The waitress laughed. “Professor!” she called back. “You sold one!”

“Sold one what?” The voice came from the kitchen.

“Your little dissertation on space people.”

A face appeared next to the ticket wheel. A handsome face with deep fissures and dark, brown eyes. Graphite hair, streaked with silver, peeked from under a paper cap. “No shit?” The professor, if that’s what he was, looked first at Alice and then at Joan. “You’re the one buying it?” He spoke with an accent she couldn’t place. He seemed to have trouble saying the word, “the.” It came out, “duh.”

Perhaps I can be forgiven for thinking I could turn this guy, George Adamski, into the main character of a novel about the early flying saucer era. After all, his biography contains all sorts of juicy bits that seemed tailor-made for fictionalization. Here’s how I described him in a Tumblr (?!) post written during a previous lifetime:

The most famous of the 1950s contactees, George Adamski, claimed he first met a being from outer space during an encounter in the southern California desert on November 20, 1952. The visitor arrived in a small flying saucer. He had long blond hair and an “extremely high forehead.” In a short conversation conducted via gestures, sign language, words, and telepathy, he told Adamski that he had come from Venus to let the people of Earth they shouldn’t play with atomic weapons. Adamski described his encounter in the 1953 bestseller, Flying Saucers Have Landed.

By the time I finally took the fiction plunge, I was confident I knew just about everything there was to know about George, including “pre-contact” details that other Adamski-philes had failed to uncover. I was ready to transform him into the protagonist of Helium.

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But it didn’t work out that way. I tried, I really did. Over and over. But George wouldn’t cooperate. He didn’t want to be my main character. Except that’s not really true. George wasn’t the problem. I was. I couldn’t figure out how to center my story around him and remain true to the historical record.

It took a while, but finally I surrendered to the inevitable. I ditched George as my protagonist and decided to tell my story through the eyes of a fictional character whose life veers off in new directions after a chance encounter with the contactee of Palomar Mountain.

To my great relief, George didn’t seem to mind.

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