APCIC Bulletin

History

The Aerial Phenomenon Clipping and Information Center began publishing its monthly bulletin from PO Box 9073, Cleveland, Ohio 44137 in 1976. Harry R. Cohen edited the publication, with S. Mac Williams serving as assistant editor. The archive holds material from Volume 1, Number 12 (December 1976) through Volume 15, Number 9 (September 1990), covering fifteen years of continuous monthly output.

Cohen's opening letter to subscribers in December 1976 laid out the operation plainly. APCIC had purchased the services of a professional national clipping service to supply complete monthly coverage of UFO, monster, cattle mutilation, and related sightings across the United States and Canada. This was not a hobbyist scanning his local papers. A commercial clipping bureau monitored newspapers and wire services nationwide, pulled every item matching APCIC's subject keywords, and forwarded the physical clippings to Cleveland for reproduction and compilation. The result was something no individual researcher could replicate: systematic, near-complete press coverage of anomalous events as reported in real time by working journalists.

Each issue opened with Lucius Farish's book and magazine review section. Farish, writing from Route One, Plumerville, Arkansas, was already one of the UFO field's most prolific bibliographers. His column listed new hardcover and paperback releases with full publisher details, prices, and terse evaluations. The December 1976 debut covered titles from Prometheus Books, Harper and Row, David McKay, and William Corliss's Sourcebook Project. Subscribers who wanted more detail on any title could write to Farish directly with a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The arrangement was typical of pre-internet information networks: a trusted specialist acting as a human search engine for a scattered community of readers.

The clippings themselves ranged from major wire service pieces to small-town newspaper accounts that would never have been preserved in any other archive. A January 1987 issue reproduced a Herald-Republic staff writer's detailed report on a glowing object seen from Wapato to Grandview in Washington State's Lower Valley, tracked by a police officer at 4 a.m. and visible even after dawn. This was the kind of report that appeared once in a regional daily, was never indexed, and would have vanished into microfilm storage within weeks. APCIC caught it because the clipping service caught it.

The September 1990 issue, among the last in the archive, reproduced Newhouse News Service coverage of Soviet military encounters with UFOs during the glasnost period. Igor Maltsev, a Soviet general of aviation and chief of the main staff of the Air Defense Forces, had told Rabochaya Tribuna that he believed UFOs existed and were piloted by extraterrestrials. A milk tanker driver named Vladimir Akhansev described being chased by a shining ball at 60 mph on a twisting road south of Moscow. Local farmers, the newspaper reported, had demanded to know who would deliver the milk if aliens stole their driver. APCIC reproduced the full article without editorial commentary, letting the absurdity and the seriousness coexist on the page exactly as they had in print.

Ron Smotek handled photo analysis for the bulletin, and his brother Richard Smotek managed research for the Supplement section, a separate component included with the standard $5.00 monthly subscription. Foreign subscribers paid $6.00 per month, which included airmail delivery. Direct reproduction of the bulletin was prohibited, a standard protection for publications whose entire value lay in the clippings they had paid to obtain.