Flying Saucers, the first magazine solely dedicated to the UFO phenomena, was published and edited by Raymond A. Palmer. Ray Palmer, born 1910, was a hunchback midget with a lifelong passion for science fiction. He edited the first SF fanzine, The Comet, in 1930, and was so successful that publishing house Ziff-Davis offered him the job of editing some of their popular pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories and Fate.

Amazing Stories was primarily an SF short story magazine, but during his time Ray bought and published several stories which were written as fact. Most famously he published The Shaver Mysteries by Richard Shaver, which concerned the "deros", evil beings which inhabit the Hollow Earth and constantly attack human civilisation. Ray launched Fate, a magazine dedicated to strange-but-true stories, with a long article by Kenneth Arnold, the man who coined the term "flying saucer" to describe the objects he saw over Mount Rainier in 1947, the first modern UFO sighting.

Publishing these stories inspired Ray to leave Ziff-Davis and start his own publishing company, to specialise in material about the UFO phenomena. His first magazine was published as Flying Saucers from Other Worlds in 1957, before evolving into Flying Saucers in 1958. The name change was due to Rays belief that UFOs originated inside the Hollow Earth, were actually piloted by Shaver's "deros", and therefore not from other worlds at all!

The Mu Meson Archives have great pleasure in providing material from select copies of this magazine for research purposes.