Clypeus.
Il giornale dei dischi volanti & Cronache dell'insolito / Notiziario mensile di Studi Clipeologici / Cronache dell'Insolito / Gli Enigmi dell'Universo / Enciclopedia dei Dischi Volanti.
1964--1999 Monthly, bimonthly, then very irregular
Turin, Italy. Language: Italian.
Editor: Gianni V. Settimo; Edoardo Russo.
Publisher: Associazione Piemontese di Esrobiologia / Società Fortiana Italiana.
Succeeded by: Gli Arcani (1972-1976)
No. 1, January 1964-no. 108, September 1999 (the last 10 issues appeared over 13 years).
4-48 pp.
5000-1000 Lire (incomparable because of the changing value of the Lira).

This journal lasted for 35 years under the general direction of one man, Gianni V. Settimo (1929-2017), but during that time it was really three or four journals, different in format and content and with conflicting views about what the reading market wanted to see in those changing times. Its original description of itself and its intentions was:

"CLIPEOLOGY (Study of Flying Saucers): Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, Gondwana, Archaeology, Lost civilizations, Prehistory, Early history, Protohistory, Speleology, Myths and Legends, Astronomy, Rocketry, Fortean Studies, Fantastic Realism, Metapsichics, Metabiology, Occultism, Bibliography and Philately of Space"

A clypeus is the simply a round shield (or the round brass boss on the front of the shield) carried by Roman cavalry, in distinction to the scutum, the larger rectangular shield carried by legionaries, and the term easily could be used to describe flying saucers by those so inclined. (The curious inclusion of "Space Philately" referred to earth postage stamps commemorating space exploration and not to interplanetary postal services. Settimo was a noted philatelist.) Clipeology, a term coined in 1959 by Umberto Corazzi to describe flying saucer-like phenomena in historical texts, played a central role in the early days of the journal and was the focus of the first article in the first issue, "Flying Saucers at the Time of the Pharaohs," which discussed the gyrating "circles of fire" supposedly to be found in the so-called "Tulli Papyrus," a gross fraud that formed one of the bases of the original, pre-von Däniken, ancient astronaut movement. The journal's discussion of the supposed papyrus was based on a supposed translation of it that had appeared in Tiffany Thayer's Doubt (q.v.) in no. 41, July 1953:

"The scribes of the House of Life found it was a circle of fire that was coming in the sky . . . Now, after some days had passed over those things, Lo I they were more numerous than anything. They were shining in the sky more than the sun to the limits of the four supports of heaven. Powerful was the position of the fire circles. . . . Thereupon they (i.e., the fire circles) went up higher directed to South. Fishes and volatiles fell down from the sky. A marvel never occurred since the foundation of this Land," etc.

Although other UFO journals accepted the papyrus and the translation, later scholarship has been less kind, pointing out that the hieroglyphic text was lifted from a 1927 book of Egyptian grammar, and the Condon Report used it as an example of gullible enthusiasm.

The journal was originally typewritten and mimeographed and functioned primarily to collect local Italian UFO reports and to support a local network of researchers. This was not successful and in 1972 the journal retained a publisher to print it and distribute it on newsstands. The next year the journal was merged into Gli Arcani, a Milanese occult journal put out by the large publishing house, Armenia Editore. When this also was unsatisfactory the journal reappeared in 1977 with no. 43, employing a new volume numbering and with the subtitle in English, as Clypeus: UFO and Fortean Phenomena and a year later as Clypeus: Miti, leggende, folclore del Piemonte Insolito, focused on Forteanism and "Unusual Piedmont Phenomena" ("Myths, Legends, Folklore and Books Unusual Piedmont," and began to feature Italian ghost stories, occultism, parapsychology and the bibliography of rare books on occultism and unusual events.. In 1979 the journal brought back the emphasis on UFOs and was published as Ufologia: Supplemento a Clypeus No. X under the care of the Sezione Ufologica del Grupo Clypeus, with again new numbering dating from 1979. About 1983 when the journal had yet again fallen on hard times it began to appear in short, approximately annual volumes under the original title, Clypeus, with numbering dating from 1964 and offered articles on the likes of "The Wandering Jew," graphology, chromotherapy, "Savage Boys," "Imaginary Animals," "The Beginning of Knowledge and of Civilization: Atlantis" "The Great Serpent among the Bushmen," etc. It took 13 years for the journal to publish the last 10 issues.

The journal originally contained the usual newspapers clippings about UFO sightings in Italy and around the world -- which it viewed as items of a Fortean "data ledger" of the curious and unexplained. It devoted considerable attention to the Shaver Mystery with translations from Ray Palmer's magazines, especially Fate (q.v.), and Alberto Fenoglio, one of the journal's principal collaborators, easily combined Shaverism with his own occult ideas on the Hollow Earth. He was one of the early students of "clipeology," the identification of strange flying or sparking objects in ancient texts with UFOs, which he outlined in his account of the flying objects seen during Alexander the Great's siege of Tyre in 332 B.C. which flashed lightning at the city walls ("Cronistoria su oggetti volanti del passato – Appunti per una clipeostoria"). His interpretation has been scoffed at. He and the journal generally inclined toward Traditionalism, with articles like "Per un ritorno ale tradizioni esoteriche" in 1967 on René Guénon-- which fails to mention Julius Evola, Guénon's Italian fellow Traditionalist, even though Evola had translated and written an introduction for Donald Kehoe's Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953) as La verità sui dischi volanti (1954), using the Pseudonym C. di Altavilla -- and then reviewed it under his own name! The journal had no sympathy for George Adamski or stories of contactees, rejecting the famous Amicizia Case that kept popping up in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s and generally tried to hew to a "scientific," rather than a mystical or sensational, approach to UFOs, refusing even to assert that they were "alien." Over time it carried contributions by Aime Michel, Donald Kehoe, J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallee, John A. Keel, the Lorenzens, Brad Steiger, Ivan T. Sanderson, Gray Barker, and notable Italian authors like Fenoglio and Gianni Cacioli.

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