A way to meet girls, it wasn’t. The world of teen UFOlogy in the early 1960s, to which I belonged, was with a very few exceptions a world of teenage boys. At times I regretted this, but accepted it as inevitable. “This is the most important unsolved mystery in the world today,” my senior colleague Edward J. Babcock, Jr., wrote in Timothy Green Beckley’s Inside the Saucers 1962 (now reprinted, for those of you who missed it first time around). Girls, we figured, wouldn’t be interested in things like that.
But if UFOlogy had its limits as a social venue, it opened the doors to achievements and excitements which I doubt we could have gotten any other way. It allowed us to receive letters addressed to “Mr. Babcock” or “Mr. Beckley” or “Mr. Halperin,” just as if we were grownups. These letters might be banal: from a librarian at Princeton University, say, listing the books on flying saucers on the library’s shelves; or from some Air Force officer tersely noting how the UFO sighting we’d asked about had been identified as the planet Jupiter. Of course this was a cover-up, but the letter arrived in an envelope marked OFFICIAL BUSINESS. That made up for a lot.
We wrote to university professors and newspaper journalists and mayors, and usually got answers. It was a pre-email, pre-Internet age, when the modes of communication were so primitive and yet a lot more communicating went on; ignoring people who wrote to you wasn’t the option it is today. We wrote to UFO witnesses and sometimes got answers, which made us investigators with potential scoops in our mailboxes. We wrote to each other and almost always got answers, and if we were real UFOlogists we wrote back and didn’t stop writing. We would just as soon have stopped breathing.
We wrote. That, as much as our unusual beliefs, may have been what defined us. At an age when we might have written nothing but classroom exercises intended for a teacher’s red pencil, we wrote what mattered to us. We wrote letters, we wrote articles, we wrote books. We even published those books.
Inside the Saucers 1962 (published July 1963). The Shadow of the Unknown (August 1963). UFO’s Around the World. (September 1966). Ever hear of those titles? Probably not, and your library probably doesn’t have them either. We ran them off on mimeograph machines, reasonably judging that the New York publishing houses wouldn’t be interested. From the point of view of book aesthetics, they were fairly awful. The Shadow of the Unknown, to which I contributed an introduction and three chapters and was proud to be part of, was the worst-looking of the lot. So what? I wasn’t Mr. Handsome either. It was the inside that counted.
Some people, at least, agreed. The glossy-paged British Flying Saucer Review, then regarded as the classiest UFO journal around, gave Shadow of the Unknown a glowing review in its November-December 1963 issue. “This excellent roneoed publication of nearly 100 pages is produced by the New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena and can be obtained from Dave Halperin at 186, Lakeside Drive, Levittown, Penn., U.S.A.” It required no great acuity to figure out that “roneoed” was British for “mimeographed,” and the foreign-looking comma after the number in my street address reinforced my sense of international recognition.
I don’t think I was swamped with orders for the book, which at $1.50 a copy—$2.00 outside the USA—was a bargain even in those days. Not that we cared. Unlike some, we weren’t in it for the money. “The whole field of the UFO mystery is very competently surveyed by a number of contributors,” said the Flying Saucer Review reviewer, and that was plenty for us.
Besides me and Ed Babcock, those contributors included Jerome Clark, now acknowledged as one of this generation’s foremost thinkers on UFOs and other anomalous phenomena, whose monumental two-volume The UFO Encyclopedia (2nd edition, 1998) belongs in the reference section of every public or college library. Jerry was 16 in 1963, one year older than me; already he’d begun to develop the brilliant prose style that distinguishes everything he’s written to this day. Even on the unlovely “roneoed” pages of The Shadow of the Unknown, it commanded attention.
And they were unlovely. Even those who admired the book had to admit that. Ed Babcock, who edited it and carried out the task of producing it, chose for some reason to run it off on alternating sheets of blue and yellow paper, with an occasional white page mixed in. Sometime in the fall of 1963, the distinguished naturalist Ivan Sanderson sent me a letter–me! 15-going-on-16 Dave Halperin!–praising our book, but expressing regret that it wasn’t printed on reasonably good white paper. “Paper is so bloody cheap, you see,” said Ivan.
Ivan gave me advice for my future writing: find an agent. They were all over New York City. He spoke as if this would be a piece of cake for me, a teenager reduced to speechless dread by the very thought of asking a girl out on a date. In retrospect I think: who knows? My devotion to UFOlogy had emboldened me, making me nervy and brash in some ways even as I was cripplingly timid in others. Maybe Ivan was right; maybe I could have found an agent, launched myself as a writer rather than as the academician I later became. What would my life have been like if I’d done that? (These are questions one asks oneself at age 70.)
I was contact person for The Shadow of the Unknown because in the fall of 1963 Ed Babcock retired from the field of UFOlogy to go to college, as many of us teen UFOlogists found ourselves doing. He was two years older than me; that’s what I meant by calling him my “senior colleague.” He had founded the New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena (NJAAP) in 1961 from his home in Kendall Park, NJ, and I had joined it the following year. In 1963 I took over from him as director. We kept the name of the organization, even though its head office (a.k.a. my bedroom) was now in Pennsylvania, just across the Delaware.
This troubled some people. It was apparently assumed that the geography of a group’s name ought to be defined by where its director lived. What were we supposed to do? I responded. Call it the Pennsylvania Association on Aerial Phenomena? That would be PAAP, which didn’t sound right. Although I didn’t say this, I thought of myself as an honorary New Jerseyite, having been born in Trenton. And besides, we had an international membership–small, somewhere between 20 and 30. But international.
And so it fell to me to write the introduction for The Shadow of the Unknown. It crackled with hope and enthusiasm. Maybe that was the way the world was in August 1963. John F. Kennedy hadn’t yet been murdered; we didn’t know how deep we already were in Vietnam. The girl I had a secret crush on hadn’t yet started coming to school wearing another boy’s class ring. “As you read this book,” I enjoined our readers, “read it with your mind alert and with a pencil in your hand. Jot down your comments in the margins. Make a note of every additional observation and deduction on the text that occurs to you. … And then, when you’re finished, put them all in a letter and send it to us–together with all the criticisms and suggestions that you can think of. You will find our addresses at the back of the book.
“Every letter we receive from you will bring us all that much closer to the solution of the greatest mystery of our time.”
I did get some letters from readers (not many). No solution presented itself. The Shadow of the Unknown remains on my bookshelf 55 years later, along with Inside the Saucers 1962 and UFO’s Around the World. When I look at it, it brings me some embarrassment but mostly pride. We were teen UFOlogists. We did amazing things.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
Connect to Journal of a UFO Investigator on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator
and Find David Halperin on Google+
Don’t have time to keep checking my blog? Sign up for my monthly email newsletter, with summaries and links to the past month’s posts, plus oldies-but-goodies from the archive.
David, your blog sure brought back memories to me about those times now so long in the past when us youthful “ufologists” honestly believed that we could solve “The UFO Mystery.” But now that we have put some years behind us, we realize that it was, after all, just our youthful enthusiasm all along. Sadly, many of us have lost that wonder, dreaming and awe that we experienced in those heady days of Camelot, but deep down in some of us it still burns, though a bit dimmer than fifty years ago.
Thanks so much for posting, Rick! Let’s do what we can to brighten the flame.
An illustrious early career, David. Me, being a girl, I started a newspaper called The Glorious Gossiper.
Do you still have copies of it, Peggy? Thanks for posting.
Your writing still crackles with hope and enthusiasm! Thanks for sharing this.
And thank you so much for your comment, Bob!