# Truman Bethurum

Truman Bethurum (August 21, 1898 – May 21, 1969) 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.

## Background

Bethurum was born in 1898 in what is now Imperial County, California. His father was a blacksmith. His parents separated when he was 4 years old. He attended Holtville High School in Holtville, California. In 1922, Bethurum married his first wife, Ruth, with whom he had 2 daughters, Lois and Doris; they were divorced in 1943. He married his second wife, Mary, in 1945. Working at various blue collar jobs as a journeyman engineer and in construction, Bethurum was a member of the International Union of Operating Engineers. In the early 1950s, he was employed as a truck driver and mechanic on a desert road-building crew. He later became a self-proclaimed spiritual advisor.

## Claims

In 1953, Bethurum first published magazine and newspaper (Redondo Beach Daily Breeze, September 25, 1953) accounts of being contacted on eleven separate occasions beginning in July, 1952 by the humanoid crew of a landed space ship near Mormon Mesa in the Mojave Desert of southern Nevada, and repeatedly conversing with its beautiful and voluptuous female captain, Aura Rhanes. Bethurum claimed the flying saucer and its crew, who spoke colloquial English, came from "the planet Clarion", which was allegedly on the other side of the Sun and thus could not 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 wrote a great deal about the purported Captain Rhanes, Clarion and its people.

## Responses

Following the publication of Aboard a Flying Saucer in early 1954, Bethurum became a celebrity among UFO and flying saucer buffs. The book sold well and Bethurum gave many interviews and lectures, attended book signings and made several appearances on radio and television. He appeared twice as a guest on The Betty White Show, an early daytime TV talk program, broadcast nationwide on NBC. Serious UFO researchers and investigators dismissed Bethurum and the other 1950s contactees as charlatans and con-artists. The majority of contactees of this period became (or already were) leaders in new paradigm movements to, in their view, inform and educate people about extraterrestrial intelligent 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. 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 Bethurum as facilitator. The Sanctuary of Thought, a philosophical group, was subsequently created near Prescott, Arizona. Bethurum claimed to possess physical evidence of extraterrestrial existence (which he never produced) such as unique items given to him by Captain Aura Rhanes.

## Later writings

Bethurum died on May 21, 1969 in Landers, California. Some of his later books include The Voice of the Planet Clarion (1957), Facing Reality (1958), and The People of the Planet Clarion (1970), published the year after his death. The first three chapters of the posthumous book are an autobiography covering Bethurum's life up to 1952 and his first encounter with Aura Rhanes and the space people. Artist Columba Krebs, who assisted Bethurum in writing some of his books, wrote the afterword. According to Krebs, Bethurum was so obsessed with Captain Rhanes, he hired a secretary who physically resembled his description of the attractive alien. Bethurum often remarked in his later lectures that his second wife, Mary, divorced him in 1955, citing jealousy over Aura Rhanes in the divorce petition. In 1960, Bethurum married his third wife, Alvira, their wedding taking place at George Van Tassel's annual Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention near Landers.