Saucers (Max B. Miller)

History

Max B. Miller launched Saucers in 1953 from a P.O. Box in Los Angeles, six years after Kenneth Arnold's sighting over Mount Rainier reset the parameters of what Americans were willing to discuss in public. Miller ran Flying Saucers International, a small non-profit that functioned as publisher, subscriber network, and organising body for one of the first flying saucer conventions ever held: the World's First Flying Saucer Convention at the Hollywood Hotel in August 1953. Frank Scully spoke. Truman Bethurum spoke. George Adamski was in the room. The mimeograph age of ufology was underway, and Miller's journal was its Los Angeles outpost.

Southern California in the early 1950s was ground zero for this new subculture. Within a fifty-mile radius of Miller's mailbox you could find the aerospace engineers of Lockheed and Douglas, the military test ranges of Edwards Air Force Base, and the contactee scene centred around Giant Rock in the Mojave Desert. Miller's journal sat at the intersection. One issue might carry a technical article on electromagnetic detection equipment by Robert C. Beck alongside a contact narrative from Orfeo Angelucci or Daniel Fry. This was not cognitive dissonance. In 1953, nobody had yet drawn firm lines between the hardware question and the contact question. Miller published both because both were live questions.

The journal ran seven volumes from 1953 to 1959. Early issues were slim (four pages for 15 cents) and focused on editorial commentary and short reports. By Volume 3 in 1955, the publication had grown into a proper quarterly with a contents page, bylined articles of substance, book reviews, and a "Short Shots & News Notes" column that tracked developments across the field. Miller attracted contributions from serious researchers: Major Donald Keyhoe submitted material, Edward Ruppelt (former head of Project Blue Book) provided an exclusive statement, and Dr. Olavo Fontes sent reports from Brazil that would later prove historically significant.

The contributors list tells you who was active and visible in civilian ufology during the Golden Age. Leonard Stringfield was filing field reports from Ohio. Leonard Cramp contributed technical analysis from England. Harold T. Wilkins provided historical research. George Hunt Williamson wrote about the "light-beam communication" experiments being attempted in Chicago. J. Allen Hynek's early paper from the Journal of the Optical Society of America was reprinted with permission. Charles Maney, a physics professor, contributed analysis. The journal was a clearing house for a community that had no other infrastructure.

By the late 1950s, the field was professionalising. NICAP had launched in Washington with military officers and former CIA officials on its board. Miller acknowledged this shift editorially, noting in 1957 that "flying saucers are finally respectable" thanks to NICAP's formation. The last issues of Saucers appeared in 1959 as the newsletter landscape consolidated. Miller had been there from the start, publishing continuously through the period when the flying saucer question moved from tabloid curiosity to organised research. The journal ceased not because interest waned, but because the institutional landscape had changed around it.

The contactee material, which later ufologists would dismiss, has its own documentary value. These are first-person accounts published within months of the claimed events, before decades of cultural feedback shaped the narratives. Whether one reads them as literal encounters, psychological phenomena, or cultural artefacts, the primary documentation preserved in Saucers exists nowhere else. Bethurum's account of his Nevada Highway 91 encounter, Stanford's 1955 contact narrative, Angelucci's writings: all appeared here in their earliest published forms.

The technical articles are equally valuable. Robert C. Beck's piece on instrumentation for UFO detection (Vol. 7, 1959) describes specific equipment: electromagnetic frequency analysers, photographic rigs, magnetometers. John Otto's light-beam communication experiments, conducted over WGN Chicago and KFI Los Angeles, are documented with circuit diagrams and operational results. These represent the earliest attempts at systematic, instrumented field research by civilians, years before MUFON would standardise field investigation protocols.