Orbit (CRIFO Newsletter)

History

The CRIFO Newsletter, retitled Orbit from its second volume, was founded by Leonard H. Stringfield from his Cincinnati address at 1411 Briton Avenue. The first issue is dated 7 April 1954, Volume I Number 1. The archive holds three bound volumes: Volume 1 (1954 to 1955), Volume 2 (1955 to 1956), and Volume 3 (1956 to 1957). Subscriptions opened at two dollars per year and rose to three dollars from 1 April 1955 with back issues at twenty-five cents each. Stringfield ran the operation as non-profit, supported entirely by subscriber dues, with the editor's stated rationale being that the magazine-and-newspaper advertising model could not be applied to a publication of this kind.

CRIFO stood for Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects. The Associate Members listed in Volume I Number 1 include James Moseley (then in Lima, Peru), the same Moseley who would go on to edit Saucer News and organise the 1967 Congress of Scientific Ufologists at the Commodore Hotel in New York. The Moseley listing places CRIFO inside the durable cross-organisational network of mid-century American civilian-research operations, the network whose surviving correspondence makes the period reconstructable today.

Contents of the surviving volumes

The April 1954 leader, "Watch Red Planet Mars," sets the editorial tone. Stringfield catalogues the White Sands scientific preparations for the July 1954 Mars opposition, naming Dr Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, and Dr Lincoln La Paz, the meteoricist, as the team leads. The same issue runs Stringfield's contemporary investigation of the Mt Palomar "two unknown objects" near-Earth observation first reported by Frank Edwards on his Mutual broadcast, with Sir Edward Appleton's 3 September 1953 address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science used as the cross-reference for the Cygnus radio-noise correlation. The four-mystery-photos feature documents Stringfield's hands-on investigation of an anonymous February 1954 submission of four photographs of an octagonal hovering object over rural Hamilton County, Ohio, including his meeting with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and his observation that the photographs were returned three weeks later with a glossy colloidal substance applied to the surface, the residue of laboratory testing.

Later issues run "1001 Other Reasons Why Saucers Are Not U.S. Weapons," Stringfield's working list of arguments against the secret-American-prototype explanation, citing Major Dewey Fournet's withheld report, the CIRVIS regulations meeting in Los Angeles in February 1954, the Secretary of the Air Force Talbott and Secretary of the Navy Kimball sightings, and the 1949 Boone County Airport (Greater Cincinnati) control-tower incident in which two operators abandoned the tower as a ball of light circled and ignored radio challenges. The Volume 1 case-files section includes Harold Fulton-sourced New Zealand reports and the early international correspondence that distinguished CRIFO from purely regional civilian-research bulletins.