The UFO Enigma

History

The UFO Study Group of Greater St. Louis was a nonprofit organisation that ran out of P.O. Box 6612 (later Box 31544) in St. Louis, Missouri. Its newsletter, The UFO Enigma, published monthly (except summers) from 1981 through the late 1980s, producing 79 issues across eight volumes. The group was unaffiliated with any national society, which gave it editorial independence but also meant it relied entirely on its own membership for content, funding, and investigation capacity.

The organisation maintained a structure more elaborate than most local groups. Under the presidency of R. Powell Adams (later Irene Alexander, then John Roppolo), it operated three standing committees: the Investigators Committee, which conducted field investigations in the greater St. Louis area; the Parapsychology Committee, which explored the fringes where UFO research intersected consciousness studies; and the Saint Charles UFO Committee, which served the community west of the Missouri River. Each committee generated content for the newsletter.

John E. Schroeder served as founding editor, with an editorial committee that included John Roppolo, Mary Hagemeyer, and the secretaries of each standing committee. Karen Teller later took over editorial duties, joined by Richard Holmes and Barbara Becker. The publication carried a mix of local investigation reports, guest speakers' presentations transcribed from monthly meetings, research papers, newsclippings, and organisational business.

Monthly meetings ran at the Farm and Home Savings and Loan Building in Webster Groves. The group heard presentations from outside speakers on topics ranging from hypnotic regression techniques (Don Mottin of the Mottin Institute of Hypnosis, who had over 16,000 hours of clinical experience and worked with the St. Louis Major Case Squad) to the relationship between religion and UFOs. December meetings featured the annual Christmas party hosted by the Saint Charles Committee.

The name "Enigma" was deliberate. The newsletter positioned the phenomenon as a puzzle requiring investigation rather than advocacy. Articles explored natural and prosaic explanations alongside genuinely anomalous cases. When Chuck Adams wrote his piezoelectricity series, he was working through the physics of how quartz-bearing rock under tectonic pressure could produce electric fields sufficient to ionise atmospheric gases at specific wavelengths. This was real science applied to anomalous observations, published in a newsletter that also reported occupant encounters and close approaches.

The group maintained a library and archive under the care of "Mike" Shannon (later Robert Murphy as historian), keeping reference materials accessible for member research. Bruce Widaman succeeded Adams as Chief Field Investigator in later years. The newsletter tracked officer elections annually, documenting the organisational continuity that kept a volunteer group producing monthly output for nearly a decade.