Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York

History

Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York held its public meetings at Steinway Hall, 113 West 57th Street, sixth floor, with bulletins priced at ten cents initially and rising to thirty cents by 1958. John Du Barry served as President. Marty Meyerson was Secretary-Treasurer, operating from 67-90 Groton Street, Forest Hills, New York. Ted Bloecher managed district correspondence from Manhattan, while other officers covered Brooklyn, Long Island, and the Bronx. The organisation produced numbered publications documenting each meeting, beginning with Publication #0 in 1954 and running through at least #27 in 1959.

The meetings attracted serious speakers. Ivan Sanderson, the naturalist and Fortean researcher, lectured on January 28, 1955, discussing unexplained aerial objects in the context of Charles Fort's collected anomalies and his own fieldwork. Richard Victor, a Field Service Representative in the Electronics Division of Curtiss-Wright Aviation, spoke at the February 25, 1955 meeting on saucers from the viewpoint of aviation and radar, describing personal sightings and suggesting a theory for their origin. By 1958, meetings featured panels with sharply divergent views: the May 23 session paired science fiction author Lester del Rey (a vocal sceptic who called UFOlogists "goofball artists") with Lex Mebane and rocket scientist Willy Ley.

CSI-NY was explicit about what it was not. When Meyer Berger's column in the New York Times (February 11, 1955) described them as holding meetings at a bookshop on Third Avenue and possessing "a rather strong strain of occultists," the group published a detailed correction. They did not meet at the Rigberg bookshop. They had no connection to "Flying Saucer News" published by the Rigbergs. They were "trying to concentrate in a serious and responsible way on the factual material involving unidentified flying objects." This insistence on distancing from contactees and occultists defined the group's entire character.

The group's intellectual range extended beyond traditional ufology. Sanderson's January 1955 lecture covered Fortean phenomena broadly: cigar-shaped objects, torpedo shapes, spheres, cylinders, strange creatures, and the Flatwoods Monster investigation in West Virginia (which he had conducted for the North American Newspaper Alliance). He noted that saucer-shaped objects might be terrestrial government devices, but the wider category of unexplained aerial phenomena had roots going back through Fort's research and further. Lex Mebane, who served as CSI-NY's chief analyst, brought statistical and photographic expertise to case investigations.