The February 1954 issue of Space Review looks nothing like the journal that preceded it. The masthead is typewritten, not typeset. The subtitle reads “A Science News-Letter” where the IFSB banner once sat. Below the volume number, a line that appeared on no previous issue: “A LIMITED AND RESTRICTED PUBLICATION.” The address is still P.O. Box 241, Bridgeport, though the postal zone has changed from 2 to 4. The word “saucer” does not appear in the table of contents because there is no table of contents. There are four pages.
The International Flying Saucer Bureau is not mentioned. Not once. The names Bender, Krengel, Barker, Roberts, Dove, Plunkett, Rievman, Fawcett, and every other individual who populated the IFSB’s twelve-page quarterlies are absent. There are no bylines. There are no sighting reports. There are no member theories. There is no Department of Investigation, no International Council, no directory of representatives. The publication that dissolved in October 1953 with a warning about “orders from a higher source” has become an unsigned, private newsletter about the planet Mars.
The opening essay contemplates the universe as “the greatest mystery of all time and it is a mystery that will never be solved.” It proceeds to discuss astronomical instruments, the prospects for lunar colonisation (“possession will belong to the first ones setting foot upon it”), and whether future explorers would choose Venus or Mars. “Most of our generation will see the reaching of the moon,” the essay concludes, “but that is as far as they will get in our generation, and maybe for some generations to come unless a miracle occurs.” The tone is sober, speculative, and entirely terrestrial in its frame of reference.
The bulk of the issue is a Mars primer, timed for the planet’s 1954 opposition. “Mars Is the Planet to Watch in 1954” draws on Hayden Planetarium data to explain the opposition geometry: Earth catching up with Mars in their respective orbits, the two objects aligning on 24 June at a distance of just over forty million miles, the closest approach since 1941. The retrograde loop of Mars through the Sagittarius “Teapot” formation is described with observational dates. Below this, “The Red Planet” summarises Martian astronomy from Schiaparelli’s 1872 “canali” through Percival Lowell’s canal theory to the seasonal colour changes that “led many to believe that life could exist there.”
A third page, “Let’s Get Acquainted with the Planet Mars,” presents a fact sheet alongside a hand-drawn illustration of the Martian surface: diameter 4,220 miles, mass 0.11 of Earth, temperatures reaching 50 degrees Fahrenheit near the equator, atmosphere mostly carbon dioxide with traces of oxygen, two moons (Deimos and Phobos) each about ten miles in diameter. Below this, “Odd Stories About Mars” collects curiosities: a January 1950 mushroom-shaped cloud observed from Osaka, the theory of lid-covered Martian cities, a model of planetary habitability running from Pluto inward in which “Mars may now be in its final stages, water supply diminishing and the atmosphere becoming thin. Its people are either dead or so intelligent that they are building space craft to find a new world to live.”
The final page reviews three books: V. A. Firsoff’s Our Neighbour Worlds (rated “Excellent”), Kenneth W. Gatland and Anthony M. Kunesch’s Space Travel (also “Excellent”), and Gatland’s Development of the Guided Missile (“Good”). All three are published by the Philosophical Library of New York. The reviews are measured and technically literate.
A note about Drew Pearson appears on page one: the columnist had mentioned that the Air Force would scan Mars when the planet neared Earth in spring 1954, sending “high-flying observation planes and guided missiles into the upper atmosphere for a clearer look.” A scientific expedition to Bloemfontein, South Africa was also noted, to observe Mars from the closest terrestrial vantage point. “This, in our opinion, is a great step forward and we are certain that much new information will be obtained.”
“In our opinion.” The editorial “we” persists through the issue, but it refers to no named individual and no named organisation. The IFSB dissolved. Its successor, the specialist group promised in the October 1953 notice (“comprised of individuals, each a specialist in his or her particular field… matters pertaining to the universe in general and will be mostly technical in nature”), produced this: four typed pages about Martian opposition geometry and guided missile textbooks.
The twelve-page journal with its sighting roundups, member theories, representative highlights, biographical profiles, and editorial manifestos has been replaced by something that reads like a planetarium handout with aspirations. Whether this was always the plan, or whether the plan changed after the three visitors Bender later described, or whether the explanation is simpler than either possibility suggests, the documentary record shows only what was published. And what was published in February 1954 was four pages about Mars, from a post office box in Bridgeport, with no name on it.
