Approach

History

Approach was a South African monthly review, subtitled Man in Life and Space, published in Pretoria by Sagittarius Publishers and edited by Edgar Sievers. The archive holds Volume 2 Number 6, dated September 1959, which by its volume numbering places the publication's first issue around mid-1958. The journal billed itself as a non-profit Peace and Brotherhood Programme publication, distributed by subscription (twelve shillings annual, by airmail for extra) from a PO box address in Pretoria.

The September 1959 issue runs a leader called Content and Where it Comes From which sets out the publication's philosophical premise: that human experience is "self-produced, created by our inner Selves before" and that the resolution of personal and political confusion lies "within and from the Law, which governs all things seen and unseen." This is theosophical and occult-tradition framing, deliberately distinct from the more witness-testimony-led civilian publications of the same period in Britain and the United States. The same issue runs a Cold War commentary on Khrushchev's American tour and a guest article from Dr T. Lobsang Rampa, the British author who claimed in The Third Eye (1956) to be inhabited by the consciousness of a Tibetan lama and whose later books extended the framework into accounts of off-world contact.

September 1959: the "Let's Go into UFO Business" editorial

The third article in the September 1959 issue, "A Point, a Theme and my Angle: Let's Go into UFO Business", is one of the most substantial editorial pieces the archive holds from a South African civilian-research source. The piece opens with the news that "The Hon. Brinsley le Poer Trench, editor of the London 'Flying Saucer Review' has resigned for private and health reasons" and that "Flying Saucer Services Ltd., the publishers, are to be commended for appointing Waveney Girvan as successor", the same Waveney Girvan who had authored Flying Saucers and Common Sense the previous year. The editorial is one of the earliest international civilian-research notices of the FSR editorial transition that would carry the publication through the next decade.

The piece then proposes a structural intervention in the international civilian-research field: the creation of "an INTERNATIONAL UFO RESEARCH INSTITUTE, working on the broadest possible lines" funded by a commercial UFO publishing operation built around the rebuilt FSR. The editorial explicitly addresses the financial precarity of Major Donald Keyhoe's NICAP ("fighting a financial battle for sheer survival") and acknowledges Gabriel Green's "remarkable achievement" in consolidating "the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America" in Los Angeles. The piece argues that the existing civilian-research field operates with "a tremendous amount of repeating and double work, with extraordinary dissipation of forces" and identifies three structural problems: lack of coordination, lack of funds, and "absence of a workable denominator acceptable to all the current concepts in UFOlogy."

This is a 1959 South African civilian-research voice arguing for an internationally-coordinated UFO research institute capable of representing the field to the United Nations. The voice is identifiably Edgar Sievers's, working from Pretoria. The fact that the piece concretely names four major contemporaneous civilian-research operations (FSR in London, NICAP in Washington, the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America in Los Angeles, plus an implied reference to Aimé Michel's French network through the broader international framing) places Approach inside the international civilian-research conversation rather than as a peripheral local publication.