Journal of the Congress of Scientific Ufologists

History

The Journal of the Congress of Scientific Ufologists is the periodical proceedings record of the annual Congress of Scientific Ufologists in the years after its inaugural 1967 New York meeting. The 1967 Commodore Hotel convention organised by James Moseley of Saucer News, which the archive treats in its dedicated Congress of Scientific Ufologists collection page, was followed by further annual congresses through the 1970s. The archive holds two issues of the Journal: Number 1, the inaugural issue under chairman Gray Barker covering the Sixth Congress, and Number 3, the full proceedings of the Seventh Congress held in Columbus, Ohio. Number 2 is not in the archive holdings and may simply not have been preserved in the small-press production runs of the period.

Gray Barker's role as Journal chairman is the editorial through-line. Barker, the West Virginia-based author of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) which introduced the Men in Black tradition into American ufology, had been one of the eight platform speakers at the 1967 Commodore Hotel convention. By the time of the Sixth Congress, Barker had moved from platform speaker to organisational chairman, with the Journal as the documentary record of that transition. The Journal's first issue is described in its own production notes as an experimental Xeroxed format, which is the technological signal of small-press civilian-research publishing entering the post-mimeograph era.