George Adamski (17 April 1891 – 23 April 1965) was a Polish-American author who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he displayed numerous photographs in the 1940s and 1950s that he said were of alien spacecraft, claimed to have met with friendly Nordic alien Space Brothers, and claimed to have taken flights with them to the Moon and other planets. Adamski was the first, and most famous, of several so-called UFO contactees who came to prominence during the 1950s. Adamski called himself a "philosopher, teacher, student and saucer researcher", although most investigators concluded his claims were an elaborate hoax, and that Adamski himself was a charlatan and a con artist. Adamski authored three books describing his meetings with Nordic aliens and his travels with them aboard their spaceships: Flying Saucers Have Landed (co-written with Desmond Leslie) in 1953, Inside the Space Ships in 1955, and Flying Saucers Farewell in 1961. The first two books were both bestsellers; by 1960 they had sold a combined 200,000 copies. In addition to his contributions to ufology in the United States, Adamski's work became very popular in Japan and helped inspire many depictions of aliens and UFOs in postwar Japanese culture and media. Early years Adamski was born in Bromberg in the Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire. He was one of five siblings born to ethnic Polish parents, Józef Adamski (1867–1937) and Franciszka Adamska (1862–1946). When he was two years old his family emigrated to the United States and settled in New York City. From 1913 to 1916, beginning at the age of 22, he was a soldier in the 13th U.S. Cavalry Regiment (K Troop) fighting at the Mexican border during the Pancho Villa Expedition. In 1917 he married Mary Shimbersky. She died in 1954; they had no children. Following his marriage Adamski moved west, doing maintenance work in Yellowstone National Park and working in an Oregon flour mill and a California concrete factory. In the 1920s Adamski became interested in the esoteric occultist religion Theosophy, and a variant called Neo-Theosophy. By 1930 "Adamski was a minor figure on the California occult scene", teaching his personal mixture of Christianity and Eastern religions, which he called "Universal Progressive Christianity" and "Universal Law." In the early 1930s, while living in Southern California, Adamski founded the "Royal Order of Tibet" in Laguna Beach, which held its meetings in