The April 1954 issue of Space Review opens with a question and eight ways the world might end.
“Are We Living on Borrowed Time?” The lead article catalogues the possibilities with the methodical calm of a man reading a list. Hydrogen bomb war. The cobalt bomb (“an even more powerful weapon… This could lead to the annihilation of all mankind”). The sun exploding. The sun burning out. The Earth stopping its rotation, half boiling and half freezing. A comet knocking the planet out of orbit. The moon falling. The polar ice caps growing too heavy and capsizing the Earth. The cessation of rain. The closing sentence offers comfort of a particular kind: “some of the above may not happen for billions of years, some may not happen for millions of years, and others may happen THIS YEAR.”
The voice is unsigned, as in the February issue. The format is the same: four typewritten pages, “A Science News-Letter,” “A Limited and Restricted Publication,” from P.O. Box 241 in Bridgeport. No IFSB. No sighting reports. No named contributors. But the doomsday preoccupation is new, and it connects backward to Bender’s October 1953 farewell editorial, which abandoned saucers for nuclear despair. Whatever private anxieties were driving the newsletter in its post-shutdown form, they were pointing toward endings rather than beginnings.
Page two reports on the Seattle windshield pitting episode. In April 1954, residents of Seattle and other western cities found their automobile windshields and eyeglasses pitted by “a strange black substance.” Scientists initially attributed it to hydrogen bomb tests; chemical analysis found no radioactive material, but “a scientist claims that some of the material removed from the convertible top of an auto had radioactive ingredients.” The newsletter’s conclusion: “It is time that we woke up to the fact that the H-Bomb and the A-Bomb are not toys and should be abandoned as a destructive weapon.” The episode would later be studied as a case of mass observation bias, but Space Review treats it as evidence of nuclear contamination.
The same page carries an unnamed reader’s response to the February issue, correcting its claim about a lunar atmosphere. “It is not possible for the moon to have an atmosphere of any extent, and probably has none at all (unless you would call a few ions of Argon an atmosphere).” The reader explains galactic structure with the confidence of someone trained in the subject: “The galactic system is composed of individual stars, star systems, clusters, etc. that revolve around the galactic center. And above these are the supergalactic systems, composed of groups of galaxies.” The newsletter prints the correction with a parenthetical: “(Thanks to the contributor).” The specialist audience promised in the October 1953 dissolution notice, if it exists, is reading and pushing back.
A Venus profile draws on V. A. Firsoff’s Our Neighbour Worlds (reviewed in the February issue): clouds making observation “almost impossible,” no moons, the speculation that Mercury may once have been Venus’s moon. “There is no reason why intelligent life could not exist on the planet Venus, because to deny this is not commonsense, but merely a manifestation.”
The longest piece is a lunar essay, “Our Nearest Neighbor,” that walks through crater theories, trip logistics (a month and a half at 200 miles per hour), tidal effects, mineral resources, and the observation of “strange glowing lights seen shining on the surface of the satellite.” The essay notes radar contact with the moon and speculates about gold deposits. And then, for the first time in the Vol. III run, the old IFSB voice surfaces: “It is almost foolish to contemplate trips to Mars and Venus before the moon has been reached, or has it been reached already???” And: “There will be a great many revelations coming forth in the near future that will astound everyone.” The closing quotes are darker: “THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE WILL SOMEDAY BE THE UNDOING OF ALL MANKIND.” And: “MANKIND WILL SOMEDAY FIND THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE AND WILL NOT BE ABLE TO COPE WITH THEM.”
These are the only moments in the Vol. III run where the suppressed subject breaks through. The newsletter that purged itself of flying saucers after the October 1953 warning cannot quite stop hinting. The moon has been reached already. Revelations are coming. The secrets of the universe will be humanity’s undoing. Read alongside the “Statement of Importance” (“the source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by orders from a higher source”), these asides suggest that whatever Bender believed had happened to him, his conviction had not diminished. It had simply gone underground, surfacing in questions that end with four question marks and closing quotes that read like warnings.
The final page reviews three books: Lynn Poole’s Your Trip Into Space (McGraw Hill, “Very Good”), The Complete Book of Outer Space (Maco Magazine Corporation, with articles by Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun, and Heinz Haber, “Very Good”), and Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell’s The Conquest of Space (Viking Press, “Excellent,” “a collector’s item”). The next issue is promised for “SOMETIME IN THE MONTH OF JULY OR THEREABOUTS.”
