Saucer Scoop

History

Saucer Scoop was published from 6464 34th Avenue North, St. Petersburg, Florida 33710, as the monthly newsletter of the International Headquarters of UFO Phenomena Organization (IHOUPO), directed by Hayden Hewes out of Oklahoma City. A subscription ran twelve issues for $3.00 (later raised to $4.00), with overseas copies at $6.00. The publication operated with a small board: an editor, a director of photographic research, a director of foreign information, and a West Coast director, Kenneth Larson.

The earliest issue in the archive, Vol. 1 No. 5, is dated August 1966 and billed as the "All Florida Issue," devoted entirely to the spring 1966 Florida UFO wave. That issue established the format that would carry through the publication's run: Saucer Scoop was, at its core, a newspaper clipping service. The editor gathered sighting reports from local and regional papers across the state, reprinted the relevant passages, and added commentary. The sourcing was specific. Reports came from the Daytona Beach News, Sanford Herald, Orlando Sentinel, Titusville Star-Advocate, Fort Myers News-Press, Collier County News, Lakeland Ledger, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Tampa Tribune, and others. Each clipping carried its date and source, creating a day-by-day record of the wave as it moved through the state.

The Florida sightings followed patterns the editor tracked closely. A triangle formed by New Port Richey, Hudson, and Brooksville produced repeated reports, and the editor noted that this area contained concentrations of power lines, electrical substations, and water pumping stations. Objects were seen over lakes, along the Gulf coast, and above the Atlantic shore. Witnesses included police officers, military personnel from nearby bases, and civilians filing reports with local sheriffs' offices. The editor assembled these into chronological sequences that showed how sightings clustered geographically and temporally.

By Volume 3 (approximately 1968), Saucer Scoop had expanded beyond Florida clippings into national UFO politics. The SCOOP SNOOPS column carried community news, field reports from regional investigators, and commentary on developments within the UFO organisational landscape. The Condon Committee at the University of Colorado dominated editorial attention: the newsletter covered the firing of project members David Saunders and Norman Levine, who had leaked internal documents suggesting the committee's conclusions were predetermined. The editor tracked RAND Corporation involvement in UFO data collection and reported on a UFO course at Wesleyan University where J. Allen Hynek delivered lectures. A rumoured replacement for Major Quintanilla at Project Blue Book circulated through the newsletter's pages.

The final volume carried the publication into 1969 and increasingly eclectic territory. An extended follow-up on the Falcon Lake case reported that Steve Michalak had visited the Mayo Clinic, where doctors found a strange chemical substance in his blood that they could not identify. Features on Stonehenge and standing stones explored theories connecting megalithic sites to electromagnetic anomalies and quartz crystal properties. Fortean phenomena crept in: fish falls in Harlow, Essex, and swarms of brown beetles in Armental, Spain. A "Dear Space Brothers" letter column revealed the contactee-adjacent fringe of the readership, where subscribers addressed messages directly to extraterrestrial intelligences.

The publication ran four volumes before ceasing, likely a casualty of the broader contraction in grassroots UFO publishing that followed the Condon Report's release in early 1969 and the closure of Project Blue Book in December of that year. The timing was not coincidental. The Condon Report gave mainstream media permission to treat UFOs as settled science, and subscriber bases for small newsletters shrank accordingly.