Wayne Sulo Aho
Encyclopedia
Wayne Sulo Aho was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 contactee who claimed contact with extraterrestrial beings. He was one of the more obscure members of the 1950s wave of contactees who followed George Adamski
George Adamski
George Adamski was a Polish-born American citizen who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he claimed to have photographed ships from other planets, met with friendly Nordic alien "Space Brothers", and to have taken flights with them...

.

Early life

Born in the state of Washington, Aho one of seven children of Finnish homesteaders, and worked for most of his life as a logger.

Like Howard Menger
Howard Menger
Howard Menger was an American contactee who claimed to have met extraterrestrials throughout the course of his life, meetings which were the subject of books he wrote, such as From Outer Space To You and The High Bridge Incident...

, Aho claimed to have been in contact with humanoid space aliens since childhood, in his case the age of 12. He mainly spoke about a contact occurring in 1957, the year he claimed to have been initiated as a "Cosmic Master of Wisdom" after attending contactee George Van Tassel
George Van Tassel
George Van Tassel was an American contactee, ufologist, and paranormal research leader who commenced building the Integratron in 1958 in Landers, California.- History :...

's Giant Rock Interplanetary Space Craft Convention. Aho said a telepathic summons led him into the desert where a saucer appeared and a voice ordered him to go forth and create his own yearly convention in his home state of Washington.

Contactee career

Aho and fellow 1957 contactee Reinhold O. Schmidt
Reinhold O. Schmidt
Reinhold Schmidt was one of the late-comers of the 1950s UFO "contactee" era that began with George Adamski in 1953. Schmidt was born and grew up in Nebraska, where he worked for most of his adult life as a grain buyer and dealer...

 went on the lecture circuit together in California, and their double-header lectures continued until Schmidt was arrested for and convicted of grand theft. Aho's presentations tended to emphasize his military service in World War II, and spent very little time on "spiritual revelations" he had received from the Space Brothers, either directly or through later sessions with a spirit medium. Aho tended to refer to himself as "Major W. S. Aho," inviting confusion with Major Donald E. Keyhoe, a UFO researcher and writer who thought UFOs were real, but held contactees in low regard.

Aho soon fell under the spell of another one-time Adamski follower, Otis T. Carr
Otis T. Carr
Otis T. Carr first emerged into the 1950s flying saucer scene in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1955 when he founded OTC Enterprises, a company which was supposed to advance and apply technology originally suggested by Nikola Tesla...

. Carr claimed to have built a full-size flying saucer operating on authentic Adamskian or Teslarian
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer...

 "magnetic" principles, and after a suitable amount of money had been collected from gullible elderly attendees at the lectures of Aho and Carr, they announced the Carr saucer, piloted by Carr and Aho, would take off from a fairground in front of thousands of witnesses and fly to the moon, returning with incontrovertible proof of the trip. Criminal charges against both Aho and Carr resulted from the inevitable public fiasco, but Aho was judged to be an innocent dupe.

Cult established and alter life

Like almost all of the 1950s contactees, including George Adamski
George Adamski
George Adamski was a Polish-born American citizen who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he claimed to have photographed ships from other planets, met with friendly Nordic alien "Space Brothers", and to have taken flights with them...

, Truman Bethurum
Truman Bethurum
Truman Bethurum was the second of the classic 1950s contactees, individuals who claimed to have spoken with humanoid aliens and entered or ridden on their flying saucers...

,
Daniel Fry
Daniel Fry
Daniel William Fry was an American contactee who claimed he had multiple contacts with an alien and took a ride in a remotely piloted alien spacecraft on July 4, 1949....

, George King
George King (Aetherius Society)
George King was Founder-President of The Aetherius Society, a UFO religion. He was also an inventor, author, lecturer and spiritual teacher.-Early years:...

 and many others, Aho did get around to founding his own
religious cult, based on the teachings of the Space Brothers: in Aho's case, the Church of the New Age, in Seattle, Washington. Following the instructions of the Space Brothers, Aho's yearly convention held near the entrance to Mount Rainier National Park
Mount Rainier National Park
Mount Rainier National Park is a United States National Park located in southeast Pierce County and northeast Lewis County in Washington state. It was one of the US's earliest National Parks, having been established on March 2, 1899 as the fifth national park in the United States. The park contains...

, in the so-called Spacecraft Protective Landing Area for Advancement of Science and Humanities (SPLAASH), created in honor of Kenneth Arnold
Kenneth Arnold
Kenneth A. Arnold was an American aviator and businessman. He is best-known for making what is generally considered the first widely reported unidentified flying object sighting in the United States, after claiming to have seen nine unusual objects flying in a chain near Mount Rainier, Washington...

, tended to emphasize New Age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...

 theories of various kinds rather than being strictly a meeting-place for flying saucer fans.

Aho spent the last decade of his life in Gardnerville, Nevada
Nevada
Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...

. He died on January 16, 2006 in Carson City, Nevada
Nevada
Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...

.

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