Flying Saucers (Dell Comics)

History

Flying Saucers was a short-lived comic book series published by Dell Comics with documented issues in 1966 and 1967. The archive holds an Issue 1 (1967) and a separate 1966 piece titled "The Encounter (Vermont 1966)" in which a Navy sailor reports a thirty-foot metallic disc craft hovering with bright light over Vermont in July 1966, with the comic's narrative built around an officer report and surrounding police-witness corroboration. The Dell run is the kind of mass-market pop-culture artefact the civilian-research record rarely treats but which documents how the UFO topic was being distributed through the comic-book newsstands of the mid-1960s alongside the documentary-research literature.

Dell Comics in the mid-1960s was past its 1950s peak as a leading American comics publisher and was producing a wide range of one-shot and short-run titles aimed at newsstand and drugstore distribution. The Flying Saucers run sits inside that broader Dell production decision rather than as a sustained editorial project. The two surviving issues in the archive are held as documentary trace of how the contactee and witness-testimony material the civilian-research bulletins were publishing was being reformatted for the comic-book reading audience of the same period.