Desmond Leslie

Desmond Leslie (29 June 1921, London – 21 February 2001, Antibes, France) was a Spitfire pilot in the RAF during World War II, became one of the first pioneers of electronic music, and co-authored one of the first books on UFOs, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), with writer and UFO contactee George Adamski.

Quotes

• Coming into San Diego we saw a beautiful golden ship in the sunset, but brighter than the sunset. I had ten-power binoculars with me, and was able to study it for half a minute from the halted car. It slowly faded out, the way they do... We have been given their simple philosophy. It runs parallel with the original teachings of Jesus.
  • Quoted by Agnes Bernelle in All the Planets are Inhabited! Weekend Mail, (26 August 1954)

• Of all the contactees, Adamski attracted the most controversy and odium; and none but a man of his strength of character could have survived the onslaught.
  • Flying Saucers Have Landed Revised and Enlarged edition, London: Neville Spearman (1970)

• Why should they risk a public landing? Their ship would be impounded for evasion of custom duties. Their clothes would be torn off and sold as souvenirs.
  • Quoted in Obituary, The Telegraph (20 Mar 2001)

The Amazing Mr. Lutterworth (1958)

(Full text)

• Out of nowhere I have appeared. They see me for the first time. No longer the image, but reality. They see and they hear me. I raise my arms, and the gasps and babble die down. I begin to speak the words we knew and decided long ago. Each hears me in his own tongue. (p.200)

• How do you speak that all men may hear you in their own tongues? It is an art known and practiced by teachers of old.

• I do not judge them, criticise nor take sides. I address them as representatives of the human race, nothing more. Then I project a picture of the world divided against itself into countless pockets of insanity, and with it the question why this should be so? Why should semi-rational beings behave worse than those with no reason at all- Why ?
• I ask... What would they do if every nation had unlimited electrical power-power for the taking-power costing nothing to obtain and available to all men equally?

• Now let us see what he can do with it. Let us see if, under easier conditions, he is able to build the planetary paradise he has always desired, or will abuse his new leisure to the destruction of his soul. Let us see if godly power will make him a little more godlike. (p. 201)

• I see here some foolish ones fidgeting and wondering why the guards do not remove me from the floor. Save your energy, for the guards cannot touch me. Nor can you so much as rise from your seats to lay hands on me. Try it, if you do not believe me.

• This power, I tell them, shall change the face of the Earth. No more shall small groups, nor even single men, be able to rule multitudes through hunger in their bellies; for there shall no more be hunger nor want nor cold; and in time again there shall be no more disease, for as man learns to live in harmony with nature, instead of continually struggling against it, he will destroy the cause of disease. (p. 206)

• For this we have lived; for this we have planned; for this have many died and suffered. You were told and you scoffed, that the meek shall inherit the Earth. But I say to you the day has come when the man of peace and brotherhood shall Inherit the kingdom he will build. But those who oppose it shall never again tread this long-suffering Earth. Those who wish to live shall live; but those who cannot live without destroying, shall themselves be destroyed, till the end of time. It is for you, and you alone, to make the choice. Think well, for the great heritage is yours.

• Only minutes were required to impress these thoughts indelibly on their minds, for a thought is instantaneous and its grasping depends on its strength and clarity.(p. 211)

Quotes about Desmond Leslie

• It seems that a lot of people have forgotten about George Adamski. In the 1950s he was one of the very first people to speak out about his contacts. He wrote a very famous book he coauthored with an Anglo-Irish gentleman, Desmond Leslie, called Flying Saucers Have Landed, which was published in 1953. It’s mainly a historical overview, a study by Desmond Leslie, of the flying saucer phenomena.
  • Spirituality and the UFO Phenomenon: an interview with Gerard Aartsen (8 September 2012)

• Perhaps you are wondering if I myself believe in flying saucers? Yes I do. I have thought it all out, and, from what I have learned from my husband, I think there is no doubt that they do exist... Until Desmond had had actual contact with the men from the other worlds I doubted their existence. But his letters are full of facts which have amazed and shaken me. What is more, I share my husband's belief that the present "cold war" conditions in the world may flare up at any time, and that the saucer men may be our only means of salvation.
  • Quoted by Agnes Bernelle in All the Planets are Inhabited! Weekend Mail, (26 August 1954)

• Desmond Leslie, who has died aged 79, was a celebrated Irish eccentric and self-styled "discologist" best known for his book The Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), which became a key text of the New Age movement. The prevailing scientific materialism of Leslie's time held no appeal to him, and he turned his attention instead to the world of mysteries. Attracted to ancient history, archaeology and esoteric philosophy, he saw in them evidence of a world view quite different from that of more soberly academic contemporaries. To Leslie, ancient monuments and artefacts were proof of a sophistication of culture and technology that could not be attributed to the people of their times. The makers, he concluded, were evidently super-human - or came from elsewhere... Leslie joined forces with another Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Brinsley le Poer Trench, who as the 8th Earl of Clancarty later promoted a debate on UFOs in the House of Lords. Together they founded Flying Saucer Review. Contributors included C G Jung, who published his own book on flying saucers in 1959.Thereafter, Leslie continued to preach the message of the space people. Their intentions, he was at pains to explain, were wholly peaceable.
  • Obituary, The Telegraph (20 Mar 2001)

• Desmond Leslie was born in London in 1921 and educated at Ampleforth, in Yorkshire, but, throughout his childhood and later, he spent idyllic summers and other periods at Castle Leslie (of which his elder brother, Jack, was the heir). After a couple of terms at Trinity College Dublin, and simultaneous tuition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he reacted against “the constraint of orthodox harmony”, Desmond joined the RAF to fight as a Spitfire pilot during the second World War. His experiences at this time formed a basis for his first novel, Careless Lives. A sense of humour was one of Desmond Leslie’s assets, though it chimes a bit oddly with a few of his outre obsessions. He was, for example, a flying-saucers devotee, and co-wrote a book on the subject that became a best-seller in the early 1950s. He was also, in defiance of his Catholic upbringing, an adherent of an esoteric religious group called the White Eagle Lodge, founded in 1936 by a spiritualist
  • An eccentric, perhaps, but not a crackpot, The Irish Times (23 Oct 2010)