa on Reddit asks, have you ever personally met one of the contactees that you've covered in any of your work? And also, kind of playing off of that, she also wants to know, what is your gut feeling to these stories? Do you personally think these could be genuine experiences with some of these people? Or where does your personal opinion lay in all of this? So yeah, two-tiered question. Okay. I guess. I've not met. any of the original contactees, I've corresponded with some figures who are involved in the organizations that still exist, like the Adamski Foundation, George King's Ethrius Society, which is the closest thing to a successful, benign, sort of benevolent UFO religion that

has ever been created. Wonderfully nice people in the Ethereus Society. I've spoken to them, yeah. extremely nice and polite. They're sweethearts. There's a branch down the road from me in suburban Detroit that I need to, I need to check out sometime and talk to them. So I came a little bit late, sort of chronologically, to talk to any of the classic folks, which I kind of regret. As for the other part of the question, sort of my gut reaction and my feelings on these,

it's very much a case-by-case thing. I think Adamski had had a sort of philosophical, cultural agenda he wanted to carry out, and flying saucers were the key to that. I don't doubt his sincerity about his beliefs. I somewhat doubt his sort of a supernatural experience. probably the ones that resonate with me the most as being sort of like something happened here. You can check out our episode on him, but Orfeo Angeloucci was a contactee who had some very, very strange experiences that had psychedelic overtones. And there's just enough strangeness to it that I believe something happened to him, whether it was alien or whether it was, some sort of terrestrial, I don't know, sometimes a default to mind control experimentation playing a role in some of these things. But Orfeo Angelucci is one of those cases where I believe something probably happened to this person.

I think in other cases, there are people who might have had a genuine paranormal encounter, whether it was a spiritual encounter, a spiritual awakening, whether it was possibly extraterrestrial. And their brain filtered things to be understandable in a way that they could comprehend and communicate. And these contact ease stories are what came out. So I think very much on a case-by-case basis, I would never put myself in the camp of all contactees were liars and frauds. I would put myself in the camp of you had a little bit of everything, including people who may have had, may have had actual, actual experiences. I'm not going to, I'm not going to deny that, that possibility. Yeah, I think that's a perfect place to be.

Like, I always tell people, I was not in the shoes when this happened to this person. So, you know, leave judgment at the door, see how it plays out. And, you know, let them live their truth, as long as it's not hurting anyone else or hopefully themselves. You know, it's a crazy world and crazier things have happened other than, you know, Venusians coming down and telling us to clean up our acts. So, well, thank you. No problem. Thanks, Aaron, for answering those listener questions and for your top three. We're going to head on over to Patreon right now.

You've been so gracious with your time. Again, head on over. We're going to do a little bonus wrap up with Aaron to tell another one of his, his favorite stories with the contact. But of course, before we go, man, where can we find everything you're up to? Your past books, your upcoming books, The Sasser Life? Give us all of it, please. Okay, so two main places to go. You can go to SaucerLife.com for all things related to the saucer life and links to my books and all of that.

Or subscribe in your favorite podcast thingy. Great Lakes lore is at Great LakesLore. is at great lakes lore.com. And we're on, I think we're six episodes in, and that's been a fun project. So we're getting ready to do some dogman stuff. So that's going to be interesting. So saucerlife.com and greatlakeslore.com.

Perfect, man. And again, I can't wait till the world officially reopens and we can head to Nova Scotia again and have those, you know, midnight conversations over a, So again, I got to thank you for coming on Somewhere in the Skies today. Thanks for having me. Somewhere in the Skies is part of the Somewhere Podcast Universe. Please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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