UFO Newsclipping Service

History

The UFO Newsclipping Service was founded by Lucius Farish in Plumerville, Arkansas in 1969. For over four decades, Farish collected, photocopied, and mailed out compilations of newspaper clippings about UFO sightings from publications across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and dozens of other countries. Each monthly issue gathered anywhere from a dozen to over a hundred individual press reports, creating what became the most comprehensive running record of worldwide UFO press coverage in existence.

Unlike journals such as the APRO Bulletin or MUFON UFO Journal, which published investigated case reports and editorial analysis, the Newsclipping Service took a different approach: it preserved the raw newspaper coverage exactly as it appeared, giving researchers access to local press accounts that would otherwise be lost in regional newspaper archives. A sighting in a small-town Arkansas gazette or a Welsh county paper might never reach the major UFO organisations, but Farish tracked them all.

The service ran continuously from 1969 until Farish's death in 2012, spanning issue numbers from the earliest unnumbered editions through to no. 425. The peak years of coverage were the 1980s and 1990s, when each monthly issue could run to 20 or more pages of densely packed clippings. Coverage was heavily weighted toward English-language press, but Farish also included translated reports from European, South American, and Asian sources when available.

Coverage by Decade