As of this writing, the British Mars lander, “The Beagle,” supposedly on the surface of the “Death Planet” for the past two weeks, has been silent and all attempts to raise a signal from the craft have failed. As of the time of this publication, maybe the American rover due to reach Mars in January will have made it successfully and we will once again have a robot vehicle crawling over the Martian surface. Or not. What’s the point? For subscribers and newsstand readers of UFO Magazine waiting for the October/November and December/January issues, we’ve been like the British landing craft—silent.
However, there really was no mystery. At the end of September, just as the October issue—this issue—was due to go to press, the previous ownership decided to turn the magazine over to a group of its current directors, including Vicki and Don Ecker and myself from the old board, and give us a whack at publishing UFO on our own. This meant a complete retooling of the magazine and a need to address problems in distribution, which we had been dealing with for the past couple of years. It took us two months, but we made it to press in December. We believe it was worth the effort.
We’re still publishing our favorite material on UFOs, alien abductions, conspiracies, Area 51, and UFO personalities who’ve broken through the surface tension of the media. And we’re still going to be taking on the folks at NASA and JPL who seem to have their own agendas with taxpayers’ money and what they will or will not decide to disclose. We’ll profile the gamut of UFO commentators, scientists, pseudoscientists, and the prognosticators—those who say we’ve never gotten to the moon and those who say the destruction of planet Earth is right around the cosmological corner. And we’ll continue to include the range of columns and book reviews that have been a part of our magazine since 1986 when it all began.
But, beginning with this issue, we’ll be changing the look of the magazine, in part necessitated by the costs of publishing and in part to experiment with design and production. This issue is half color, half black and white. Again, this is necessitated by the costs of a start-up and a change of printers. We’ve also changed the paper and the cover. Let us know what you think. We’ll do our best to accommodate your wishes and implement any suggestions we can.
We’re going to be more inclusive of the kind of material we publish and the kinds of ads we take. Frankly, we need to expand so as to broaden our base. But we’re still going to maintain an editorial skepticism about some of the wilder theories circulating through the ufological hallways until someone can come up with a modicum of evidence to, at least, make a prima facie case for substantiating it. We still want to know who’s abducting whom, what information (that belongs to us) our government is holding back, and what the origin is of the mysterious sightings that still take place around the world every single day. And we’ll cover all the conferences that we can and report on new information that researchers and speakers are making available.
Our core publishing mission is still the same. We report on the kinds of phenomena the mainstream media will never touch, not because we believe that all of it is automatically true, but because we believe someone should be talking about it—even if only to look at the evidence and bring it into the light of day. It’s easy to laugh at the Raelians and Clonaid’s claims of cloning human beings, for example. But when the parents of a cloned child have the courage to bring it before the cameras, and the tabloid media report that the child’s mother was once arrested for an unpaid parking ticket and so, therefore, the cloning is a hoax, remember—you read it here first.
If you’re one of our subscribers, we thank you for waiting for us to get your magazine to you. If you’re picking us up from a newsstand or bookstore, stick around. We’re the only American magazine on the stands dedicated solely to reporting on UFOs and related phenomena. If you like what you read and can’t be sure you’ll get to your bookstore before we’re sold out, give us a year’s try. At twenty bucks, we’re a better bargain than a couple of movie tickets (not including parking). As always, you can find us online at www.ufomag.com.
Write to us. As many of you have discovered, we do answer our mail.
