Magonia

History

John Rimmer founded Magonia in 1979, taking up the editorial line that Peter Rogerson and Roger Sandell had developed in the earlier journal Merseyside UFO Bulletin (MUFOB) through the 1970s. Where the wider British UFO scene oriented around BUFORA's case-file conservatism or Flying Saucer Review's encounter literature, Magonia positioned itself as the venue for sceptical and psychosocial analysis, the critical wing of British UFO research that took the phenomenon seriously precisely by interrogating the accounts rather than collecting them.

The journal's name comes from Jacques Vallee's 1969 book Passport to Magonia, which argued for continuity between modern UFO accounts and historical folklore of fairy abduction, sky-people and changeling encounters. Rimmer and his contributors took Vallee's framing as their starting point. Magonia ran for three decades, publishing Peter Rogerson's detailed source criticism of contactee and abduction accounts, Hilary Evans's psychological work on visionary experience, John Harney's catalogue of recurring narrative patterns, and reviews by Nigel Watson and Kevin McClure of the broader UK research literature.

Magonia ceased print publication in 2009 after thirty years. Rimmer continued the editorial project as Magonia Review of Books online, which continues to publish reviews of new UFO and forteana titles in the same critical-analytic mode. The print archive remains the principal British primary source for what came to be called the psychosocial hypothesis in UFO studies.