UFO Potpourri

History

UFO Potpourri was John F. Schuessler's personal newsletter, a one-man operation that ran from approximately 1971 through at least November 2004. Schuessler compiled newspaper clippings, government documents, conference reports, and his own commentary into a serial publication that reached over 455 issues across its run. The archive holds 112 of these, spanning from the earliest readable issue (No. 14, April 1971) through No. 455 (November 2004), with the densest coverage in the 1980s and 1990s.

The publication began in the St. Louis, Missouri area, where Schuessler was working as an aerospace engineer and had become involved with the Midwest UFO Network (later the Mutual UFO Network, MUFON). Issue No. 14 promoted the 1971 Midwest UFO Conference in St. Louis and referenced Skylook, MUFON's official publication, then edited by Norma Short. Schuessler was among the founding generation of MUFON members and would eventually serve as the organisation's International Director.

By the mid-1980s, the return address had shifted to PO Box 58485, Houston, Texas 77258-8485, reflecting Schuessler's relocation to work at the Johnson Space Center area with McDonnell Douglas (later Boeing) on the Space Shuttle programme. The Houston years produced the bulk of the surviving issues. Schuessler had a fax number (713-488-3121) and was operating from the Clear Lake area south of Houston, the same neighbourhood where NASA engineers, astronauts, and contractors lived and worked. His aerospace credentials gave him access to technical communities that most UFO researchers could not reach.

The final issues in the archive carry a Littleton, Colorado address (9862 West Unser Avenue, 80129-6986) and an email address (schuessler@mho.net), placing Schuessler's retirement years in the Denver metro area. By 2004, the newsletter had been running for over three decades.

The content reflected whatever Schuessler found interesting or important at the time, which is precisely what makes the collection valuable. Issue No. 272 (June 1984) compiled Houston Post and USA Today coverage of J. Allen Hynek and James Oberg debating UFO evidence at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, alongside Frank Drake's estimates of extraterrestrial civilisations. Issue No. 301 (circa 1986) assembled British newspaper reports of UFO sightings across England, Scotland, and Wales: taxi drivers in Deeside, police officers in Wymondham, a fourteen-year-old boy temporarily blinded in Carleton, twenty-plus calls to the Summit County sheriff in Colorado, and law enforcement officers in Grand and Summit Counties watching triangular objects through a telescope over Williams Peak.

Issue No. 400 (February 1996) opened with the death of astrophysicist Thornton Page, who had served on the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel in January 1953. Schuessler reproduced Page's 1975 Houston Chronicle interview, his 1980 statement on the need for UFO studies, and James McDonald's account of how the CIA reclassified the Robertson Panel's full report after McDonald had already read and taken notes on the declassified version at Project Blue Book headquarters. The level of primary-source documentation in a single issue was remarkable: Page's own words from three different decades, McDonald's firsthand account of document suppression, and the Fund for UFO Research's collected McDonald writings all compiled in one place.

The November 2004 issue (No. 455) covered the Brookings Institution's 1960 report to NASA on the societal implications of discovering extraterrestrial life, Lyndon Johnson's standing orders to the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee to monitor UFO developments, and a 1960 police officer sighting at Lambert Field airport in Berkeley, Missouri, investigated by the Military Transport Service at Scott Air Force Base. Schuessler's editorial voice surfaced in suggestions for FOIA requests targeting the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee records under Johnson and subsequent presidents, and in his pointed observation that the Brookings report may have shaped government policy on UFO denial.