ARCHIVES FOR UFO RESEARCH

AFU

Clipping collection - United States

The Kenny Young clipping collection

With American ufologist Bill Jones as our intermediary, AFU received (in 2007) the clipping collection of American ufologist Kenny Young. Kenny Young sadly died of leukemia in 2005, not having reached 40 years of age. He had left his materials and papers to be guarded by colleagues, see biography and details here. The clipping collection covers the years 1947-2003 and was retrieved by Bill Jones from different parts of the Young collection. It is ordered and preserved by date in two file folders.

The Barry Greenwood clipping collection

In November 2005 we received this offer by email from American researcher Barry Greenwood: "I can exchange copies of clipping files I've constructed over 40 years. I have over 240 volumes of press from which to draw, including much pre-1947. These aren't cut from other publications like UFONS, APCIC and aren't transcripts either. "They come from clipping agencies, private collections and microfilm research. I also have several cubic feet of ball lightning records and other assorted material, inventories of which I have as well."

Since then we have received six US Flat Rate envelopes of clipping copies covering the period 1909-1935. The material (now archived in three file folders: 1909-1919, 1920-1929 and 1930-) includes extremely interesting early press materials on airship sightings, discussions on life on Mars, the Scandinavian ghost fliers, contemporary reviews of Charles Fort's books, when first published, and, not to forget a plethora of old meteoric and light-ball sightings. Just to mention a few genres. Let's admit we have been a little slow on responding to the exchange proposal with Barry Greenwood (we will send him European UFO magazines by return!), but we will try to repatriate ourselves! Greenwood recently sent us copies of the three Just Cause issues we were still missing in our collection, plus the very last (issue 12) of his UFO Historical Review's (at least in paper print form). You can find Greenwood's excellent work at the Sign Historical Group web site. We have also made print-outs of Greenwood's "Union Catalog of UFO Articles" and "Ball Lightning Bibliography" to add to our ever-growing collection of valuable search tools at the archives.

The Earl Neff clipping collection                                                        (complete volume directory at bottom of this page!)

At the end of January, 2004, AFU received a donation of American press clippings from ufologist Bill Jones in Ohio. The box contained more than 2.000 unsorted clippings which once belonged to MUFON Ohio member Richard Lee, who had gotten most of them from the now deceased ufologist Earl J. Neff. Clas Svahn has now catalogued the entire collection into twenty binders which are available for researchers at Archives for UFO Research. The donation contains many important articles from some of American ufology’s most intensive years.

In the middle of the 1960s, numerous articles about UFOs and flying saucers could be found in American magazines, many of them being just as interesting today as when they were written. Then the UFO phenomenon was taken seriously and no self-respecting magazine could avoid discussing it.

The collection contains lots of fascinating reading, and it’s hard not to get stuck for hours with them. Most comes from the Ohio-based magazines Cleveland Free Press and Cleveland Plain Dealer, but there are also hundreds of other sources from all over the U.S.  

The Cleveland magazines were very generous when it came to space (no pun intended), and it was common for UFO articles to be on the front page, for example on November 5, 1966, when the entire top of the page was covered with the headline ”Flying saucers still a mystery – Called serious business”, followed by an article by tabloid journalist Frank Edwards who later, the same year, published a book with a similar title. The lengths of the articles were often extensive. It’s easy to tell that both the public and the editors had a serious interest in UFOs.

Not many articles mentioned foreign sightings, perhaps because so many were reported in the U.S. One exception is an article in the New York Times dated July 14, 1968, and headlined “U.F.O.’s add spice to life of Latins”, where the reporter describes how the flying saucer debate – and several sightings – had come to enrich the daily life for people in Argentina and Chile. The article tells, among other things, of how young girls were afraid to go outside after Buenos Aires based magazine La Razón published the story of a married couple who lost consciousness during a car ride, only to wake up in their car outside Mexico City, 8.000 kilometres away. The story is most likely a hoax, and according to the New York Times it was never confirmed despite investigations made by the governments of both countries. 

Most other articles from the years 1966 to 1968 deal with American sightings. In the January 1966 edition of Popular Science Magazine, Pulitzer price winner MacKinlay Kantor wrote a piece with the headline “Why I believe in flying saucers”, in which he tells of an event on January 4, 1954, when he witnessed how a bright shining semicircular object, after having hovered completely still in the sky, suddenly took of with a very high speed.

Kantor later wrote a biography of one of America’s most famous militaries, General Curtis LeMay (1906–1990), a man who Kantor came to know very well. In the Popular Science Magazine article, Kantor reports a discussion he had with General LeMay regarding the UFO phenomenon. LeMay was cautious about what he was saying, but still offers the following: “Several of the mysteries can be explained as weather balloons, stars, reflexes, and other natural things. I’m not saying that among the cases, where no solution has been found, there are genuine, flying objects. All I can say is that among the unsolved cases, no natural phenomenon has been found that’s able to explain them all. I repeat: There are a few cases we’ve been unable to explain. That we never were able to explain”.  

Republican member of Congress James G. Fulton was one of those who suspected that the U.S. Air Force never told the whole truth regarding the UFO dilemma. Fulton was interviewed by UPI, and in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette March 31, 1966, he stated that “the Air Force acts like a child who doesn’t believe in ghosts and hides under a blanket, while at the same time keeps an eye open just in case.” 

The UFO reports were treated seriously by the press, but the idea that Earth was visited by beings from other planets was never far away. Among the authors, several knowledgeable names are to be found. One of them was German rocket scientist Willy Ley (1906–1969) who also wrote several science-fiction stories. In an article in Family Weekly January 21, 1968, he discussed different sightings which he believed to be ball lightning. Not once does Ley ridicule the phenomenon, and he points out that the sightings often were likely to have perfectly natural explanations. 

Another author, not quite as critical, was Otto Binder (1911–1975), author of the book “What we really know about flying saucers”. Binder wrote an entire article in nautical magazine “Rudder magazine”, February, 1968, where he offers advice to sailors what to do in case they have a sighting at sea. “Many ships have returned to shore with far more insane stories than any of those about sea monsters,” Binder wrote.  

An odd UFO author was science-fiction author Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988), who in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette January 6, 1967, described how the two largest UFO organizations at the time, APRO and NICAP, worked. Under the headline “Many sure flying saucers manned by aliens” he said that while APRO accepted and investigated sightings where beings had been involved, NICAP shunned those sightings. The cause was strictly tactical. NICAP hoped to, one day, bring the UFO question to the highest political level including a congressional hearing, but since they feared being mixed up with crazies they assumed that focusing strictly on the ships would minimize that risk. Simak’s article was part of a series of six which all were published in the Pittsburgh magazine.  

Among the material there are several classic articles, such as the UPI article about astronomer and Air Force expert Allen Hynek (1910–1986) and the press conference that took place after numerous sightings had been made in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The article was published in, among other magazines, the Daily Times-News (Mt. Pleasant, Michigan) on March 26, 1966, under the headline “Expert Dismisses flying saucers as swamp gas”, and resulted in giving the entire work of the Air Force an aura of ridicule since all sightings appeared to be explainable using the swamp gas theory.

Even though Hynek, during the well-attended press conference, was keen to point out that his theory about the swamp gas only was applicable to two of the sightings reported from behind a college in Hillsdale on March 21, his statement still resulted in seriously negative press and also became the one final event that made Hynek quit working for the Air Force and Project Blue Book and instead devote his time to private investigations.

Between June and August, 1966, Hynek wrote the chief of the Air Force and Science magazine, and more and more started to look like an individual who took UFOs seriously. On January 12, 1968, Cleveland Press published a statement where Hynek accused the Air Force of making a poor job when investigating UFOs.

Several of the articles deal with sightings by pilots. In the Salt Lake Tribune, October 3, 1961, pilot Waldo Harris (who isn’t just named in the article, his home address is there, too) tells of how he and seven witnesses on the ground saw a disc-shaped object shortly after take-off  from Utah Central Airport. Harris says that the object was grey in colour, about 15 metres wide and only a little more than 1 metre thick. When he flew against it it suddenly took off with a tremendous speed. Harris followed it and saw how it came to a halt over Utah Lake Omni Station. “It then flew straight up and turned westwards with an amazing speed and disappeared out of sight,” he tells the magazine. And he was not alone.

On February 25, 1959, the greater part of the front page of the Detroit Times was covered by an article headlined “Mystery sky discs trail airliner here”, with a picture of pilot Peter Killian and stewardesses Edna LeGate and Beverly Pingree holding one plate each. What the three of them and several others onboard the plane had seen during 45 minutes was how three glowing objects appeared to be following the plane while at the same time not showing up on any radar. There was never any drama though, and the article never mentions how they objects disappeared.

But there were other objects that were more obvious. On July 13, 1964, the Cleveland Plain Dealer told of how a strange projectile had travelled through, among other things, a thick glass door before it smashed into the cement floor of Mrs. Howard W. Morgan in Bay Village. The object could not be defined as a meteor even though that was the initial definition. What it really was apparently never established, but on the picture in the magazine one is able to see Mrs Morgan holding a large, dark object in her hand. Perhaps it was part of a satellite? 

Another interesting thing is a student at the Warner & Swasey laboratory who is interviewed by the magazine and tells of two other events where real meteorites fell to earth. One of them struck a hole in the roof of a garage in Chicago, and continued through the roof of a car and then came to rest in the exhaust pipe. On the other occasion the meteorite struck a hole in a porch and then fell down into the hand of a woman sitting there. 

Several other articles offer similar beauties. For instance, an article in the Pittsburgh Press March 5, 1967, with the headline “Visitors from outer space”, where author David Gleason argues that U.S. Air Force and NORAD are looking for a few individuals who dress in military uniforms and using fake IDs track down witnesses, silence them, and steal their photographs. According to the article, these men had been visible in California, New Jersey, Washington, Texas, Connecticut, and Long Island. Other odd figures that sometimes appear in print are the Men in Black, who among other places can be found in a note from Congress of Scientific Ufologists Convention in Cleveland (Cleveland Press June 22, 1968). One of the delegates apparently came up with the idea that the MIBs were ufologists in disguise from rival organization NICAP. 

The most obvious trend in the articles from 1966 to 1967 is how serious the “flying saucer” phenomenon is being treated. Long articles by journalists such as John Keel discuss the subject from a range or different aspects.  Beginning in 1968, the number of articles and sightings start to decrease, and this was brought to attention by Florida-based magazine The Gondolier on August 1 that very year. The magazine concluded that both Aerial Phenomenon Office at the Wright-Patterson base, where Blue Book had its headquarters, and NICAP had started to notice a “strong decrease” in reports coming in. Blue Book alone was apparently losing up to 75 percent.

On March 12, 1967, Sunday News began a series of articles where Ed Wallace said that five million Americans claimed to have seen a flying saucer. The series contained descriptions of what today have become true classics, such as police officer Lonnie Zamora’s sighting of a landed object in the desert outside Socorro, Texas, on April 24, 1964, and the Kelly-Hopkinsville case from August 21, 1955, when the entire Sutton family claimed to have been under siege by “little green men” for several hours. 

Among the clippings there are several interesting interviews with ufologists (Keyhoe, Hynek, and others), witnesses, and contactees (such as Paul Villa and Daniel Fry). Fry, who says the number of witnesses is not five but eight million, got a large section of the front page in The Gondolier on February 6, 1967, after he had paid a visit to the city of Venice. He was, just as most other who told stories of amazing trips in flying saucers, treated quite well by the reporter interviewing him. 

Another thing found in the collection is about 100 articles from tabloid magazine National Enquirer from Boca Raton, Florida. However, even though the magazine wasn’t exactly known for serious journalism, it still had a few decent UFO articles over the years. However, the entire archive of the magazine was doomed; original pictures, notes, recordings, and clippings were shredded after been put into special plastic bags in the Summer of 2003. All this because of the anthrax virus. On September 19, 2001, little more than a week after 9/11, Bob Stevens, the magazine’s photo editor, opened a letter addressed to singer Jennifer Lopez. The letter contained anthrax, which killed Stevens within three weeks and quickly spread throughout the building, which was evacuated, leaving everything inside to its doom. Three  million pictures, notebooks, tape recordings, and other of historical value is now destroyed and lost forever even though the tabloids owner American Media Inc. says that most of the files were already duplicated. 

Complete magazines could also be found in the clippings from Bill Jones, among others a National Enquirer where the entire front page was covered by the news that a flying saucer had touched down in Virginia: “Saucer lands in Virginia”. Reporter William Allen writes about Cliff Crowder from South Hill who on April 21, 1967, at nine in the evening was driving along a dirt road when he saw an enormous object hovering over the road. Soon Crowder saw an object six metres high standing in the middle of the road. A flashing light hit him, and the object appeared to disappear upwards. A small fire remained on the road, but it went out after about twenty seconds.

Cliff Crowder drove straight to the local police station, and when he returned to the scene with four police officers from South Hill and Mecklenburg County, the ground was still warm and a large dark spot was visible where the fire had been. The site was later investigated by several ufologists, among others William Powers who worked as an assistant to Allen Hynek. Pieces from the burnt spot were sent to the Wright-Patterson base in Dayton, Ohio, but the test results were inconclusive and it was never known what caused the fire. 

That was a short summary of a part of the Earl Neff papers, papers that are now glued on white document paper and sorted into twenty files. These files consist of the following volumes.