Janos People: A Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind

by Frank Johnson

The Janos People; a close encounter of the fourth kind. On board a Janos spaceship, over England, Monday June 19, 1978. Late one night, while traveling in their car on a lonely road in Oxfordshire, a family of three adults and two small children were intercepted by a large spaceship, and were taken on board for nearly an hour, during which the flying saucer made a short trip. They saw on film, how the Janos people lived, their clothes, houses and gardens, boats, lakes, and food and vegetation. They watched in horror.

198 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Gus Scott-Exley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hindsight is a wonderful thing...

So this is a book I have wanted to read my entire life but for one reason or another have never gotten around to, until now. And I am glad I waited. Firstly I should say I became aware of this book when we (our family) were gifted a copy by one of the people that was allegedly abducted, a very good and close family friend. I cannot remember there ever being much talk about this whole thing at the time so cannot speak to that but then again I was quite young and wouldn't necessarily have thought to ask questions.

I also want to say that I consider myself quite open minded, I believe that the existence of intelligent alien life is a mathematical certainty. And knowing the person that was among the five as I did, I would be very surprised if this person would lie or go along with some kind of ruse like this, that being said, I do not for a second believe this happened. From this point on I will point out my issues with the story that make no sense at all which will obviously contain spoilers.

1) Janos was rendered uninhabitable by a moon that broke up and rained down on the planet.
This makes little sense, throughout the book it is pushed again and again that the people of Janos are masters of gravitation, are able to build ships KMs wide and yet they are unable to correct the declining orbit of a small moon, which while happened sooner than they thought, they still knew for some time was happening.

2) The power on Janos is nuclear and all of the power stations are somehow linked, one blows they all blow.
For an advance civilization to have an apocalypse causing single point of failure is asinine, at no point did someone say "hey guys, what if we lost one? they would all blow" utter nonsense.

3) Their spaceship, a spaceship that is so advanced it has control over gravity and can fly at close to light speed is littered with buttons, dials and levels, not a touch screen, holographic display in sight, or some other technology we have not yet conceived. We in the 21st century use buttons and dials less and less as we control so much now from our smart phones or computers or smart speakers. Which also begs the additional question of why people needed to be taken to a nearby screen, no one had a tablet, smart phone or futuristic equivalent that we have yet to conceive of? no because although they speak of high def displays, TV was something that already existed in the 1970s and was always predicted to get better, all of the tech seems directly our of the 1970s or at least where tech was clearly heading from the 1970s.

4) Their medical tech was far far ahead of ours
As you would expect for an advanced civilization, but apparently even at that there is nothing they can do for radiation exposure.

5) Their planet wouldn't be irradiated forever.
Lets say for the sake of argument that they allowed this moon to break up and cause a chain reaction causing all of their nuclear power plants to melt down. Using the only estimate we have, namely Chernobyl, we are told that this site will remain radioactive for around 20,000 years. Which I grant you is a long time, yet we know that Janos is several thousand light years, lets say for the sake of argument its 5,000 light years away, give the relativistic nature of their alleged space traveled this distance in about 2 earth years (as viewed by the people on board) but outside the ship, thousands of years past and we know it would have to be more than 5,000 years because they were travelling less than the speed of light, so this figure could be substantially larger. But again for the sake of argument lets say it took them 5000 earth years to get here. Why didnt they just fly around at this same speed for a few years? seems a small price to pay to get their own planet back in an once the radiation has dropped to safe levels.

In conclusion, history and time has not been kind to this book. I don't really believe the five were lying per-se, I do think they were lead by the nose by the author of this book and by his (by his own admission) ufologist hypnotist friend who clearly wanted to see what they saw.

So why 3 stars instead of 1? because its an entertaining yarn in itself, its not poorly written and I think if you except if for what it mostly is, namely fiction, you might enjoy it.

[Fiona Robson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fantastic read, and I wish I could meet the people involved in the close encounter. Fascinating and one of the few Close Encounter stories which did not terrify the life out of me. Loved the way the author sympathetically wrote, conveying the views of the Janos people and keeping the account of hypnosis objective. Would love to hear more of this case i.e. did the family ever hear from the Janos people again?

[Dan Zarfati · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting contact/abduction case of a whole family, three adults and two kids, two adults had regressive hypnoses but the two kids did not confirm the situation in detail, the whole story is really interesting for a case study. The Janos people are apparently a human civilization that abides somewhere. Human ET is not that rare, we have a few cases such as men in black, the hubrids of David Jacobs and others, and the "Pleiadeans". This group seems to be akin to the Pleiadeans because of their more affectionate behavior compared with the other groups. Having said all this, it seems to me that the scenario that they portray is completely bogus, and it is more of a psychological experiment of sorts.

[John Bray]

I cannot click on the right button to read this book.
please give me some direction as to be able to read this book.

thank you,

john Bray