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Summary:
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From Pat Deveney's database:
Pursuit.
The Newsletter of the Society for Investigation of the Unexplained.
Science is the Pursuit of the Unexplained
1968--1989
Quarterly
Columbia, NJ.
Editor: John A. Keel, Hans Stefan Santesson, et al.
Publisher: Ivan T. Sanderson Foundation.
1/3, June 1968-1989 (the journal incorporated the first two issues of the Foundation's newsletter, May 1967 and March 1968, and began its own numbering with vol. 1, no. 3, June 1969).
32-60 pp. (varies). Subscription included in $5.00-$12.00 a year dues. The Society for Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU) was founded by Ivan T. Sanderson (1911-1973) in 1965 to acquire, investigate and report on tangible objects in science that were not readily explained. Over time, these goals were expanded to include all Fortean subjects, like the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull, UFOs, Atlantis, Charles Hapgood's Piri Reis maps and earth's shifting poles, curanderos, vampires, incorruptible bodies, leylines, Tesla, Sinistrari's demons and semen, transcriptions of Charles Fort's notebooks, etc. Sanderson was a Scottish biologist who moved to the United States and achieved some fame in the 1950s and 1960s was a popularizer of various cryptids (especially the Abominable Snowman) and cryptozoology in general. The journal regularly contained excerpts from the press on unexplained and mysterious events. At various times it was accompanied by an irregular Newsletter and a monthly newspaper, The Animal World, for young people. John A. Keel (1930-2009) was a leading author of the period on the unexplained, beginning with his The Mothman Prophecies (1975), which explored the coming of red-eyed and winged beings to Point Pleasant, West Virginia. He was basically Fortean in his approach and came to reject the space-ship and physical alien approach to UFOs and focus on them as psychic phenomena. He is said to have coined the phrase "Men in Black" in 1967.
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