The Visitor

History

The Visitor was a small mimeographed newsletter on flying saucers, issued from Belleville, in Wayne County near Detroit, Michigan, by Don Wysocki. It served as the bulletin of a Detroit-area study group concerned with saucer reports and what its members called interplanetary relations, and it appeared in the mid-1950s, during the early contactee period. A surviving issue, Volume 1, Number 10, is dated May to June 1957, which places the start of the run around 1956.

The newsletter was produced and circulated by Don Wysocki of Belleville. It was tied to a local group whose members met to discuss saucer sightings and contactee accounts, and a Detroit-area saucer research body of the later 1950s continued the same circle.

As a club bulletin of the mid-1950s, The Visitor carried sighting reports, notices of meetings and lectures, and material drawn from the contactee writers then in circulation. Surviving issues reproduce notes from George Adamski's lectures and references to Clarion, the planet that some contactees described as hidden from view from Earth. The newsletter was typed and mimeographed, in the small print runs usual for local saucer groups of the period.

The Visitor belongs to the documentary record as one of the many local club bulletins through which the early saucer and contactee movement organised itself. These mimeographed newsletters, produced by small groups in single towns, formed the grassroots layer of 1950s ufology beneath the national magazines. The Belleville group and its bulletin sit within the Detroit and Michigan saucer scene of that decade.