Wiesengrun, Martin

Martin Wiesengrün (a pseudonym) is a German UFO contactee who claims to have met beings from planets called Arian and Uru, circling Aldebaran, in 1957.

He claimed that in July 1957, when he was a 15-year-old living on the island of Rügen on East Germany's Baltic coast, at the time, an isolated part of the Soviet-controlled DDR, completely cut off from Western UFO culture. The contact reportedly happened in the summer of 1957 in Glowe, on Rügen island.

He says he was repeatedly visited by tall, human-looking beings who claimed to come from the Aldebaran star system, and he was reportedly taken aboard their craft multiple times, including a 50-meter shuttle that docked inside a larger mother ship. On one occasion he reportedly stayed with them for three days. The beings were said to come from a planet called Arian, with other crew members from a second world, Uru, also orbiting Aldebaran. Uru is said to be the second planet circling Aldebaran, with its inhabitants looking like regular humans.

The story was eventually written up as a book, "UFO Contact From Planet Arian of Aldebaran," translated into English and published through Wendelle Stevens' UFO Photo Archives (Stevens was a well-known compiler of contactee accounts). A German-language version, "Mein UFO-Erlebnis auf Rügen," was also published. In the German edition's foreword, the author explains his reasons for using a pseudonym — he says discussing it openly back then could have risked his existence, and he still prefers to discuss it with only a few people, though the first name used in the narrative is his real one.

The Origin-of-Humanity Narrative

A substantial portion of Martin's reported education aboard the ship concerned an alternative account of human origins, presented to him via an onboard historical database:

Approximately 70 million years ago, two distinct pre-human hominid populations are said to have existed on Earth: forest-dwellers (light-brown skin, primarily fruit/grass diet) and marsh-dwellers (dark-skinned, with webbed fingers and toes, aquatic hunters). The two groups reportedly traded goods but could not produce offspring together.

The account holds that multiple spacefaring civilizations were mining Earth for an iron alloy (combined with aluminum, manganese, copper, silver, gold, tin, and nickel) used to resurface their vessels' hulls. Needing laborers, they are said to have genetically hybridized members of the Pallian race with the marsh-dwellers to produce a workforce suited to heavy labor. When mining ceased to be profitable, the visitors reportedly departed, leaving the hybrid population to fend for itself — this population's descendants are presented as the ancestors of modern humanity.

The account also addresses the extinction event approximately 65 million years ago: three planetoids are said to have approached Earth on a collision course, detected by Pallian research craft in orbit. Two were reportedly neutralized or diverted; the third (estimated at ~100,000 tons) was partially destroyed but a large fragment struck the Earth, triggering the catastrophe the account links explicitly to the extinction of the dinosaurs.