Contactee

A contactee is someone who claims to have met extraterrestrials. It is most often used to describe those who claim some sort of ongoing contact, reporting messages from the aliens and eventually generally describing their experiences in vaguely religious or mystical terms. It is basically the concept of "medium" or "channeler" recycled for the space age.

One of the first, and thus most well-known, of the contactees was George Adamski, who claimed to have met a man from Venus while out in the California desert in the 1940s. Many of his descriptions of flying to the mild-climated planets Venus and Saturn, and the civilised societies encountered there were later shown to be completely different from the hard data reported by space probes. This may or may not be because his claims are very similar to the science fiction novel Pioneers of Space, written in 1949 by one G. Adamski. Many claims of contact came after Adamski published his books; most of the contactees had less information to impart than did Adamski, and only Howard Menger supplied photographs - and composed music that he claimed to have heard on Venus. Cynthia Appleton, meanwhile, brought forth something far more substantial from her benevolent Space Brother friends - a baby.