Aerial Phenomena Hot Wire

History

The Aerial Phenomena Hot Wire was Coral Lorenzen's internal circulation tool at APRO during the 1960s. Where the main APRO Bulletin ran on its bimonthly publication schedule and dealt with cases at the depth a printed bulletin allowed, the Hot Wire was an in-between document: a single-page or two-page typed sheet sent to APRO's network of regional field investigators when a case was developing fast and the standard bulletin schedule could not keep up.

The Hot Wire's circulation was restricted. It did not go to APRO's general subscriber list but only to the field-investigator roll, a much smaller group of trusted members who had completed APRO's investigator training and signed the confidentiality protocol that governed how they handled witness contact information. The format was deliberately spartan: no masthead, no contributor credits, often no date heading. Lorenzen treated it as working correspondence rather than as a publication, and it travelled accordingly.

Surviving copies of the Hot Wire are scarce because most recipients treated them as ephemera, used the case-development information for their own investigations, and threw the sheet away. The few complete sets that survive sit in the personal papers of long-serving APRO field investigators rather than in any institutional archive. The single issue in this collection is among the rarer surviving examples and dates from a period of intensive APRO field activity.