Ray Palmer

Raymond Arthur Palmer was a science fiction editor who, more than any other individual, created the flying saucer as a cultural phenomenon. As editor of Amazing Stories from 1938, he published Richard Shaver's stories about underground civilisations that used advanced technology to torment surface dwellers. The "Shaver Mystery" generated enormous reader response and boosted circulation dramatically.

When Kenneth Arnold reported nine disc-shaped objects near Mount Rainier in June 1947, Palmer immediately grasped the significance. He commissioned Arnold to investigate the Maury Island incident, co-founded Fate magazine with Curtis Fuller in 1948, and launched the first magazine devoted entirely to flying saucers. Palmer's genius was connecting grassroots interest in anomalous aerial phenomena to a publishing infrastructure that could sustain it.

He published Flying Saucers from Other Worlds (later just Flying Saucers) from 1957 to 1975, providing a platform for civilian sighting reports, reader correspondence, and speculative theory that no mainstream publication would touch. His editorial approach was populist, often sensational, and always commercially astute. Serious researchers viewed him with suspicion, regarding his mix of science fiction and factual reporting as damaging to the field's credibility.

But Palmer reached an audience that the serious researchers never could. His publications kept civilian interest alive during periods when the Air Force was working hardest to suppress it.