Wayne Sulo Aho

American contactee

Wayne Sulo Aho (24 August 1916 – 16 January 2006) was an American 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.

Born in the state of Washington, Aho was one of seven children of Finnish homesteaders and worked for most of his life as a logger. He was a captain in the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps in the 1940s. Like Howard Menger, 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'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.

Aho and fellow 1957, contactee Reinhold O. Schmidt 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. Carr claimed to have built a full size flying saucer operating on authentic Adamskian or Teslarian "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.