I was stunned by the power of light. Even when I put on my sunglasses, I had to hold my hand to my forehead to subdue the glare. Now I was saluting the power of light.

My reaction was partly just the logical neural response to emerging from a dimly lit chamber into the bright sunlight. I would have had the same reaction if I’d been emerging from a movie theater. But I hadn’t been in a theater. I’d been in a dome about one hundred feet high, looking at a telescope that filled most of that space. For nearly half a century this had been the most powerful telescope in the world. It had helped create the universe as humans know it today: an expanding universe of billions of galaxies, a universe of powerful forces like quasars and black holes and supernovae, a universe with a wide variety of stars that are born, evolve, generate new elements, and die. Here atop Palomar Mountain in southern California, at 5,571 feet, there was a mile less atmosphere to filter the starlight than at sea level, making it good for observing the stars and for stunning me with sunlight.

I was also philosophically stunned by the power of light, for the telescope had focused me into seeing light as a carrier of all the secrets of the universe. The light on my face had just jumped out of the orderly chaos of the sun and raced through space at an incredible and incredibly precise speed. I saluted a sun that was far more powerful than me, a sun that had been burning for 4.6 billion years and that keeps an entire planet pulsing with life. This telescope could register light that had traveled across billions of light-years and that told all kinds of amazing stories.

I turned and looked up at the dome exterior towering above me. It was painted white so it would reflect the sunlight and protect the telescope from warming up, which would distort its focus. The dome did indeed reflect the sunlight, becoming a monument to light, an architectural diamond. Like many of the world’s iconic buildings, this dome was an act of basic, pure geometry; it was nearly the size and shape of the Roman Pantheon. Yet this building was also a precision instrument that opened up its 250-ton shutters and rotated all night long, its one thousand tons turning almost soundlessly.

As I slowly walked around the dome, several times, like a planet orbiting a star, I thought of how this dome had been born from a vision.

When George Hale was in his early teens, he had a revelation about the cosmos. It was a scientific vision, mediated by a scientific instrument, yet it had the life-changing power of a mystical vision, for like many mystical visions it was all about the oneness of the cosmos, the unity of the stars, Earth, and humans.

Humans have long been inclined to think of the sky as a different realm and reality than the earth. The sky was the home of the gods; the earth was the home of humans. The sky was a realm of order, even perfection; the earth was a realm of chaos and struggle. The sky was a realm of light; the earth was a realm of stone. Even the science-minded Aristotle accepted this old schism and perpetuated it far into the future. For Aristotle humans lived in the realm of the four elements (fire, air, water, and earth) while the sky consisted of another element, the ether, which was, well, ethereal—nonphysical, pure, spiritual. The earth and its atmosphere were a realm of imperfection, of change and conflict, generation and decay and death. The sky was a realm of perfection, of perfect spheres moving in perfect circles, eternally. There could be no change in the celestial realm. If a comet appeared in the sky, then by definition it had to belong to earth’s atmosphere.

Aristotle’s cosmos, endorsed by the Christian Church, cast deep shadows into the scientific Enlightenment. When Galileo aimed his telescope at the night sky and reported (in his book The Starry Messenger) that the moon held mountains and holes, it was an act of blasphemy, both scientific and religious. Yet even Galileo retained the idea that the laws of motion in the sky were different from those on Earth. Two centuries later the science-minded Thomas Jefferson was refusing to believe in meteorites, rocks falling out of the sky, for battered rocks did not belong in the celestial realm. Comets too took a long time to be promoted from atmospheric blemishes to cosmic travelers.

In the nineteenth century physicists and chemists were replacing the four elements of Aristotle with a large alphabet of atomic elements. When they shined light through elements in gaseous form, each element absorbed the light in a different way, leaving its own pattern of black lines—missing light—in the light’s spectra. In the 1860s British astronomer William Huggins pointed a new instrument, the spectroscope, at the stars and recognized the spectral fingerprints of familiar elements, the same elements that exist on Earth. There was hydrogen, the main ingredient of the oceans, inside the sun. There was iron, just like that mined for locomotives, inside the stars.

For Christmas in 1881, when George Hale was thirteen years old, his mother gave him a book that described the nature of sunlight and included instructions on how to build a primitive spectroscope. George took a blade of glass from an old chandelier in the attic, built his spectroscope, and looked through it at a candle flame. He was delighted to see the flame dissected into a rainbow. Wanting a better spectroscope, George built one that used sulfur, very smelly sulfur, and pointed it at the sun. He was thrilled to see the sun’s spectra full of lines, the fingerprints of the elements that were all around him, and in him. He said he was “completely carried off my feet. From that moment my fate was sealed.”

George Hale would devote his life to the spectroscope and to exploring what was happening inside the sun and stars. At age twenty, while still a college student, he built his own spectroscopic laboratory, a small brick building in his parents’ yard. There he made his first serious scientific discovery, the presence of carbon in the sun. Two prominent astronomers had already reported finding carbon in the sun, but other astronomers had disputed their reports. Now George was seeing for himself that the sun held carbon, the element of life, the element of George’s own body. His warmth and the sun’s warmth were generated by hearts with something in common. The sky was made of ourselves; the ordinary earth was actually cosmic. Somehow, humans were part of the flowings of massive, ancient, powerful forces.

George Hale’s vision was also a vision of the future of astronomy. At that time astronomers saw their work as mapping the stars, the stars’ positions, brightness, colors, and motions. The spectroscope meant that humans could now look inside the sun and stars and determine their substance, internal structure, temperature, dynamics, and evolution. It meant that the accumulated discoveries of physics and chemistry about thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and the atomic elements could now be applied to astronomy. George Hale became the leader of “astrophysics.”

Two years after finding carbon in the sun, Hale invented a new instrument, the spectroheliograph, the high-tech equivalent of holding a hand over your eyes, that blocked the sun’s glare and allowed observations of the sun’s long-hidden corona and prominences. Later he discovered that sunspots are magnetic, science’s first discovery of magnetic fields on an astronomical body. In the 1890s Hale founded Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, with the best telescope ever built and the first astrophysics laboratory for sifting all the secrets hidden in light.

George Hale was obsessed by what he described as a “divine discontent.” He was never satisfied with what he had accomplished; he always saw new possibilities and was driven to pursue them. Even as Yerkes Observatory opened, Hale was dreaming of a greater observatory in a better location, and a decade later he had built it atop Mount Wilson, overlooking Pasadena, California. Soon he was dreaming of an ultimate telescope, which he located atop Palomar Mountain.

For nearly a century George Hale’s observatories were the world leaders of astronomy; they transformed our concept of the universe. They validated and elucidated Hale’s vision of the unity of earth and sky by helping astronomers understand how stars are born, evolve, and die, and how stars generate the elements that become planets and life. They discovered a cosmos full of galaxies racing outward from a moment of creation.

The discovery of the expanding universe came directly from the light spectra that had inspired George Hale’s vision of cosmic unity. As astronomical bodies move, their spectral lines shift position in a way that reveals their direction and speed; the spectral lines in galaxies had revealed extreme motions, outward motions. Yet these spectra could also inspire a rather different vision.

As the Palomar telescope absorbed light from the farthest galaxies, it also absorbed enormous emptiness. Its photographs consisted mostly of nothingness. Even massive galaxies roaring with the energy of hundreds of billions of suns were largely canceled out by the emptiness of space, leaving only a flake of light. From the Palomar telescope all this emptiness and darkness and coldness funneled into the human mind. It flowed into old cosmologies that had cozy skies and gardens of creation and began to dissolve them. It filled humans with a vast loneliness.

When the Palomar Observatory was almost ready to open in 1948, the most famous astronomer George Hale ever had working for him, Edwin Hubble, who had proven that the universe is expanding, offered some public comments about what Palomar would achieve. He said that it would further refine our understanding of the size and expansion rate and age of the universe. Then he said that Palomar would observe Mars and determine if it really held canals and civilization. Hubble’s colleagues were surprised and annoyed. Palomar astronomers had no intention of studying Mars and zero faith in the idea that Mars held intelligent life. Yet Edwin Hubble had more experience at public relations; he knew what was on people’s minds. And perhaps Edwin Hubble, after all his years of staring into the emptiness of the expanding universe, also understood the deep loneliness it could bring.


 
On my drive up Palomar Mountain, at the junction where the highway that followed the waist of the mountain met the “Highway to the Stars” that led steeply up to the Observatory, I stopped at a campground nestled in oak trees. I was looking for a famous little café called Palomar Gardens. It wasn’t famous for its food, its hamburgers and doughnuts. It was famous for offering the secrets of the universe. If I had stopped here half a century ago I might have been served my hamburger by a distinguished-looking man, about sixty years old, with silver hair and a European accent. Thousands of people came to Palomar Gardens just to see this man in person and to hear his wisdom. His books sold more copies than those of the astronomers atop the mountain. Some people seeking the secrets of the cosmos came up the mountain only as far as Palomar Gardens and never went to the observatory. The man was George Adamski, the first human contacted by extraterrestrials.

For the first five years of the UFO era, which began in 1947 when private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing “flying saucers,” UFOs were only objects or lights in the sky, seen at a distance. They really were unidentified objects, prompting the US Air Force to investigate whether they might be secret enemy aircraft, and prompting others to wonder if they were the spaceships of aliens.

In 1952 the aliens finally revealed themselves and their purposes. For their conduit they selected George Adamski and telepathically invited him into the Mojave Desert. There he encountered a spaceship from Venus and met its occupant, a handsome, blond, thoroughly human-looking Venusian named Orthon. Orthon told Adamski that the Venusians were deeply worried about humans now that they had atomic bombs. Orthon declared that humans were spiritually shallow and that Venusians understood the Creator of All and lived by the Universal Laws that governed the cosmos. The Venusians were deeply benevolent beings, and they wanted to help humans survive and find spiritual enlightenment.

George Adamski reported that the Venusians were very democratically minded, and this seemed proven by the fact that they had selected a hamburger server when they could easily have landed right in front of the world-famous Edwin Hubble as he walked out the door of Palomar Observatory. If Edwin Hubble had been the one to proclaim the existence of the Venusians and their plan for world enlightenment and peace, he would have had far more impact. It seemed the Venusians had a terrible sense of public relations.

Yet George Adamski did have better credentials than Edwin Hubble as a spiritual prophet. Adamski had been a spiritual prophet for over two decades. In the 1920s he had founded the Royal Order of Tibet in southern California and gathered a band of followers. He taught a mixture of eastern religions, Christianity, and especially theosophy, a modern blending of old mystical and occult traditions. Adamski called his teachings “Universal Law,” which included a moral system far above mere human laws, calling on humans to live in harmony with the cosmos and all other living beings. Adamski wrote several books, gave radio talks, and traveled the Southwest giving lectures. All the while, the Space Brothers were observing Adamski’s efforts and recognizing his brilliance, which is why they would select him to be their messenger. The aliens’ teachings were remarkably similar to Adamski’s. Some of the messages Adamski attributed to the Space Brothers were almost word-for-word quotations from his own books.

In the years when George Adamski was speaking for himself and not the Space Brothers, he hadn’t made much of a stir. He had remained one of many small-time California gurus who, before the 1960s counterculture and the New Age, hadn’t found much of an audience. Then Adamski moved to Palomar Mountain and saw the enormous appeal of science and technology. In the mid-1940s Adamski and his followers developed Palomar Gardens as a communal home for themselves, a base for their spiritual mission, and a source of income. Palomar Observatory drew lots of tourists from all over the world. Some tourists were seeking a sense of the cosmos, and others came to admire an engineering feat equal to anything of its era—the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge. As George Adamski mingled with the Palomar pilgrims he surely noticed that astro-technology held a much stronger draw than his theosophical lectures. Adamski had always been interested in astronomy. At Palomar Gardens he had two telescopes, one of them with its own dome. He decorated the walls of the café with photos of the Palomar dome and telescope and astronomical objects.

When George Adamski found an astro-technological mouthpiece for his theosophical lectures, he found that he suddenly had a vast and rapt audience. That wasn’t just because he had revolutionized the flying saucer craze. He had stepped into the spiritual void of modern civilization, a void created largely by science, partly by observatories like Palomar. Astronomers had revealed a universe of vast emptiness, not just an emptiness of space but an emptiness of meaning, connection, spirit. Even the mighty Palomar telescope hadn’t located Heaven or angels. Like the prophets of old, Adamski had ventured into the desert and met angellike beings who had revealed the spiritual plan of the cosmos. For people who could no longer believe in biblical angels with wings and harps, these angels came in spaceships and had scientific powers far beyond those of humans. These angels offered humans companionship, a spiritual cosmic order, and a moral system by which human civilization could survive. The idea of a space-age religion was so powerful that it couldn’t be spoiled by all the amateurish, cheesy efforts of its own prophets.

Along with his testimony, Adamski offered a photograph of the Venusian spaceship. His photo would shape the popular image of flying saucers through the 1950s and 1960s. His spaceship had an upper hub with portholes, and a lower, sloping brim, under which were three white bulbs. Skeptics said that it looked like some sort of lamp fixture. One skeptic found it to be identical to a heat lamp made for chicken coops. Another skeptic enlarged the photo and said that one of the bulbs was imprinted with a design and the letters “GE,” the logo of General Electric.

In his second book, published in 1955, Adamski reported that the Venusians had contacted him again, taken him aboard their spaceship, flown him to their mother ship and then around the moon. This time Adamski met people from Mars and Saturn. They too were fully human, for that was the ultimate form for evolved, intelligent life. It also allowed numerous Space Brothers to live and work on Earth undetected. The Space Brothers were far more evolved than humans; they were extremely handsome and lived as long as one thousand years. Adamski was surprised to find that Venusian women were allowed to be space travelers. They too were extremely attractive; even the ones who were two hundred years old hardly looked much over twenty. But Venusian women were still good housewives, with all the latest gadgets for cleaning and cooking. Venusian women dis-approved of modern, vulgar human dances like the jitterbug.

The Space Brothers showed Adamski the super-technology of their spaceships, which had no engines but harnessed the energy currents of space. Adamski saw images of Venusian cities, which had modernistic architecture. He saw a map of the solar system, which turned out to have twelve planets. At the moon Adamski saw that it held an atmosphere, water, vegetation, animals, and lunar humans living happily.

Adamski met with a Master Teacher who explained the cosmic order. Earth had been the last planet in the solar system ready for habitation, and its first human inhabitants were transplanted from other planets. But they soon discovered that Earth’s atmosphere was defective. Most people left, leaving a remnant to degenerate. The other planets began using Earth as a dump for their defective individuals. That’s why Earth turned out so primitive, with hatred, murder, war, greed, poverty, crime, hunger, and tyranny. All the other planets were peaceful and egalitarian, with no money, competition, or unmet needs. No one worried about death, for they knew that the life essence wasn’t the body but the spirit, which would be reincarnated in a new body.

Adamski warned his readers that the flying saucer movement was in danger of being contaminated by the lunatic fringe. Psychics long had claimed that they were receiving messages from spirits, but lately it had become a fad for psychics to claim they were receiving messages from space aliens.

Many people in the flying saucer movement, which was struggling to get taken seriously, were appalled by Adamski and by newer contactees who were popping up with similar messages. In the early 1950s, before the Space Age, all scientific studies of the planets were still long-distance, but they looked very unpromising for Venusians or Martians. Movie-star Venusians preaching philosophical banalities were even less helpful to the cause. Leaders of ufology set out to discredit Adamski by interviewing some of his followers and announcing that they hadn’t actually witnessed his desert meeting with Orthon as he’d claimed.

The astronomers at Palomar Observatory were not amused either. Too many of the media reports about Adamski showed him at his telescope and identified him as a “Palomar astronomer,” and Adamski didn’t discourage this. The observatory received too many letters addressed to “Professor Adamski.” Adamski did like to call himself “Professor,” though he’d had little education. The Palomar astronomers did stop at Palomar Gardens, mainly because there were very few eating places on the mountain, but they did have some curiosity about Adamski. According to Adamski, astronomer Fritz Zwicky came to his home at Palomar Gardens three times and sounded him out, only to turn around and ridicule Adamski in public lectures. It’s possible that George Adamski served a doughnut or coffee to Edwin Hubble.

In trying to defend himself Adamski made even more outlandish claims. In his third book, published in 1960, after the Space Age was launched and the public was avidly educating itself about planetary science, Adamski claimed that all twelve planets were inhabited. The asteroid belt accelerated tiring light beams into the outer solar system and allowed the outer planets to remain warm. Adamski claimed that a vast conspiracy, led by “international bankers,” was trying to silence him. In private, Adamski began engaging in the psychic spirit channeling he had publicly denounced. The banalities of his Space Brother revelations were often embarrassing even to his inner circle, many of whom finally abandoned him.

Adamski did find followers all over the world, and in 1959 he went on a world lecture tour. In Switzerland he was hosted by a woman named Lou Zinsstag, who was the niece of famous psychologist Carl Jung. Zinsstag tried to interest Jung in Adamski, since she knew Jung was interested in the subject of UFOs. Jung started reading Adamski’s books but when he came to the angelic, movie star Venusians, he decided that Adamski was an absurd fabricator. Jung wrote his own book, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, exploring the psychological functions of belief in aliens. Believers were plugging Space Age images into very old, unconscious needs, making aliens fill the role of angels. Jung was especially intrigued that UFOs were imagined to be round. Jung was a student of mandalas, circular Tibetan artwork rich in religious symbolism, and he had mapped out how round shapes in art and religion served as markers of psychological wholeness. Flying saucers were projections of powerful, irrepressible psychological forces that had been cut off from their traditional outlets in an age of science.

Lou Zinsstag too eventually lost faith in Adamski, but she couldn’t shake the power of the idea. She wrote a book about Adamski, subtitled “Their Man on Earth,” and insisted that his meeting with Orthon was real, but then he came under the bad influence of his obsessive followers.

Long after Adamski’s death in 1965, even after astronauts had walked on a barren moon and spacecraft had photographed the planets, true believers kept finding him. In 2001 Colin Bennett wrote a biography of Adamski, hailing him as the genius originator of a world-changing idea, yet flaying him for his absurd presentations of the idea. The basic idea was too powerful to die.

Yet as the decades passed, Adamski’s vision of aliens evolved considerably. His perfect humanoids shrank into little green men or reptilians. His angelic helpers began behaving strangely, ominously. They were mutilating cattle and kidnapping people, implanting strange devices and violating women. A rear guard of believers tried to keep the aliens local by identifying faces on Mars and hidden portals on the moon. But for others, the aliens ceased flying nuts-and-bolts spacecraft and became psychic, inter-dimensional travelers. The UFO movement developed a deep paranoia. As year after year passed and no alien hardware appeared for proof, belief in a dark government cover-up became more urgent, for if there was no cover-up, there were no aliens.

Pulling into the Palomar Gardens campground, I didn’t see any café. I went up the hill to the combined office, store, and recreation room.

On the wall was a poster of Adamski, two posters showing Orthon’s spaceship, and some badly faded newspaper articles. One article, ten years old, said that the new owners of the campground had discovered its history and were planning to sell Adamski T-shirts and ball caps. I looked around, but it seemed that nothing had come of those plans.

As I was buying my caffeine I asked the host if many people came here for its Adamski history, and she said that some still did. But there was little left to see. She pointed to a flat zone beside the highway and said that the café had been there but had burned down thirty years ago. Adamski’s telescope dome was long gone.

When I got to the top of the mountain I stopped at its highway-junction store and café. I asked the shopkeeper about Adamski and she recalled how a busload of Japanese tourists, apparently on a UFO tour of America, had stopped here.

The store included lots of religious art and icons from around the world; since 1977 the store and vegetarian café had been run by a yoga retreat center just up the road. I suggested to the shopkeeper that they were carrying on the spiritual tradition of Palomar Mountain, and she answered that they were strictly about yoga but that their participants, many of them from harried Los Angeles lives, did bring their own varied spiritual interests with them, and that Palomar Mountain, with its quiet and beauty, was a sanctuary for finding peace. In many traditions, seers had sought mountains to seek visions. This included, I thought, astronomical seers. Her store also offered lots of astronomical images.


 
George Hale was troubled by the emptiness and loneliness of the cosmos he was helping to create.

Hale was raised not just to be a devout Christian but to accept a strict and avenging god. His grandfather Gardner was a New England minister who created a scandal by divorcing his wife, a rare act for anyone in the mid-1800s and unthinkable for a minister. Gardner sent his daughter Mary to live with her grandfather, also a minister, a very stern man who preached a stern god. Mary grew up devout but in a very insecure, fearful, and grim way, and that was how she raised her son George. When Mary packed George off to college at MIT, she had him live with a church deacon who would make sure George attended church twice every Sunday and would guard him against the tools of the devil, such as beer.

Yet George Hale, born nine years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, grew up in an age of science and heroic engineering. His father owned an elevator company that was thriving in the age of skyscrapers—it was a Hale elevator that lifted tourists to the top of the Eiffel Tower. At MIT George was exposed to the latest scientific thinking. In his freshman year Alfred Russel Wallace came to campus and lectured about evolution and about how it dethroned humans from their central role in creation. To his friends George tried to defend the traditional Christian cosmos, but as they argued back he came to see the flaws in his worldview, which caused him deep confusion, guilt, and despair. Perhaps this internal conflict found an outlet and a solution in George’s intense spectroscopic pursuit of cosmic connections.

George Hale was always prone to intensity and despair. As a boy he was very high-strung and sickly. His mother had been the same way, so perhaps George inherited a flawed physical foundation, on top of which wobbled his precarious psychology. George picked the wrong lifework for a man with his flaws: building the world’s greatest telescopes involved huge and numerous technological challenges and setbacks, and building the observatories involved endless logistical and funding challenges, especially that of charming money from wealthy and highly temperamental patrons. Several times Hale suffered severe nervous breakdowns, with physical symptoms such as crippling headaches and dizziness, and psychiatric symptoms such as nightmares, hallucinations, and severe depression. His doctors ordered him to quit work and go to sanitariums or take long vacations in Europe.

We have to wonder if George Hale’s religious doubts contributed to his collapses into despair. Hale didn’t leave us much evidence, but we do know that when his father died, when George was thirty years old, George was plunged into another religious crisis, an obsession with ultimate realities. George had thought he had gotten out of his mother’s religious cosmos, but now he found himself longing for it, longing for a cosmos of benevolence and immortality where he would see his father again. He didn’t see how science could prove the existence of heaven, but he felt that heaven was necessary.

While some prominent scientists were publicly interpreting the new scientific cosmos and the relation of science and religion, Hale kept quiet. We catch only glimpses of his ongoing ambivalence. He refused to attend church, even when his wife urged him to do so “for the sake of the children,” but in both public and private he said that astronomy served to reveal the full powers of the Creator.

Hale was certainly aware that modern science, especially the science emanating from his telescopes, had set off an intense cultural discussion about the reality of religion and the meaning of the cosmos. Many writers, artists, and intellectuals were portraying the new cosmos as meaningless, even malevolent. While we are left wondering to what degree this spiritual despair helped to trigger George Hale’s personal despairs, certainly Hale was no poster boy for a nurturing cosmos.


 
At the end of my day at the observatory I drove back down the mountain and to the nearest town, Temecula. There, my home base for my Palomar visit had the right name: the Palomar Hotel. The hotel had opened in 1927 with the name of its owner, McCulloch, but a decade later, as the Palomar Observatory dome was being finished and becoming a tourist attraction, the hotel was renamed the Palomar Hotel. Perhaps the new name also implied high-tech: the Palomar Hotel was the first in town to have electricity and indoor bathrooms. Today it was promoted as a historic, rustic hotel. It had only eight rooms and was quiet and locked much of the time, so I had a key to the front door and could sit in the little lobby as if it were my own private living room.

Some of the hotel’s history was Hollywood history. In the silent-movie era actors and film crews stayed here while filming westerns in the surrounding ranchlands, foothills, and mountains. (Back in 1914 Palomar Mountain had starred in Cecil B. De Mille’s The Virginian.) In 1966 my own private living room was the setting for the pilot episode of a science- fiction TV series, The Invaders. The invaders were “alien beings from a dying planet,” the weekly opening warned us as a flying saucer zoomed out of deep space and toward Earth. “Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world.”

But the show’s hero, David Vincent, has discovered the presence and purpose of the aliens. All we are told about David Vincent is that he is an architect, which implies he is a well-educated, mature professional, not some kook. Late one night Vincent is attempting a mountain shortcut but comes to a dead end and falls asleep in his car, only to be awakened by a glowing flying saucer landing nearby. The next morning he insists on bringing a county detective to see the saucer, but of course all traces of it are gone. They do find two campers, who deny having seen anything unusual. Vincent returns by himself that night and discovers that the two campers are aliens in human form. They flee. But they had told the detective their address: the Palomar Hotel. They even used the real street address: 285 Front Street.

David Vincent drives into Temecula, which in 1966 was a small town. It seems deserted. Vincent walks up to the Palomar Hotel and finds its owner, Kathy Adams, played by Diane Baker, raking leaves in the large yard. Vincent asks her where the town residents have gone, and she explains that the entire town has been bought by some mysterious corporation. Kathy says she has never heard of the two campers who gave the Palomar Hotel as their address, and she invites Vincent into the lobby to check the register and see for himself.

Snooping around town, Vincent discovers that an abandoned power plant has been turned into an alien base, full of regeneration tubes with which the aliens maintain their human form. As he is waiting for a friend to arrive so he can show his proof of alien presence, pretty Kathy Adams reveals that she is an alien. As she caresses David’s face she pleads: “Don’t fight us. You can’t stop it. It’s going to happen.” David Vincent spends the next two TV seasons fleeing the aliens, trying to warn the human race, and getting treated like a crackpot.

It seems that the name “Palomar” has a special magnetism in UFO culture. It was a legitimate gateway to the cosmos.

The Invaders was aired at the height of 1960s popular enthusiasm for flying saucers, and it drew upon the imagery of George Adamski. The invaders’ flying saucer was a close copy of Adamski’s saucer, though the invaders’ saucer had five glowing bulbs underneath, while Adamski’s had three. The invaders looked human and were secretly living and working among us. Perhaps even the name “Kathy Adams” was a reference to Adamski. But the TV show acknowledged the Space Age, sending its aliens not from Venus or Mars but from much farther away. The biggest difference was that the invaders were the opposite of Adamski’s benevolent helpers.

There was some symbolism in using Temecula as the setting for The Invaders, for Temecula was the scene of one of the most famous invasions in American literature. In the 1880s Helen Hunt Jackson had come here gathering materials for a novel about the injustices committed against Native Americans. She had already touched the national conscience on this subject with her documentary book A Century of Dishonor, and now she was hoping to write the Indian equivalent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For the central event of her novel, Ramona, Jackson selected the true story of the invasion of the Temecula Valley by white settlers, their land grab, and their eviction of the Temecula Indians. Writing only a few years after the Battle of the Little Big Horn had made General Custer a martyr of Manifest Destiny, Jackson was uncompromising in her criticism. She has one Indian character protest: “If there are Americans who are good, who will not cheat and kill, why do they not send after these robbers and punish them? And how is it that they make laws which cheat? It was the American law which took Temecula away from us, and gave it to those men! The law was on the side of the thieves!” Ramona became a national bestseller and later generated several movie versions, a number one hit song in 1928, and an annual theatrical Ramona Pageant near Temecula.

Now the Invaders would teach Americans what it was like to be invaded by an implacable, overpowering Manifest Destiny.

The Invaders was aired during the same years as the original Star Trek, and both shows appealed to a Space Age sense of wonder. Though both were constrained by the formulas of 1960s network TV, they did reach farther than most mass entertainment, offering a sense that humans are part of a vast cosmos full of planets and strange life forms. Yet The Invaders never developed the deep following of Star Trek. When I had checked into the Palomar Hotel, which devotes one page of its publicity flyer to The Invaders, I asked the manager if many people recognized the show anymore, and he said, “Not many.” In the gift shops down the street I would notice lots of 1960s TV nostalgia merchandise, including Star Trek lunch boxes, but I never noticed any Invaders merchandise.

It isn’t hard to guess why the two shows met different welcomes. Star Trek offered an optimistic vision of human abilities and the human future. The Invaders said that humans were an inferior species, doomed to be conquered, and too stupid to even recognize what was happening. And perhaps people were reluctant to define the universe as malevolent. In its own, often cheesy ways, science fiction does reach the deep, mythic human imagination that wrestles with the need to define the universe as good or evil or some mixture of both.

As a kid I’d been fascinated by both shows, by their imaginings of the universe. Today I didn’t remember a single scene from The Invaders, but I did like the idea of stepping back into its universe, which was easier to enter than the universe of Star Trek. Before heading for Temecula I had checked out an Invaders video to see where I was going to be staying. Now as I looked around the Palomar Hotel I recognized the white archways in front, the wooden front door, the bell on the stairway banister, and the yard where Kathy Adams had raked leaves. As I walked around downtown the only thing I recognized for sure was a white bridge across the creek. But I did see plenty of evidence that invaders had built a fake town here. Most of the Old-West-style buildings in “Old Town” Temecula had been built long after 1966 to create a theme park for shopping and dining and entertainment, to draw from Los Angeles people who were sick of endless strip malls and hungry for a lost, friendlier universe of small-town Main Streets.


 
The next day I went back up the mountain. This time my goal wasn’t the observatory but the mountain itself. One of the reasons why the observatory was here was because George Hale had been enchanted by the mountain itself, by its green oasis of forests atop the dry brownness of southern California. Hale had investigated Palomar Mountain when he was first looking for an observatory site in southern California, but Palomar was too remote and lacked a road or electricity or phone lines, so he had selected Mount Wilson instead. Today the western edge of Palomar Mountain holds a state park with forests, lots of hiking trails, and great views of the Pacific Ocean; on a clear day, you can see Catalina Island sixty miles away. I wanted to feel that I had gotten to know the mountain, this conduit between earth and sky.

For a hike I selected a trail that offered ocean views and, near its peak, a view of the observatory dome a few miles away. Unfortunately, this morning the dome was hidden by mist rolling up the mountainside, clouds condensing from recent rains. The ocean too was hidden. I could look down the steep edge of the mountain at the lands below and the Native American town of Pala—they too had been invaded and evicted from better lands. But soon this view also was obscured by clouds. Okay, I would look at the forest.

The forest seemed to be a mixture of elevations and ecosystems, of oak trees you would find farther down the slopes and of pine and fir trees that grew only at elevations this high or higher. The trees were old and tall and beautiful. At first I got expansive views of the forest, but as the clouds continued thickening, I was sometimes seeing only the trees right in front of me.

I began to worry. Driving back down the mountain in this kind of fog would be dangerous. The road was steep and twisting and lined by boulders and dropping cliffs, and now it would hold invisible cars moving too fast or too slow. If I had been expecting a hike that would leave me feeling in harmony with the mountain, the mountain was sending me a different message: I was a soft bag of water and carbon that was quite small and vulnerable compared with the forces of gravity and stone and weather.

Okay, for now I would enjoy the tree right in front of me. I looked up at its huge form, its trunk and branches and leaves. I looked at its shapes and textures and colors. In the mist, the tree had become more mystical, less defined, less likely to be taken for granted. The tree was a strange assertion of form against formlessness, of life against gravity and stone and weather. Like me, the tree was a city of carbon, loaded with layer within layer of order and activity. It was carbon welded inside the sun and woven on Earth into a far more elaborate order. It was carbon that was now reaching thousands of leaves back toward a star like those from which it had arisen. It was sunlight flowing in patterns far more careful and skilled than the energy currents inside the sun. It was a river of sunlight carrying life into the future.

Except that right now, with the clouds cutting off the sunlight, the solar harvest was shutting down. In billions of cells the energy flow was slowing, sloooowing, and freezing. The tree was going into waiting mode. I imagined the tree feeling some deep botanical hunger for sunlight. It was the hunger of life to go on living. It was the atomic hunger of the universe to generate order. It was the same hunger that moved humans to turn trees into churches to proclaim cosmic order and to defend the shapes of carbon against chaos and destruction.

At another tree I stopped and looked up at a raven that had just landed there and was looking down at me. If I had been at the trailhead with its cluster of picnic tables and garbage cans I would have assumed a hunger motive behind the raven’s gaze, but right here it seemed more like curiosity, the need of every animal to define what was going on in its environment, to define benefits or threats, good or evil, angels or invaders. In humans, this need had stretched far beyond defining food, predators, or driving hazards. Some human cultures looked at ravens and saw omens of evil, and others saw wise creator gods. In humans, defining the environment has manifested as telescopes that can define a galaxy billions of light-years away and sketch out the forces that created and shaped the cosmos.

I came to a grove of trees where every tree was riddled with hundreds of little holes, and most of the holes were stuffed with an acorn. This was the work of a bird called the acorn woodpecker, who didn’t store acorns to eat them but to invite insects to lay their eggs in the decaying acorns, and then the woodpeckers feasted on the insect larvae. What an unlikely way of life. How did the woodpeckers ever come up with a system like this? I pried an acorn out of its hole and looked at it, pondering how such a small thing could contain a huge tree, or a future woodpecker. What a strange carbon universe. The smooth dome of the acorn reminded me of the dome of the observatory. It reminded me that in the final stages of grinding the telescope mirror the opticians had used pine pitch and ground-up walnut shells as abrasives, perfectly gentle carbon abrasives. It seemed right that trees had helped to sprout the telescope.

When I finished the long loop of the trail I still hadn’t seen the observatory dome, but the clouds were offering occasional gaps. I wandered down the trail again, enjoying its view of the mountaintop and keeping an eye out for the dome, though I wasn’t sure exactly where it was supposed to be. Then suddenly the clouds divulged the observatory dome, as white as the clouds, as if the clouds had suddenly solidified into the dome. In the largest sense, they had indeed. The clouds of Earth and the nebulae of space and the rushing light of the Big Bang had solidified into a shape that could be astonished by its existence and by the universe, and that could discover the long odyssey it had made. Clouds had solidified into a creature who often felt like an alien in the universe, but in this too, especially in this, humans had embodied into consciousness the primordial mystery of the cosmos.

At the Palomar Hotel I slept with the curtains open to the stars. I was on the second floor, over the side yard where Kathy Adams had raked leaves, so no one but the stars was going to look in on me. As I orbited to sleep I watched the stars, and as I slept the stars paraded across my bed, across my face, across my closed eyes, as unseen as during the daytime; but the stars were always there, ready to be seen not just as constellated human faces but as the womb of human faces. The stars touched my face like a mother caressing her baby.

When I woke up in the middle of the night I could have turned on the TV to hypnotize myself back to sleep, but I had my own TV show in the yard below. I watched Kathy Adams raking leaves, her cute smile, her long black hair, her tight, curvy jeans. The rustic wagon-wheel fence in the show had been replaced, but the trees were probably the same.

I thought of the 1930s Philip Berry play Hotel Universe. I had read it, not seen it on stage, for it wasn’t a great play and hardly ever got staged anymore. I had read it because I thought the title was great. The universe is like a hotel where people come and go, never owning the place or feeling entirely at home; strangers meet and interact and make stories of love or conflict or mystery, and then they disappear. And what was the symbolism of the name “Palomar Hotel”? I was sure I should know this, for after all I held the key that unlocked the Palomar Hotel.

When I woke up in the morning in the Palomar Hotel I went downstairs to my own private living room, carrying the tray of cinnamon rolls I had bought just for this morning. I cut a huge serving of cinnamon rolls, thick with cream cheese. This morning was Christmas morning. Along with the stars, the Christmas lights on the street had shined on me all night.

With my feast of cinnamon rolls I was celebrating the birth of Christ, the embodiment into human form of the powers that run the universe. The universe came to Earth to proclaim that the universe is powerfully benevolent, but Christ found that humans are terribly confused, so troubled by the mysteries of life and death and good and evil that they could not believe his message and they murdered him.

As I looked around the lobby I once again saw the human mythic imagination as the alien Kathy Adams, another embodiment into human form of the powers of the universe, but this time a malevolent power.

In the Palomar Hotel humans come and go, never owning the place or feeling entirely at home; we get a brief chance to look into the cosmos that made us, to feel its mystery and try to figure it out. Even with the most powerful telescope, the mystery remained. The Palomar Hotel was full of confusion, of sleeplessness and troubled dreams and soothing fantasies.

When it was time to go, there was no one to say goodbye. I dropped the key onto the desk. I let myself out, and the door to the Palomar Hotel locked behind me.