Nexus

History

James W. Moseley produced the first issue of Nexus in July 1954, when he was 23 years old and operating from his New Jersey home. The magazine was mimeographed, side-stapled, and circulated to a small subscriber list he had assembled through correspondence with the existing civilian-research groups. Six issues appeared across Volume 1 (July to December 1954); Volume 2 began in January 1955.

Moseley renamed the publication Saucer News in 1955, dropping the more abstract Nexus title in favour of the directly descriptive one. The change reflected a shift in editorial line. Nexus had positioned itself somewhat in the contactee tradition, accepting reports of physical contact with extraterrestrial beings as material to be evaluated rather than dismissed. By the time the rename to Saucer News took effect, Moseley had begun the cynical drift that would characterise the rest of his publishing career, the editorial position that took the saucer story seriously while taking the saucer-research community as material for satire.

Nexus's surviving Volume 1 issues are accordingly a different document from anything Moseley produced later. They show the editorial line he started with rather than the line he ended up with. The witness accounts are treated with more credulity, the contactee narratives are treated as evaluable, and the broader tone of the publication is closer to the earnest small-press saucer scene of 1954 than to anything in the later Saucer News, Non-Scheduled Newsletter or Saucer Smear runs.