Infinity Newsletter

History

Infinity Newsletter is one of the earliest American UFO-adjacent publications held in the archive. The masthead states "Established 1945" and the January 1957 issue (Number 49) is labelled "Our 13th Year" of "Recording the Unknown," placing the publication's first issue in late 1944 or 1945, two years before the Kenneth Arnold sighting of 24 June 1947 which is conventionally treated as the start of the modern UFO era. The archive holds four issues: Number 48 (October to December 1956), Number 49 (January 1957), Number 50 (May 1957), and Number 51 (September 1957). The publisher imprint reads "Barlow Studio's International," with the editor signing as "HB" and a named publisher in some issues listed as "Miss W. Wilks" of Florida. The cover price across the surviving run was sixty cents.

The publication's pre-Arnold founding distinguishes it from nearly the entire civilian-research record. The mainstream civilian-research apparatus (APRO 1952, NICAP 1956, CSI Los Angeles 1953) all formed in the years after Arnold. Infinity Newsletter was a going concern, with a back-catalogue of issues, by the time the modern flying-saucer era began. The pages of the surviving issues catalogue the editor's reference holdings: every UFO and flying-saucer book published to date, scientific reference works, government reports, magazine articles, scrapbooks of news clippings, recordings of flying-saucer publications, and science-fiction and supernatural-tradition material. That working library is the kind of long-cultivated documentary infrastructure that the post-1947 civilian-research organisations had to build from scratch.