The Roundhouse

History

The Roundhouse was published monthly from Maquoketa, Iowa, a small town in Jackson County on the eastern edge of the state. Neal Kearney owned and published the newsletter from his rural address at R.R. 3 (Rural Route 3), Maquoketa, with Gladys Kearney listed as associate editor. The first issue appeared around August 1952, and the newsletter ran through at least January 1955 (Vol 4 No 1). It carried the Latin motto "Adama Te Quod Non Intelligunt" and the subtitle "The Strange & Unusual," signalling scope broader than flying saucers alone.

Subscription cost $2.75 for twelve issues, with single copies at 25 cents and a trial offer of three issues for 65 cents. The newsletter was printed in the USA (noted on its contents pages) and ran to roughly four to six mimeographed pages per issue. Its production quality reflected the limitations of a rural Iowa publisher working without commercial printing: typewritten stencils, hand-drawn illustrations, and OCR-resistant mimeograph reproduction that makes the earliest issues nearly unreadable today.

The Roundhouse was the organ of the Civilian Saucer Investigation club, a local group based in Maquoketa. The group sat within the broader network of civilian saucer clubs that proliferated across the American Midwest after the 1952 Washington D.C. sighting wave. Iowa was not peripheral to the phenomenon: the newsletter documented local sightings including the January 1951 Sioux City airport incident (a cigar-shaped craft larger than a B-29 that dived at and then paced a civilian aircraft) and observations from the Iowa City area where State University of Iowa faculty engaged seriously with the topic.

Darold Powers wrote the recurring column "The Quest," which ranged from speculative physics (gravity theories involving "auranic impulses," time travel paradoxes for interstellar flight) to careful reporting of Iowa sightings and contactee claims. Powers engaged directly with the ideas of George Adamski and George Williamson while maintaining a questioning tone. His January 1955 column explored whether flying saucers might originate from future residents of Earth, using Dr. George Gamow's expanding universe theory as a framework.

John Otto of Chicago featured prominently in the newsletter's technical content. Otto conducted experiments in radio communication with aerial objects and built a spectro-photo communication receiver using light-beam detection. The January 1955 issue included a schematic for Otto's receiver (using an RCA 923 photo-tube, 90 volts DC maximum) and reported that both CW (continuous wave) and voice signals had been received, though nothing interpretable as International Morse code. Kearney himself built a comparable unit using a nine-power homemade telescope and received what appeared to be CW from an unknown source in a northeasterly direction.

The newsletter's content mixed hard sighting reports with Fortean curiosities: the liquefaction of Saint Januarius's blood in Naples (reported as prophecy in the June 1954 issue), "sheriff kills monster" stories, green fireballs over the American Southwest, and advertisements for Rosicrucian literature. Material from Clara John's "The Little Listening Post" in Washington D.C. was reprinted, connecting the Iowa newsletter to the wider civilian saucer research network.

The December 1954 issue (Vol 3 No 13 or 14) carried international coverage: Italian saucer photographs from Taormina, Sicily (taken by Giuseppe Grasso, showing two disc-shaped objects witnessed by hundreds including U.S. Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce), Swedish telephoto lens captures at 19,000 feet, and Yugoslavia's official investigation after astronomer Milorad Protic confirmed a glowing object could not have been a meteorite. The same issue noted the Air Force's position that its technical intelligence chiefs still had no opinion on what saucers were, though they confirmed the objects were "not any plane, missile or weapon developed by the United States."