For those of you who do not know, FSR was launched in the spring of 1955, as a bi-monthly. There were 5 issues in that first year.
Having seen a mysterious white disc with a piercingly bright bluish light on top racing through the sky in the far west of China, near the eastern marches of Tibet, in the summer of 1941, and having subsequently noted and extracted from the American newspapers, in 1944, the first reports of "Foo Fighters" when I was stationed in New Orleans just before the Invasion of Europe, I was sufficiently intrigued by what was to become "our subject" to have already started my own file before WWII had ended.
The proposal to publish a journal about the "Flying Saucers " was reported in 1955 in the London papers, I was back in England then, and I made contact at once and received the subscription form from Brinsley le Poer Trench, later Lord Clancarty. My knowledge of a number of languages gave me the opportunity to begin contributing straight away, and my first piece appeared in the second issue of FSR (May/June 1955).
Meanwhile, on December 15, 1954, the "Founding Fathers" of FSR had held their first meeting, at 4 Berners Street, London W.1.
The participants were:-
Waveney Girvan, Derek Dempster, Desmond Leslie, Benjamin Harrington, Oliver Moxon, Lewis Barton, Desmond Judge, Denis Montgomery.
and for some extraordinary reason which I have never been able to fathom, they had already had the new enterprise registered with Companies House as "FLYING SAUCER SERVICE LIMITED", with its address at 1 Doughty Street, London WC1. Anyone seeing this weird title must surely have thought that it was some sort of 'cosmic minicab' firm!
For our first 83 issues --- in other words up to Volume 14, No.6, at the end of 1968 --- our front cover bore the full title FLYING SAUCER REVIEW, and as readers will have noticed, I have now done what I had resolved to do when I took over the Editorship in November 1982 with Volume 28, No.2. That is to say, I have reverted to our original cover.
Why have I done this? It is an interesting and an instructive story, and maybe well worth telling.
In all, FSR has had a total of five editors, viz., Derek Dempster, Brinsley le Poer Trench, Waveny Girvan, Charles Bowen and myself. And of all these the longest serving was Charles Bowen, from issue No.10/6 (1964) to 28/1 (1982), a total of 18 years and 103 issues! Charles was assuredly our hardest-working and most severely harassed editor,for he managed all this while still performing his full-time ten-to-five job in the Finance Dept, of the South African Embassy in London.
Unfortunately however Charles was in my opinion somewhat timid, just as Dr. J. Allen Hynek was, and often seemed afraid to defend his corner vigorously against the skeptics and the critics. Had he stood his ground more firmly, on several accounts, I feel sure that we might have had a much greater readership today.
We all know what fun the gag-writers and the clowns of the media have had over the past forty or so years with the term, "flying saucer" --- which however, despite them, has now gone into pretty well every language. The numerous documents so far released under the US Freedom of Infomation Act of 1974 show that for several years every one of the CIA and FBI and Naval and Military Intelligence reports in the USA, as well as all the daily press reports, spoke of "flying saucers" or "flying disks".
The poor gag-writers and Media clowns have no inkling of this. Nor have they any inkling of the fact that the term "flying saucer" was NOT first employed in 1947 by Kenneth Arnold, as we are always told. 
The term in fact dates back to nearly a century and a quarter ago, to January 24, 1878, and was first used by a Texan farmer named John Martin. An account published in the local newspaper, the Dennison Daily News, of January 25, 1878, under the heading "A Strange Phenomenon", gives the first-hand report from the farmer, described as "a gentleman of undoubted veracity", who had observed a dark flying object travelling "at a wonderful speed" over his property six miles north of Dallas.
He told the newspaper that when the thing was right overhead it looked "about the size of a large saucer." When Dr J. Allen Hynek was in Britain on one of the several visits that he made to this country (and he had a private session with all the directors of FSR every time) he gave me a photostatic copy of the original report from the Dennison Daily News.
(Regarding the monstrous term "UFO", and how it was deliberatly introduced by the American authorities and how the American civilian researchers of " our subject " were brainwashed into meekly accepting it, followed by all the others, like a flock of sheep, I shall have something further to say on another occcasion).
Returning now to the early history of FSR, it was not long before we began to find that quite a lot of our readers --- particularly the native Brits, who are well known for their traditional nervousness about " what the neighbours might think " --- showed distinct squeamishness about signing cheques made out to "FLYING SAUCER REVIEW". Evidently they were pretty concerned about what their bank-manager might think of such politically incorrect behavior! So, in the summer of 1971, I persuaded the other Directors that we should apply to the Registrar of Companies for our name to be switched from the ridiculous "FLYING SAUCER SERVICE LTD." to "FSR PUBLICATIONS LTD." The bank-managers wouldn't have a clue as to what that meant, and would-be readers of FSR need no longer hang their heads in shame.
This change of name proved to be a definite step forward for us. But, on the other hand, Editor Bowen's decision three years earlier (1968) to remove the bold name "FLYING SAUCER REVIEW" from our cover and to replace it by a meaningless logo, was a disastrously foolish step, as I shall show. (I wonder what demon induced him to do that?)
For almost thirty years, after my long spell of duty in foreign parts, I always worked in London and I commuted daily from my home in Hertfordshire. For the first decade or so, to a certain special department in Whitehall and then, after that, to an office inside the building of the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington, where, --- while still employed by the Ministry of Defence --- I was concerned with maps in various East European, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern languages.
And during all those years that I travelled daily to London, I always made a special point of carrying and reading FSR in the train up to Baker Street and then on the Underground Line to Westminster or, later, to Kensington. And it must have happened on at least a dozen occasions that complete strangers would step across the gangway to me and say: "Flying Saucer Review! Where can I get that?".
On one particularly amusing occasion, just before I got out of the train in the
Whitehall area, I noticed opposite me a high-ranking officer in Royal Air Force
uniform, sitting beside, and talking with, a man in civilian clothes whom I knew to have a big job in the Ministry of Defence. Ten minutes later, as I was going up the steps of my Ministry, I found that they were both just in front of me, and I heard one of them say to the other: "Fantastic! Did you see that chap on the train who was reading a Russian astronomical journal and Flying Saucer Review!".
The point of my story is that, although I still continued with my practice of carrying and reading FSR on the train, after Charles Bowen had removed our name from the cover I never again had anyone ask me where they could get the magazine.
Finally, I might also mention that there is a certain public library in Hertfordshire to which I send FSR regularly, and have done so for several years past. The journal is always displayed very well and very publicly there, on shelves among other magazines, in a large area set aside for readers of journals and newspapers. I often pass through that room and have always looked to see where FSR is, and it had always been in its usual place on the display shelf. I never found anybody reading it or examining it. It simply sat there on the shelf.
But when I walked through there a while ago, to see how FSR 39/1 was fairing, with restored name on the cover, I found that it was out. And I found that there was a man reading it!
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