Inexplicata

History

Inexplicata launched in the fall of 1998 with a name borrowed from the Vatican. In 1997, the Vatican had upgraded its official Latin dictionary to include neologisms, among them "res inexplicata volans" for Unidentified Flying Object. Scott Corrales, who had been translating and distributing Latin American UFO research in English for years, took the second word of that definition as both title and omen.

Corrales edited the journal from Derrick City, Pennsylvania. Juan Carlos Mallory served as assistant editor, handling article submissions and letters from P.O. Box 228 in the same town. The contributing editors reflected the journal's geographic reach: Manuel Carballal in Spain, Willie Durand Urbina in Puerto Rico, and Dr. Rafael Lara Palmeros in Mexico. Each brought regional expertise and long-standing investigative networks in their respective countries.

The journal carried regular departments: Dr. Rafael Lara's "Mexico Watch" column tracked one of the world's most active regions for sighting activity during the late 1990s, and "Ex Libris" reviewed Spanish and Portuguese-language UFO literature unavailable to English readers. Feature articles covered the full spectrum of Hispanic anomalous research: Manuel Carballal wrote on Spain's aeronautical history of flying saucers and investigated living-dead folklore intersecting with UFO encounters. Roberto S. Contreras documented sightings at Chiquihuite Hill. Salvador Freixedo, the controversial former Jesuit priest turned paranormal researcher, contributed on the UFO phenomenon in China.

The scope was deliberately broad. Corrales stated in his inaugural editorial that the journal would follow its researchers "to a myriad fields which at first may appear to have no connection to traditional ufology." Cryptozoology appeared alongside classic saucer reports. Corrales's own lead article in the first issue covered mystery animals from Egypt to Latin America. This interdisciplinary approach reflected the research culture of Hispanic ufology, where investigators like Freixedo and Carballal moved freely between phenomena that English-language researchers typically siloed into separate fields.