George Hunt Williamson, a metaphysical teacher, flying saucer contactee, and bishop, was born on December 9, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois. As a youth Williamson had a variety of psychic experiences capped by a vivid out-of-body experience in his late teens which aroused his interest in the occult. He attended college and studied anthropology, though he never attained the advanced degrees he later claimed. In 1951 he read The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe and became interested in UFOs. Thus it was that in 1952, he and his wife, Betty, then living in Prescott, Arizona, met another couple interested in the saucers, Alfred and Betty Bailey. One evening the four experimented with automatic writing and received a message purportedly from an extraterrestrial, Nah-9 of Solar X Group. In subsequent communications, he and other extraterrestrials warned of a nuclear blast about to occur on Earth. The ongoing messages received by the small group later became the basis of a 1954 book, The Saucers Speak!
His involvement in contact with the space entities led Williamson to George Adamski, and he, his wife, and the Baileys began to commute to Southern California to attend Adamski's lectures. Adamski channeled messages from his space contacts, one of which heralded an imminent face-to-face contact. That contact occurred on November 20, 1952, when the Williamsons, the Baileys, Adamski, and two of his associates met at Blythe, California, and headed into the nearby desert. Here Adamski would have his meeting with Orthon, which the rest looked upon from some distance. After Adamski told his story to the press, the Williamsons moved near Adamski's residence at Palomar, but soon parted company over Adamski's public stance against channeling.
Following the publication of The Saucers Speak!, Williamson was briefly associated with fellow contactee Dick Miller at the Telonic Research Center, but soon moved to Peru. There, under the name Brother Philip, he founded the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, an occult community that attracted not only other contactees, but many of a theosophical inclination. This was Williamson's most productive period as a writer. He authored Secret of the Andes (as Brother Philip) (1958), Secret Places of the Lion (1958), UFOs Confidential (with John McCoy) (1958), and Road in the Sky (1959), and a volume he had written earlier, Other Tongues—Other Flesh, was also published (1957). He was the first to call attention to the Nasca lines as a possible artifact related to extraterrestrials.
By 1958 the Peruvian experiment had come to an end, and Williamson spent the next years touring the world and lecturing to contactee-oriented audiences. However, by the early 1960s he disappeared from the flying saucer world. In fact, in 1969 he legally changed his name to Michael D'Obenovic, asserting that this was the real name of his Serbian-American family prior to their migrating to America. Also, in 1971, he was ordained as a priest in the Liberal Catholic Church by Archbishop Gerrit Munik and became the priest of a small congregation in Cornville, California. Early in the 1970s he left the Liberal Catholic Church and in 1974 was consecrated as a bishop by John Marion Stanley of the Orthodox Church of the East. He was consecrated a second time in 1977 by Albert R. Coady of the Eastern Catholic Syro-Chaldean Archdiocese of North America, like Stanley's church, a small independent Orthodox jurisdiction. Both jurisdictions were aligned with the Charismatic Movement and believed in the experience of glossolalia or speaking-in-tongues.
D'Obenovic had reasserted his Orthodox heritage, but did not agree with the Charismatic emphasis of his consecrators, and a short time after his second consecration, he found a new independent jurisdiction, the Holy Apostolic Catholic Church Syro-Chaldean Diocese of Santa Barbara and Central California. By this time he was pastoring a small parish in Santa Barbara, California. During these years Williamson rarely associated with the flying saucer community though he gave a few conservative lectures on UFOs as D'Obenovic. He died in 1986, and his church dissolved shortly thereafter. A friend who was a member of the church in Santa Barbara subsequently authored a brief biography.
Sources:
Griffin, John. Visitants. Santa Barbara, Calif.: The Author, 1989.
Robinson, John J. "George Hunt Williamson—Revisited." Saucer News 10, no. 3 (September 1963): 9-10.
Ward, Gary L. Independent Bishops: An International Directory. Detroit: Apogee, 1990.
Williamson, George Hunt. Other Tongues—Other Flesh. Amherst, Wis.: Amherst Press, 1957.
——. Road in the Sky. London: Neville Spearman, 1959.
——. The Saucers Speak. London: Neville Spearman, 1963.
——. (under pseudonym Brother Philip). Secret of the Andes. Clarksburg, W.Va.: Sucerian Books, 1958.
——. Secret Places of the Lion. Amherst, Wis.: Amherst Press, 1958.
