That's All Folks ...

John Rimmer
Editorial Notes, Magonia 99, April 2009

Well here it is. Welcome to Magonia 99, the last in the series which has survived in one form or another since 1968. Firstly as Merseyside UFO Bulletin, then simply as MUFOB when the editorial base moved from Merseyside, and finally as Magonia. Peter Rogerson outlines our history in more detail elsewhere in this issue, so I shall concentrate here on my reasons for ending the publication at this point.

Magonia Memories: Where Did It All Go Right?

Peter Rogerson
'Northern Echoes', Magonia 99, April 2009

It is hard to imagine that this journal in some incarnation or another has been around for at least forty years. The exact date depends whether you date its origins with the Merseyside UFO Group Newsletter which started in 1965; with John Harney taking over its editorship and change to Bulletin in 1966; or with the founding of the original Merseyside UFO Bulletin in January 1968.

Some Thoughts on 'The UFO as an Anti-Scientific Symbol'

John Rimmer
Magonia 99, April 2009

I decided to reprint this article [1] in the last print issue of Magonia, as it is one of the most quoted and referred-to articles that I have written for MUFOB and Magonia. Before re-reading it in detail I was expecting to find it rather dated and irrelevant, but instead I was surprised by just how relevant it is to the current situation, and in fact how predictive it seems to have been - not just ufologically, but politically.

A Testable Hypothesis

Jerome Clark
Magonia 99, April 2009
 
On June 25, 1947, a falsifiable hypothesis about the transparently bogus character of the "flying disc" reports suddenly flooding the American press would have advanced the following confident predictions: The excitement is a fad which will fade before it can do further harm to society. The most sensational and suggestive reports will collapse under scrutiny.

Mediums, Mystics and Martians

Gareth J. Medway
Magonia 99, April 2009

In 1853 Spiritualism became the latest fashionable pursuit in the southern Spanish port of Cadiz. Seances were regularly held after dinner as a parlour game. At one, on 8 November 1853, there was the following exchange:
Is there a spirit present? Yes.
What is your name? Eqe.

Seriously Silly

'The Pelican'
Magonia 98, September 2008

The Pelican has long since solved the UFO so-called "mystery". There are two separate but related fields of study which may be described as ufology, but very few people pursue them. One kind of study uses the physical sciences to investigate UFO reports to try to discover the physical stimuli which produce them. For example, a "strange" light in the sky reported by a number of witnesses might be identified as the planet Venus.

UFOs at the National Archives

David Clarke
Magonia 98, September 2008
 
For the past six decades the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has kept what it knew about the topic of 'unidentified flying objects' locked away in its archives. Unlike their counterparts in the USA, who ran an officially-funded 'UFO project' for two decades, the British MoD preferred to quietly monitor the subject and preferred to say nothing publicly about its UFO policy or the results of investigations of reported sightings, particularly those by aircrew.

Scalping the Skeptics

"The Pelican"
from Magonia 82, August, 2003

The Pelican does not like being described as a sceptic. This is because so many people who call themselves sceptics simply cannot confine their criticisms to matters which they understand, usually the hard sciences, such as physics, astronomy or biology. They persist in blathering on about matters of which they evidently know very little with the result that, instead of recruiting people to the cause of logic and honest scientific research, they merely succeed in arousing hostility, and for no good reason.

Apollo 20: A Space Absurdity

Curtis Peebles
Magonia 97, April 2008.

Beginning in April of 2007, an individual with the user name ‘retiredafb’ began posting a series of video clips on YouTube. These were described as from ‘Apollo 20′, a secret joint U.S./Soviet space mission in 1976 to examine a crashed UFO near the crater Izsak on the far side of the Moon. The Apollo 20 story offers a chance to examine the methodology and mindset of exopolitics advocates regarding evidence and its use in reaching conclusions.

Curiouser and Curiouser: ‘High Strangeness’ UFO Encounters

Gareth J. Medway
Magonia 97, April 2008

The term ‘High Strangeness’ refers to those UFO cases where the witnesses do not merely claim to have sighted a mysterious light or unknown object which might have been an alien spacecraft, but also say that a variety of unusual things happened to them afterwards, such as poltergeist outbreaks in their homes, strange telephone calls, and visits from the ‘Men In Black’.