Interplanetary Space Patrol

History

The Interplanetary Space Patrol was a Texas-based civilian-research organisation founded in late 1957 by James A. Lee (Jim Lee), a shortwave amateur radio operator based in Abilene at 620 Cedar Street. The archive holds Bulletin Number 1, dated 16 December 1957. The bulletin's existence and timing are documentary evidence of the public response to the Levelland mass-sighting case of 2 to 3 November 1957, in which Sheriff Weir Clem of Levelland, Texas catalogued multiple separate witness accounts of an object that caused vehicle engines to stall, headlights to dim, and car ammeters to swing to full discharge as it passed at close range along farm-to-market roads in the cotton-belt country west of Lubbock.

The Bulletin No. 1 letter, addressed "to all my many new friends", documents the volume of mail Jim Lee had received in the weeks after Levelland and the editorial decision to publish a form-letter response. The bulletin reproduces Sheriff Clem's report alongside Lee's own consolidation of contemporary witness statements, including Newell Wright Jr's account from highway 116 east of Levelland, a Mr Williams of Kermit at the Oklahoma Flat Road intersection, the unnamed Waco motorist on the same road, and the operators of two self-propelled grain combines near Pettit whose engines both shut down apparently as the object passed near by. The grain-combine detail is the kind of corroborative-but-not-headline witness statement that the wire-service press did not pick up and that small-press bulletins like this one preserved.