Truman Bethurum was one of the well known 1950s UFO or alien "contactees"- individuals who claimed to have spoken with people from other inhabited planets and entered or ridden in their spacecraft. Bethurum was born in Gavilin, California, and in the early 1950s worked as a truck driver and a mechanic on a desert road-building crew. He later became a spiritual advisor. In 1953, Bethurum first published magazine and newspaper accounts of being contacted on eleven separate occasions by the human crew of a landed space ship, and repeatedly conversing with its beautiful and voluptuous female captain, Aura Rhanes. Saucer and crew, who spoke colloquial English, came from the unknown planet Clarion, allegedly on the other side of our Sun, and thus cannot be seen from the Earth. Bethurum's 1954 book, Aboard a Flying Saucer, gave many details of his suffering at the hands of skeptics and a great deal of information about Captain Rhanes, Clarion and its people. Most contactees of this period became leaders in new paradigm movements to inform and educate people about extraterrestrialintelligent life; in addition to Bethurum, some of the better-known contactees of the 1950s included George Adamski, Daniel Fry, George Van Tassel, Gabriel Green, Orfeo Angelucci and George King. Mr. Bethurum made it known that the space people had asked him to consider creating a place of learning for those who were interested in considering the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life, with Mr. Bethurum as facilitator. The Sanctuary of Thought, a philosophical group, was subsequently created near Prescott, Arizona. Mr. Bethurum claimed to possess physical evidence such as unique items given to him by Captain Aura Rhanes. Some of Bethurum's later books include The Voice of the Planet Clarion, Facing Reality, and The People of the Planet Clarion, published posthumously after his death in Landers, California in 1969. The first 44 pages of the final book are an autobiography of Bethurum covering his life up to 1953. Artist Columba Krebs wrote the afterword. Bethurum himself often jokingly remarked in his many public lectures that his second wife had divorced him in 1955 mainly due to jealousy over the beautiful Captain Rhanes. He later remarried a third time, the wedding taking place at one of George Van Tassel's popular annual Giant Rock Spacecraft Conventions.
