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.

What the Archive Holds

The NHI Archive holds 425 issues spanning 1969 to 2011. From these, 3,314 individual sighting reports have been extracted with structured data including date, location, description, and source newspaper. This makes the Newsclipping Service the single largest source of sighting data in the archive, accounting for over half of all sighting records in the database.

The extracted sightings span from historical cases referenced in press retrospectives all the way to contemporary reports from 2011. The geographic coverage reflects the English-language press bias of the collection, with the majority of reports from the United States and United Kingdom, followed by Canada and Australia.

Coverage by Decade

Significance

The Newsclipping Service fills a gap that no other publication in the UFO field covers. Investigated case reports are valuable, but they represent a tiny fraction of the sightings that actually make it into local newspapers. Farish's decades-long effort to capture that broader picture created an unmatched longitudinal dataset of public UFO reporting.

For researchers, the collection is particularly valuable for tracking wave patterns and geographic clusters. The 1980s Belgian wave, the 1990s Phoenix Lights and its aftermath, the UK's Rendlesham Forest coverage, and hundreds of smaller local flaps are all documented through contemporaneous press accounts. Cross-referencing Newsclipping Service reports with investigated case files from MUFON, APRO, and NICAP reveals how much sighting activity was happening below the threshold of formal investigation.