Apologies once again for the late appearance of a '25 Years Ago' review. However, I hope that by publishing these features Magonia Review readers will be encouraged to visit the original articles to which I provide links, and perhaps from there explore further into our archives, which now include virtually all the articles from MUFOB and Magonia, and of course our associated Book Review Archive.
This issue of Magonia was a response to the previous issue and continued the American theme. It contained two important articles from American contributors. This was at a time when we began to comment on the way in which UFO research in Britain and Europe was taking a very different path to the research being conducted across the Atlantic.
This issue was something of an American special, with both major articles looking at the state of American ufology, the issues facing it, and its differences to European and UK ufology. Thomas Bullard’s The American Way sought to explain American ufologists’ attitudes to the abduction phenomenon, claiming that the American’s tendency to take a literalist view of such accounts is ‘less naïve than it seems’.
The lead article in this issue is 'From My Pennine Valley Notebook', by David Clarke. Yes, the title is a rip-off of John Keel's classic Flying Saucer Review piece from the 1970s, 'From My Ohio Valley Notebook', and it was inspired by Dave's introductory paragraphs, where he states: “folklore seems to be very much in the making in the haunted areas of the Pennine Hills into which I have been wandering in recent years”.
Two back issues to look at this time: must try harder to keep to schedule! The crop circle have now settled into a niche between conceptual art and cosmic mysticism, but back in 1988 some people, including Magonia contributor Paul Fuller, still thought that there was a chance of establishing its bona-fides as a genuine physical scientific phenomenon. 🔻
The most prominent item on the cover of this issue of Magonia is a quotation from the British Air Ministry DDI (Tech) Department. Issued in April 1957. 
It’s not often that Magonia has ever made it into the pages of the sensational tabloids (only twice, to my knowledge), and only ever once managed to get involved with anything resembling a sex-scandal. The front page of Magonia 29 carried an account of my contact with a reporter from the notorious Sunday Sport. I gave a talk to BUFORA shortly after my Evidence for Alien Abductions book was published and he cornered me in the tea interval. His report was headed ‘Breeding Cock-up’ (subtle, or what?) and you can read all about it HERE.
Magonia 27 (September 1987) was notable for carrying the first of many important articles by the American ufologist Martin Kottmeyer. 'Break a Leg' looked at the UFO experience as a piece of theatre. Martin's first clue that UFO narratives more closely resembled theatrical scripts than real-life events was when he noticed: "The tip-off was all the chases. Chases are staple items in our fantasy lives.
Our main article was Martin Kottmeyer's 'Break a Leg', which examined the pattern of UFO narratives, to discover the dramatic structures which shaped them. Martin comments: "The tip-off was all the chases. Chases are staple items in our fantasy lives. It is a formula element to most action-adventure television ... the reliance on chase sequences is understandable: it is a quick, easy way of heightening tension ... In ufology it is a simple matter of observation that chases are absurdly commonplace."
Arch-sceptic Steuart Campbell occasionally graced the pages of Magonia, and in this issue he sets out his argument that UFO reports are almost entirely the result of astronomic mirages. (This article is not currently online.) While it's certainly true that many reports can be explained in this way, he goes beyond this to state "Astronomical mirages can explain so may UFO reports, especially the most intractable ones that I can claim that the UFO problem is practically solved!" He asserts that cases such as Father Gill, Travis Walton, the Hills and Socorro are all based on astronomical mirages, and continues: "A scientific hypothesis has been found which explains UFO reports..."
Magonia 26, June 1978, featured as its main article an account by David Clarke of the remarkable events surrounding the investigation of the once-notorious Cracoe Fell landing case. In summary, a number of people, including two police officers saw and photographed an alleged 'landed UFO', perceived as a bright light settled on a cliff face at Cracoe, about three miles from Skipton in North Yorkshire.
After numerous changes of format, with number 25 Magonia settled down to the A4, 16 or 20 page standard that continued until the closure of the print magazine. Magonia had now moved into the computer age (sort of) and this issue was produced on one of Alan Sugar’s Amstrad PCWs, a pretty basic word processor which was blessed with one of the world’s worst dot-matrix printers.
The appearance of Magonia 24 heralded a radical change in design and production of the magazine, being the first to be produced on a computer, the now legendary Amstrad PCW8512, with printout on a very noisy dot-matrix printer using a typewriter ribbon. It also marked our final A5 size issue, prior to the last of our numerous changes of format.
The May 1986 Magonia was a bit of a mixture with no overarching theme like some previous issues. Lead article was Michael Goss's description of 'phantom-hitchhiker' stories on public transport (including rickshaws!); although as Mike readily admitted in the case of public transport we are probably dealing with phantom fare-dodgers rather than true hitchhikers
The main article in this issue is Michael Goss' examination of the legend of the preserved pterodactyl. The classic literary example of this is Conan Doyle's The Lost World, where Professor Challenger returns from his expedition to the deepest jungles of South America with a living specimen, presenting the creature with its "putrid and insidious odour" to an amazed audience of zoologists at London's Queen's Hall.
H. Michael Simmons article Once Upon a Time in the West examined the reports of the 1897 airship in America's Mid West, with particular reference to how the stories were handled by the local newspapers in the region. Although some writers have suggested that the airship panic was helped on its way by William Randolph Hurst to promote an 'invasion panic'
Magonia 19 featured a cover montage showing a scary looking character at a London tube station, to illustrate Mick Goss's article, 'The Maniac on the Platform', a review of rumours and urban legends, prompted by Mick overhearing a conversation about a series of deadly encounters on tube stations, where innocent passengers were pushed in front of oncoming trains by a madman - a veritable maniac.
One feature of the old print version of Magonia that I quite liked doing was the ‘25 Years Ago’ piece. One reason was that it was always useful for filling in the odd half page that invariably seemed to be left over once I’d got everything else laid out for the printers. The other, rather better, reason was that it gave a glimpse of how attitudes to UFOs and ufology had changed in the intervening quarter-century. Or more usually how little had changed. So I thought I’d start giving it a go here on the blog.