In the Beginning…
It was this week in 2010 (16 years ago!) that I shot my first interview for They Rode the Flying Saucers. It was a huge deal for me: my first movie, my first interview, my first crew, and I had no idea what I was doing. I had numerous people looking to me to tell them what to do, and I had to pretend that I knew what to say. We were at the Oak Knoll campgrounds on Mt. Palomar in California, a place that used to be called Palomar Gardens, the onetime home of George Adamski, the pioneer “Contactee” who started a movement in 1952.
Alan Tolman and Glenn Steckling at Oak Knoll Campground on Mt. Palomar in California, 2010.
Who were the Contactees? Simply put, they were people in the 1950s and 60s who claimed to have had face-to-face interactions with visitors from other planets. Typically, these beings were said to be human in appearance, very attractive, and came bearing a message of peace and love, and a warning about the dangers of our nuclear technologies. To me, this sounded like a kind of “proto-Hippie” movement, the precursor to the New Age movement, and one that hasn’t gotten much attention. So I thought it would be interesting to make a short, 15-minute animated re-creation featuring some archival audio of these people that I’d found at the LA public library. As I researched the subject, I realized that a lot of the settings in the stories—Mt. Palomar, Giant Rock—were within a couple hours of where I lived in Los Angeles at the time, so I decided to do some filming to flesh out the film. That led to discovering that some of these people who were still around, and the project quickly spiraled into a full feature documentary.
And that’s how I found myself on Mt. Palomar on an April morning in 2010. I was set to interview Glenn Steckling, the director of the George Adamski Foundation, International. George Adamski’s story of meeting a Venusian named Orthon in the desert went viral (to use a modern term) in 1952, and soon others were claiming similar encounters. Glenn’s father Fred took up the directorship of the Adamski foundation after Adamski’s death in 1965, and he in turn passed it on to Glenn.
Glenn was kind enough to bring along Alan Tolman, who had been a friend of Adamski’s, and who’d spend a lot of time at Mt. Palomar with him. Alan had an incredible story to tell, one I’m grateful to be able to include in the documentary.
Over the years, Glenn continued to advise and contribute to my efforts and was very generous with his time and resources. He told me I would be very interested to read his last book, “The UFO Reality: Can Truth Prevail?”, and I was shocked to see my own name in it! I am so grateful to Glenn and Alan both. Unfortunately, neither of them are with us to be able to see the film fully finished.
I was able to screen the film a few months ago for Glenn, and he gave it his blessing just a few weeks before he passed away in January of 2026. I am sad that he will not be able to sit in a theater and watch it with a crowd at a festival to see Adamski’s story up there on the big screen, something he’d been hoping for his entire life.