Round Robin

History

Round Robin began as a mimeographed letter mailed to fifteen or twenty correspondents from 3615 Alexia Place, San Diego, in February 1945. The editor was Meade Layne, a retired teacher of literature who had spent the late 1930s and early 1940s building a network of correspondents interested in what he called "psychic research and parapsychology." The first issue cost between twenty and twenty-five cents per copy to produce and was not sold. Layne wrote in the opening paragraph that this might also be the last issue, and that whether the bulletin continued depended entirely on reader response.

The 1945 first issue is striking for what it does not contain. There is no mention of flying discs, no mention of aerial phenomena, no anticipation of what was coming. Layne's preoccupation in February 1945 was a phenomenon he and his correspondents called "vitality globules" or "spiritone," small luminous entities allegedly visible to certain observers under specific conditions. Dr. P.S. Haley, President of the California Society for Psychical Research, had been studying them for years. William G. Randall, a Pasadena attorney, was contributing observations. E.C. Krieger, an ordnance engineer in Indiana, had asked friends in the South Pacific to make their own observations. The early Round Robin circle was a network of educated amateurs working at the edge of what they could justify as legitimate inquiry, two years before Kenneth Arnold sighted nine objects over Mount Rainier and reframed the question entirely.

The shift began in 1947. By Volume 3 Number 5, dated May to June 1947, Round Robin had picked up contributing editors. Max Freedom Long had joined to write on Hawaiian Huna practice. Vincent H. Gaddis, the Fortean writer who would later coin the phrase "Bermuda Triangle," contributed regularly on anomalous phenomena. David Dagmar handled correspondence. The May-June 1947 issue carried Gaddis's first major article on the Shaver Mystery, the controversial Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer narrative of subterranean deros and teros that ran in Amazing Stories from 1945 to 1948. The Shaver Mystery article appeared in the same eight-week window in which Kenneth Arnold made his sighting on June 24, 1947, and the Roswell debris was recovered three weeks later. Round Robin was already publishing in this conceptual territory before there was a public flying disc question to attach it to.

The 1948 run is the pivot. The August 1948 issue (Volume 4 Number 6) introduced "The Rajah Natcha Discourses on Sky Phenomena," a seance communication channeled through the San Diego medium Mark Probert. Probert became central to BSRA's editorial direction. His seances, conducted in the home of Irene Probert with Layne and a rotating circle in attendance, produced communications attributed to a group of discarnate teachers led by an entity called the Yada di Shi'ite, identified in the transcripts as a Tibetan adept who had lived 500,000 years ago. The Probert seances, excerpted issue by issue from August 1948 onwards, supplied a coherent cosmological framework: aerial phenomena were vehicles from an adjacent vibrational plane, projected into our material density by intelligences operating in what Layne called "etheria."

The September to October 1948 issue (Volume 4 Number 7) made the institutional change formal. The masthead now read "Issued in the interests of Borderland Sciences Research Associates (BSRA) and of all students of Psychic, occult, spiritistic and paraphysical phenomena." A standing "Disc Data" section appeared. The MaComb fires poltergeist case in Illinois received coverage in the back pages. The address change to 5540 Adams Avenue reflected the growth of the circle from a 1945 mailing list into a small institution with a director, contributing editors, and a defined research programme.

By May 1949, with the green-fireball wave underway over New Mexico and Project Twinkle being set up at Holloman to investigate, Round Robin Volume 5 Number 3 ran what Layne called a "Memorandum Concerning the Flying Discs." It is the first formal statement of the BSRA position: flying discs were ether-ship intrusions from an adjacent plane, observed in solid form because their crews had condensed their vehicles to material density to interact with the post-Hiroshima environment. Three issues later, in August 1949, Volume 5 Number 5 led with an article titled "Etheria Calling" and treated the framework as established doctrine.

The archive holds 36 issues spanning February 1945 (Volume 1 Number 1) to early 1960 (Volume 16 Number 1). The 1947 to 1950 run is continuous on the Volume 3 to Volume 6 sequence, with gaps in the very high-volume years on either end. After Meade Layne stepped back from direct editorial work in the mid-1950s, BSRA continued under Riley Crabb, who carried the publication forward into the 1960s and 1970s under a different format that the archive holds separately.