Anomaly

History

Anomaly was an irregular New York metropolitan newsletter published from 1969 through 1974 by a research circle whose stated editorial decision, from Volume 1 Number 1 onwards, was to step deliberately outside the flying-saucer framework that the mainstream civilian-research bulletins of the period worked inside. The archive holds thirteen issues: Number 0 (a founding flyer), Number 1 (May 1969), Number 2 (September 1969), Number 3 (December 1969), Number 4 (July 1970), Number 5 (October 1970), Number 6 (February 1971), Number 7 with a Fall to Winter 1971 supplement, Number 8 (Summer 1972), Number 9 (June 1973), Number 10 (November 1973), and Number 11 (April 1974). The publication's editorial scope statement is unambiguous: "Flying saucers. This is the first and last time you will see those two words in this publication."

The May 1969 leader sets out the working framework. The publication committed itself to the "statistical and scientific analysis of all the many neglected ecological, parapsychological and psychiatric aspects surrounding the study of aerial anomalies (AA)" with the long-term aim of building "a valid body of statistical and corroborated evidence." The editorial position, six years before Jacques Vallée's The Invisible College and one year before John Keel's Operation Trojan Horse, was that the UFO reports themselves are a small part of a much larger phenomenon, that the appropriate research focus is the witness and the experience rather than the object, and that the conventional civilian-research bulletins' tape-recording-and-photograph methodology had largely failed to advance the field.