Journal of UFO History

History

Richard H. Hall launched the Journal of UFO History in March 2004 from his home in Brentwood, Maryland, where he maintained the Donald E. Keyhoe Archives. Hall had spent ten years as an officer of NICAP (1958 to 1969) under Keyhoe's mentorship, and had remained active in UFO research for decades afterwards. The journal was printed by the Brentwood Press at 4418 39th Street, published six times per year, and sold for twenty-eight dollars annually (fifty dollars for two years). Overseas copies went by air mail letter post.

Hall wrote most of the content himself. The inaugural editorial stated plainly that the journal's future depended on market forces: "If enough people are willing to subscribe, the supply of historical information on hand is nearly unlimited and publication can go on indefinitely." He brought a philosophy degree from Tulane University and more than forty-five years of experience as a writer and editor in Washington, D.C. His educational background included a minor in mathematics, and he had first encountered Keyhoe in 1957 when a letter from the retired Marine Corps major arrived at the Tulane math department where Hall worked as a student clerk.

The journal's content reflected Hall's historian's temperament. Each issue carried running chronologies of early UFO sightings, built month by month from newspaper accounts, government documents, and organisational records. Volume 1 covered the period from World War II foo-fighters through the early 1950s. By Volume 2, the chronologies had reached late 1953. Alongside these chronologies, Hall published essays on NICAP's institutional history, primary documents from the Keyhoe Archives, dialogues with other researchers (including Wendy Connors), and a regular "Historical Viewpoints" column that reprinted dismissive statements from scientists and officials alongside the evidence they had ignored.

The final issue (Volume 2, Number 6, January-February 2006) covered UFO-balloon encounters with Navy Skyhook research balloons, CIA UFO documents newly available online, a landing-trace case in Lithuania, the Kinross Affair (a 1953 incident in which an Air Force jet apparently collided with a UFO over Lake Superior), and the continuing late-1953 sightings chronology. Hall noted that many two-year subscribers were due for renewal, an indication that the journal had maintained its readership across both volumes.

Hall's approach was explicitly documentary. He collected viewpoints from across the spectrum, not to achieve false balance but to demonstrate the gap between official confidence and evidentiary reality. The "Historical Viewpoints" columns juxtaposed statements like "UFOs are natural phenomena or hoaxes" (Bernard Lovell, Jodrell Bank) with military assessments like the Air Force Inspector General's 1959 brief calling UFOs "serious USAF business." The contrast made the point without editorial commentary.