Max B. Miller

Max B. Miller printed the first issue of Saucers in 1953 from a post office box in Los Angeles, four pages in mimeograph format at fifteen cents. He published it through Flying Saucers International, the non-profit organisation he founded and ran, and held the titles of president and editor across the entire run. His first mailing address was P.O. Box 34, Preuss Station, Los Angeles 35, California. He changed it to P.O. Box 35034 by the September 1954 issue, opened a physical office at 135 Ranchita Drive in Mountain View in the San Francisco Bay Area by June 1955, and gave 1420 South Ridgeley Drive, Los Angeles 19, as the address on the final volume.

The Los Angeles geography sat at the centre of the work. Miller's mailbox was a short drive from the aerospace plants at Lockheed and Douglas, with Edwards Air Force Base across the Antelope Valley to the north and George Van Tassel's Giant Rock two hours east into the Mojave. Within months of the first issue Miller had organised the World's First Flying Saucer Convention at the Hollywood Hotel, and through the following years he built Flying Saucers International from a one-man box number into an organisation with a Director of Investigation in Chicago (John Otto), a Director of Research Investigation (William A. Devlin), an Honorary Vice-President (Bud Pecaro), and a northern California office head in Mountain View (Larry J. LaBarre).

Miller wrote as well as edited. He conducted the Late News columns from the March 1954 issue, reviewed books in every issue, and wrote all the editorials. In 1956 he published a full-length book of his own, the Trend Book Flying Saucers: Fact or Fiction?. The source material the archive holds documents his work through the magazine and the convention record. It does not establish his birth date, his birthplace, his family, his education, or the circumstances of his death, and those gaps are recorded for the editor at the foot of this page rather than filled by inference.

Phase one, 1953 to mid-1954: the contactee bridge-builder. Miller's first editorial gave the extraterrestrial hypothesis as settled: the space visitors were of interplanetary origin and here for a purpose. He ran St. John 8:32 on the masthead, sold George Adamski's Flying Saucers Have Landed through Flying Saucers International alongside Donald Keyhoe's books, and gave equal space to investigators and to the contactee wing. Orfeo Angelucci wrote regularly, Truman Bethurum's Aura Rhanes account ran in Volume 1, and Daniel Fry's White Sands testimony followed. The organising of the Hollywood Hotel convention, with Adamski, Scully, Bethurum and Van Tassel sharing a platform, belongs to this opening phase.

Phase two, late 1954 to 1955: cautious distancing. In the Volume 2 Number 4 question-and-answer column, December 1954, Miller drew a line he had not drawn before. He had recommended the Leslie and Adamski book as reading, he wrote, "but we have not endorsed it nor Mr. Adamski's account therein." In Volume 3 Number 1, March 1955, he refused to stock Cedric Allingham's Flying Saucer From Mars, quoting a negative British review and marking it "Not recommended." He had already reported, without editorial comment, in Volume 2 Number 1, March 1954, that Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer, the central sources for Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers crash-retrieval narrative, had been convicted of a $250,000 doodlebug swindle on December 29, 1953. Scully kept contributing through 1954 and 1955, and the demand for documentation tightened in Miller's editorial guidelines: no flat statements without documentation would be considered.

Phase three, 1956 to 1957: the investigative turn. Volume 4 Number 1, March 1956, carried Edward Ruppelt, the former head of Project Blue Book, calling the Air Force's own Special Report Number 14 "worthless," and beside it Wilbur Smith's statement from Canada's Project Magnet putting a "90 to 95 per cent probability that the flying saucers do exist." Volume 4 Number 2 reproduced Keyhoe's eleven-question letter to Senator Harry Flood Byrd next to the Department of the Air Force reply from Major General Joe Kelly. Volume 4 Number 3 reprinted J. Allen Hynek's "Unusual Aerial Phenomena" from the Journal of the Optical Society of America. R.M.L. Baker Jr.'s photogrammetric analyses of the Tremonton and Montana films followed, and Volume 5 Number 3, September 1957, carried Dr. Olavo Fontes's chemical analysis of metallic fragments recovered in Brazil. In June 1957, Volume 5 Number 2, Miller named the field's failing directly: a lack of discrimination, excessively imaginative and unsubstantiated claims, and a failure to expose the obvious frauds that were prevalent. Three months later, in Volume 5 Number 3, he endorsed NICAP, listed its board and its Connecticut Avenue address, and described its work as tireless and selfless.

Phase four, 1958: sceptical maturity. Volume 6 Number 1 gave the cover to Almiro Barauna's photographs of an object over Trindade Island, taken from the Brazilian Navy ship Almirante Saldanha on January 16, 1958, and developed aboard in the presence of Navy officers. The same issue ran Ralph Benn's East Los Angeles film case of December 1, 1957, in which the Air Force returned Benn's original 8mm Kodachrome with splices he had not made. Volume 6 Number 2 carried Miller's most pointed editorial act of the entire run: the cover photograph was a deliberate fake, and Miller's text inside the issue said so openly, declaring he had faked it "to show the ease with which UFO photos may be faked." That issue also carried Keyhoe's "Questions About NICAP Answered." By Volume 6 Number 3 Adamski, a fixture of the 1953 and 1954 coverage, was being handled at analytical distance.

Phase five, 1959 to 1960: terminal decline. The last volume appeared as combined double numbers, Volume 7 Number 1-2 and Volume 7 Number 3-4, published "for purposes of survival." Miller's editorial "Where Do We Stand?" in the first double issue said the field had been "deluged with wholesale garbage." The same issue carried M.K. Jessup's "Ufology: A Plea and a Warning," among the last pieces Jessup wrote before his death in April 1959. The final double issue announced the end: "It is with deepest regret that we announce the termination of publication of SAUCERS with this issue." The reason was money. "This issue alone cost more to print than we have in our UFO fund." Beside the notice ran Robert Beck's "Instrumentation for UFO Detection," the most technical article in the run, and Richard Hall's "The Future of UFO Investigation." Miller's closing material turned to Project Ozma, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's search for intelligent radio signals, and quoted the Cornell physicists Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi: "The probability of success is hard to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero."

Miller published Flying Saucers: Fact or Fiction? as Trend Book 145 in late 1956, around seventy thousand words at seventy-five cents. The book was first referenced in Volume 4 Number 4, December 1956, and promoted from Volume 5 Number 1 onward. Tom Towers, writing in Volume 5 Number 1, called it "a well-documented book on 'flying saucers.'" By 1957 the Flying Saucers International catalogue carried it alongside Ruppelt's Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Keyhoe's Flying Saucer Conspiracy, and Wilkins's titles. Samuel J. Ciurca Jr. compiled a detailed index of the book, which Miller serialised across Volume 7 Numbers 1 and 2 in 1959.

Miller organised the World's First Flying Saucer Convention at the Hollywood Hotel, August 16 to 18, 1953, drawing around fifteen hundred people. Adamski, Scully, Bethurum, Van Tassel, Angelucci, Criswell, Silas Newton and Arthur Louis Joquel II spoke. The convention produced a formal resolution from Scully calling for a civilian Project Saucer, and a telegram to President Eisenhower that drew a reply from Brigadier General Joe Kelly. Letters on display came from the Vice-President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Mayor of Los Angeles, and the science-fiction crossover was visible in the presence of Forrest J. Ackerman and the artist Mel Hunter.

Two further conventions of 1954 ran in the magazine's pages. George Van Tassel's World's First Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention met at Giant Rock on April 4, 1954, the start of the annual desert series, with Van Tassel, Scully, Angelucci, Williamson, Bethurum and Fry. The First Annual International Flying Saucer Convention, organised by the Saucer Research Foundation, ran at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles from June 4 to 6, 1954, with Hal Styles as moderator; Miller and William Devlin were photographed there. At Van Tassel's second Giant Rock convention, March 12 and 13, 1955, Miller recorded two Air Force Intelligence members, at least one FBI representative, and Captain Ruppelt of Project Blue Book attending without speaking.

Drawn from Miller's editorials and columns in Saucers, each anchored to the issue in which it appeared.

• Saucers, the journal Miller founded and edited from 1953 to 1960, with the full issue-by-issue record
• United States, where the Hollywood Hotel, Carthay Circle and Giant Rock conventions Miller documented sit in the convention era
• APRO Bulletin, where Dr. Olavo Fontes's Brazilian work continued after the metallic-fragment analysis Miller published in Volume 5 Number 3
• J. Allen Hynek, whose Optical Society paper Miller reprinted in Volume 4 Number 3

1. Saucers, Volume 1 Number 1, 1953. Opening editorial. Published by Flying Saucers International, P.O. Box 34, Preuss Station, Los Angeles 35, California.
2. Saucers, Volume 2 Number 1, March 1954. Late News column, Newton and GeBauer fraud conviction.
3. Saucers, Volume 2 Number 3, September 1954. Convention coverage, Giant Rock and Carthay Circle.
4. Saucers, Volume 2 Number 4, December 1954. Questions and Answers, the Adamski non-endorsement; reader poll results.
5. Saucers, Volume 3 Number 1, March 1955. The Allingham non-recommendation.
6. Saucers, Volume 4 Number 1, March 1956. Ruppelt on Special Report 14; Wilbur Smith on Project Magnet.
7. Saucers, Volume 4 Number 2, June 1956. Keyhoe's letter to Senator Byrd and the Air Force reply.
8. Saucers, Volume 4 Number 3, September 1956. Reprint of J. Allen Hynek, "Unusual Aerial Phenomena," Journal of the Optical Society of America.
9. Saucers, Volume 5 Number 1, March 1957. Promotion of the Trend Book; Tom Towers notice.
10. Saucers, Volume 5 Number 2, June 1957. Miller's editorial on the field's failings.
11. Saucers, Volume 5 Number 3, September 1957. Miller's NICAP endorsement; Dr. Olavo Fontes, "Conclusive Proof That Saucers Exist."
12. Saucers, Volume 6 Number 1, 1958. Trindade Island cover; the Benn film case.
13. Saucers, Volume 6 Number 2, 1958. The deliberately faked cover photograph; Keyhoe NICAP question-and-answer.
14. Saucers, Volume 7 Number 1-2, 1959. "Where Do We Stand?"; M.K. Jessup, "Ufology: A Plea and a Warning"; Ciurca index of the Trend Book.
15. Saucers, Volume 7 Number 3-4, Fall and Winter 1959 to 1960. Termination notice; Robert Beck, "Instrumentation for UFO Detection"; Richard Hall, "The Future of UFO Investigation"; Project Ozma and the Morrison and Cocconi quotation.
16. Max B. Miller, Flying Saucers: Fact or Fiction? (Trend Books No. 145, 1956).