Albert K. Bender was a timekeeper at Acme Shear in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a Protestant born in Duryea, Pennsylvania in 1921, a Second World War veteran who had served as a dental technician at Fort Meade and a clerk at Langley. He collected classical recordings, exchanged tapes with correspondents across the country, decorated his den with horror artwork he called his “chamber of horrors,” and cooked spaghetti and meatball dinners that his associate editor, Max Krengel, praised in print. In October 1952, from a post office box in Bridgeport, he published the first issue of a twelve-page quarterly called Space Review.
It was the journal of the International Flying Saucer Bureau, an organisation Bender had founded earlier that year. The IFSB claimed members in fifteen US states, two Canadian provinces, and ambitions for branches in England, France, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, and Australia. Its address was P.O. Box 241, Bridgeport 2. Its operational headquarters was Bender’s home at 784 Broad Street. Its subscription price was seventy-five cents a year for members, a dollar forty for everyone else. Reliable Press of Bridgeport handled the printing.
The timing was deliberate. Three months before the first issue reached mailboxes, the phenomenon had become front-page news. On the nights of 19 and 26 July 1952, radar operators at Washington National Airport tracked unidentified objects over the Capitol and the White House. Air Force jets were scrambled. The objects vanished before interception and returned after the fighters withdrew. “SAUCER OUTRAN JET, PILOT REVEALS,” ran the Washington Post headline. “AERIAL WHATZITS BUZZ D.C. AGAIN!” Project Blue Book logged more reports during the summer of 1952 than in any comparable period before or since.
Space Review’s lead article opens with Washington. “During July and August there were unusual reports from our Capitol that saucers were picked up on the radar equipment at that location,” the unsigned piece reads. “The Air Force ordered jet planes up to chase these objects that caused ‘blips’ to appear on the radar screen. No satisfactory solution has yet been decided upon.” From there, the issue compiles sighting reports from more than twenty locations: Los Alamos (a metallic object over atomic installations, 2 August), Seoul (US bomber crews observing globe-shaped objects), Dodge City (an American Airlines pilot tracking a bluish-white object at 500 to 1,000 miles per hour), Miami (airline pilots reporting eight saucers over Chesapeake Bay), and Bridgeport itself, where IFSB members reported objects appearing over the city after the Bureau’s formation. “It may be only a coincidence,” the Bridgeport report notes, “but the officers of the IFSB do not consider it to be such.”
Buried among these dispatches, occupying two unremarkable paragraphs, is a report from Sutton, West Virginia, dated 14 September 1952. A housewife and six boys investigating a landing report encountered “a 10-foot tall monster, with a bright green body and a blood-red face” that emitted “an overpowering odor that made all of them vomit.” The case would later become famous as the Flatwoods Monster. In October 1952, it was one clipping among dozens.
The issue runs to twelve pages. After the sighting roundup comes an editorial (unsigned but Bender’s) that references the Orson Welles broadcast and speculates about extraterrestrial visitors with the earnest confidence of a man who has not yet encountered doubt. Max Krengel contributes a column from the Associate Editor’s desk, mapping the three theories then circulating among members: extraterrestrial origin, natural phenomena, and mass hallucination. Krengel dismisses the third: “When one reads the names of some of the people who have gone on record as having sighted these objects, intelligent people find it difficult to lightly push them aside.”
Page five carries a science fiction news column by Alan C. Rievman, the IFSB’s Connecticut representative and international secretary, reviewing Galaxy Novels, the latest Bob Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot,” and recommending FATE magazine (whose editor, Robert N. Webster, sat on the IFSB Council). The column documents what the organisational structure already implies: in 1952, science fiction fandom and civilian saucer research were not separate communities. They shared members, publications, mailing lists, and conventions.
Five IFSB members submit their personal theories on page six. Gail Sprague of Wisconsin concludes the saucers are extraterrestrial. Ronald Gmyrek of Minnesota favours Mars. Dick Campbell of Indiana argues for Venus, citing its size, proximity during conjunction, and permanent cloud cover. The theories are speculative, personal, and published without editorial qualification. An editor’s note promises one page for member theories in each issue. Page ten carries three structured sighting reports submitted by members, with standardised fields for shape, colour, speed, height, direction of flight, and reporting authority. It is an early and modest attempt at systematic civilian data collection, predating the more formal protocols that organisations like the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena would develop after 1956.
The issue closes with a biographical profile of Bender (the Associate Editor signs off by noting his host’s spaghetti-and-meatball dinners “served on saucers”), a directory of representatives with their home addresses, an astronomical calendar courtesy of the Hayden Planetarium, and a short science fiction story by a member named Akben Dern about alien refugees fleeing their world’s nuclear destruction.
Space Review lasted one year. Four or five issues appeared between October 1952 and October 1953. In the summer of 1953, Bender claimed to have been visited at his Broad Street home by three men dressed in black who warned him to cease his saucer research. The final issue, October 1953, carried a cryptic notice: “The mystery of the flying saucers is no longer a mystery. The source is already known but any information about this is being withheld by orders from a higher source. We advise those engaged in saucer work to be very cautious.” The IFSB dissolved. The story of the three visitors became the foundational narrative of what ufology would come to call the Men in Black.
That is the later history. The October 1952 issue knows nothing of it. What it documents is simpler and, in its way, more revealing: the moment when scattered witnesses, science fiction enthusiasts, and amateur investigators found an organisational form. A timekeeper in Bridgeport, a vice-president in Stratford, an international secretary on Main Street, fifteen state representatives sending newspaper clippings from Wausau and Farson and Eaton Rapids. They had a post office box, a quarterly journal, and a conviction that the objects in the sky deserved serious attention. Within a year the whole enterprise would collapse into silence and legend. In October 1952, it was twelve pages of sighting reports and book reviews and member theories, printed by Reliable Press and mailed for thirty-five cents.
