Flying Saucer News (Great Britain)

History

Flying Saucer News appeared in spring 1953 at sixpence per copy, two years before Brinsley le Poer Trench and Derek Dempster launched Flying Saucer Review and at a moment when British civilian saucer publishing was still being conducted in small, cyclostyled, seasonally issued formats. The archive holds nine consecutive issues running from spring 1953 to spring 1956: spring 1953, autumn 1953, spring 1954, summer to autumn 1954, winter 1954 to 1955, spring 1955, summer 1955, autumn 1955, and spring 1956.

The spring 1953 lead editorial, titled "Quickening Pace?", reports two developments the editor thought significant: the formation of Civilian Saucer Investigation (New Zealand), drawn to the editor's attention via reporting in the Auckland Star, and the opening of a "Department of Flying Saucers" within the French Ministry of Information following a sighting by five officials at Le Bourget airport in February 1953 who reported an object streaking across Paris at "800 mph." The same issue carries a piece on "Tito's Saucers," reporting that flying saucers had been flown over districts of Belgrade in February 1953 shortly before the Marshal's visit to Britain, with Belgrade radio attributing the craft to the Yugoslav Air Force Construction Institute.

The publication's editorial position from the first issue was that the increasing number of "nocturnal lights" reports needed to be distinguished from genuine daylight disc observations, and that a new name should be coined for the night-time objects to avoid muddying the disc question with what the editor took to be a different phenomenon entirely. The editorial concedes, however, that even some of these nocturnal objects had been reported chasing fighter aircraft and guided missiles, complicating any clean separation. This methodological emphasis on classification became a recurring theme through the run.

The archive's seasonal run is continuous from spring 1953 through spring 1956. Three years of British civilian reporting at four issues per year produced a consistent thread of British and Continental case coverage. The publication closed or merged out of the archive's view in 1956, the year Flying Saucer Review found its footing as the dominant British saucer periodical and absorbed much of the civilian-research audience.