Cleveland Flying Saucer Club Bulletin

History

The Cleveland Flying Saucer Club Bulletin was founded by Thomas M. Comella from 20019 Scottsdale Boulevard, Shaker Heights, Ohio, with Sally Noble as secretary. The archive holds Volume 1 Number 1, dated 18 December 1954, a six-page mimeographed bulletin. Membership cost two dollars a year, with the bulletin promised at least monthly and donations beyond the entrance fee encouraged for production costs. The Club's founding posture is unusually explicit in the opening editorial: the bulletin is responding directly to "the stupid official statements explaining the disks as air inversion, hallucinations, etc.," and is positioning itself as a public successor to the broadcaster Frank Edwards, who had been fired from his Mutual Broadcasting position that year and whose final article in the November 1954 REAL magazine, titled "They're Not Telling You the Truth About the Spies From Space," is treated by Comella as the editorial event the Cleveland Club was launched in response to.

Comella was simultaneously running a column called "Saucer Roundup" in MYSTIC magazine, Ray Palmer's spiritualist-leaning fantasy and esoterica publication out of Evanston, Illinois. The Cleveland Bulletin's editorial back page promotes MYSTIC and treats the column as the longer-form sister venue for material that did not fit the monthly bulletin. The cross-promotion places the Cleveland Club inside the wider Palmer publishing network rather than inside the New York or West Coast civilian-research traditions of the same period.