Gordon Creighton

Gordon William Creighton was a British diplomat, linguist, and intelligence officer who edited Flying Saucer Review (FSR) for over three decades, making it the most internationally respected UFO journal of the Cold War era. He spoke ten languages, held posts in Turkey, China, and Latin America for the Foreign Office, and served in a wartime intelligence capacity before turning to UFO research.

Creighton took over FSR editorship in the 1980s after Charles Bowen and transformed it into a publication with genuinely global coverage. His linguistic skills allowed him to translate and publish case reports from French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Chinese sources that would otherwise have remained unknown to English-speaking researchers. FSR under Creighton published the first English-language accounts of major cases from Brazil (Colares, Varginha), France (Trans-en-Provence), and the Soviet Union.

His editorial perspective was distinctive: Creighton believed the phenomenon was fundamentally deceptive and possibly demonic in nature, a view that set him apart from both the nuts-and-bolts camp and the benevolent-contactee school. This perspective coloured FSR's later years but never compromised its factual reporting of cases.

Creighton edited FSR until his death in 2003. The complete FSR archive is one of the most valuable English-language primary sources for international UFO case research.