UFO Historical Revue

History

The UFO Historical Revue (UHR) was edited by Barry Greenwood, the longtime co-author of Clear Intent (1984, with Larry Fawcett) and editor of the CAUS publication Just Cause. The archive holds Number 13, dated September 2009, which is the journal's revival issue after a three-year suspension. The original print run ended in September 2006; UHR returned in 2009 as a digital-only PDF publication distributed through Greenwood's archive site at greenwoodufoarchive.com.

Greenwood's revival editorial sets out the journal's terms of reference. The stated mission was pre-1947 aerial phenomena, the airship waves and mystery aircraft sightings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which fall outside the conventional 24 June 1947 starting line of modern ufology. The revival acknowledged that the field had lost several of its central figures in the intervening period: John A. Keel, Richard Hall, Robert Todd, and Al Chop are named in the September 2009 leader as researchers and witnesses whose passing the revived UHR was partly intended to honour by continuing the documentary work they had done. Greenwood writes that the digital format made the relaunch possible at all, since the cost structure of the original hardcopy publication was no longer sustainable in a market where print civilian-research journals were disappearing from newsstands.

Contents of Number 13

The September 2009 issue centres on two long-form pieces. The first, "FBI Academy Records Revealed," documents a 1986 discovery by Jim Melesciuc and his brother of FBI Academy microfilm holdings of UFO press coverage spanning 1978 to 1991. Five folders of clippings were copied during repeated visits to the Quantico library, dealing with UFO secrecy, sightings, feature articles on personalities, and at least one item critical of the government's handling of UFO reports. The article reproduces the Academy's internal subject categorisations, which is the kind of documentary detail Greenwood was specifically positioned to surface from his Mass MUFON era.

The second long piece is a Ramey memo analysis. The Ramey memo is the document held by General Roger Ramey in the 8 July 1947 Fort Worth photograph, the partially legible page whose contents have been the subject of nearly three decades of forensic enlargement and disputed transcription. The UHR analysis works through the line-by-line reading of the text alongside enlarged image plates supplied by Mary Castner and Joel Carpenter, with a particular focus on the contested "ROSWELL, SAID" reading on line 5. The piece is the kind of slow, technical, forensic-imaging work that defines Greenwood's editorial output and that the more discursive civilian-research journals of the same period did not run.