APRO Field Investigator Handbook

History

The APRO Field Investigator Handbook is the 1972 operational manual issued by the Aerial Phenomena Research Organisation to its field investigator network. The archive holds the single bound edition, titled Recommended Procedures for APRO Field Investigators. The credited authors are L.J. (Jim) Lorenzen, John Munday PhD, Theodore Spickler, and R. Leo Sprinkle PhD. The handbook sits inside APRO's longer organisational record alongside the APRO Bulletin as the operational documentation of the working method APRO was teaching its national field-investigator corps to apply.

APRO had been founded in Wisconsin in January 1952 by Coral E. Lorenzen, with her husband Jim Lorenzen joining as co-director after their move to Arizona. By 1972 the organisation had been operating for two decades, had a national field-investigator network, and had accumulated the substantive case database that Coral Lorenzen's books (The Great Flying Saucer Hoax, Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space) and the running APRO Bulletin had drawn on. The Handbook is the documentary trace of APRO's effort to codify the working method behind that database into a manual that new field investigators could apply consistently.