Looking for Orthon [Illustrated] [ペーパーバック]

I was disappointed in this book.Perhaps I was wrong in expecting something more akin to a biography of Adamsky rather thenan overly long social essay.The author carries his coy andbemused portrayal of Adamsky onfar too long--what at most shouldhave been a brief essay grew tobook length. After a while theone-dimensional semi-joke he attempts to make Adamsky out to be--something akin to how onewho is a little fond of a pet with an entertaining foible mightportray the animal--chasing itstail, for example, grows very, very thin.

The typical pseudoscience book has the characteristic that each chapter deals with a different topic and is completely unconnected to previous and subsequent chapters, and to the book's supposed title or theme. Colin Bennett has found a new paradigm! Each of the 17 chapters in this book, supposedly about 1950s "contactee" George Adamski, is THE SAME! Each chapter starts with a bit of completely unreliable "information" about Adamski, and then veers into precisely the same diatribe, reworded only slightly from chapter to chapter. The word "pandimensional," as a result, occurs on just about every page in the book. Invariably, we hear about the irredeemable and total evil of science, scientists and indeed scholarship or scholarly integrity of any kind in any context. Then we hear about Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Then we hear about Uri Geller, the long forgotten Ted Serios the bellhop and "thoughtographer," Pacific Cargo Cults, and the same few Adamski followers. And then we get an incoherently presented Fortean account of a saucer sighting or a haunting or whatever pops into the author's mind at that particular moment. Then we are told Adamski was unintelligent and an obvious liar, but really, really charming. Then we are told that everything Adamski said was true, because there is no difference between lies and the truth, between fact and fiction. [In fact the author repeatedly uses the undefined, ambiguous and confusing noun "faction," by which he appears to want to imply that fiction and fact are never distinguishable. I have the strong suspicion that if a neighbor ran up to him on the street and blurted out that Bennett's home had just burned down, and that he had lost his entire family, pets and possessions, he would be able fairly directly to determine whether the report was true or false, and that the truth or falsity of the claim would be of deep significance to him.] Then on to the next chapter where the same themes and rants are repeated with only slight variation.

As it turned out, just before reading this volume I had researched Adamski to write a brief profile of him. There is pretty much nothing in the 224 pages here that is either (1) reliable, or (2) different from what is fairly readily available on the Internet. The only "new" aspect to Adamski to be found in LOOKING FOR ORTHON is the claim that he was a homosexual who frequently seduced or tried to seduce handsome young followers (see for example p. 42), but no reason is presented within the text to take the claim seriously. I was reminded by the present book that there is a rich and detailed word-portrait of Adamski in a second printing of a book by Edward J. Ruppelt, a printing available only through the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club back in 1960. I'm impressed that Bennett has even seen a copy. I myself treasure the one I bought in 1960.

Adamski is a very important and very typical character in the history of 20th Century pseudoscience. He deserves a good, detailed, researched biography in english. This is not it, and I do not know of any.

Plainly stated, "Looking for Orthon" is one of the most compelling treatments of the UFO phenomenon I've read in years. Superficially, "Looking for Orthon" can be read as a biography of the late flying saucer contactee George Adamski, but it's much more; Bennett probes the innards of 20th century society with an intellectual and literary dexterity seldom encountered in popular works on UFOs. Bennett treats Adamski's bizarre story as the multilayered mythological enigma that it is, recreating the circumstances in which Adamski, good-natured opportunist and hobbyist astronomer, supposedly met a man from Venus. Bennett argues that Adamdki's claimed contact rattled Western society's ontological bedrock, regardless if it actually happened. There aren't very many books that address reality-challenging issues as ably or as wittily as Bennett's. "Looking for Orthon" is a must for anyone seeking the roots of the postmodern condition, and destined to be a classic.