On 1 March 1953, the International Flying Saucer Bureau established a Department of Investigation. The staff consisted of five men: Gray Barker of Clarksburg, West Virginia, as Chief Investigator; August C. Roberts of Jersey City, New Jersey, as Chief Photographer; Domonic Lucchesi, also of Jersey City, as Chief Aeronautics Engineer; Lonzo Dove of Broadway, Virginia, as Chief Astronomer; and the Reverend S. L. Daw of Washington, D.C. Their mandate was to “approve or disapprove of all sightings sent into the Bureau.” Their decisions, the announcement noted, “will be final unless proven otherwise.”
The April 1953 issue of Space Review, labelled the “First Anniversary Issue,” is the document of a small organisation at peak ambition. Alongside the Department of Investigation, the issue publishes for the first time a complete listing of the IFSB’s officers and council: five executives, five investigators, seventeen International Council members, and a seven-person editorial staff. There were representatives on four continents. Paul Baudat, a fifty-four-year-old technician-electrician in railway signals, represented France from Franconville. Edgar Jarrold, a thirty-four-year-old RAAF storeman and president of the Australian Flying Saucer Bureau, represented Australia from Fairfield, Sydney. Captain Plunkett still held Bristol. The sighting reports in this issue came from the United States, Britain, France, Japan, Korea, Poland, Israel, Canada, Africa, New Zealand (fourteen separate locations), and Australia. The IFSB’s clipping network, at least, was genuinely global.
Gray Barker, two months removed from a one-line directory entry, wrote his first column as Chief Investigator. “We now have ample proof of the saucers’ existence,” he observed, “but not enough information for freezing one particular theory about what they’re up to.” He advocated open-mindedness (“the wildest theory may prove to be the most nearly true”) and closed with the most provocative question yet published in Space Review: “What if the entire structures of our religions should be shattered to bits upon the first interview with a little man who gets out of a spinning space ship.” His article on the Flatwoods Monster, published in FATE magazine that January, appears in the issue’s magazine bibliography. The man from Clarksburg was establishing himself as the IFSB’s most intellectually ambitious voice.
The same issue carried Bender’s detailed report on the Adamski-Williamson affair. On 24 November 1952, according to the account brought to the IFSB by council member N. Meade Layne, a group near Desert Center, Arizona had observed a cigar-shaped object and then, two hours later, watched a disc land a quarter mile distant. George Adamski reported the craft as twenty feet in diameter, translucent, with portholes and ball-bearing devices. A being “about 23 years old, round face, tan and ruddy complexion, gray-green eyes and long sandy hair” who “wore red-brown slipper-like shoes, pants tied around the ankles and a brown jacket” allegedly emerged and spoke in a mix of English and something that “sounded like Chinese.” Bender published the account in full but appended a careful caveat: “This whole story is being given careful study by our own IFSB before we will make any comment on its authenticity.” The Department of Investigation, formed in the same issue, provided the institutional framework for that judgement.
Not everything in the issue exercised such restraint. Max B. Miller, president of Flying Saucers International and an IFSB Council member, contributed an eight-point news release claiming the US government knew saucers were interplanetary and would “soon release” confirmation, that “the great prophet Nostradamus predicted that in late 1953” a ship of higher intelligence would land and intervene in a third world war, and that flying saucers maintained a base on the far side of the moon. The disclaimer at the bottom read: “The above statements are not necessarily endorsed by the IFSB.”
The distance between Barker’s measured column and Miller’s Nostradamus citations defined the tension within the IFSB by its first anniversary. On one side, a Department of Investigation staffed by men with titles (Chief Astronomer, Chief Aeronautics Engineer) and a stated commitment to approving or disapproving sighting reports. On the other, an International Council that included Max Miller and his imminent-disclosure prophecies. The same issue that published a practical photography guide by August C. Roberts (“get that camera out of mothballs… the only pictures on record today have been taken this way”) also published an editorial by Bender predicting Earth’s polar caps might capsize the planet in 1953 and that “the coming of the saucers may have to do with saving us from our horrible fate.”
The Vatican, at least, was sober. The issue reprinted Father D. Grasso’s November 1952 pronouncement: “Roman Catholics are free to accept or deny the existence of space dwellers according to their own points of view. The last word is up to experimental science.” The article concluded that “neither dogma nor theology would find themselves in difficulties, should science be able to ascertain the existence of human beings outside the earth.” It was the first time Space Review cited a major institutional authority beyond the pilots, police officers, and civilian researchers who populated its sighting reports.
John Armitage’s “Sauceritis” ran across two pages, the first extended contribution from Britain. Armitage surveyed the competing theories (aeronautic scepticism, Soviet magnetic research, extraterrestrial origin), referenced an alleged 1924 radio signal from Mars recorded on film, and concluded with a reference to Marconi and Mansfield Robinson’s 1928 attempt to contact Mars using the Rugby Transmitter. His prose was measured, his conclusions agnostic, his tone that of a man trying to think clearly about something the culture had not yet decided how to discuss.
This was the International Flying Saucer Bureau at its high-water mark. A Department of Investigation. Representatives in France, Britain, Australia, Puerto Rico, New Zealand, Canada, and fifteen American states. An International Council that included the editor of FATE magazine, the president of Borderland Sciences Research Associates, the creator of the Mysterious Traveler radio programme, and the president of Flying Saucers International. A saucer photograph authenticated by the Chief Photographer. A Vatican pronouncement. Sighting reports from twelve countries. The back issues were sold out.
Six months later, it would all be over. The October 1953 issue would carry its cryptic warning about “orders from a higher source.” The IFSB would dissolve. Gray Barker, Chief Investigator for barely seven months, would spend the next three years writing the book that turned those seven months into a permanent addition to American folklore. In April 1953, none of that had happened yet. There was a Department of Investigation, and it had work to do.
