LUFORO Bulletin

History

The London UFO Research Organisation formed in 1959, joining the small cluster of British civilian groups that had taken up the saucer story since Desmond Leslie and George Adamski's 1953 book had put the subject in front of UK readers. LUFORO's bulletin began publication shortly after the group's founding and ran through three years of intensive London-based correspondence and case investigation. The bulletin's masthead listed a handful of members who would later become familiar names in British UFO research, including officers who would carry through into the merged BUFORA leadership.

The bulletin's content sat between sighting-report compilation and editorial commentary on the wider field. LUFORO took an interest in the early American contactee material then circulating in Britain through Desmond Leslie's lectures and the Adamski tours, but the bulletin maintained a more cautious editorial line than the contactee literature itself. LUFORO members investigated south-of-England sightings, kept up correspondence with American groups including NICAP and APRO, and published occasional translations of early French and Belgian reports.

LUFORO merged with the British UFO Association in 1962 to form the British UFO Research Association, BUFORA, which took over publication responsibilities and superseded the LUFORO Bulletin. The bulletin's short three-year run nonetheless documents the moment at which British civilian UFO research consolidated into a single national organisation, a structural transition that defined the next four decades of UK ufology.