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The magazine pictured was a 1967 issue (Volume 2) of TRUE’s efforts to provide an objective skein of flying saucer material, at a time when UFOs were yet to be fully ridiculed by The Condon Report, news media, and the public.

Lloyd Mallan was a featured writer in the issue [ Articles on Pages 9, 18, 26, 32, 44, 50, et cetera], along with John Keel and J. Allen Hynek.

I’ve lauded Mr. Mallan in the past:

But he’s been less appreciated by James Oberg (and others):

Yet, the TRUE magazine, in which he’s featured, is not overboard with its repository of flying saucer accounts, touching on a few notable items, the Betty/Barney Hill kidnapping and Lonnie Zamora’s Socorro sighting.

Frederil Pohl, in his piece The Fanciful World of Saucer Books [Page 48 ff.], noted that “The Hills don’t claim their experience actually happened.” [Page 75, italics in article]

And that “The evidence for the Hills may have existed – Betty and Barney say there were certain strange markings on their car which looked like chemical discolorations. But NICAP sent an investigator down; they still had the car then, they said; they told him about the markings; but he didn’t bother to scrape off a sample. And now the car is gone.” [Page 75]

While accepting that Officer Zamora is an honest man, “he’s not a liar,” Mr. Pohl does take Zamora to task for losing his glasses during his sightings, Pohl saying he tried to view, when he visited Socorro, the marks (dents) left by the craft Zamora claimed to have seen from the spot where Zamora’s police car was stopped, and where he dropped his glasses. Pohl “couldn’t see much detail. His [Zamora’s] eyes may be better than mine, I don’t know. I only know that I wish he hadn’t lost his glasses just then.” [Page 75]

Pohl doesn’t tell readers that Officer Zamora saw the craft before he lost his glasses and its symbol, only losing his glasses when the object took off and Officer Zamora running back to his squad car, losing the glasses when he fell.

But the magazine added this photo to the back cover, highlighting a faked photo, and its maker, to show that some (many?) flying saucer photos were fake? [Notice the similarity to the Trent/McMinnville UFO photos – the attitude of the saucer and the wires above.]

Yes, there was a skeptical patina to the issue, something that changed in the years following, for most, if not all, UFO magazines.

RR