BUFORA Journal

History

The British UFO Research Association was founded in 1962 through the merger of two earlier groups: the London UFO Research Organisation (LUFORO), founded 1959, and the British UFO Association, founded 1962. The merger consolidated what had until then been a fragmented civilian-research scene around London and the south of England. BUFORA's journal, the BUFORA Journal, began publication shortly after the merger and ran continuously through the rest of the twentieth century. The format has shifted across the years from quarterly bulletin to bimonthly magazine and back.

BUFORA defined itself early as the methodologically conservative wing of British UFO research, in contrast to the more contactee-friendly Flying Saucer Review (FSR) under Gordon Creighton's editorship from 1959 onward. Where FSR welcomed entity-encounter material and crossed freely into the esoteric, BUFORA kept its journal close to sighting reports, witness questionnaires, and the slow accretion of case files. The two journals were the major British civilian publications of the period and they operated with deliberately different editorial lines.

BUFORA conducted the Anamnesis Project (1981 to 1989) under the direction of Hilary Evans and Manfred Cassirer, a long-running psychological study of UFO witnesses that produced some of the most methodologically careful witness research of the period. The journal published the project's findings, including the still-cited Aphrodite Clamar and Geoffrey Doel work on abduction-experience continuity with hypnagogic states. Later, under Philip Mantle and others, the journal covered the 1980 Rendlesham Forest case, the Welsh sighting waves, and the slow movement toward UK government document release that ran through to the 2000s and beyond.

The journal was rebranded UFO Times around 1989 to 1990, the name under which it ran through the rest of the 1990s. The change reflected the broader period rebrand of British civilian UFO research as a more professionally-presented project under the editorial direction of John Spencer and others. Issue 5 of UFO Times in January 1990 was published as a special abduction issue and included BUFORA Ltd's fifteenth annual report to the membership, evidence that the new title was a continuation of the same institutional record rather than a separate publication.