Journal of Borderland Research

History

Meade Layne founded the Borderland Sciences Research Associates in San Diego in 1945 and began publishing the bulletin that would become the Journal of Borderland Research. The founding mission stated by Layne was to investigate phenomena that mainstream science had set aside: the Mark Probert seances at the Inner Circle in San Diego, the dowsing and radiesthesia traditions, Wilhelm Reich's orgone research, Charles Fort's catalogues of anomalies, and what Layne called the "etheric" hypothesis of flying-disc origins, an early non-extraterrestrial framework for the saucer phenomenon proposed shortly after Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting.

Layne ran BSRA until his death in 1961. Riley Hansard Crabb took over as director and editor of the journal that same year, retitled the organisation BSRF (Borderland Sciences Research Foundation), and continued publication for the next twenty-four years. Crabb's tenure widened the journal's scope to include UFO contactee material, ceremonial magic, Tibetan Buddhist sources, mid-century parapsychology, and the slow accumulation of cases Crabb labelled as evidence of an intelligence operating from outside ordinary physical space. Crabb retired in 1985 and Tom Brown took over BSRF and the journal, continuing publication into the digital era.

The journal's editorial position is unusual in the broader UFO research field because it never committed to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Layne's original etheric framework, that saucers came from a region of vibration adjacent to the physical, persisted under Crabb and remains the journal's house position. The journal has therefore tended to attract researchers whose work crosses into spiritualism, esoteric Christianity, magnetism, ley lines, and the underground-civilisation thread, while keeping its distance from the technological-spacecraft framing that dominates the rest of the field.