MUFON Arizona Newsletter

History

The MUFON Arizona Newsletter ran monthly from at least August 1993 (Volume 2, Number 8) through 2001, publishing from the Scottsdale and Phoenix metro area. Ray Maurer served as State Director during the early period, with Tom Taylor as Section Director and newsletter producer. Meetings were held at 8227 E. Orange Blossom, Scottsdale (a clubhouse facility), on Monday evenings at 7:30. By 1997, Tom Taylor had moved up to State Director with Jim Ossipov as Maricopa County Section Director. George Parks took over as State Director by January 2001.

The chapter maintained a sprawling organisational structure covering Arizona's vast geography. Section directors ran operations in Maricopa, Pima, Yuma, Cochise, and Mojave counties. Field investigators fanned out across desert highways, military corridors near Luke Air Force Base, and the Mogollon Rim country north of Payson. Monthly programmes alternated between video screenings, guest speakers, and panel discussions featuring abduction experiencers from within the membership.

The newsletter featured regular columns: "From the Director's Desk" carried organisational news and case commentary, while Tom Taylor's "Media Watch" tracked television, radio, and newspaper coverage of UFO subjects. Taylor listed every broadcast he could find, from Ted Loman's weekly "UFO AZ" programme on Tucson's Channel 22 to national specials. He noted with frustration that the Arizona Republic and Mesa Tribune "refused to cover this story to any degree" after the Phoenix Lights.

Field cases ranged from the straightforward to the strange. The August 1993 issue carried Joe Hammond's report of a Strawberry, Arizona sighting: a stationary silvery disc, "the width of a dime at arm's length," observed for over ten minutes at sunset on 7 April 1993, near Highway 87 north of Payson. That same issue documented Ray Maurer's poolside encounter in Palm Springs with a woman who described classic abduction indicators: missing time, lights, paralysis, marks on her body, and a bone inexplicably missing from beneath her nose. The September 1993 programme featured a panel discussion on abductee implants, prompted by a US News and World Report article on pheromone-detecting organs in the nasal cavity.

The chapter operated a national UFO Hotline (1-800-UFO-2166) for sighting reports and organised field trips, including a May 1997 tour of the Very Large Array radio telescope outside Socorro, New Mexico. By 2001, the newsletter had migrated to a web-augmented format, with the chapter maintaining a website at hometown.aol.com/mufonjason/mufonaz.html and adding an Experiencer Support Group run by Dr. Ruth Hover.