Interplanetary News-Scope

History

The Interplanetary News-Scope was a short, free, free-will-donation supplement to the Interplanetary News Digest, edited and published by Genevieve A. Johnston. The archive holds two issues, dated October 1956 and December 1956, both addressed from a PO Box in Hollywood, California (27662, Hollywood 27). The supplement was launched at a moment when Johnston was suspending the larger Digest for reasons she explained directly: "due to lack of funds, lack of time and sheer exhaustion of my energy, it has been some time since the last issue of the Interplanetary Digest." A large New York publisher had considered taking the Digest over and declined, the editor wrote, "because it is based on a spiritual foundation." The News-Scope was the workaround: a free letter, distributed when news and money allowed, keeping Johnston's readership in touch while the main publication was on hold.

Johnston's earlier address had been Box 426, Joshua Tree, California, the desert town that hosted George Van Tassel's Giant Rock contactee gatherings. Some of her Digest issues had carried Van Tassel material verbatim alongside Adamski reprints, Orfeo Angelucci excerpts, George Hunt Williamson reports, and Robert Short channelled transmissions. The October 1956 News-Scope letter is the document in which Johnston marked editorial distance from her previous Joshua Tree associations: "I wish it known that I do not have any contact with Giant Rock, whatsoever. Plus the fact, that I am not a co-operation nor an organization of any kind. But, rather, I am adventuring into the FREEDOM OF THE ULTIMATE." The Hollywood move was not just geography. It was repositioning.

Contents of the surviving issues

The October 1956 issue (two pages) reproduces wire-service sighting reports drawn from the Los Angeles Times, the Citizen-News, and Griffith Park Observatory bulletins, including the 9 August 1956 California meteor seen from Eureka to Monterey to Reno, an 18 August 1956 Hollywood sighting of an orange-red object near Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, and a Tokyo report of a 1,400-mile-long yellow Mars cloud. The editorial column places these reports inside Johnston's theological framework, the framework she calls "the FREEDOM OF THE ULTIMATE." The December 1956 issue runs the November radio-hoax commentary, a year-end Christmas leader on what Johnston framed as the New Age unfolding on Earth, and continued cross-referenced reading suggestions.