APRG Reporter

History

The Aerial Phenomena Research Group formed in Los Angeles in 1956, two years after the Lorenzens had moved APRO from its Wisconsin origins toward what would become its mature Tucson operation, and the same year Max B. Miller's Flying Saucers International was running the World's First Flying Saucer Convention at the Hollywood Hotel. The Los Angeles civilian-research scene of the mid-1950s was crowded. APRG defined itself by a more conservative investigation method than the contactee-friendly groups, taking sighting reports, working them up with witness questionnaires, and printing summary investigations in the APRG Reporter for a small subscriber list.

John H. Otto served as the principal editor and case investigator. The bulletin ran for roughly two years, never reaching the circulation of APRO or NICAP, and folded by the end of 1958 when several of its core members shifted their effort into the Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York correspondence network or, in two cases, into early NICAP affiliate work. The print run was short but the methodological footprint was real.

The APRG Reporter's editorial line distinguished it from its Los Angeles contemporaries. Where Max B. Miller's Saucers maintained openness to contactee material and where Otis T. Carr's promotional vehicles were getting underway in the same period, the APRG Reporter restricted itself to case investigations with named witnesses and physical-trace claims. It printed several otherwise undocumented California and Nevada sighting reports from 1956 and 1957, including witness drawings, that survive nowhere else in the civilian-research record.