UFO Research Newsletter

History

UFO Research Newsletter launched in April 1971 as a monthly publication of UFO Research Associates (UFOR), operating from PO Box 34252, Washington, D.C. 20034. Gordon I.R. Lore, Jr. edited the newsletter, with Marty D. Lore serving as business manager. Annual subscriptions cost $7.00 domestically, $8.00 for foreign surface mail, and $11.00 for foreign airmail. Single copies were fifty cents. The publication ran through September 1980 (Volume 6, Number 12), covering nine and a half years on a monthly and later bi-monthly schedule.

The debut issue opened with a story that set the newsletter's tone: the United States Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs had been teaching cadets that UFOs were probably extraterrestrial probes, years after the Air Force itself had officially closed Project Blue Book and declared the subject unworthy of further study. Major Donald G. Carpenter's Chapter XXXIII of the Academy's physics textbook, "Unidentified Flying Objects," stated that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was "the most stimulating theory" and cited evidence including the 1955 Kelly, Kentucky creature encounter, the 1957 Fort Itaipu heat-ray incident in Brazil, the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill abduction, and the 1964 Socorro landing investigated by police officer Lonnie Zamora. Lore let the contradiction between official Air Force policy and official Air Force education speak for itself.

Each issue followed a consistent format. The lead article compiled sighting reports from the preceding months, organised by location and grouped by characteristics: electromagnetic effects, radar trackings, physiological effects, landings, occupant reports, animal reactions, physical evidence. The reports were sourced almost entirely from newspaper accounts, with Lore citing the specific paper, date, and often the journalist by name. A February-March 1974 issue covering the massive 1973 sighting wave drew from the Woodbury Daily Times, the Hackensack Record, the Bristol Herald Courier, the Newport News Times-Herald, and dozens of other papers. Witness sketches were reproduced alongside the text. Jeanann Rader's drawing of a hamburger-shaped object she saw near Glassboro, New Jersey on 3 December 1973 appeared courtesy of the Woodbury Daily Times.

The depth of sourcing was consistent across the run. A February-March 1977 issue opened with a New Year's Day 1977 sighting near Valence, France (from the Los Angeles Times), then compiled American reports involving a plane crash caused by a UFO encounter, pilots who allegedly attempted to fire on unidentified objects, jets chasing objects, UFOs hovering over a telecommunications satellite base and near an Energy Research and Development Administration site, and an object tracked on radar at Boston's Logan Airport for approximately an hour. The witness in North Amherst, Massachusetts, Terry Cunningham, reported that the bullet-shaped craft appeared to photograph her with flash-like bursts of light, and that her memory nearly completely blacked out after the encounter.

The final issue, September 1980, announced the newsletter's closure after nine and a half years. The editors stated they had "accomplished our goal of bringing to the UFO community and interested students of the phenomenon an effective vehicle of communication." The farewell was followed by one last comprehensive sighting roundup covering January through May 1980: a UFO that crashed into a tree, an object that caused the ground to shake, another that shattered a chandelier, objects tracked on radar at Burlington International Airport in Vermont that moved at roughly 1,500 mph on the radar screen. Air traffic controller Donald Kernan told the Burlington Free Press that the lights "did a kind of dance," and controller Richard Morris confirmed the radar tracking of a clear, unidentified target.

Lore then announced that UFOR would begin publishing a new newsletter called Ascent to Freedom, devoted to the "wisdom and psychic/spiritual teachings of Bartholomew, an entity from another dimension." Subscribers with remaining issues were offered the choice of receiving the new publication or a refund. The transition from systematic UFO sighting documentation to channelled spiritual teachings was abrupt, but it was not unusual in a field where the line between physical-evidence research and metaphysical speculation had always been porous.