Pursuit (SITU)

History

Ivan T. Sanderson founded the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU) in 1965 from his home in Columbia, New Jersey. Sanderson was not a hobbyist. He held a degree in zoology from Cambridge, had worked as a wildlife correspondent for the BBC, and spent decades conducting fieldwork in remote regions of West Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. He had seen things in the field that did not fit the textbooks, and by the 1960s he wanted an institutional framework for studying them.

SITU filled that role, and its journal Pursuit, which launched in 1967, became its public face. The publication reflected Sanderson's intellectual range in ways that distinguished it sharply from every other anomaly journal of the period. A single issue might contain a paper on unidentified submarine objects sighted by naval personnel, a statistical analysis of anomalous animal behaviour preceding earthquakes, a report on archaeological artefacts that challenged accepted timelines, and a field investigation of a UFO landing trace. Sanderson refused to treat these as separate categories. He suspected they were connected.

The breadth was deliberate. Sanderson argued that science had become so compartmentalised that phenomena falling between disciplines simply went uninvestigated. Nobody owned them. Pursuit would. Its editorial mission: collect, document, and analyse precisely those reports that no conventional journal would touch. Not because they were unscientific, but because they belonged to no recognised science. Sanderson coined "USO" (unidentified submarine object) for underwater anomalies and developed the "vile vortices" hypothesis, mapping twelve geographic zones where ships and aircraft seemed to vanish at disproportionate rates. The Bermuda Triangle was the most famous. He identified eleven others.

The journal maintained a tone that was neither credulous nor dismissive. Contributors included working scientists who could not publish anomalous observations in their own fields, retired military officers reporting experiences that had no official channel, and independent researchers working outside institutional frameworks. Sanderson insisted on documentation: dates, coordinates, witnesses, environmental conditions. Speculation was permitted only after the data had been laid out.