I think we are, and have been, the very best UFO Magazine in the world, and I hope I can one day flesh out this website so that you can see it, too. I mean it. If you could see all the contents of all the issues, you'd flip out. With joy.

Meanwhile, we're under a sneak attack on our good name, created lo these many many years ago by the hard work and sacrifice of Vicki Cooper Ecker, Sherie Stark, Don Ecker, more recently by my husband Bill, and then finally by me. Suddenly, we have to defend our name and our space in the universe, and defend it we will.

One of the more tedious parts of this defense involves placing these little Rs in little circles and strewing them around and near the letters of our name. Some of this can be done in Photoshop, and so far, so good. But here on the web, in the text at the bottom of the page, you'll notice a stray character has crept in, rather like a thief in the night.

I've trid everything I can to get rid of it, to no avail. It's got something to do with the "charset=utf-8" or something equally arcane in the header of the source code, but one way or the other, I'll figure it out and fix the problem. Things will work out and the little extra nuisance character will be gone and we'll continue on, undeterred.

In the days to come, I hope to also flesh out this very good website so that you can see and review back issues, meet our wonderful columnists, and read some of the interesting articles that we publish. I'm also going to create a space for the overflow that the print magazine just can't handle: the daily sighting reports we get, the letters that come in at all hours of the day and night, the book and film reviews that we have no space for, and of course, the links to other groovy sites on the web.

For today, I've got the contents of our August issue up. It's going to be a great issue, as always. Tomorrow, I hope to have more pages up and also some info on our July cover artist, Jim Nichols. People really want to know more about him and where to get his art.

But first, as they say on Big Brother (yes, I'm addicted; I freely admit it), first I must work on getting the offending character removed from between the UFO Magazine and the ®.