Saucercommentary

History

Saucercommentary appears to have launched and ceased within the same issue. The debut number arrived in the mid-1950s as one of dozens of similar small-circulation American bulletins that started up in the years immediately after Kenneth Arnold's 1947 Mount Rainier sighting and the 1952 Washington DC radar flap brought the subject back into national news. The publication's stated intention was to provide commentary on the case literature rather than to compile new sightings, a niche several editors attempted to fill in the 1950s with limited success.

No subsequent issues are known to exist. The bulletin's editor and circulation list are not preserved in the surviving copy. The format, format dimensions, and typesetting match the conventions of mid-1950s American small-press saucer publishing: mimeographed, side-stapled, no professional production. The single issue's content includes commentary on the contactee literature then dominant in the West Coast scene and editorial scepticism toward the Adamski-era contact narratives that were drawing the most press attention.

The publication's significance is not in its contents but in its survival. Hundreds of comparable single-issue or short-run American saucer bulletins began publication between 1950 and 1960. Almost all of them have disappeared entirely. The few that survive in any archive document an institutional form, the single-editor mimeographed bulletin, that was the basic publishing unit of American civilian UFO interest before APRO and NICAP absorbed the audience.