65 HS1-834228961 62-HQ-83894 Serial 449

This serial shows how far from UFO sightings the FBI’s flying saucer file could stray. It opens with an October 3, 1966, memo from the Los Angeles field office to Director J. Edgar Hoover about issue No. 24 of Flying Saucers International, the July 1966 journal of the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America (AFSCA), based in Los Angeles. The magazine follows, with a run of newspaper clippings.

Why the Bureau looked at it

The issue reached the FBI through its Philadelphia office from Jarvis H. Cooper, an IRS employee who said he subscribed because his son was interested in flying saucers. He believed an article on pages 2 and 3 followed the Communist Party line. That article was presented as a message from “Master Kalen-Li Retan,” head of a planet called Korendor, received by short-wave radio on May 4, 1966, by a young technician named Bob Renaud; it attacks the Pentagon, defense industries and the economics of the Vietnam war. Los Angeles reported that its indices held nothing on Renaud, that the club had never been investigated, and that no further action was planned.

A snapshot of the contactee movement

The enclosures preserve the club’s world in detail: the program for AFSCA’s third national convention at the Centennial Coliseum in Reno on July 8–10, 1966, with speakers such as George Van Tassel, Daniel Fry, Howard Menger and Orfeo Angelucci, all known for claiming contact with space people; a mail-order list including Albert K. Bender’s book on the “three men,” linked to Gray Barker’s book; and 1965–66 press cuttings on sightings, among them a Wall Street Journal piece on the Air Force’s approach.