October 1946 — three cases, led by the Palomar Gardens sighting that launched George Adamski's contactee career, alongside a Paterson, New Jersey horseback encounter and a Swedish arrow-shaped object. thinkaboutitdocs.com.
1946: October UFO & Entity Sightings Archive
October 1946 holds only three entries, but one of them is arguably the single most consequential case in the history of American ufology’s contactee movement. On the night of October 9, during a meteor shower over Palomar Mountain, California, hundreds of people across the San Diego area — reported in real time on local radio — watched a large, dark, cigar-shaped object maneuver in the sky for over an hour. Among the witnesses at a small campground called Palomar Gardens was a struggling philosophy teacher named George Adamski, who would spend the next six years building toward his famous November 1952 desert meeting with a Venusian he called Orthon. That same night, in San Diego proper, trance medium Mark Probert reported his own sighting and attempted telepathic contact with the object on the advice of Meade Layne, founder of the Borderland Sciences Research Association — the group that would go on to document and publish much of the era’s early contactee history.
Date: October 1946
Location: Paterson, New Jersey
Time: Dusk
Summary: A horseback rider observed a silent, slow-moving bluish-white light. The horse she was riding, normally calm and docile, became extremely nervous and reared; the witness wondered if the horse heard something inaudible to her own ears. The object was estimated at an altitude of 300-500 feet over a mountain roughly 5 miles away (editorial note in the original source suggests the two referenced locations are actually closer to 3-4 miles apart). The horse and rider were on an elevated area overlooking the city of Paterson.
Source: Gordon I. R. Lore Jr. and Harold H. Deneault Jr., Mysteries of the Skies, Prentice-Hall, 1968, pp. 148-149
Date: October 9, 1946
Location: Palomar Gardens/San Diego area, California
Time: 19:25
Case Status: Disputed
Summary: During an annual meteor shower, hundreds of witnesses across the San Diego area — including callers to local radio stations — reported a large, dark, cigar-shaped object hovering and maneuvering in the sky, visible for approximately 95 minutes. Among the witnesses, at the Palomar Gardens campground he ran near the base of Palomar Mountain, was George Adamski, then an unknown philosophy teacher who would go on to become America’s first and most famous UFO contactee. Separately, in San Diego proper, trance medium Mark Probert reported witnessing a “strange winged flying machine with red lights” and, on the advice of Borderland Sciences Research Association founder Meade Layne (by telephone), attempted telepathic communication with the object. [Full Report]
Source: Borderland Sciences Research Association (BSRA); George Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953); Håkan Blomqvist, drawing on BSRA’s Round Robin journal archives Source Status: DISPUTED — the mass sighting itself, independently reported by hundreds of witnesses and local radio, is well corroborated as a real event; Adamski’s own later personal narrative and photographic claims tied to this and subsequent sightings were extensively investigated and are widely regarded within ufology as fabricated, most notably by Project Blue Book’s Edward Ruppelt and by former Adamski associates who later described staged hoaxes.
Date: October 20, 1946
Location: Southern Sweden
Time: Unknown
Summary: One arrow-shaped object was observed by two witnesses.
Source: AFU Sweden
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
October 1946 — Where the Contactee Movement Was Born
The Palomar Gardens/San Diego sighting of October 9 deserves to be understood on two separate levels, and this revision treats them separately. The underlying event — a large object maneuvering over San Diego during a meteor shower, seen by hundreds of independent witnesses and reported on local radio the same night — is a genuinely well-corroborated mass sighting. What happened afterward is a different matter: George Adamski, one witness among hundreds that night, spent the following six years building a mythology around it that culminated in his globally famous, and widely discredited, claimed 1952 meeting with a Venusian named Orthon. This archive documents the 1946 event honestly while being direct that Adamski’s subsequent personal claims — photographs later explained by former associates as staged hoaxes, a narrative that investigators including Air Force officer Edward Ruppelt considered a calculated con — are a separate and far weaker evidentiary matter than the mass sighting itself.
“I had never given too much thought to the idea of inter-planetary travel in man-made ships. This subject had never entered my mind until late in 1946.”
George Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), recalling the October 9, 1946 sighting over Palomar Gardens.
