Saturday, July 08, 2006

With Adamski's mothership to Venus in 1930

Famous contactee George Adamski needs no introduction. Flying Saucers have Landed, cowritten with Desmond Leslie (1953) was published worldwide. In it, Adamski claimed to have had contact with Orthon, the Venusian occupant of a UFO, in the California desert. Afterwards would follow Inside the Spaceships (1955) and Flying Saucers Farewell (1961). Before these books saw print, Adamski founded an esoteric society, the Royal Order of Tibet in 1934, and wrote a science fiction book Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus (1949).

But years before Adamski's evocative descriptions of the UFOS and the large motherships and intelligent life on Venus, a Swedish science fiction author had developed that theme. In 1930 Nils Meyn's Die Reise zur Venus (the Voyage to Venus) was published in Germany. In the book an inventor discovers that each planet has a unique charge. Building a spaceship the Urania, he calculates the charges for Venus and Earth, since a body is attracted to a planet when it has the same charge, hence, also his spaceship when he gives it the same charge. On Venus they discover a prehistoric world with saurians but also human beings. 

Nils Meyn (1891 - 1957) wrote Rejsen til Venus. Fantastisk fremtidsfortaelling (Voyage to Venus. A Fantastic Tale of the Future) in 1915. Apparently the only foreign language edition was published in Germany. 

Meyn debuted in 1911 with his Med Luftskib til Mars (With an Airship to Mars). He also wrote other science fiction books for a juvenile audience. One, entitled De flyvende Tallerkener (the flying saucers) was published in 1953.

Another, Invasion fra MÃ¥nen (Invasion from the Moon), published in 1957, again features on its cover a mothership - this time even with flying saucers emerging from it. A detail Meyn or the illustrator of the cover undoubtedly had picked up from Adamski.

These and other images, giving a fascinating insight in early Danish science fiction are found here.

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