The Scoriton Contact: Ernest Arthur Bryant and "Yamski"

Spring 1965. The age of the contactee was fading. George Adamski, the most famous of them all, had spent years describing meetings with Venusians. On 23 April 1965, Adamski died.

Saturday 24 April 1965. About 5:30 p.m. Ernest Arthur Bryant, 51, was near Scoriton, a small village on the south-east edge of Dartmoor. Bryant was an ex-Commando and a former prison and security officer, now working as a gardener and handyman.

According to Bryant, a saucer literally came out of nothing. It moved with a pendulum motion. Then it hovered about one metre above the ground, a few metres away, where the hedge was low and sheep grazed nearby. An opening appeared in the side. Three occupants in silvery suits, like tinfoil diving suits with helmets, took off their helmets and waved Bryant over.

Two were tall, with extremely high foreheads that came to a point, thin sallow features, fair hair and blue cat-like eyes with vertical pupils. They never spoke. They seemed particularly interested in the sheep. "I did have that feeling that they knew what I was thinking," Bryant said.

The third looked like an ordinary boy of 14 or 15, with short brown hair and very dark brown eyes. This one did the talking. "We are from Venus." The boy regretted that "Des" was absent, "because he would have understood," warned of forces from Epsilon that took people for procreation purposes, and gave the name Yamski. Then he promised, "One month from today we will bring proof of Mantell."

Bryant described a dim triangular globe in the ceiling, a couch, a screen of rhythmic coloured lights, and a purple robe with a very big, bright red rose on the sleeve. Then the craft rose and vanished.

On the evening of 7 June 1965, Bryant reported a pale blue light travelling west to east at 300 to 400 feet, with a sound like a ship's turbine. The next morning Bryant found metal fragments with curved blades, a broken glass phial of silver sand, and a paper inscribed in Greek. The paper read "Adelphos Adelpho," translated as "From brother to brother." A foul-smelling jelly at the site quickly evaporated. The fragments were offered as wreckage of the F-51 flown by Captain Thomas Mantell, who died in 1948 while chasing a UFO.

Two members of BUFORA, Eileen Buckle and Norman Oliver, took up the case as individuals and presented it at a public meeting on 26 February 1966. Buckle believed it and wrote The Scoriton Mystery in 1967, while Oliver did not; he argued that the events were "reported in reverse order," with coincidences meaningful only to a reader well versed in ufology. Bryant died of a brain tumour on 24 June 1967. Oliver later visited Bryant's widow. She said the story had first been presented to her as the basis for a science fiction script.

The fragments were not from an F-51. One piece was reportedly identified as part of a bombsight, and Oliver found the items had been bought at a naval surplus store. Yamski echoed Adamski, "Des" pointed to Desmond Leslie, Adamski's co-author, and Adamski's own circle, including Alice Wells and Leslie, dismissed the story. Some wondered about the tumour. BUFORA Journal editor John Cleary-Baker asked: "was the tumour responsible for the UFO or the UFO for the tumour?"

Oliver's Sequel to Scoriton followed in 1968. Most later writers, including Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman, treat the case as a hoax. Yet it lingers as a strange coda to the contactee era. A visit the day after Adamski died. A promise kept with the wrong wreckage.